This is Democracy – Episode 121: Historical Memory and National Trauma

[0:00:03 Speaker 0] This Is Democracy,

[0:00:07 Speaker 2] a podcast

[0:00:08 Speaker 0] that explores

[0:00:08 Speaker 2] the interracial inter generational and inter sectional

[0:00:11 Speaker 1] unheard voices living in the world’s most influential democracy. Welcome

[0:00:21 Speaker 2] to our new episode of This Is Democracy. This week we have with us one of the foremost scholars, philosophers and public intellectuals in the world, writing about a topic that’s very close to us. I think every day where history matters for us every day, which is how we think about memory and the ways in which memories of the past particularly memories of a traumatic, guilt ridden, difficult past, the ways those memories are used or not used to improve or limit our democracy. In other words, what is the role for historical memory in addressing past injustices? Uh, Susan Neiman, who is our guest today? Susan has written some of the most important work on this. Uh, she is the director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin. She was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and that’s central to a lot of her work. But she studied philosophy at Harvard in the Fryer University, met in Berlin, was a professor of philosophy at Yale and Tel Aviv University before moving to Berlin, moving back to Berlin for the Einstein Forum. She is the author of numerous books of contemporary philosophy, uh, and political philosophy as well, a number that I just like to mention evil and modern thought particularly relevant, perhaps to our world today. Moral clarity. A Guide for grown up idealists. I’m not sure I’m a grown up idealist, but at least gives one a

[0:01:45 Speaker 0] guy, probably are. If you if you’re doing this podcast, Thank

[0:01:49 Speaker 2] you, Susan. That makes me feel a lot better. And her most recent book, The book that’s really going to be at the center of our discussion today, which is really a phenomenal book. Both Zachary and I have read it, learning from the Germans race and the memory of evil. It has just come out in paperback with a brand new final section, at least for now, on the Black Lives matter movement and how it relates to Susan’s really in depth discussion of historical memory in Germany and the

[0:02:17 Speaker 1] United States over the

[0:02:18 Speaker 2] last century. Uh, Susan, thank you for joining us today.

[0:02:21 Speaker 0] That’s a pleasure.

[0:02:23 Speaker 2] 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 120 or so I think. Zachary, what is the title of your poem?

[0:02:39 Speaker 1] Helps here in Aramaic or fall? I remember.

[0:02:44 Speaker 2] Let’s hear it

[0:02:46 Speaker 1] fall. I remember you sneak up on us from behind the orchard fence. You seem cold and distant until the signs at the gas station begin to freeze. Helps Karina Make and the older man in the supermarket met Colton Hall. Fishing girth. Net English Lawson Hoffman Fall I remember you like a blessing. A prayer for the lost souls in tandem with the damp leaves trodden underfoot. The air is burning now The earth is burning. The fires are so hot they feel as if they could be frozen London from him today, regarding hot in Mandarin and arm Beirut and then from behind the shelves, a man has touched your arm. He is memory RSD arena room. And there are the eyes of your underlings and the eyes of the mistreated ones and the eyes of your fathers and your mothers and your great great forgotten ones. A skeptic shoot dinos land. There is the guilt of your country. A skipped Deschutes diner hand. There is the guilt of your hand. We come to send a delegation to meet them. Ended there in the room. We come to us under their general, Let them enter that side. We come to center their shield mid abs made. Certainly Kite,

[0:04:01 Speaker 2] that was really powerful,

[0:04:03 Speaker 0] Very powerful.

[0:04:05 Speaker 2] I think you should translate that last section for us and and and tell us what your poems about

[0:04:11 Speaker 1] uh well, so I’ll answer the latter question first. So my poem is really about, um is really about how we think about historical memory and guilt. And it’s particularly about this moment we find ourselves in in the fall of 2020 right before the presidential election, sort of thinking about our history and how it’s going to affect our future. And the last six lines of the poem in German translate roughly as How does the end of history come with the end of memory? How does the end of memory come with the end of time? How does the end of guilt come with fall with tenderness?

[0:04:48 Speaker 2] It evokes a little bit of T. S. Eliot right? Not with not with a bang, but with a whimper.

[0:04:53 Speaker 0] Well, I was also thinking exactly. I don’t know if you know, there’s a fairly well known poem of Rocca. I don’t know, it’s title anymore, but it starts with S s happiest. It’s fall. Do you know that?

[0:05:06 Speaker 1] Um, I think I may have come across it, but I was definitely going more T s. Eliot.

