Susan Neiman on How the US Can Atone For Historical Sins

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: I guess the world thinks that Germany after the defeat suddenly became reconciled and suddenly, you know, outlawed all of this, you know, awful, awful politics that led to Nazism.

SUSAN NEIMAN, AUTHOR, “LEARNING FROM THE GERMANS”: That’s exactly right. And I think the three basic things we can learn from the Germans. And the first one, and perhaps the most important, is how very hard it is to confront your nation’s crimes. There will always be pushback. There will always be people who come up with arguments like — well, other people were just as bad, let’s look to the future and not dig up these old bones. And as you rightly said, the Nazi period has come to serve for much of the rest of the world as such a symbol of absolute evil. I mean, it’s kind of a black hole, because we tend to look at the Nazi period from the very end. We don’t look at the beginning. You know, there were 6.5 years in which the Nazis were in power before they even started a war, much less started with genocide. But because it serves us now and we only focus on this end point, we tend to assume, well, the minute the war was over, they got on their knees and, you know, begged pardon and tried to atone. And the really shocking thing is that they didn’t. When I first came to Berlin in 1982, I had friends who would tell me with a great deal of shame that their parents were Nazis. They wouldn’t say, my parents were Nazis and they thought they were the world’s worst victims. But that is very much what the view was in West Germany. East Germany was somewhat different. And I think there is a little bit of hope in there for those people. And you’re absolutely right, the way the 400th anniversary of slavery is being commemorated in the states is very much an example of a fairly broad sweep of Americans trying to come to terms with slavery and the neo-slavery that followed it, not simply as an unfortunate little blip on our history, but quite a central part of it. And of course, there’s been gigantic pushback. Newt Gingrich criticized “The New York Times” for their 1619 Project and plenty of less prominent people find it appalling.