History and Guilt

8/13/2019 History and Guilt

1/17

History and guiltCan America face up to the terrible reality of slavery in the way that Germany

has faced up to the Holocaust?

bySusan Neiman

Susan Neimanis a moral philosopher and essayist. Her latest book is Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up

Idealists(2008). She lives in Berlin and is the director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam.

On 22 December 2012, the distinguished African-American film director

Spike Lee tweeted: American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone

Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. He ignited a small storm in the

US media, saying that he would not see Quentin Tarantinos new film

Django Unchainedbecause it was an insult to his ancestors. Less than a

month later, at the Berlin premiere of the movie, Tarantino himself

declared that American slavery was a Holocaust. The German media

chided him for his provocative and exaggerated remarks, butconcluded that it was the sort of thing audiences in Germanywhere he

is extremely popularhave come to expect from Tarantino.

If someone had predicted a year ago that I would find myself writing

about a Tarantino film, I would have bet a large sum against it. I didnt

even want tosee one. Because it was the subject of intense discussion

over issues I care about, I had dragged myself to see his previous film,Inglourious Basterds (2009), and found it bearable, but I had no interest

in his other work. Tarantino seemed to suggest that you can revel in

every form of violence and exploitation so long as they are depicted with

skill and plenty of irony; you can take gun-dealingarguably the
http://www.aeonmagazine.com/author/susan-neiman/http://www.aeonmagazine.com/author/susan-neiman/http://www.aeonmagazine.com/author/susan-neiman/http://www.aeonmagazine.com/author/susan-neiman/http://www.aeonmagazine.com/author/susan-neiman/


2/17

lowest form of human occupationand make it seem hip and sexy.

Arent moral objections to this sort of thing simply uncool?

But my view of Tarantino changed profoundly as I watchedDjangoUnchainedthe night it opened at my local cinema in Berlin. For the film

is spiked with complex references that made clear how profoundly

Tarantino had been influenced by German attempts to come to terms

with the shame of its criminal past. Since those attempts are not well-

known to a wider American or British public, it is important to sketch

themnot only to understand Tarantinos latest work, which is barely

intelligible without that background, but to address the broader questions

of what other nations can learn from Germanys struggles to address its

own historical guilt.

Germans have been wrestling with the question of history and guilt for

more than 60 years now. Their example makes clear just how many

moral questions a serious contemplation of guilt must raise for America.

These include what constitutes guilt, what constitutes responsibility, and

how these are connected. A common slogan of second-generation

Germans has been: Collective guilt, no! Collective responsibility, yes!

But the question of what responsibility entails has been politically

fraught. Does taking responsibility for a violent history demand an

eternal commitment to pacifism? Or to supporting the government of

Israel whatever it does, as some argue? Or rather to supporting the

Palestinian people whatever they do, as others have claimed?

Working through Germanys criminal past involved

confronting ones own parents and teachers and calling

their authority rotten


3/17

Contemporary Germans understand collective responsibility as meaning

a commitment to avoiding in the future the sins their fathers and

grandfathers committed in the pastbut this raises fresh moral tangles.

Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and a few others offer clear cases of guilt andresponsibility: they planned and carried out crimes with malice and

forethought. What about those who didnt plan them, but merely carried

them out without much thought of any kind? Were those who signed

orders on desktops more guilty (because further up in the hierarchy) than

the guards who herded naked Jews to their deaths? Or is a human being

who is capable of doing that to another human being more depraved than

a bureaucrat such as Eichmann, who claimed that watching a mass

execution made him sick? And what about the voters who put the Nazis

in power, hoping it would stop the inflation, streetfighting, and general

chaos that threatened to engulf the Weimar Republic?

Of course, there are those who say they worked with the Nazis in order

to prevent worse things that might have happened had less scrupulous

people done their jobs. There were many of these, ranging from the

Jewish councils who helped prepare the lists for deportation to the State

secretary of the Foreign Office, Ernst von Weizscker, who was

instrumental in a host of crimes, but successfully argued at his trial that

anyone else would have done worse.

These are just a few of the moral questions that cannot be avoided when

you begin to examine real, historical cases of evil. Hannah Arendt tried

to tackle them, with the result that her bookEichmann in Jerusalem(1963) was surely the most vilified work of 20th century moral

philosophy. Her careful attempt to understand forms of responsibility and

to disentangle responsibility from intention was misunderstood by nearly

everyone, and created furore and fury even among those who had been


4/17

her close friends. Perhaps its not surprising that so many moral

philosophers since have preferred to stick to trolley problems.

The German language has a word for coming to terms with pastatrocities. Vergangenheitsbewltigung came into use in the 1960s to

mean we have to do something about our Nazi past. Germany has spent

much of the past 50 years in the excruciating process of dealing with the

countrys national crimes. What does it mean to come to terms with the

fact that your father, even if not a passionate Nazi, did nothing whatever

to stop them, watched silently as his Jewish doctor or neighbour was

deported, and shed blood in the name of their army? With very few

exceptions, this was the fate of most Germans born between 1930-1960,

and it isnt a fate to be envied.

Working through Germanys criminal past was not an abstract exercise;

it involved confronting ones own parents and teachers and calling their

authority rotten. The 1960s in Germany were more turbulent than the

1960s in Paris or Praguenot to mention Berkeleybecause they

were focused not on crimes committed by someone in far-off Vietnam

but considerably closer to home, by the people from whom one had

learnt lifes earliest lessons.

The process of Vergangenheitsverarbeitung functioned quite differently

in the Eastern and Western zones. Nazi propaganda had been far more

interested in stirring fear of the Bolshevist Jewish menace than of any

other enemies, so when the Red Army advanced towards victory in

Berlin in 1945, millions of Germans moved west to escape them. Thosewho had been committed Nazis, or simply knew something of the 20

million Soviet citizens that the German troops had killed, were

understandably afraid of becoming targets of revenge. All of this meant


5/17

that, when the guns stopped firing on 8 May 1945, more Nazi

sympathisers lived in the West than in the East.

The country was divided into occupied zones, each ruled by a particularAllied military, while the Allies considered what to do with 74 million

people who had committed, condoned, or ignored some of the worst

crimes in human history. The Soviet and western Allies managed to co-

operate long enough to carry out the Nuremberg Trials, which convicted

a few of the most prominent war criminals. Both also instituted plans for

re-education, which came to be known as denazification. Generally, the

Soviets looked to German high culture as a source of inspiration,

promoting theatre productions of the 18th-century philosemitic play

Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise) by the Enlightenment dramatist

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, while Americans leant towards lectures about

freedom and democracy.

The generation that had fought the war refused to talk

about the past

While neither effort was particularly effective, the process of

denazification was promoted in the East thanks to the fact that hundreds

of German communists were ready to return from exile to form the

countrys leadership. The new German Democratic Republic of East

Germany, created from the Soviet-governed zone in 1949, considered

itself anti-Nazi. It expressed this by symbolically renaming streets,

reshaping the citys architecture along with its lesson plans, and

commissioning a new national anthem,Auferstanden aus Ruinen (Risen

from the Ruins).


6/17

Without a leadership that was committed to confronting the nations

crimes, the population of the Federal Republic of West Germany was

even less willing to take up the mantle. With its cities still in ruins, its

citizensstill reeling from the loss of sons and husbands on the frontwere inclined to think of themselves as the wars biggest victims. Not

enough that the devastation of the war was evident on every street

corner; on top of that, the occupying armies insisted that it was the

Germans own fault! A few young intellectuals and artists agreed with

the Allied perspective, and produced important works such as the film

The Murderers Are Among Us (1946) and books by authors from the

literary association Gruppe 47, whose members included the later Nobel

laureates Heinrich Bll and Gnter Grass. But neither the majority of

German citizens nor their American overseers desired critical

engagement with the Nazi period, nor sought to address the fact that the

schools, courtrooms and police stations of the Western zone were still

largely staffed by former Nazis. For the Cold War began before the

Second World War ended, and the US president Harry S Trumans

administration was far more interested in undermining the Soviet Union

than in rooting out former Nazis.

The 1950s and early 60s offered little change. With all energies focused

on rebuilding the economy, and most traditional authoritarian structures

left intact, the generation that had fought the war refused to talk about the

past. Accounts differ about when the silence began to break. Was it the

series of radio programmes on anti-Semitism produced by the

philosopher Margherita von Brentano? Or Rolf Hochhuths 1963 playDer Stellvertreter(The Deputy) about the Popes complicity in the

Holocaust? Or was it the Eichmann trial of 1961 together with the

Auschwitz trial of 1963, which drew public attention and left major

writing in their wakes? Whats undisputed is that, by 1968, young


7/17

Germans including the future foreign minister Joschka Fischer were

throwing rocks at police whom they considered to be not only the agents

of present evils, but standing in a direct line with those responsible for

evils past.

