Are Monuments to Past Sins Vital for National Reckoning?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: Next, a crucial message on facing a terrible history. For his latest piece, the author and Atlantic staff writer, Clint Smith, examines what America can learn from Germany’s effort to memorialize the holocaust. It’s called, “Monument to The Unthinkable”. It documents his extensive travels through Germany. Discovering nationwide efforts to remember. In this conversation, he is sharing what he learned with Michel Martin.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Clint Smith, thank you for talking with us.

CLINT SMITH, AUTHOR, “MONUMENTS TO THE UNTHINKABLE”: It’s so good to be here.

MARTIN: You have been interested in the topic of public memory and how people and nations and communities should account for the past. Your most recent book, “How The Word is Passed” just — it was a very beautifully reviewed, very much acclaim, very much appreciated by the public. And it examined how different historical sites across the United States reckon with or don’t, their relationship to slavery. For your latest piece for the Atlantic, you go to Germany to continue that examination. Why Germany?

SMITH: You know, Germany is sort of, often lifted up as the exemplar of public memory. A place that is very engaged, very direct, very transparent, very comprehensive in the way that they account for the crimes of their past, and what the German state did during the holocaust. And so, for me, both as a person, as a writer, as a journalist, it fell incumbent upon me to go to this place, regardless of whether or not I was going to write about it. To try to get a deeper sense of how does Germany tell the story of its past. And one of the things that I was interested in is how much of what Germany does is an actual internal reflection? How much of what, sort of, does the existence of the monuments and all the (INAUDIBLE) is reflective of deep internal, sort of, reflection — meditation on its past? How much of it is, sort of, performance of contrition for the rest of the world? And how much of it is both?

MARTIN: So, let’s just talk about some of the things that you learn when you went to Germany. I certainly learned a lot of things on your piece that I did not know. For example, it was surprising to me that a lot of these commemorative sites were installed in the 1990s. It’s like, so long after the events that they commemorate took place.

SMITH: Part of it was that you had eastern Germany and western Germany who were controlled by fundamentally different powers, and this was, sort of, beginning of the cold war and peoples’ notions of, like, who played what role in the, sort of, winning of the war shaped how memorials and monuments were being erected. So, that was a part of it. But, also, I think what people don’t always consider, is that there was enormous amount of shame and an enormous amount of grief. Not only to Germany lose the war, but people lost family members as a result of the war. And now you’re — they’re being told by the rest of the world, that the cost that their family members died for was a horrific thing. That they are evil people. That they fought for an evil leader. And so, there is this, sort of, coalescence of grief, and mourning, and shame, and confusion that ultimately results in this profound, sort of, silence. Right. People just don’t want to talk about it. People don’t want to have conversations about what they were doing during the war. Were they participating? Were they complicit? Did they watch? Did they — and so, for generations, there was largely little conversation about the holocaust. And it wasn’t until peoples’ children and grandchildren began asking questions and saying, you know, grandma, where were you when this was happening? Grandpa, like, did you — were you in the army? Were you watching as people were — as Jewish families were sent down the street? And it is those — it is sort of two generations later in which the conversation begins to turn and in which results in these monuments coming up. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, you know, the first state sanction holocaust memorial didn’t go up until, I believe, 2005 — it wasn’t open until 2005. And so, it did take time and it wasn’t immediate. And I think that that’s because there was a lot of shame and silence that people had to work through over the course of generations.

MARTIN: So, you went to Germany in part to draw connection to the American experience. And the current American experience of reckoning or not, as the case may be with atrocities in the American experience. And so, first of all, you know, what does Germany have to teach America about this? What conclusions did you draw?