[0:05:10 Speaker 0] Okay. I prefer T s Eliot Carioca myself, actually, but that the his happiest phone was a good poem. You

[0:05:19 Speaker 2] know, I’m glad you mentioned that. Susan, I I read it years ago. I’m going to go back and find it when? When we’re done and maybe put it up on the on the website with the link to your book. That’s really, really wonderful. Uh, Susan building on Zachary’s poem. Uh, and this sort of haunting elements of memory, uh, maybe you can take us through a little bit about why you wrote this book. Learning from the Germans. It’s It’s It’s a deep, thoughtful intellectual book, but it’s also very personal book which I loved.

[0:05:45 Speaker 0] Thank you. Yeah, it’s it’s not an academic book. Um, although I’m sometimes I call myself a recovering philosophy professor, but it’s it’s written. Much of it’s written in the first person. It also contains a lot of interviews. I I thought it was very important not just to have my voice in, uh, 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. Uh, not because I believe racism is only a problem in the deep South. I should, you know, emphasis. But because, uh, 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 There’s a certain This book has two beginnings. Actually, um, one was in the fall of 1982 when I first came to Berlin thing on a Fulbright fellowship, thinking I was going to stay for a year and go back. And, uh, the reason I didn’t go back was that I became absolutely fascinated with this German concept of Fagan Heights Alpha biting, which I translate is working through the past. It’s Germans like long compound words. Um, right. But it’s not a concept that exists in any other language. And, um, you know, there’s a sense in which it simply, uh, emerged as a way of saying, What the hell are we going to do about the Nazis? Uh, 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 take over power, and people in Berlin were preparing for to commemorate it with a year’s worth of exhibits and discussions and, uh, theater and people doing the research about their neighborhoods and what their neighborhoods were like in the third, right, I should say, this was at the time, not at all the government sponsored project. And it wasn’t even a majority. Uh, certainly not a majority of Berlin of Germans and not even a majority of, uh, Berliners who have always leaned somewhat to the left of the country. But those were the people that I would have normally graduate 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. Um, we’ve never really talked about Hiroshima. Um, and that was the 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 their. So it’s a subject that I’ve been thinking about for, you know, more than you know, 35 years. Um, 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, uh, you know Nikki Haley did take down the flag of the first time that, you know, major national politician had called for dealing with or getting rid of Confederate symbols. And I thought, Gosh, America is finally beginning of a gang myself out by tongue and since this is something I’m I’ve thought about for a long time, Maybe I can make a contribution, but I, uh 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 their, 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, um, following people around who were doing this work as well as people who were absolutely opposed to it, Uh, as a way of trying to figure out what would be a genuinely American flag. Shanghai itself are biting, working off 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, um, 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. Um, so I of course, there are many differences in those two histories. You’re a historian So, you know, um, you know it’s important to care about cultural and and historical differences, but I still think there are lessons

[0:11:21 Speaker 2] Well, and I have to say I first became aware of your book. It had just come out and and I think I had read a review of it. But I was at a meeting of the World War Two Museum, the National World War Two Museum in New Orleans, where I’m on on the board. And, uh, we were talking about memories of World War Two. And it was It became so evident to me as we were planning a conference on World War Two memory. Um, how little Americans have thought critically about our own war experience, and that’s in no way to trash the experience of the United States in World War Two. But how much more advanced German thinking was on this? And this is This is a theme that resonates, I think, in your book. Why is it that around many of these issues, the Germans have seemingly done more thinking about this more of the work of addressing the dark and embarrassing and traumatic parts of their history? That Americans, why is

[0:12:15 Speaker 0] that? Well, there’s several several reasons for you know, we can give several reasons. One is I don’t know if it’s okay to swear on your podcast or not.

[0:12:26 Speaker 2] Go ahead.

[0:12:27 Speaker 0] Okay. I was actually 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. Um, but I’m quoting here. James MEREDITH, one of the people that I interviewed, um, in the book, the great civil rights hero from Mississippi. And, um, one of the things he said to me, she 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, you know, the worst crimes in human history. Um, I’ll agree with that, Um, and of course, since they were devastated at the end of the war, there was some pressure on them from the outside to, uh, 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. Uh, in West Germany, Uh, in particular. They thought of themselves as the war’s worst victims. And when I realized that it took me decades to realize this because it’s not something they like to talk about it all, you have to work to ferret it out. Um, 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 are you know, we were hungry, just barely alive. Maybe you’ll catch the reference there. Um, and on top of it, the damn Yankees wanted to tell us it was all our fault. Um, and I suddenly realized they sound just like the defenders of the lost cause. Um, 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, Um, it’s no wonder that those people who are asking, you know, for similar confrontation with our history in the US 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, the 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, uh, and it was rough. But other people suffered more, and it was our fault. And you know, so So, yes, the defeat played a role. There’s some other however, uh, things that sound more prosaic. You have no idea what kind of a media landscape we have here, Uh, public media landscape. And I’m you know, I’m pleased to see podcast like yours appearing to make up for the fact that you know most radio programs and almost all of television, um 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, um, I don’t actually have time, and I watch much German television or radio. But I am so happy every year to pay my little tax. It is not very much, Um, 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, um, 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, um, for doing. That’s another thing that plays a role.