By 1968, few of those most directly responsible for Nazi crimes were

running the show. But anyone who was staffing positions in the army,

the police force, the intelligence service and the foreign ministry, among

others, had been, at the very least, trained by former Nazi officials. Its

still sometimes thought that the Nazis appealed to illiterate mobs, a view

unfortunately suggested by Bernhard Schlinks dreadful bookDer

Vorleser (1995) and the subsequent movie The Reader(2008). In fact,

the highest proportion of Nazi party members came from the educated

classes. Without the sort of denazification that neither the Federal

Republic nor its occupier were willing to undertake during the Cold War,

there was no one initially available to staff leading institutions but old

Nazis.

An old joke illustrates the problem. A former migr arrives at Frankfurt

airport and asks the first stranger he meets if he had been a Nazi. Not

me, says the stranger. The migr asks the next man. Heaven forbid!

he replies. I was always inwardly opposed to them. Finally, the migr

meets a man who admits to having been a Nazi. Thank heavens! says

the migr. An honest man. Would you mind watching my bags while I

go to the toilet? For the next generation it was clear that Germany's

institutions needed to be overhauled from top to bottom.

The American television miniseriesHolocaust(1978), though schlocky

and little-noticed in the US, caused waves in Germany by exploring the

ordinary human lives that lay behind the cold number of 6 million. The


8/17

50th anniversary of Hitlers takeover was marked in 1983 in Berlin by a

years worth ofexhibits on topics as various as Women in the Third

Reich, Gays and Fascism and The Architecture of Destroyed

Synagogues. Neighbourhoods vied with each other to explore their ownlocal history. In Berlin, a play entitledIt Wasnt Me, Hitler Did Itopened

in 1977 and ran for 35 years.

When in 1986, the right-leaning historian Ernst Nolte suggested that

Hitler had learnt most of his lessons from Stalin, he was accused by the

philosopher Jrgen Habermas of trying to excuse German crimes. The

ensuing Historians Debate raged for three years not in academic

journals but in newspaper, television and radio discussions.

The prominence of the Holocaust in American culture

serves a crucial function: we know what evil is, and we

know the Germans did it

The mid-1990s brought a fresh shock when a Hamburg research institutedecided to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the wars end with an

exhibit proving that not only the SS but many ordinary Wehrmacht

soldiers participated in the perpetration of war crimes. To the rest of the

world this was hardly news, but the exhibit prompted unexpected protest,

and was even firebombed by those who claimed it dishonoured the

memory of their fallen comrades or fathers; eventually a special session

of parliament was convened to discuss it.

Nor has the need to rake through the Nazi period shown many signs of

diminishing as the years go by. Just this spring, German viewers were

offered an excellent television miniseries Unsere Mtter, unsere Vter


9/17

(Our Mothers, Our Fathers), depicting the ways in which four well-

intentioned young people became slowly implicated in Nazi crimes.

In 1999 the German parliament voted, after years of public debate, tobuild the official Holocaust memorial in the most prominent piece of

empty space in Berlin. I prefer a more unsettling monument to the past

the thousands of Stolperstein or Stumbling Stones that the German

artist Gunter Demnig has hammered into sidewalks in front of buildings

where Jews lived before the war, listing their names, and birth and

deportation dates. As some opponents predicted, the uses to which the

Holocaust Monument has been put are anything but appropriate. But

given that the centre of Berlin has been rebuilt with bombast, a

bombastic Holocaust memorial, sticking out like a stylised sore thumb

amid the triumphalist architecture of the Brandenburg Gate and its

surrounding embassies and institutions seems just about right.

By comparison: can you imagine a monument to the genocide of Native

Americans or the Middle Passage at the heart of the Washington Mall?

Suppose you could walk down the street and step on a reminder that this

building was constructed with slave labour, or that the site was the home

of a Native American tribe before it was ethnically cleansed? What we

have, instead, are national museums of Native American and African

American culture, the latter scheduled to open in 2015. The

Smithsonians National Museum of the American Indian boasts exhibits

showing superbly crafted Pueblo dolls, the influence of the horse in

Native American culture, and Native American athletes who made it tothe Olympics. The website of the Smithsonians anticipated National

Museum of African American History and Culture does show a shackle

that was presumably used on a slave ship, but it is far more interested in

collecting hats worn by Pullman porters or pews from the African


10/17

Methodist Episcopal church. A fashion collection is in the making, as

well as a collection of artifacts belonging to the African American

abolitionist Harriet Tubman; 39 objects, including her lace shawl and her

prayer book, are already available.

