As an increasingly polarized America fights over the legacy of racism, Susan Neiman, author of the contemporary philosophical classic Evil in Modern Thought, asks what we can learn from the Germans about confronting the evils of the past.
Susan Neiman is an American moral philosopher who has taught at Yale and Tel Aviv University. She currently lives in Germany, where she is the Director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam.
The history wars shape far more than how we remember the past. They
shape the societies we bequeath to future generations. Susan
Neiman's book is an important and welcome weapon in that battle
*The New York Times*
Ambitious and detailed, [Neiman's book] 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 American churchgoers in Charleston, South
Carolina...[Neiman] has lived in a succession of places in which
the past lies heavy on the present. And, perhaps even more
crucially, she has done so with an outsider's perspective and the
distance to ask difficult questions.
*The Guardian*
Growing up in the American south during the civil rights era, and
spending much of her adult life in and around Berlin as a Jewish
woman, Neiman has a keen ear for discomforts and awkwardnesses and
the tics of guilt and avoidance
*The Observer*
Susan Neiman relates hard truths from which others shrink. Her
audacious work is a refreshing change from those, afraid to offend,
who leave unsaid things that seem self-evident.
*The Guardian*
The United States has much to learn from twentieth-century German
history. As a learned, and passionate guide, Susan Neiman draws on
her long-term immersion in German history and her knowledge of
American (especially Southern) racism to address vital questions:
Does Germany's reckoning with Nazism offer lessons for the United
States? How should a nation's history be told to new generations?
Should monuments to Confederate leaders be removed? Should there be
reparations for slavery and other historical injustices? Packed
with stories about individuals and communities dealing with the
legacy of racial violence, Learning from the Germans identifies
constructive steps for addressing the past and the present to make
a different future.
*Martha Minnow*
Susan Neiman has devised a genre that's encompassing enough to
address the problem of evil: investigative philosophy. She tests
moral concepts against lived realities, revealing actual human
beings wrestling with-or away from--the unforgiving past: Germans
who implant memorial plaques in the street, who work to integrate
immigrants, and who think Germany was not defeated but liberated in
1945; and in Mississippi, citizens who insist that humanity drives
better when it takes the time to gaze into the rear-view mirror.
This compelling, discerning book is as necessary and provocative as
its title.
*Todd Gitlin*
An ambitious and engrossing investigation of the moral legacies of
two pasts - German and American - which stubbornly refuse to
pass
*Brendan Simms*
Neiman's commentary is thoughtful and perceptive, her comparison
timely. This is an exceptional piece of historical and political
philosophy.
*Publisher's Weekly*
Eloquent, moving and searching
*Michael Ignatieff*
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