[0:17:14 Speaker 1] Um, so what about a personal personal confrontation? I remember reading recently a book called Germany and the Germans by John Arda in From the 19 Nineties, and he describes going to I think it was at the University of Stuttgart, where they had like the grandfathers and and and and grandmothers and who had lived through the war Uh, one on one with with students who who who grew up after the war. And there was very much a sort of generational tension. How much of the sort of forgotten heights Alpha Beta was personal. And why haven’t we had that in the United States?

[0:17:49 Speaker 0] So that’s a really good question. And of course, it depends whether the person you’re confronting is your grandfather or your father. Um, in the late sixties when people were confronting their parents who had served in the Wehrmacht or, uh, 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, Um, and you had a sense of family structures being quite destroyed in many cases. The interesting thing I felt like where the family family structures weren’t destroyed. I mean, I was once invited to, uh, you know, spend up a weekend in the country, somebody who said her parents were away and said to use our house and, um, the parents had, you know, pictures of the father in uniform all over the house and I left the next day. I

[0:18:51 Speaker 2] can imagine

[0:18:52 Speaker 0] Yes. You know, if this is what it means to have a nice relationship with your parents, I’m not sure that I’m I’m I’m going for what? Look, um, I think the 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 Nazi criminal or even a serious Nazi. That that has left, um, real scars. One of the people I interviewed in the book, Alexandra Senft, 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. Um, so, you know, the confrontations didn’t happen at all for decades, and they they certainly happened. Uh, you know, they’re 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 100 year old hole in our memory. As I talked about in the book between the end of the Civil War and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 I was fortunate. I I grew up in in the South, although I know you don’t hear it. Um, 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. Uh, everybody was much too focused on the present, you know, focused on getting rid of segregation. And and, you know, it was a time. Zachary, you’re fortunate to have had your young political consciousness formed by, uh, you know, an African American president of great integrity and intelligence. Uh, 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. 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 Okay, there was slavery. Slavery was terrible. Um, but then we fought a war in order to end it. That was still the line, You know, that I learned, Um, mostly, um, And then there was Jim Crow. I think Jim Crow is a terrible expression. I’m on a, you know, minor campaign to stamp it out, because it’s a euphemism. It prettify eyes what Bryan Stevenson calls the age of racial terror, which I think is a much more accurate expression. I agree. I agree. Yeah. And the words Jim Crow allow us to think. Okay, there were racial stereotypes. There was racist prejudice. But, you know, it wasn’t we We don’t know about the web of, uh, legal continuation of various things that have been called neo slavery. Um, 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. Um, you know, 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, um and and of course, in the background lynching as a real instrument of terror to intimidate people of colors. So, you know, we we tended to think that all of that was more or less so We okay, 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 my 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 impact. Of course either, you know,

[0:24:02 Speaker 2] Well, there’s a long time it wasn’t even in our scholarship. I mean, you could you could be a scholar of American history without addressing these issues until, until you know, 30 years ago,

[0:24:11 Speaker 0] right? Right. And and then you had to be a scholar. You know, you had to be Eric Foner or you know, something like 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 have not examined are 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 Robinson is 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.

[0:25:08 Speaker 1] Yeah, so we also see you talked about this in your book a lot as well. Um, later on, particularly in recent decades, an effort by Germans not only to talk about their past, but to make, to take actions, to atone for it, to accept refugees and to, um, to send aid to Israel and and other such activities. Um, how how how big of a part of for Gang and Heights. Alphabet tune is this and

[0:25:33 Speaker 0] and has

[0:25:33 Speaker 1] it been applied in the United States? And and how could it be

[0:25:37 Speaker 0] so very good question? I mean, let me start by saying that the Gang Heights Alpha Biden has you know, it’s it’s not one thing. Um, it’s not a, you know, a one off vaccination. Okay, um, 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. Um, you know, it involves, uh, movies, literature, songs. Um, all of that stuff needs to be rethought of. I think reparations need to play a role. And they have, uh, 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, Um, the Vermont 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. Um, so obviously, where there’s been damage and, you know, again, it’s a 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, uh, our cities. As I say in the book, there is no Hans van marked in Germany. I mean, I just made that up as a counterpart to Johnny Reb. Uh, what there are are thousands of memorials to both victims, And the few resistance here is that there were, um all of that is part of a gang has alpha bite on.

[0:27:48 Speaker 2] So, Susan, this is such a powerful narrative that you put together here and it is so, so compelling because it’s it’s thoughtful. And you you draw out interviews with major figures. You mentioned Brian Stevens and and many others on the German side on the American side. Uh, we always like to close our podcast episode Susan with a forward looking hopeful, uh, Daniel mall.