SMITH: Well, one of the things that I hadn’t fully considered and didn’t fully realize until I was there was the profound differences in terms of the population of people. With regard to how many Jewish people are left in Germany, and how many black people are left in the United States. Which is to say in Germany, there are only — there’s under 150,000 Jewish people left in that country. They represent less than a quarter of a percent of the population of Germany. There are more Jewish people in the city of Boston than there are in all of the German nation. That’s very different than the United States where in the U.S., there are 40 million black people. And we represent a massive social, political, and economic bloc. And so, one of the things that Jewish folks in Germany will tell me is that it is easy for Germans to build monuments and memorials, and museums to what happened in the holocaust. To what — to Jewish families. To lay wreaths down on certain days of the year because, as they put it, Jewish people or more historical extractions than they are actual people. And again, that’s very different than here whereas if one is to put up a monument or lay a wreath down to account for what slavery or Jim Crow apartheid did to black people, or this nation did to black people. You can’t simply put a wreath down and then not look around and see 40 million people who are experiencing the direct remnants and residue of the systems that created this violence and the suppression, and these distortions. And that’s something that people are much less willing to do, right? Because I think it is easier to apologize and to create objects of memory and iconography of memory to a group of people that most Germans do not actually have a relationship with. Many Germans don’t know a Jewish person. They don’t spend time with the Jewish people. And I think that that is one of the most profound differences that exist between the two nations. And still, I think it is helpful to think about how ubiquitous the, sort of, sites of memory in Monuments of Memory are in Germany, right. And there’s something about, you know, tens of thousands of the Stolperstein, which the English translation stumbling stone. And it’s so powerful. You go, you walk — you know, and you’re walking down the street in Berlin. And in the middle of these, sort of, cobble stones sidewalks, you’ll see a stumbling stone and have the birthdate, the date the person was deported, date they were killed, and where they were killed. And you look down, and you can look up, and you see the home that this person lived in, or the synagogue they attended, or the apartment that they lived in. And because of the dates, you can tell who were the children, who were the parents, who were the grandparents. And it creates this profound sense of intimacy in proximity to that history that I found it to be so striking. And one of the women who I was spending time with, there were some stumbling stones in front of her home. And we were talking about what it would be like if there were — she — you know, she knew that I was from New Orleans, was — which was once the largest and busiest slave market in the country. She knew that I was a descendant of enslaved people. And we were saying, could you imagine what it would be like if in New Orleans there were stumbling stones placed in front of the homes where enslaved people were held? The buildings where enslaved people were sold. The places where enslaved were persecuted. And she said to me — she was like, the streets would be packed. The entire city would be paved in brass stones. And that was such a profound moment for me. And I thought about how different would our sense of what happened be here in the U.S.? If we were encountering daily reminders of what had been done in these spaces. And that is not to say that memorials and Stolperstein or anything else (INAUDIBLE) that are going to suddenly solve all of our problems of national memory. But I do think that it creates a fundamentally different landscape that people navigate in ways that they understand the relationship of places in the past.

MARTIN: Why don’t we? Why — what conclusion did you draw about why here in the U.S. we don’t encounter those kinds of reminders on a daily basis?

SMITH: You know, we were talking about how long it took Germany to finally build monuments and memorials to the holocaust. You know, the war ended in 1945 and stumbling stones didn’t emerge until 1996. Slavery ended over 150 years ago. The national museum of African American history and culture opened in 2016. Again, like 150 years after the end of slavery which the entire first floor of that building is dedicated to it. We still don’t have a museum in this country, singularly dedicated to telling the story of slavery. As important as the national museum of African American history and culture is. And so, I think it says something about how long it has taken us to finally be able to have honest, robust, empirically grounded and accurate conversations about the history of our country. And part of it — part of the reason that it’s so distorted and part of the reason that it’s taken so long is because of the success of the lost cause propaganda after the end of the civil war where, you know, people often say the south lost the war but they won the peace. Which is to say that they created narratives in which they suggested that slavery had nothing to do with the civil war. Even if it did, slavery wasn’t that bad. It was largely a, sort of, benign of civilizing institution. John Calhoun, the late South Carolina senator said, it was a positive good for both black and white people alike. And so, these are the, sort of, messages that took hold in the American public consciousness. And it wasn’t until the civil rights movement that people began to think about slavery as something that was bad to begin with, right? Because so much of the messaging had been tied to slavery being an institution that was actually beneficial for black Americans. And so, we are only in the beginning stages in the, sort of, grand scheme of things. I think. We are still in the beginning stages of beginning to more robustly encounter and engage with the horror that slavery was. Both on a personal scale, on an emotional scale, but also in terms of the vast, sort of, systemic violence that enacted on an entire demographical people for generations.

MARTIN: Germany is seeing an enormous surge in antisemitic incidences, similar to what we are seeing here in the United States. I mean, last year, in 2021, if I have my facts correctly — I mean, the antisemitic instances reached what many considered to be an all-time high. And along with, you know, racist attacks directed at other groups, which — you know, we have also talked about. So, how do you — what makes the case for you that confronting this history every day is making a difference?

