Learning from the Germans

Susan Neiman, in the Guardian, suggests that we Brits need to learn from the Germans about how to confront our racist legacy:

Until the past week, Europeans have been slow to examine their own histories of racism and colonialism. In the New York Review of Books, Gary Younge decried the “toxic nostalgia” that tainted Britain’s misunderstanding of history: only one in five Britons regards their former empire as something to be ashamed of. Such nostalgia for empire played a toxic role in Brexit fantasies.

Last autumn I published a book that argued that other nations have much to learn from the ways in which Germany has faced the evils of its past. Since Trump’s followers wave swastikas as well as Confederate flags, Americans now know that Nazis are not just a German problem. Most Britons, however, were perplexed by my claims. Two talkshow hosts indignantly insisted that Britons had nothing to learn from the Germans since “Hitler was about world domination”. I managed to reply that I’d learned that the sun never set on the British empire. 

Ooh yes, very good response. British Empire, Third Reich....just the same, really.

Yet Britons and others are making up for lost time: just after a statue of Edward Colston was dragged into Bristol’s harbour, a statue of King Leopold II was removed in Belgium. Monuments are not just a matter of heritage; that’s why we don’t memorialise everything. Monuments are values made visible, embodying ideals we choose to honour. Unless we choose to celebrate their values, statues of slave owners belong in museums, not public streets. We cannot have a just and decent present as long as we refuse to face our pasts. 

It took Germans some time to learn this after the second world war, but they finally invented a concept for it: Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, which translates as “working off the past”. Now Berlin has a dizzying number and variety of monuments to the victims of its murderous racism. By choosing to remember what its soldiers once did, Germany made a choice about the values it wants to reject. Other choices, such as erecting glass walls in government buildings, reflect the values it wants to maintain: democracy should be transparent. 

In addition to reimagining public space, Germany paid reparations, rewrote school lesson plans to include material against racism and filled its museums with exhibits about the worst aspects of its history. Can the magnitude of Germany’s murderous history be compared with others? The differences are easy to enumerate but comparisons are possible, sometimes even necessary. Toni Morrison dedicated Beloved, her novel about slavery, to the “60 million and more”, referring to the Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the slave trade. As Germany has confronted the terrors of its past, so should other nations. 

"The differences are easy to enumerate", but she doesn't bother to enumerate them. 

I imagine it'll soon be a legitimate question in schools and universities: who was worse, Hitler or Churchill? Discuss, with reference to the Bengal famine, bearing in mind that Hitler was cleansing Europe of Jews, who are white really, so it was just white against white, and probably doesn't even count as racism....

Incidentally, on those wonderful German reparations:

The Herero and Nama genocide was the first genocide of the 20th century, waged by the German Empire against the Ovaherero, the Nama, and the San in German South West Africa (now Namibia). It occurred between 1904 and 1908....

Between 24,000 and 100,000 Hereros, 10,000 Nama and an unknown number of San died in the genocide. The first phase of the genocide was characterized by widespread death from starvation and dehydration, due to the prevention of the Herero from leaving the Namib Desert by German forces. Once defeated, thousands of Hereros and Namas were imprisoned in concentration camps, where the majority died of diseases, abuse, and exhaustion.

In 1985, the United Nations' Whitaker Report classified the aftermath as an attempt to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples of South West Africa, and therefore one of the earliest attempts at genocide in the 20th century. In 2004, the German government recognized and apologized for the events, but ruled out financial compensation for the victims' descendants. In July 2015, the German government and the speaker of the Bundestag officially called the events a "genocide". However, it has refused to consider reparations.

Not so much Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung there, then.

Comments

[Shir]

"Hitler was cleansing Europe of Jews, who are white really, so it was just white against white, and probably doesn't even count as racism..."

I'm far from bring a genetics expert but the Med. region, especially it's Eastern part, is a bridge between three major other regions and probably had population exchanges in some degree (Aaron's wife in the Tanach for example is said to be from the kingdom of kush while Greeks and Romans and Phoenicians and others traveled between a lot of the Mediterranean's shores). So "racially" speaking everyone's would have been "mixed up" with each other anyway... to some degree.

Besides that, partial deportation of Jews from Israel by the Romans, forced conversion to Christianity in some parts and then keeping the Jewish faith a secret, the murders and rapes during the crusades and other occasions - which led Jews to decide that women are not to blame for being raped so the babies born could be considered Jewish (which is why a mainly patriarchal religion decided the mother of a baby would be the deciding factor of the newborn's faith/ethnicity), the running away from places like Portugal, Spain, England to the rest of Europe would not have caused some more rapes, or willing population mixing?
Have we been murdered and raped enough that we have "genetically" ceased to exist but are still good enough to be shoved into gas chambers?

I know this is not what this post is about but seeing that sentence (even as criticism to the reporter and her supporters concealed, true views) is infuriating and depressing simultaneously.

[Mick H]

That crack about Jews "being white really" is meant to be directed against those (mainly on the left) who see things that way - who think Jews are white and privileged, and therefore antisemitism isn't a problem. Not what I think!

[Shir]

I know, I do read your other posts. I thought it was clear but I can't really express myself very well when I'm a bit emotional:

" seeing that sentence (even as criticism to the reporter and her supporters concealed, true views)..."