Dont get me wrong: it is deeply important to learn about, and validate,

cultures that have been persecuted and oppressed. Without such learning,

we are in danger of viewing members of such cultures as permanent

victimsobjects instead of subjects of history. The Jewish Museum

Berlin is explicit about not reducing German Jewish history to the

Holocaust. One section of the museum is devoted to it, but the rest of the

permanent collection features things such as a portrait of the philosopher

Moses Mendelssohn, filmed interviews with Hannah Arendt, a Jewish

Christmas tree, and a giant moveable head of garlic. (Dont ask.) The

exhibit is awful, but presumably useful for those visitors whose only

association with the word Jew is a mass of gaunt prisoners in striped

uniforms. In the same way, some Americans, no doubt, still need to see

more than savage Hollywood Indians or caricatured Stepin Fetchit black

people in order to get a more accurate picture of the cultures many of our

ancestors tried to destroy. But more importantly, Americas museums of

Native American and African American history embody a

quintessentially American quality: we have always been inclined to look

to the future instead of the past, and our museums follow suit. Its

impossible to compare whats on display in our national showcase with

what you can find in Germany without feeling that Americas national

history retains its whitewashand that a sane and sound future requiresa more direct confrontation with our past.

We do have one place on the National Mall that focuses on unremitting

negativity: the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I am not the


11/17

first person to ask why an event that took place in Europe should assume

such a prominent place in our national symbolismparticularly when

our government did little to save Jews before and during the Holocaust,

yet ensured that former Nazi scientists could be smuggled into the USafterwards. The idea that it is evil to round up people and send them to

gas chambers is about as close to a universal moral consensus as we get.

And having a symbol of absolute evil unconsciously gives us a sort of

gold standard against which most other evil actions measure only as

common coin. Nazis function conveniently as place-holders of a

paradigm of evil, useful to discredit opponents as varied as Saddam

Hussein, Karl Rove, and Barack Obama. (It is truly terrifying to see how

many pictures of Obama with a tiny moustache exist on the web.)

The prominence of the Holocaust in American culture serves a crucial

function: we know what evil is, and we know the Germans did it. There

is, of course, a large and growing body of work done by historians,

cultural critics, and others that examines more specifically American

forms of evil. Few of them, however, receive the same widespread public

attention or sales figures as the latest book, film or memoir about yet

another aspect of the Holocaust, which lets us have our cake and eat it,

too. We can spend our time pondering serious matters, give appropriate

expression to our horror, and lean back in the confidence that it all

happened over there, in another country.

We no longer believe in bad seed or bad blood. Still, the idea that we are

tainted by the sins of our fathers has a long and profound history.

According to traditional Christianity, nothing we can do is enough toexpiate them: we are all doomed to die for the fall of Adam and Eve, and

salvation can come only after death. According to the Old Testament, we

must serve some time for the sins of our fathers, unto the third and fourth

generation. These traditions run deep even for those who might have


12/17

rejected them, for they have a reasonable core. We all of us benefit from

inheritances we did not choose and cannot change. Growing up involves

deciding which part of the inheritance you want to claim as your own,

and how much you have to pay for the rest of it. This is as true fornations as it is for individuals.

A Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung must force emotional confrontation with

the crimes it concerns, not just a rational assessment of them. This

confrontation was notably missing in the first decades of the Federal

Republic of West Germany, which used reparations payments to the

State of Israel as a substitute for facing up to what it meant to have

caused the murder of millions. The country thus assumed forms of legal

responsibility without really assuming moral responsibility until the

slow, fitful turmoil of the 1960s.Mutatis mutandis, something similar

has happened in America. Affirmative action measures are a way of

taking collective responsibility for slavery and the blackface minstrel Jim

Crow, but few white Americans have been forced to face just how awful

slavery was. (And few of us know just how long it continued, in one

form or another. I discovered by accident, when reading a biography of

Albert Einstein, that he supported a group of clergymen who visited

Trumans White House in 1946 to push Truman to make lynching a

federal offence. Truman refused.)

