What can be compared to the Holocaust? Everything? Detention camps on America’s border? Nothing? This history war, generally the province of academics, has recently become part of American political discourse.
Into this discussion comes Susan Neiman’s “Learning From the Germans.” Neiman, who has lived in Germany for much of her adult life, and who directs Berlin’s Einstein Forum, contrasts Germany’s response to the Holocaust with America’s response to slavery and centuries of racial discrimination. Her concern is not “comparative evil” — which event is worse — but “comparative redemption,” how each community has responded to and reframed the memory of its unsavory past. Neiman contends that postwar Germany, after initially stumbling badly, has done the hard work necessary to grapple with and come to terms with the legacy of the Holocaust in a way that could be a lesson to America in general, and the American South in particular.
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