Learning from the Germans Quotes

“There are pragmatic as well as moral grounds for the United States to follow Germany's lead [in dealing with it's past human rights crimes]. American media may have largely ignored the reasons we decided to destroy Hiroshima or oust the democratically elected governments in Iran or the Congo. Other nations' media has not. Few Americans are quite aware of how little credibility we retain in other parts of the world.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“Tribalism will always make your world smaller; universalism is the only way to expand it.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“The capacity to return hate with love wipes reason off the map, at least for a while. I cannot understand it any more than I can understand how, knowing that story, black churches across America continue to open their doors and their hearts to white strangers again and again. What love and courage. What courage and love.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“Monuments are not about history; they are values made visible.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“The monuments were not innocuous shrines to history, they were provocative assertions of white supremacy at moments when its defenders felt under threat.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“African American history in all its torment and glory is American history, and we cannot move forward until all Americans see it that way.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“Before you can learn anything else, your teachers must have taught you that your voice matters.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“If the name Ole Miss evokes football fields and magnolias for its alumni, it evokes tear gas and shotguns for others.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“How we remember the past constrains the possibilities we consider for the future.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“The nation must achieve a coherent and widely accepted national narrative. Here language is front and center. ... Narratives start with words and are reinforced by symbols. ... Narratives are transported through education.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“Shortly after the war's end, posters went up all over the British and American zones [in Berlin]. Under a photograph of corpses at Bergen-Belsen was printed the sentence THIS IS YOUR FAULT.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“The focus on Auschwitz is a form of displacement for what we don't want to know about our own national crimes.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“Public memory: what every half-educated member of a culture knows in her sinews, for it seeped into them in ways she can hardly remember.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“We are historical beings, unable to describe ourselves without describing ourselves in space and time.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“But if I had to set priorities, I’d prefer that political commitments—expressed in laws preventing expressions of racism, punishing racist crime, and roundly condemning it from the highest levels of government to the teachings in elementary schools—come first.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“The rise of the Tea Party following Obama’s first election was the first hint of backlash revealing the extent of white supremacy. Its roots in America’s psyche are too deep to be pulled up by the victory of one extraordinary black man. Those who hailed that victory as the dawn of a post-racial era were those who’d never fully faced American darkness.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“rise of the Tea Party following Obama’s first election was the first hint of backlash revealing the extent of white supremacy. Its roots in America’s psyche are too deep to be pulled up by the victory of one extraordinary black man. Those who hailed that victory as the dawn of a post-racial era were those who’d never fully faced American darkness.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“If Obama was the American dream—“Nowhere else on earth would my story be possible”—Trump is the American nightmare.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“During a 2015 meeting with representatives of those countries, a European Union official dismissed their claims with the words, “We cannot correct history. What happened, happened.” One wishes he’d read Améry: “What happened, happened. This sentence is just as true as it is hostile to morals.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“The philosopher Janna Thompson has argued that obligations to right historical wrongs persist indefinitely, if not eternally. She believes that keeping transgenerational commitments, implicit or not, is the central moral and political good that gives nations the basis for trust.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“It’s natural to defend the honor of your forebears, if only with arguments so facile that a well-educated child could see through them. He fought for states’ rights. States’ rights to do what?”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“Descendants of Confederate soldiers have self-serving reasons for denying that their ancestors fought and fell in service to a criminal enterprise.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“By declaring “I support states’ rights” just miles from the spot where the civil rights workers were murdered, Reagan revealed—to those who knew anything about dog whistles—that behind his grandfatherly pose he was a strong supporter of white supremacy, as his actions during his presidency would prove. His opposition to civil rights legislation, escalation of Nixon’s war on drugs, and support for apartheid South Africa were prefigured at Neshoba. Every Mississippian could decode the message.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“The stumbling stones document what larger memorials cannot show: that the terror began not in far-off Poland, but in the heart of a city full of clubs and cafés, spaces where you can still buy a lottery ticket or go to the dentist. Each four-inch square recalls an ordinary human being, in the midst of her life, who was deported and murdered with little notice and no protest from the other ordinary human beings who surrounded her every day. The terror was here.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“cannot show: that the terror began not in far-off Poland, but in the heart of a city full of clubs and cafés, spaces where you can still buy a lottery ticket or go to the dentist. Each four-inch square recalls an ordinary human being, in the midst of her life, who was deported and murdered with little notice and no protest from the other ordinary human beings who surrounded her every day. The terror was here.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“Another plaque states that Nazi students burned books on this spot, but the words are too sparse to convey what thousands of tourists passing by need to know: it wasn’t an unwashed, unlettered mob, but hundreds of well-off and well-read students, and their professors, who gleefully followed the Nazis’ first orders. There are photos showing their faces beam as they toss books into the flames right in front of the Humboldt University. We’d like to believe that illiterate masses are responsible for right-wing nationalism, but the numbers tell another story.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“Participating in Southern debates about Confederate monuments led me to try, over and over, to imagine a Germany filled with monuments to the men who fought for the Nazis. My imagination failed. For anyone who has lived in contemporary Germany, the vision of statues honoring those men is inconceivable. Even those who privately mourn for family members lost at the front, knowing that only a fraction of the Wehrmacht belonged to the Nazi Party, know that their loved ones cannot be publically honored without honoring the cause for which they died.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“The 2017 demonstrations against the planned removal of the Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, established one thing beyond doubt: Nazis are not just a German problem. You may prefer to call the demonstrators white supremacists, but that’s a distinction without a difference. The deliberate use of Nazi symbols—swastikas, torches—and slogans—Blood and Soil! Jews will not replace us!—leaves no room for doubt. Not everyone who wants to preserve those symbols is a Nazi. But American Nazis’ embrace of the Confederate cause made clear that anyone who fights for those symbols is fighting for values that unite Nazis with racists of all varieties.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“The monuments were not innocuous shrines to history; they were provocative assertions of white supremacy at moments when its defenders felt under threat. Knowing when they were built is part of knowing why they were built.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

“What is certain: it’s good that those deeds have been marked and preserved. Imagine a world where the greatest crimes ever committed were consigned to dust. Where nothing acknowledged racist terror of any kind—the Holocaust, the genocides, the lynchings were left without a trace. Whatever helps us escape oblivion is welcome.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil