Confronting evils

[Music] Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History magazine, Britain's Best Selling History Magazine. [Music] I'm Ellie Corthon. On today's podcast, you'll hear a conversation I had with the philosopher and cultural commentator, Susan Neiman. Susan's most recent book, Learning from the Germans, investigates how nations grapple with difficult historical legacies of racism and colonialism. And she looks at two main case studies, Nazism in Germany and Racism in the American South. Susan came to our studio and Bristol to tell me more. Your new book digs into how nations deal with painful and often horrific aspects of their national history. And you focus on racism in the US and also Nazism in Germany. What first motivated you to delve into how nations deal with or ignore such incendiary issues? I first went to Berlin as a graduate student in 1982. When not very many non-German's and certainly very few Anglo-Americans and even fewer Jews went there. And people actually looked quite as scant when I said I was going to spend a whole year in Berlin. And my answer at the time was the war has been over for almost 40 years and wouldn't it be just as racist to condemn all of Germany now as the Germans were racist in condemning Jews or particular other tribes? And so I thought it was done with. And I arrived in Germany in October 1982 and what was overwhelming was the presence of the Nazi period in the consciousness of ordinary people all over the city. They were engaged in the beginnings of this process for which there's a long German word, "Fekanghetsaufarbeitung", which I translate as working off the past. And it was taking place at the time in West Germany, not sponsored by the West German government, although the East German government did sponsor it there. But it was taking place groups of citizens were forming exhibits and making films and art. And insisting that basically their parents and teachers come to terms with the horror that they had done. So we're even thinking about the subject ever since then. And to some degree taking the temperature of Germany, because I had my first child in Germany and in 1985 and there was a question about whether I was going to stay or not. In 1988 I decided that a Jewish boy and even a foreigner couldn't have an ordinary life in Berlin and I left. 12 years later I was offered an extraordinary and quite unique job being director of the head of an Einstein forum, which is an interdisciplinary public think tank. And the question came up again. I had given birth to two more children in the meantime. Who were born in New Haven, Connecticut. And I was living with them in Tel Aviv and the question was, is it crazy for me to consider a job there? Has the country changed? So I went, visited many, many times and decided, yeah, actually through this process, which was just beginning in the early 80s of working off the past. Germany has actually become a much sainer, much better country. So in a certain sense I've been thinking about these topics for a long, long time, though I'm not a historian. I was trained as a philosopher. But the actual immediate impulse for this book happened on a specific date. It was June 2015 when I was standing in my Berlin apartment watching President Obama's wonderfully moving eulogy to the or four, the nine black churchgoers who were murdered in Charleston. And it was a moment at which the United States looked as if it had come face to face with what unworked through love of the Confederacy could come to because it was found out that the murderer had posed with pictures of the Confederate flag, actually also with pictures of the Rhodesian flag of all things. And was very much one of these white supremacists. Let's revive the southern fight. So it looked as if America was beginning to face that. And I thought I had some experience that might be helpful. And one of the things that you grapple with in the book is the the challenge of historical comparisons and you acknowledge that one aspect of history is never completely identical to another, for example, the case of Germany and the case of America. But why do you think that those two nations make a particularly interesting comparison? Well, you see, it's quite interesting because we're always told to remember the Holocaust because we're meant to learn lessons from it. But if it's not comparable with anything, what lessons can we possibly learn? And I've been pleased that I thought I was going to get a lot of flak for making that comparison. And perhaps because of the book, I do acknowledge that no two historical events or periods are exactly like and no two countries are actually like. People have understood that, yeah, of course, you can make comparisons. I think you can make comparisons to Britain as well. But if you want to start with the United States, we can do that because I focused on the United States partly because I am an American partly because I think in order to talk about working off the past, one needs to go very deeply into particular stories and to particular histories. And I did spend half a year in Mississippi, the deep south where I had actually never been before. And many people are quite afraid to go to Mississippi even today. But I wanted to see what people in Mississippi were doing to deal with the legacy of racism and slavery simply because Mississippi was the worst of the worst. This is not to say that there isn't racism in other parts of the United States. But in Mississippi, it's like a magnifying glass. They are very concerned with their history, although often the tales they tell themselves are false. We still do not know how many people died in the middle passage. And you could say, well, slavery was economically fueled. It wasn't simply murdering people for its own sake. They're arguments about whether the degree to which the persecution of the Jews was economically fueled too. So that's not a clear line. What we do know, that millions of African Americans were murdered in the process of slavery. Both in the transportation and middle passage and