Alex Clark - Nazism, slavery, empire: can countries learn from national evil? Interview with Susan Neiman
Moral
philosopher Susan Neiman has studied how Germany came to terms with the crimes
of nazism. She explains why the US and Britain should take note
“I really do see that our relationship to
our nation is like a grown-up relationship to our parents. We have to sort this
through and say: ‘These parts of my national history I can be proud of and I
can stand by, and these parts I’m sorry for and I’d like to do my best to
somehow make up for.’
When Susan Neiman’s
German friends discovered she was working on a book called Learning
from the Germans, they laughed. “They told me: ‘You cannot publish a book
with that title. There’s nothing to learn from the Germans; we did too little
and too late.’ And there is something paradoxical about saying: ‘Well, we
committed this terrible crime, but weren’t we great at coming to terms with
it?’ You can’t really say that. But someone who’s a semi-outsider as I am, can,
in fact, say that.”
Neiman, a moral
philosopher, spent part of her childhood in the American south and she has
written a comparative study of how Germany has come to terms with the crimes of
nazism, and why the US, in failing to confront its own human rights abuses,
should take note. Ambitious and detailed, it ranges from the initial reluctance
of German citizens to begin the process of truth and reconciliation to
small-town Mississippi, and the shooting of nine African American churchgoers
in Charleston, South Carolina, four years ago. It was that massacre,
carried out by a white supremacist, that prompted Neiman, whose previous books
include an examination of the concept of evil, to begin researching and
writing Learning from the Germans. From her home in Berlin, where
she has lived for the past 22 years, Neiman watched Barack Obama give a
heartrending eulogy to the dead, and then followed as governors began to order
the taking down of Confederate flags, and Walmart announced that it would stop
selling Confederate memorabilia. It struck her that amid the horror lurked a
hopeful moment – a moment of potential change – and that she herself had “some
knowledge and experience that I could share, that might be helpful”.
Neiman’s mother
campaigned for the desegregation of Atlanta’s public schools – an activity that
earned her, as Neiman recalls, several late-night phone calls from the Ku Klux
Klan. One hot summer’s day, her mother invited an African American friend and
her children over for the afternoon, and Neiman asked if they could all go to
the outdoor swimming pool. No, came the answer. The lake, then? Still no.
Imploring and questioning did not change the answer. In the end, the children
played beneath the garden sprinklers; only years later did Neiman realise that
it would have been against the law for them to have swum together.... read more:
Susan Neiman - Evil in Modern Thought // Lecture: 'Hannah Arendt's Disruptive Truth Telling'
Kwame Appiah's review of Moral Clarity
