Summary of Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 I began life as a white girl in the segregated South, and I’m likely to end it as a Jewish woman in Berlin. I was never a victim of a concentration camp or pogrom, and I learned about the Holocaust as a child, but it did not impact my own life.
#2 I have a deep connection with the South, and I miss it. I miss the newness of green, and the promise that it brings.
#3 I had a difficult time making friends as a child, but I did meet some liberals who shared my political views at the Actors and Writers Workshop, an integrated youth group in Atlanta.
#4 I came to Berlin not to get over the Nazis, but to understand them better. I was writing about the nature of reason, and they provided a world-historical question mark. I felt exalted by the heady sense of abandon, and I loved being forgotten in a city in limbo.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Germany
• History
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 10 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822529410
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I began life as a white girl in the segregated South, and I’m likely to end it as a Jewish woman in Berlin. I was never a victim of a concentration camp or pogrom, and I learned about the Holocaust as a child, but it did not impact my own life.

#2

I have a deep connection with the South, and I miss it. I miss the newness of green, and the promise that it brings.

#3

I had a difficult time making friends as a child, but I did meet some liberals who shared my political views at the Actors and Writers Workshop, an integrated youth group in Atlanta.

#4

I came to Berlin not to get over the Nazis, but to understand them better. I was writing about the nature of reason, and they provided a world-historical question mark. I felt exalted by the heady sense of abandon, and I loved being forgotten in a city in limbo.

#5

In 1982, most Americans in Berlin were members of the occupying army, and I was the first Jewish person many Germans had ever met. They found it funny that I was Jewish, and didn’t notice color.

#6

I had planned to spend 1982 in Berlin, but instead, I stayed there and became obsessed with the city. I had married a Berlin poet, and after their son was born, I began to long for a place where a Jewish child could be ordinary.

#7

I spent my second night in New Haven drinking an entire bottle of wine, in tears. The difference between Berlin’s intensity and New Haven’s dismal mixture of suburb and ghetto was screaming. But a contract had been signed, an apartment abandoned, and I settled in to enjoy what there was to enjoy.

#8

I was lucky to find a nice apartment in Berlin, which was close to the Einstein Forum. On sunny summer days, you might think you were in multicultural heaven. But on my block there was a Kurdish, a Finnish, and a Brazilian café.

#9

In 2018, there was a spike in anti-Semitic incidents in Germany, but the country responded by creating a new, high-ranking office to combat anti-Semitism. In the United States, after Charlottesville, Nazis were excused, and in Britain, the Labour Party response to charges of anti-Semitism was self-destructively slow.

#10

The Jewish question has been solved in Germany. The Jewish culture festival that I attended this year was hosted by the German Historical Museum, which is led by a Jewish historian.

#11

The crisis that gripped America was not just about the fact that the shooting took place in a sanctuary, but also the voices of many victims’ families declaring hate would not win.

#12

The video that showed massive goodness responding to purest evil lowered the flag and moved President Obama to Charleston to deliver one of his most powerful speeches.

#13

The first two parts of the book are empirical. Part One examines the history of Germany’s attempts to come to terms with the Nazi period, both before and after reunification. By comparing the different flaws that riddled the ways each half of Germany faced and avoided its Nazi past, a deeper reunification is possible.

#14

There are many books that examine Germany’s confrontation with its past, as well as American responses to Reconstruction or the age of racial terror. I make no attempt to add to these historical records.

#15

The rise of the AfD has led many to doubt the progress Germany has made in the past several decades, and even to lament that we’re living through a Nietzschean eternal return. However, it is important to remember that Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung isn’t a foolproof inoculation against racism and reaction.

#16

The doctrine of original sin, which states that all humans are born with a sin nature, is often ignored when things get particular. We have a natural impulse to believe that we and our tribe may make mistakes, but nothing that merits the word evil.

#17

The first generation of postwar Germans sounded like nothing so much as the defenders of the Lost Cause version of Confederate history. The impact of the Wehrmacht Exhibit was profound, and it became part of the history of postwar Germany.

#18

The failures of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung in Germany should give hope to other nations facing similar problems, but the process of American and British public memory is just as flawed, if not more so.

