Annotations for Speakers: Susan Neiman

You probably are if you're doing this podcast.

Susan, thank you for joining us today. It's a pleasure. Before we turn to our discussion, as always, we have our scene-setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri and today's poem is actually a bilingual poem from Zachary. This is the first of your bilingual poems in one hundred and twenty or so [episodes], I think. Zachary, what is the title of your poem?

That was really powerful. Very powerful. I think you should translate that last section for us and tell us what your poem's about.

Well, I was also thinking, Zachary, I don't know if you know, there's a fairly well known poem of Rilke. I don't know its title anymore, but it starts with es ist herbst, it's fall. Do you know that?

But yeah, I prefer T.S. Eliot to Rilke myself, actually. But that, his herbst poem, is a good poem.

Thank you. Yeah, it's not an academic book, although sometimes I call myself a recovering philosophy professor. [Laughter] But much of it's written in the first person.

It also contains a lot of interviews. I thought it was very important not just to have my voice in in the book, but also to have the voices of many, many people both in in Germany and in the Deep South, which is where I focused my research, not because I believe racism is only a problem in the Deep South, I should emphasize. But because the South works like a magnifying glass for the rest of the country. Everything is out in the open.

And, you know, you certainly can't say that people aren't concerned with their history. But let me go back to this book. It has two beginnings, actually. One was in the fall of 1982, when I first came to Berlin on a Fulbright Fellowship, thinking I was going to stay for a year and go back.

And the reason I didn't go back was that I became absolutely fascinated with this German concept of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, which I translate as working through the past. Germans like the long compound words.

But it's not a concept that exists in any other language.

And, you know, there's a sense in which it simply emerged as a way of saying, "what the hell are we going to do about the Nazis?" And coming to Berlin in 1982, I was absolutely struck by the ways in which people were talking about the Nazi past. It was just before the 50th anniversary of the Nazi takeover of power.

And people in Berlin were preparing to commemorate it with a year's worth of exhibits and discussions and theater and people doing research about their neighborhoods and what their neighborhoods were like in the Third Reich. I should say, this was at the time, not at all a government sponsored project. And it wasn't even a majority of, certainly not a majority of, Germans and not even a majority of Berliners, who have always leaned somewhat to the left of the country.

But those were the people that I would have normally gravitated to, that is intellectuals, artists, activists. And they were examining their country's history, which also meant their parents and their teachers' complicity, with an intensity that I immediately had to ask, why aren't we doing this in the United States?

And at the time, I wasn't even thinking very far back about our history. I was thinking we don't talk about the Vietnam War anymore. We've never really talked about Hiroshima.

And that was a moment when I began to think about the contrast between the ways in which Americans dealt with their history, and or don't, and what the Germans were doing with theirs. So it's a subject that I've been thinking about, you know, for more than 35 years.

And the immediate impetus to writing the book, was when I was watching President Obama give the eulogy for the nine churchgoers massacred in Charleston in 2015. And in tears from my Berlin apartment, and thinking, however, because, you know, Nikki Haley did take down the flag, it was the first time that a major national politician had called for dealing with, or getting rid of, Confederate symbols.

And I thought, gosh, America is finally beginning a Vergangenheitsaufgabeitung. And since this is something I've thought about for a long time, maybe I can make a contribution. But I didn't want to simply do it from afar.

I had a sabbatical coming to me from my institute, and I wanted to spend some time with them, you know, even in 2016, there were Americans looking at this history, particularly around questions of racial reconciliation. So I based myself for a year in Mississippi, following people around who were doing this work, as well as people who were absolutely opposed to it, as a way of trying to figure out what would be a genuinely American Vergangenheitsaufgabeitung working of the past.

I do believe we have things to learn from what the Germans have done with their history, including their mistakes, and there have been many.

I don't think any two countries' histories are the same. And the first chapter of the book talks about all the differences between, you know, American and German history, because I knew, of course, people would object immediately. So, of course, there are many differences in those two histories.

You're a historian, so, you know, it's important to care about cultural and historical differences, but I still think there are lessons.

Well, there's several, several reasons for, you know, we can give several reasons. One is, I don't know if it's OK to swear on your podcast or not. [Laughter] Go ahead.

OK, I was actually in a radio program in, of all places, the Bay Area. And I used a slightly profane expression and the moderator apologized to her audience. So you never know.

But I'm quoting here James Meredith, one of the people that I interviewed in the book, the great civil rights hero from Mississippi. And one of the things he said to me, he said, "well, the Germans got their ass kicked and we didn't." And of course, there's a way in which that's true.

