Thread by @bnashat

“Were these monuments built for Germans to collectively remember what had been done, or a performance of contrition for the rest of the world?”

Fascinating @TheAtlantic essay by @ClintSmithIII on 🇩🇪 remembrance and lessons for the 🇺🇸 #slavery #Reparations
theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

I grew up around many of these monuments in Berlin and followed the debates since I was a child. And I believe that #Stolpersteine are among the most effective ways to remember, because they are immediate, personal, and created and maintained by civic action.

“Dear father! I am saying goodbye to you before I die. We would so love to live, but they won’t let us and we will die. I am so scared of this death, because the small children are thrown alive into the pit. Goodbye forever. I kiss you tenderly.”

Judith, 12, Belarus, 1942

“Kugelmann compared @jmberlin to the @smithsonian’s @NMAAHC in the sense that both attempt to tell the story of an oppressed group, without the entirety of their cultural identities being linked to that oppression.”

“As the @YaleLawSch legal scholar James Q. Whitman has documented, when Nazi officials first formulated their Nuremberg race laws, in 1934, they drew inspiration from the U.S., modeling them in part on the #JimCrow laws.”

press.princeton.edu/books/hardcove…

“What Germany does well in regards to the Holocaust is show that when you honor the victims instead of the perpetrators, you’re still remembering history,” @LadyGodiva83 said. 1/2

“But you’re making it clear who the aggressors were, who the victims were, and who we honored. I think this is important in terms of how the country heals.” @LadyGodiva83 shook her head. “That is why I think the United States is very far from healing.” 2/2

“The scream and shots of a race riot in Atlanta; the marching of the Ku Klux Klan; the threat of courts and police; the neglect and destruction of human habitation; but nothing in my wildest imagination was equal to what I saw in Warsaw.”

W. E. B. Du Bois in Warsaw, 1949

And @ClintSmithIII reflects:

“I was reminded, too, that many of 🇩🇪’s most powerful memorials did not begin as state-sanctioned projects, but emerged—and are still emerging—from ordinary people outside the government who pushed the country to be honest about its past.” 1/2

[…] “Sometimes that means standing on the street for years collecting signatures for the massive memorial to murdered Jews […]. 🇺🇸 do not have to, and should not, wait for the government to find its conscience. Ordinary people are the conscience.” 2/2

@threadreaderapp unroll please

And shoutout to @ev_rat and @longformpodcast as I’ve learned about this piece there:

https://twitter.com/longform/status/1603079345899442178