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Published Aug 2019
432 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
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.
In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman is a white woman who came of age in the civil rights–era South and a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin. Working from this unique perspective, she combines philosophical reflection, personal stories, and interviews with both Americans and Germans who are grappling with the evils of their own national histories.
Through discussions with Germans, including Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who created the breakthrough Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibit, and Friedrich Schorlemmer, the East German dissident preacher, Neiman tells the story of the long and difficult path Germans faced in their effort to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust. In the United States, she interviews James Meredith about his battle for equality in Mississippi and Bryan Stevenson about his monument to the victims of lynching, as well as lesser-known social justice activists in the South, to provide a compelling picture of the work contemporary Americans are doing to confront our violent history. In clear and gripping prose, Neiman urges us to consider the nuanced forms that evil can assume, so that we can recognize and avoid them in the future.
"Neiman's commentary is thoughtful and perceptive, her comparison timely. This exceptional piece of historical and political philosophy provides a meaningful way of looking at the Civil War's legacy." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A timely, urgent call to revisit the past with an eye to correction and remedy." - Kirkus Reviews
"Combining big thoughts and startling snapshot particulars, Learning from the Germans is an enthralling moral meditation on mass social sin and its expiation as practiced in post-Third Reich Germany and the post-apartheid American South. Susan Neiman, a citizen-philosopher who has never shied from difficult topics, has mustered her stylish pen, formidable intelligence, and unique experience as a southern-Jewish expat in Germany to produce a nuanced work of conscience with urgent relevance today." - Diane McWhorter, author of Carry Me Home
"Learning from the Germans asks a deep question: as Americans struggle, once again, with the legacy of slavery, what can they learn from the German attempt to come to terms with the holocaust? Susan Neiman's eloquent, moving and searching answer is clear. It is time for Americans to listen and learn from the anguish and truth-seeking of the German confrontation with evil." - Michael Ignatieff, author of The Ordinary Virtues
"Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans puts discussion of the horror of American anti-black racism into instructive, fascinating, and disturbing dialogue with rumination on the record of Nazism in Germany. This is a moving, deep, important book." - Randall Kennedy, Professor, Harvard Law School
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Susan Neiman is the director of the Einstein Forum. Her previous books, which have been translated into many languages, include Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age; Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists; Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy; The Unity of Reason; and Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin. She studied philosophy at Harvard and the Free University of Berlin, and was a professor of philosophy at Yale and Tel Aviv Universities. She is the mother of three grown children and lives in Berlin.
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