Thread by @iwashyna

Hey @JoeZickafoose, I started Neiman’s “Learning From the Germans”, and it is already a fascinating read on several levels by page 9

https://twitter.com/newyorker/status/1281551569406894082

The above link is an interview with Neiman (fascinatingly contentious at places, not to the interviewers credit)

Here is her essay version of her book:

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

“Evil is what others do” -Neiman

“The descendants of the Wehrmacht made the same claims as the descendants of the Confederate Army”

“Surely they knew—at least when they opened the camps—that what they’d done was pure evil?
“They did not.”

- Neiman

“if everyone cleans up her own mess, we won’t have to worry about anyone else’s… A German who talks about the singularity of the Holocaust is taking responsibility; a German who talks of its universiality is denying it.”
- Neiman

“We all benefit from inheritances we did not choose and cannot change. Growing up involves sifting through all the things you couldn’t help inheriting and figuring out what you want to claim as your own”
- Neiman

Neiman on when Jaspers needed to teach recent Nazis about #FalseEquivalence

Neiman: “Arendt… simply could not grasp the idea that thinking people could consciously do evil, or fail to repent when confronted with the extent of their crimes.”

Neiman on Reemtsma “with trust we can, as a society, refuse to accept violence”

Arguing that protests against far right violence were effective

“Who are you to tell us anything about morals?… There’s just one answer: I am not one of the murderers”

Neiman, Reemstma, Arendt

Neiman’s how to “work off a nation’s criminal past”

1/ coherent honest national narrative

2/ honor consistently heroes + victims, not criminals

3/ embed narrative in public education

4/ put it to new music

5/ criminals pay, victims restituted

One of the fascinating things about Neiman’s book is the way she gives voice to those Germans who say her project — “Learning from the Germans” — is misguided

To reflect on my own Catholic school education: I was taught in a high school founded by dissident Catholic priests who escaped Hungary’s communist jails

Yet somehow I always learned that anti-fascism was the absolute bedrock, though those priests were devoutly anti-communist

Neiman’s chapter on East Germany reflects her commitment to understanding gradients of evil — even to “there’s a world of difference between a person who began by fighting for equality in solidarity and one who began from a racist worldview”

It would be easy to get distracted on this point, as the interviewer at the top of thread did, but in context it is worth mulling

As someone who started reading the book to think about de-nazification, it is astounding how much that was not done — the West German equivalent of the FBI, 3/4 of whose executive employees had been Nazis, with more than half of those belonging to the [all volunteer] SS”

Oh, this is a great + highly generalizable point

“Stanley Cavell divided thinkers into those whose main categories are political and those whose categories are primarily psychological”

Now Neiman in conversation w Schorlemmer “we are all capable of asking for forgiveness, and giving it as well—without denying what happened”

Neiman:

“Unexamined pasts eventually seep into the quiet lives people try to lead. ‘Human beings need more than bread and circuses.’

“‘Of course they do. The question is whether they want it.’”

Neiman’s core warning: “being on the right side of history at one time is no guarantee that you’ll be on the right side of history at another”

Neiman’s pivot to the South where she grew up is brisk

“The line from Southern hatred of Reconstruction to Southern opposition to government programs is a straight one”