[0:28:11 Speaker 0] What

[0:28:13 Speaker 2] do you take from this About the possibilities going forward? I think Americans are maybe at least a younger generation. It seems to me, and I find this certainly with my students are much more open to talking about a lot of these issues. Then my students were even 10 years ago. Uh, so what? What do you see as the positive pathway forward for us taking into account your analysis of historical memory and the uses and misuses of it.

[0:28:41 Speaker 0] I see a lot of hope at the moment, but I think we’re in a perilous time. Um, 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 has steered. 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, uh, in America, connecting the violence, which still outrageously exists more towards people of color than towards anyone else that 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, uh, 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, Um, and it’s very important. I think, that white Americans not consider ourselves as allies an ally as someone who is, you know, has a temporary, uh, alignment of interests with someone else like the U S. And the Soviet Union did during World War Two. Right? But wasn’t an alliance based on principle? I support black lives matter, Um, not out of interest, but as a matter of principle, because I care about universal human justice. And I am part of, uh, you know, many people of many ethnic backgrounds who have always done so, uh, Hannah Arendt, in her very important book, Eichmann in Jerusalem criticized the state of Israel because when they indicted Iceman, uh, they did it, uh, they indicted him for crimes against the Jewish people, and she says he should have indicted. They should have been indicted for crimes against humanity. And I think that’s exactly right. And I think we need to see the crimes crimes against African Americans as crimes against humanity that should engage and enrage every decent American as we work to reconstruct a better country.

[0:31:25 Speaker 2] Uh, that’s so powerful. Susan and I loved how you close the book in what you called in place of conclusions. Because there is no conclusion to this story where you talk about how in your words, I gave tribalism a try,

[0:31:38 Speaker 0] right?

[0:31:40 Speaker 2] But then you say it surprised me. I had a little whiplash at the end. I didn’t expect that from

[0:31:44 Speaker 1] you.

[0:31:45 Speaker 2] And then you said, uh, this book itself is offered as an exercise in universalism in the hope that understanding difference will help us to find shared souls. Zachary that this book obviously moved you. We read a lot together, but I think you really were moved by this. Why did it move you? And do you think that that Susan’s plea for universalism will resonate with your generation?

[0:32:10 Speaker 1] Yeah, I think

[0:32:11 Speaker 0] that it really

[0:32:12 Speaker 1] resonated for me because it’s a very sort of under It’s an understanding of American history and and world history from a perspective, that is, that is deeply intellectual. And I think, the most accurate depiction of history that we can see. And I think it’s actually a very hopeful thing for young Americans like myself, because I think sometimes it’s a little easy to be put off by people who who want to be all negative about American history or all positive about American history. And I think that this this book in the message of this book offers a great framework for how we can understand our history from a realistic perspective.

[0:32:49 Speaker 0] Thank you so much. And you know what Jeremy said also resonates with your poem. Um, 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

[0:33:08 Speaker 2] well and reading your books who’s in certainly felt not just like reading an exploration in memory and history, but also an exploration and redemption. What you’re talking about is the most hopeful thing, right? How how democratic societies offer the possibility for redemption because this is a theme of our podcast. Weekend and week out. Democracy is about no finality. Democracy denies that there’s an end to history. There’s no there’s no perfect template, and we’re not looking to create the perfect man and woman were looking to constantly remake ourselves for our times. It’s a constant rebuilding or in the Jewish tradition, lador of a door from generation to generation. And, uh, I think your book really captures that so well, Thank you for joining us from Berlin today for this discussion.

[0:33:56 Speaker 0] Well, it’s been a pleasure, and now I’ll look up your podcast more often.

[0:34:00 Speaker 2] I hope you will. I

[0:34:03 Speaker 0] will. And

[0:34:04 Speaker 2] Zachary, thank you, as always for a moving poem in two languages. This time you keep outdoing yourself every week and most of all, thank you to our listeners. And I do want to encourage everyone to pick up a copy of Susan’s book. It’s now in paperback, Learning from the Germans. A title. Very easy

[0:34:20 Speaker 0] to remember.

[0:34:21 Speaker 2] Thank you for joining us for this episode of This Is

[0:34:24 Speaker 0] Democracy.

[0:34:32 Speaker 1] This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

[0:34:39 Speaker 0] The music in

[0:34:40 Speaker 1] this episode was

[0:34:41 Speaker 2] written and recorded by Harrison Lemke, and you can find his music at Harrison Lemke

[0:34:45 Speaker 1] dot com.

[0:34:46 Speaker 0] Subscribe and stay tuned for a new episode every Thursday, featuring new perspectives on democracy. Yeah, yeah