SMITH: I think it’s a difficult counterfactual to do in the sense that, you know, what would — how do we imagine what German — the sort of, political, social, ecosystem of Germany would be today if there were no reminders, right? If on — you know, the holocaust and slavery are qualitatively different phenomenon but I think it can be helpful, obviously, to compare them. But you know, here in the United States, one of the places I went from my book was Angola Prison. Angola is the largest maximum-security prison in the country, 18,000 acres wide, bigger than the (INAUDIBLE) Manhattan, the place where 75 percent of the people held there are black men, where 70 percent of them are serving life sentences. And it’s built on top of a former plantation. I went to Dachau for this peace. And I had this moment where I was standing in Dachau, in this concentration camp where tens of thousands of people were killed, and it’s this haunting vast expansive grave. You look to the left, it’s the remnants of the crematorium, you look to your right, there’s the sort of skeletons and barracks. And I close my eyes and I just try to imagine what it would be like if on that length there was a prison and in that prison, the vast majority of the people held there were Jewish. I couldn’t even imagine it because we’re so abhorrent. It was so disgusting. It was so impossible to imagine that we would ever allow something like that to exist. But here in the United States, we have the largest maximum-security prison in the country where the vast majority people are black men life sentences, in which people watch over them with — on horseback, with guns over their shoulders while they pick crops for pennies on the hour on top of a former plantation. And so, part of — I think that there is the sort of implications of failing to remember manifest themselves in very real social and political infrastructure, right? So, for the people who are on that land, who are in these spaces that history feels acute, it feels personal, it’s not a metaphor. It is in their bodies. It’s in the calluses on their hands. And that is a profound difference, right? And the reason Angola is able to exist on a former plantation, the reason the largest prison in the country exists on the grounds of former plantation land is because of a profound failure of our collective memory, to understand that as being abhorrent and as being unacceptable. And I think there’s smaller and different examples of that in every sector of our society in ways that are often illegal in Germany, like you can’t — you know, we pride ourselves on the right to free speech here. But in Germany, you can’t deny the holocaust. That is — it’s against the law, right? You can’t say — there are certain things you can and can’t say because it is so clear that it is — that it would invoke and bring back this thing that this country is trying to move past and a recognition that one has freedom of speech, but there are also limits to the ways in which people can deploy that speech.

MARTIN: But then, I’m still wondering how then — how do you move the ball along? I mean, as you point out in your piece, that this is a couple of generations in in Germany. It is really the children and grandchildren of the holocaust generation that really demanded that their elders deal with this history. So, then, the question becomes like, when does this happen in the United States in their examples of, you know, descendants of Robert E. Lee, for example, descendants of confederate generals who have played prominent roles in demanding that, say, confederate iconography be removed from public spaces in some parts of the country. But right now, we are in the middle of a very much a movement against that. I mean, we have political candidates who run for office basing their public stance as very much in opposition to this kind of reckoning. So, how do you move the ball along? Did you — did Germany give you any lessons about that?

SMITH: I think the main thing that Germany taught me is that you shouldn’t wait for your government to do these things, right? When Mr. Demnig, who — the artist who created the Stumbling Stones first began putting them in the ground, that wasn’t a state sanctioned project. He was doing that on his own. And then, the government tried to stop him. And then, they realize there was such wide support for them that they eventually began to support his work. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe didn’t just emerge from the sort of goodness of the government’s heart, they were people who stood on street corners for years collecting signatures, pressuring local officials, pressuring federal officials, right, for years and years, for decades, trying to push the country to say, how can we not have a memorial to the worst thing this country has ever done? One of the worst things that has happened in modern history? How can we not have something that is like a very clear reflection of our contrition, a very clear reflection of our commitment to never going back to that version of ourselves? If anything, there’s a more fervent desire to continue to push forward with this amid the rise of antisemitism. And I think here, there are some examples of that. There’s examples like Bryan Stevenson Museum, there are also examples of a group of teachers and students in Connecticut who began the Witness Stones Project, which is very similar to the Stumbling Stone, and they are placing them in front of the places where enslaved people lived, who were held, who were sold. And so, you know, all sorts of places across this country have smaller versions of this. And I think, ultimately, it is those small neighborhoods, community and the city-based initiatives that make the most impact and have the most potential to change minds, to change hearts, to change our understanding of ourselves.

MARTIN: Clint Smith, thank you so much for talking with us.

SMITH: Thank you.