Some degree of traumatisation must take place. Facts are

insufficient, and numbers often make them worse

This is why the violent scenes inDjango Unchainedwere absolutely

necessary. As both Tarantino and his black stars have said, real slavery

was a thousand times worse than what they showed in the film. Tarantino

edited out parts of the two most brutal scenes, in which men are torn


13/17


14/17

history might seem a tad extravagant (narcissistic is a cruder word for

it), its a fantasy to which many Germans thrilled. A friend who has

written a series of deep, complex and nuanced books on the subject of his

nations criminal past told me he cheered like a child when TarantinosNazis burst into flames. For all his erudition, the film had tapped into

buried emotions that had moved and motivated him for decades. In a

recent interview forDie Zeit, Tarantino said he was always being asked

what Germans thought ofInglourious Basterds. If anyone in the world

dreams of killing Adolf Hitler, he answered, aside from the Jews, its

the last three generations of Germans. American history,German

imagination: Tarantino got both of them right.

Tarantino is not the first American director to follow a major film about

the Nazis with a film about American slavery. Steven Spielberg did the

same when he followed Schindlers List(1993) withAmistad (1997).

Both are means for sending a message that Nazism should not be used to

end discussions about evil but to begin them, and that American crimes

deserve as hard a look as any other. InDjango Unchained, Tarantino

took it one step further than Spielberg inAmistad, by making the only

decent white person in the film a German. The good guy could have been

any old European, but Tarantino underlines his characters German

identity with constant references to it. And he rubs our noses in our own

prejudices by using Christoph Waltz, the actor he cast to play the most

memorable SS officer in film history, to be the only white person in

Djangowho is viscerally revolted by American slavery.

The German presence inDjango reveals the influence of German

Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung on Tarantinos films. While filming

Inglourious Basterds, he lived in Berlin for half a year, which is long

enough to get a sense of how Germans keep their awful past firmly in the


15/17

present consciousness. His interview with Gates in The Root reveals just

how conscious the influence was: I think America is one of the only

countries that has not been forced, sometimes by the rest of the world, to

look their own past sins completely in the face. And its only by lookingthem in the face that you can possibly work past them. Nor does he shy

away from the most direct comparisons. If there were a Nuremberg trial,

he says in the same interview, then D W Griffith, the director of The

Birth of a Nation (1915)the silent film that inspired the rebirth of the

Ku Klux Klanwould be judged guilty of war crimes. And The

Clansman (1905)the book by Thomas Dixon on which that film was

basedcan for Tarantino only stand next toMein Kampf when it

comes to its ugly imagery it is evil. And I dont use that word lightly.

Some critics have questioned the appropriateness of a white director

making a film about slavery, but thats precisely the point of

Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. Tarantino has claimed that his great-

grandfather was a Confederate general, which suggests that in making

this film he was following in the footsteps of two generations of

Germans and confronting ancestral evil.

The German reviews ofDjangowhose headlines asked: Dare we

compare American slavery to the Holocaust? generally answered No.

In an inimitable blend of pedantry and cynicism, they explained the

differences between slaveholding, which had an economic purpose, and

the Holocaust, which had none. They then concluded that Tarantino had

used the word provocatively to promote his film. As severalcommentators pointed out, the deliberately inflammatory use of the word

Holocaust is music to the ears of right-wing groups and should

therefore be avoided at all costs. These reviews might show the wisdom

of Tzvetan Todorovs remark that Germans should talk about the


16/17

particularity of the Holocaust, the Jews about its universality (applying

Kants idea that if everybody worried about their own virtue and their

neighbours happiness instead of the opposite, we would come close to a

moral world).

But I am a little surprised that the American discussion of the film has

focused more on counting the number of times the word nigger is used

than on the questionsDjango Unchainedwas meant to raise. Were

Americans guilty of crimes that were as evil as those of the Nazisand

if so, what should we do about it today?

In a long attack onDjango Unchained, the historian Adolph Reed argues

that it represents the generic story of individual triumph over

adversity neoliberalisms version of an ideal of social justice. While I

applaud Reeds attempt to call our attention to the pervasiveness of

neoliberal ideology, Im appalled by the idea that attending to individual

stories is an invalid historical approach. The insistence that every human

being has his or her own story is a statement about human freedom that is

lost when we assume that real history is only a matter of political

economy and social relations.

After weve confronted the depths to which our history sank, we can

and we mustidealise those who moved it forwards. Tarantinos

heroes are as delightful as they are unbelievable; interestingly enough,

his strength lies in depicting villains.Inglourious Basterds features two

Nazis who are appealing, and very differently so. This is as it should be,

if we are ever to understand how all kinds of ordinary, and even

appealing, people commit murder, whether in Majdanek or in

Mississippi. But it is equally crucial that we get our heroes right, too.

Heroes close the gap between the ought and the is. They show us that it


17/17

History and Guilt

Documents

Transcript of History and Guilt