Learning from the Germans
Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil
Susan Neiman
Having read it
★★★★★
An accessible but, quite honestly, a tough read that despite its difficult subjects is a very worthwhile one that really gets you thinking about legacies and how invariably they get ignored and avoided, rather than be legitimately confronted, understood and learned from.
It takes time to take in different perspectives but, as the author’s discussions showed throughout the book, doing that leads to better understanding, recognition and appreciation of society’s and individuals’ characteristics and behaviours, for good or ill, over the longer-term.
A good passage
Failures foster hope where it’s clear that they lead not to final solutions, but to progress that can be gauged by real difference in people’s lives.
A second good passage
[...] you can get quite a lot, actually, if you let yourself be touched by a piece of art. Made by cultural insiders for each other, to start with, but from the perspective of watchful outsiders too. Both inside and outside perspectives matter. We are not alone in this world. The arts are the only thing that have the power to shake you up. All the facts in the world don’t matter until they move you, and the arts, broadly speaking, can do that better than anything else.
A third good passage
Many – perhaps most – countries have rapacious and violent histories that they cover, in time, with a fuzzy blanket of benevolence. We brought the natives religion, or railroads. The natives were no angels either, and besides, our neighbours were worse. In the end, the attempts at justification come to little more than everybody does it, and we weren’t as bad as some. American sins are not worse than those of other nations. They are simply more jarring because, unlike the foundation of other nations, America’s took place amid a fanfare of ideals. Others nations commenced by believing in nothing but themselves; only America began its morning by pledging allegiance to a set of principles.
That Native Americans had a right to life, and African Americans to liberty, was a truth whose self-evidence eluded the Founding Fathers. From its inception, the United States of America insisted on ideals it refused to realise. Yet those ideals refused to fade. Sometimes they merely served the cause of self-delusion, but sometimes they retained enough weight to guide every progressive movement from abolition to the present day. Given that fact, recognising the justice of reparations is a recognition of the need to rethink American history.