in the time thereafter. What we also now know, which many people, myself included until I began researching this book, is that slavery didn't end in 1865. There were practices that were not simply individual prejudice but written into law, which were in many ways worse than child slavery. For example, the institution of convict leasing. In 1890, many of the southern states drew up what were called black codes. Basically, forbidding African Americans to do anything but keep their heads down and shuffle by quietly. Even that, in some cases, could be considered a crime. So vagrancy, for example, if they weren't working for a white person, was a crime for which people could be put into jail. And minds, plantations, factories, least convicts from jail. And without even the economic interest that slave owners had, after all, if you paid $1,000 for a slave, you wanted them to stay alive. The owners of the mines and the factories didn't even have that kind of interest because they knew that they could always get more convicts. They were not only usually in cooots with the sheriffs of the various places, often they were one in the same person. So the mortality rate in some of these places was 40%, which was quite a bit higher than during Chattel's slavery. So we know that millions of African Americans were systematically murdered and deprived of their rights and that we're still seeing the consequences today. So I don't see why we shouldn't compare that. I'll just one more point. Sometimes people have asked me, isn't the right comparison more the genocide of Native Americans? Well, that is a comparison that one could make as well. And I know means want to deny that that in some ways is America's original sin. But I think that for questions of the impact on contemporary politics, the impact of slavery and neo-slavery plays more of a role in contemporary American problems. I think we cannot explain the election or sort of election of Donald Trump without seeing it as a backlash to the eight years of Barack Obama. So that's why I decided to focus on that rather than the extermination of Native peoples. So to pick up on your point about Mississippi, when you went there, what did you find? And how would you characterize America today's attitudes towards its past in terms of slavery? So a funny thing happened. I like seeing silver linings. They're hard to find. Three years ago, I would have said there's not a lot of awareness. And there really wasn't. What I did find in Mississippi were small groups of people black and white who were concerned with memorializing civil rights history with bringing that were still people who hadn't been brought to trial or who had been brought to trial and been acquitted. People, clan members, who were responsible for the murders of civil rights workers. So that was being done by brave activists, black and white. But it wasn't reaching the mainstream. As Donald Trump's presidency becomes more and more clearly an outgrowth of white supremacy and his encouragement of the Nazis in Charlottesville, the demonstrations in August of 2017 when he said, well, they're very fine people on both sides. This was over a demonstration about removing the monument of Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate armies. And one counter-demonstrator was killed by these people who get referred to as neo-Nazis. But there's nothing neo about them. They were using Nazi slogans. They were carrying Nazi-like torches. They were wearing t-shirts with slogans, citing Hitler. So that was a moment at which I think Americans started realizing that this repressed past was haunting our daily politics. And what you've seen in the past two years is really quite extraordinary that you have mainstream publications like the New York Times, like the Washington Post doing really serious work commemorating slavery and not only commemorating slavery, but as the New York Times 1619 Project, 1619 is supposedly the date when the first enslaved African was brought to American shores. There's some historical questioning if that was really the first. But let's call it the 400th anniversary of slavery in the United States. The New York Times started a project in their words. I believe this is an exact quote to rewrite the history of the United States from the perspective of slavery. Now, all of us knew that there was slavery in the United States. We also thought we knew that it was over in 1865. And we didn't have to worry about the period between 1865 and Rosa Parks's Montgomery bus boycott. So that whole period was kind of left so dark that many very educated Americans, myself included, I have to say, didn't realize just how deep and how structural the continuation of these forces were. But of course you couldn't know anything about American history, without knowing that there was slavery, but there were still arguments about whether the slavery was the cause of the Civil War, and there were arguments about the monuments. So historians have come out and made very public statements that have gotten a lot of place saying no. Let's face up to this straight forwardly. And that has just, I would say, it's really been less than two years. If anything good has come out of this presidency, it is an awareness of how deep the forces go that created the racism that helped elect him. To bring in the German comparison again, why do you think that it has taken America so much longer to grapple with its past than was the case in Germany? One of my friends, Diarmac Water, who's a historian of the Civil Rights Movement argues, an answer to that question, that actually you have to count the legal end of slavery with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which was in the mid-60s, because there were so many forms that lasted that long of institutionalized segregation. So that's one answer, and I think there's quite a lot in it. But what that says is, forces that most white people were not aware of. Black people certainly were. But most white people were not aware of, continued to be in power until the middle of the 60s. Still to come on