#19

The lack of detail about the Holocaust makes it a mystery, which allows Nazis to apply the term to everything from Obamacare to Black Lives Matter.

#20

The idea that everyone should clean up their own mess is a dangerous one, and it was used to excuse the actions of Nazis and Allies alike. The comparisons between the Holocaust and other events were made by both Nazis and African Americans in the fight against racism.

#21

The German word for debt is the same as the word for guilt. Germans have worked off their debt by creating countless works of art, film, literature, and television.

#22

The Holocaust is used as an example of evil, and as a way to commemorate it, we know what evil is. However, this distorts our moral vision, and we only see large, bold objects.

#23

The American effort to examine her country’s crimes by the light of German history is an exercise in self-hatred. The German right routinely refers to efforts like the Wehrmacht Exhibit as dirtying one’s nest.

#24

The Olympics of suffering is wrong for two reasons. First, we have no way of measuring the scale of evil. Second, comparing evils against each other for political purposes is morally unacceptable.

#25

The history of racism in America is much longer than the history of racism in Germany. While American racism has been much more destructive and violent than German racism, did the forms it took in America prevent the sort of atonement that has taken place in Germany.

#26

There are several reasons for American slowness in facing our history, and one is fairly simple: there’s a 100-year hole in it, and few white Americans are even aware of it.

#27

The American public prefers narratives of progress, and will not accept the notion that their country has ever done anything wrong.

#28

African Americans are an important part of American culture, and they refuse to be anything but a vital part of American life.

#29

Guilt and atonement are essential parts of working off past debts. In Germany, the neo-Nazi murders of Turks and other people of color shocked the country, and the trial of the one accomplice who survived showed just how much hatred had been directed toward these groups.

#30

The Civil War has had a lasting impact on American life, and the country’s political culture is a reflection of the South’s attempts to win the war by other means.

#31

Critical thought about history and memory is evident in American debates that give hope for a mature relationship to one’s culture. Americans must face their past if they want to have a full-bodied future.

#32

The German people, especially the younger generation, have always felt that they were being unfairly treated by the rest of the world after the war. They felt that the world was being too harsh on them, and they did not want to pay reparations.

#33

The German war generation paid a heavy price. Seven million lives were lost, which was less than the twenty-seven million killed in the Soviet Union alone, but seven million was still a tenth of the total German population.

#34

The women were the ones who kept the home fires burning during the war. They were the ones who managed the rations and dragged the mattress to the cellar when the air-raid sirens sounded night after night.

#35

The post-war West German sense of victimhood was so deep that it is almost invisible today. Berlin was thrilled to welcome Neil MacGregor as the founding director of the museum, but when his 2015 BBC radio series on Germany turns to the women who cleared away the rubble, he concludes that they were not victims.

#36

The sting of defeat penetrated German childhood so deeply that they found it difficult to separate from it when they grew up. They were not only party to war crimes, but they considered themselves to be victims of them.

#37

The German philosopher Carl Schmitt, who did not apply to the Allies for permission to teach, wrote that the only two wartime German philosophers still read widely today were anomalies whose failures of judgment were as colossal as their fame.

#38

The German philosopher Karl Jaspers was not initially opposed to the Nazis, as he believed they were the bulwark that would save Europe from bolshevizing Russians and Anglo-Americans. But he later broke with his colleagues and insisted on German guilt.

#39

The most important part of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung is the unconscious. The Frankfurt School argued that the most effective way to deal with the past is to repress it, but this only creates resistance.

#40

Even those who are willing to admit responsibility for their silence are still afraid that too much atonement will sap a nation’s strength. Without commitment to shared national traditions, what holds a people together.

#41

The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research conducted a group experiment in which they asked German citizens to discuss German guilt. However, none of them expressed any desire to return to the good old days of the Third Reich.

#42

Many of the participants in the study pointed to America’s sins to defend their own actions. They argued that American treatment of black people was worse than German treatment of Jews, and that lynching is worse than mass murder.

#43

The German people were able to defend themselves against feelings of guilt, and they did not feel any wrongdoing. They believed that the Americans were in charge now, and that they were the los