And one can say if there's any moral agreement in the world, it's that the Nazis committed the worst crimes in human history. I'll agree with that. And of course, since they were devastated at the end of the war, there was some pressure on them from the outside to, you know, do something about their history, although it was slow and faltering, certainly in the West.

And I think that's a very important message for Americans to learn. We tend to assume that the crimes of the Nazis were so awful that the minute the war was over, they fell on their knees and begged for atonement. That is not what happened at all.

In West Germany, in particular, they thought of themselves as the war's worst victims. And when I realized that, and it took me decades to realize this because it's not something they like to talk about at all. You have to work to ferret it out.

I realized that the tropes with which, West Germans in the first decades after the war spoke about the war, you know, we lost a quarter of our territory and seven million people were killed and our men were in POW camps if they survived at all. Or they were wounded and our cities were burned and we were hungry, just barely alive. Maybe you'll catch the reference there. And on top of it, the damn Yankees wanted to tell us it was all our fault.

And I suddenly realized they sound just like the defenders of the lost cause.

And from that, I think one can actually get a measure of hope because if it turns out that even, you know, Nazis took a long time to acknowledge that they had some atoning to do, it's no wonder that those people who are asking, you know, for similar confrontation with our history in the U.S. are getting pushback. It's no wonder that we're having a cultural war over this, because people tend, in the first instance, they like to think of their people as heroes. If they can't think of them as heroes, they think of them as victims.

That's the next best thing. But, you know, people focus on their own suffering. That's what people do.

But what was historically unique, was that the Germans made a further step, which is to say, yeah, we suffered and it was rough, but other people suffered more and it was our fault. And, you know, so yes, the defeat played a role. There's some other, however, things that sound more prosaic.

You have no idea what kind of a media landscape we have here, public media landscape. And I'm, you know, I'm pleased to see podcasts like yours appearing to make up for the fact that, you know, most radio programs and almost all of television is commercial television. It does not go in for long form discussions of any kind.

And that's entirely different in Germany. In Germany, most of the media is public and we all pay a little tax. The funny thing is that I don't actually have time.

I watch much German television or radio, but I am so happy every year to pay my little tax, which is not very much. It's like, let's say, $100 a year, because I know that that ensures that we don't have Fox News, you know, so the German public is used to serious discussions in television, in radio, in the newspapers of a kind, that we don't have enough outlets in the United States for doing. That's another thing that plays a role.

So that's a really good question. And of course, it depends whether the person you're confronting is your grandfather or your father. In the late 60s, when people were confronting their parents who had served in the Wehrmacht or, you know, and certainly gone along with the Nazis. Even if they hadn't actually been members of the party, the confrontations were terrible, understandably.

And you had a sense of family structures being quite destroyed in many cases. The interesting thing, I felt like the family structures weren't destroyed. I mean, I was once invited to, you know, spend a weekend in the country with somebody who said her parents were away and said, use our house. And the parents had, you know, pictures of the father in uniform over the house. And I left the next day.

[Laughter] You know, if this is what it means to have a nice relationship with your parents, I'm not sure that I'm going for it. Look, I think so. So there are people now talking about the ways in which people, you know, didn't confront their grandparents and where the grandparent was, in particular, a Nazi criminal or even a serious Nazi, that has left real scars. One of the people I interviewed in the book, Alexandra Semft, has written about her grandfather, who was actually one of the very few people executed as a war criminal, and, you know, talked about the way that that destroyed her family.

So, you know, the confrontations didn't happen at all for decades. And they certainly happened. You know, there are sort of waves of these things.

And of course, every family is personal. Look, I think the biggest problem in the United States is this hundred year old hole in our memory, as I talk about in the book, between the end of the Civil War and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

I was fortunate, I grew up in the South, although I know you don't hear it. My parents were from the North, but my mother was very active in the civil rights movement in Atlanta. So I'm kind of a civil rights kid. That was the you know, that was the atmosphere that I grew up in. But nobody talked about history. Everybody was much too focused on the present, you know, focused on getting rid of segregation.

And, you know, it was a time, Zachary, you're fortunate to have had your young political consciousness formed by, you know, an African-American president of great integrity and intelligence. When I was young, we couldn't imagine it. We couldn't even imagine a black cabinet member at that point.

So the focus was on the present and the future. People were not talking about the history. At least white people certainly weren't. And I rather think black people weren't either. They knew more of it, of course, than white people did, but it wasn't a focus of attention.

So we tended to think, OK, there was slavery. Slavery was terrible, but then we fought a war in order to end it. That was still the line, you know, that I learned mostly. And then there was Jim Crow, I think Jim Crow is a terrible expression.