the History Extra Podcast. When nations look at their history, they either like to think about its glories, or they think of their own suffering. It was absolutely new that a nation would think about actually the sufferings that caused other people. You don't just look at how nations have dealt with their past, but you also offer suggestions and look at how they could approach this in the future. What do you see as integral to shaping the way in which a public mood or a collective memory reflects on its past? So one interesting thing about what you just said, how nations have dealt with this in the past, well, actually until Germany, they didn't. Germany really came up with a new model. Neil McGregor said about Britain. He said, "German's used their history to think about the future, the British used their history to comfort themselves." And he was talking about the British, but you could say that in general, when nations look at their history, they either like to think about its glories, or they think of their own suffering. It was absolutely new that a nation would with the breath that the German nation has done think about actually the sufferings that caused other people. And re-look at its entire history in the light of that. And I think we have to acknowledge how what a different paradigm that is. And I think we can learn three things from the German experience. The first is this is something that's really hard to do, and there will be a lot of pushback. And there was tremendous pushback in the first couple of decades after World War II ended in West Germany, not in East Germany, because in East Germany, the leaders of the country had been the Nazis' first victims. The Nazis' first victims were not Jews. They were communist. The second victims were social democrats, and then they went after the Jews. So that's important to know. It's something that's very often forgotten. So the leaders of East Germany were genuinely anti-fascists. had either. gone to prison or wanted to exile in order for that to happen. And so they imposed a certain kind of reeducation that did not happen in the Western zones. There were the Nuremberg trials. Those were done all the four allies together. But the West Germans looked at that as a case of victor's justice. They laughed at them. They laughed at the denotification attempts, which were often really quite clumsy. Some people who had fled Germany because of the Nazis in the '30s were brought back by both the British and the American armies to try to oversee certain processes looking at who would be allowed to take over the press and the media and so on. But there weren't enough educated German speakers to oversee this entire process. And the West Germans absolutely resisted it. They saw themselves as the wars worst victims, which shocked me for a while. But it took them a very long time, a good 40 years, to get out of the paradigm of seeing themselves as the wars worst victims. So that's the first thing that's important to know. When you hear conservatives saying, "Oh my God, are you tearing down monuments and forgetting our national history?" That's exactly what was said in Germany. Do not denigrate our soldiers. They were brave people fighting for their homeland, atrocities happen in wars. So every time you think, "Oh my God, either in America or in Britain," you listen to these conservative voices, dismiss the idea of actually critically looking at history. Tell yourself, "Well, that's exactly what the Germans did in 1945 until about 1985." So that's the first thing. The second thing is that any kind of critical look at history has to be very particular. There isn't a recipe that you can apply directly from one country to another. And it has to be varied. It has to encompass all kinds of things. Looking at lesson plans and schools is terribly important. But all kinds of public programming, be it in museums, be it in the media, be it in the arts. All of those things are extremely important. The question of reparations has to come up. One has to consider who is what to whom and what do we do about it. But the third and perhaps most important thing to learn from the Germans is that actually you can go through this process. The country really tore itself up for a good generation because these encounters are very personal. It's their conflicts between generations often. It's not just a process of time, of course. But some of it is generations looking slightly differently, getting more information, seeing what, let's say, empire might have meant to people in India or in Africa. But you can go through this rather painful process and come out the other solid better. And certainly I began by, you asked me how I came to this and I began by talking about coming to Berlin in 1982. The Berlin of today is in every way a much better place than it was 35 years ago. And by no means the only person who thinks that, I think Germany has a different position in the world because of the process that it's gone through. You mentioned there reparations and there's been a lot of debate about reparations, whether they're useful or whether they're too little, too late essentially. And that argument has also been played out around public apologies. I just wondered what your opinion was on those two approaches to this issue. They could be extremely useful. We could start by thinking about forgiving debt to developing countries who were the source of much of the wealth of Europe and the United States. There's just no question about that. I think once you understand how much of our wealth came from policies that deliberately impoverished places like India or places in the Caribbean, it becomes much harder to argue against the fairness of reparations. So I don't think they would be too little too late. I think apologies are important, but I'm sorry without something more than I'm sorry. And I think they need to be more than I'm sorry. I think they, and this again, was also important in Germany. I think a simple check. Now I'm off, isn't enough either. I mean, just in the same way, if you like, if somebody