...it’s not the German material that makes Neiman’s book so powerful. She recounts it with a lucid, masterful brevity, but what really matters here is the juxtaposition contained in its first sentence: 'I began life as a white girl in the segregated South, and I’m likely to end it as a Jewish woman in Berlin.' Neiman wants us to use each place to think about the other, but she’s finally more interested in America, for we are the ones with something yet to learn about the business of facing the past ... She’s not, of course, the first to make that link. W.E.B. Du Bois saw a parallel between the color line and the Warsaw ghetto ... But none of the Americans who’ve seen the connection has had Neiman’s comprehensive knowledge of how the Germans have worked to overcome their past; none has pursued it so tenaciously, so originally ... Neiman poses questions, but rather than answering them she educates her readers by thinking through their implications ... Neiman isn’t the ironist that West was, but she too believes that history has lessons, and that if we think hard enough, carefully enough, we can learn them. We can fail better, at least, at the endless job of getting straight with our past. Race and the Memory of Evil—there’s not a corner of this country untouched by that evil, and it endures precisely because of the way we misremember it.
... fascinating ... The history wars shape far more than how we remember the past. They shape the societies we bequeath to future generations. Susan Neiman’s book is an important and welcome weapon in that battle.
... richly rewarding, consistently stimulating and beautifully written ... Neiman is a professional philosopher with the skills of an investigative journalist and historian ... This brief overview barely begins to convey the way this disturbing but hopeful and insightful book wrestles with the questions of who we are as human beings and what values we have as a nation. I strongly recommend it.
A fascinating book that assists readers in gaining a deeper understanding of the past in order to move forward. Highly recommended for all history readers and teachers.
Growing up in the American south during the civil rights era, and spending much of her adult life in and around Berlin as a Jewish woman, Neiman has a keen ear for discomforts and awkwardnesses and the small tics of guilt and avoidance ... I think [Neiman] underplays the extent to which the task of 'working through' history becomes ritualistic ... Where the account goes awfully wrong is in the musings on East Germany, where Neiman is prone to accepting the GDR’s self-serving use of its 'anti-fascist' badging at a face value it never merited, despite the good faith of many cultural figures in the idea ... It would be a bit like talking about Brexit Britain through the eyes of a lot of Remainers and Lib Dems. The narrative of 'colonisation' of the east by the west after unification is treated unsceptically.
Neiman aims to encourage American efforts at a grim time. It might be easy for a critic to argue that Americans have already missed the...boat ... This idiosyncratic degree of optimism—treating a century and a half of intransigence as evidence that Americans can evolve—is deliberate. The book is a compare and contrast in two case studies. But it’s also, as Neiman acknowledges, undergirded by a broader idea most often associated with Enlightenment-era thinking: that history is fundamentally progressive—things get better over time ... indeed the book is more persuasive at a theoretical and intuitive level than at an empirical one. There are a few notable omissions—for example, in the section praising the Treptow monument to fallen Soviet soldiers, she fails to discuss the mass rape suffered by German women at the hands of the Red Army ... Inattention to economic context also complicates an otherwise very persuasive case for reparations ... Most importantly, the idea that Trump’s presidency rests on Southern denial—however intuitively persuasive—skates past some pesky particulars ... Addressing racial inequality and injustice in the United States today is a much larger task than Neiman seems to propose.
One of the more unflinching aspects of Learning from the Germans is her conviction that American and southern realities are more flexible, or at least less inflexible, than most would think ... Neiman acknowledges both the limits and possibilities inherent in her comparative endeavor ... Neiman’s interviews are extensive, and she allows the voices of those involved in thinking about how to address public memory to animate her pages ... Neiman’s firmly focused questions of guilt, reparations, and how to memorialize Till’s murder reveal a variety of motives and dispositions.
[Neiman's] perspective of being Jewish in Germany is compelling ... The reader can easily see how the Trump administration is rending the tender social connections she is documenting ... an important book for showing us a path we can follow.
... insightful ... From memorials to Emmett Till, Neiman gleans some guidance on how to preserve the memory of a terrible event while educating the public on the dangers of intolerance. Neiman’s commentary is thoughtful and perceptive, her comparison timely. This exceptional piece of historical and political philosophy provides a meaningful way of looking at the Civil War’s legacy.
Neiman’s account is long and at times plodding, but her examination of how that situation came about serves as an important lesson for those who seek to face up to the past wrongs in this country ... A timely, urgent call to revisit the past with an eye to correction and remedy.