I'm on a minor campaign to snap it out because it's a euphemism. It prettifies what Bryan Stevenson calls the age of racial terror, which I think is a much more accurate expression.

Yeah. And the words Jim Crow allow us to think, OK, there were racial stereotypes, there was racist prejudice. But, you know, We we don't know about the web of legal continuation of various things that have been called neo-slavery.

The way in which ordinary behavior, if carried out by African-Americans, was criminalized, the way in which there was actually a deliberate turn from, you know, thinking of African-Americans as stupid and lazy, which was the stereotype during slavery days, to thinking of them as criminals. All the way through, you know, redlining and the ways in which people of color were barred from getting mortgages, were barred from getting Social Security.

So and and, of course, in the background, lynching as a real instrument of terror to intimidate people of color. So, you know, we we tended to think that all of that was more or less so. We think, OK, it was, you know, it was too bad that there was segregation, but then we had the civil rights movement and it wiped it out.

And, you know, our ignorance, and I must say myself ,very much until 2015, until I I started thinking about these questions, I was as ignorant as anybody else. And I know professors of American history who didn't know very much about it.

Right. And then you had to be a scholar. You know, you had to be Eric Foner or, you know, in order to address those issues. And, you know, if it wasn't your field, it didn't get into public discussion in the way that it is now. So I think that's the main reason why Americans have not examined our racist history.

There's a second issue that I'm only going to mention because I know we don't have time to go into it. I think we are still living in a time where the Cold War has cast its shadow over American history, which is why great, you know, civil rights activists like Paul Robeson [are] almost forgotten, which is why we don't talk about Hiroshima and we don't talk about Vietnam. But that's a question for a podcast in itself.

So [that is a] very good question. I mean, let me start by saying that Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung has, you know, it's not one thing. It's not a, you know, a one off vaccination, OK?

It involves, you know, constructing a different national narrative, but that itself is not just something to be done by historians. And it's not just something to be done in history books.

It involves popular culture. You know, it involves movies, literature, songs, all of that stuff needs to be rethought of. I think reparations need to play a role.

And they have certainly played a role in Germany with reparations to Holocaust victims, reparations to the state of Israel. And here is something that Americans tend to forget or not ever to have known about. The Wehrmacht laid waste to Poland and Russia and killed 14 million Slavic civilians.

So East Germany paid a huge amount of reparations to Poland and the Soviet Union as well. So obviously, where there's been damage and, you know, again, it's a complicated subject. The damage needs to be materially repaired if there are still people who need to be brought to justice. They need to be brought to justice. We need to think about the iconography of our cities, as I say in the book. There is no Hans Wehrmacht in Germany.

I mean, I just made that up as a counterpart to Johnny Reb. Yes. What there are are thousands of memorials to both victims and the few resistance heroes that there were. All of that is part of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung.

I see a lot of hope at the moment, but I think we're in a perilous time. It surprises me to complain about polarization because it's such a centrist thing to do. And I am not a centrist. I'm a Social Democrat and I'll say it to anybody who wants to hear it. I've always been on the left. But I think we need to be very, very careful in this moment.

I agree with you that people are finally in America connecting the violence, which still outrageously exists more towards people of color than towards anyone else. That violence with the violence in our past and the need for a new narrative. But I think it's extremely important that this be seen as a universalist project.

I know the word universalism is, you know, not very popular these days, but I'm making an argument to revive it. And I try and do that in the book. This is American history.

This is not black history. And it's very important, I think, that white Americans not consider ourselves as allies. An ally is someone who is, you know, has a temporary alignment of interests with someone else like the U.S. and the Soviet Union did during World War Two.

But wasn't an alliance based on principle? I support Black Lives Matter, not out of interest, but as a matter of principle, because I care about universal human justice. And I am part of, you know, many people of many ethnic backgrounds who have always done so.

Hannah Arendt, in her very important book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, criticized the state of Israel because when they indicted Eichmann, they indicted him for crimes against the Jewish people, and she says he should have...been indicted for crimes against humanity.

And I think that's exactly right. And I think we need to see the crimes against African Americans as crimes against humanity that should engage and enrage every decent American as we work to reconstruct a better country.

Thank you so much. And you know what Jeremy said also resonates with your poem. You know, there isn't a conclusion. This is something you know that's going to go on for a very long time, and it's a multi generational project. So I think it's wonderful that the two of you are doing this together.

Well, it's been a pleasure, and now I'll look up your podcast more often.

I will.