really injured you and said, oh, sorry. You want to know that they genuinely regret what they did, that they've thought about it, that they're going to do everything possible not to do it again. Well, in the case of nations, of course, we need to think about what actually was done to some of these places that have asked for reparations, which frankly I think are justified. Now I'm not an economist. So I've looked at some plans in the United States, but the truth is no one has worked out a plan yet. People have been calling in the United States for reparations hearings in Congress since 1987, and they were finally held just this May. So just hearings, first of all, to investigate the justice of the question, which is what I'm qualified to talk about. And once we've established the justice, once we have agreement on that, then we can talk about exactly how they should be carried out. The interesting thing is that a number of African Americans who have written and spoken about this question have said, you know, even the acknowledgement would be helpful, because it's not an acknowledgement, oh, the poor black people, you know, they still can't get it together, we'll throw them another bone. It's saying no, we owe, we owe number one because so much of our wealth was founded on their unpaid labor. And that continued for a very long time. So that's on the American side. On the British side, honestly, if the Guardian showed that British citizens just two years ago or three years ago, finished paying off reparations to the slave owners of Jamaica. Right? Everyone understands politically, I suppose, that in order to abolish slavery without riots and civil war, although would there really, would there really enough slave owners who would have taken to arms maybe, I don't know. But in order to abolish slavery easily, that it was moved to compensate the people who had owned other people. But to not even think about compensating those people for the unpaid labor that had created so much of the wealth is pretty shocking when you think about it. Those who would oppose emotions such as reparations or public apologies, they might say, for example, well, it wasn't as personally how are we responsible for the crimes of our fathers? What would you say to that position? I would say that actually, when your parents die, you actually are responsible for their debts. OK? I mean, you cannot, if your parents estate is heavily indebted, you don't get to have the inheritance until you've paid off the debts. Now you can say, it's a homey metaphor. What does it have to do with nations? What does a lot to do with nations? We who have the benefit of being born in, frankly, the most privileged part of the world with advantages that the majority of people in the world can't even dream of. of. Or of course now that they have smart phones, they do dream of them because they see them. And that plus climate change is of course what's contributing to the enormous refugee crisis in the world is that it's no longer a secret that our lives are fundamentally different than those lives, even those of us who aren't terribly well off. As long as we're in the middle class in Europe or the United States, we are part of and have benefited from nations and systems that protect us that we call on, that we vote in hopefully and engage in various ways. And that involves therefore also being responsible for those nations as a whole. You cannot simply take the benefits of any organisation, frankly, and opt out of the things that you don't like. Why do you think that this book is still especially timely or relevant in 2019 and what lessons would you want people today to take from it? Well, still relevant is an interesting question. I think both in Britain and in the United States, we are in the middle of what have been called history wars, where people are beginning to ask precisely those questions in the United States. As I've said, the racism that has fueled Donald Trump's rise to power and continues to fuel his constituency has brought Americans to think about the unexamined parts of their past. And in Britain, Brexit and all the controversies surrounding it, have led to a quite complicated discussion about to what extent his empire playing is nostalgia for empire playing a role, to what extent is a kind of refusal to really look at Britain's own history, even visa via the war. I think, or perhaps even visa via the Germans, I mean the enmity towards the Germans and the rather caricatured views of Germany today, which I often run into in Britain. It's quite marvelous to listen to educated people say of the film, the reader. I'd never imagined a Nazi eating apple crumble. Well, you know, what do you think they had horns or something? But I honestly, I could list you a whole set of strange quotes that very educated English people have had about Germany. And this feeling that, well, we know what evil is, it's putting people into cattle cars and gassing them at the end of their journey. And that's what the Germans did, is aware of sort of outsourcing our moral responsibilities. But if we look at what the Germans have been doing for the last 30 or 40 years to examine their history and now actually their colonial history, that's something that's been taken up quite a lot in the last year or two with Namibia and so on. I think it's enormously relevant to the debates that are being had here in Britain and ought to be had in other countries as well. That was Susan Neiman. Her book, "Learning from the Germans, Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil" is out now published by Alan Lane. If you're interested in more on some of the big issues of global history, then why not pick up a copy of our System magazine, BBC World Histories. Issue 20 is on sale now and it includes features on the greatest leaders of all time what NATO could learn from ancient Athens and Auschwitz 75 years on. Thanks for listening. Today's podcast was produced by Benuret and Jack Bateman. Tune in next on Monday when Andrew Roberts will be discussing the challenges of war leadership. [Music]