On the past in Germany and the past in the US - Thomas Laqueur in LRB:

'Neiman seeks analogies between Germany’s experience and possible ways of recuperating the more or less unredeemed American past. What Nietzsche called ‘monumental’ history extracts from the past a particular great and worthy deed and uses it as a model: by showing that a thing was ‘at least possible once’ we see that it ‘may well again be possible sometime’. Neiman wants Germany’s way of coming to terms with its criminal past to be such an example. But Nietzsche also warned that monumental history caused ‘the individuality of the past [to] be wrenched into a general shape, with all its sharp corners and angles broken off for the sake of correspondence’. Neiman understands, of course, that ‘no two histories are ever entirely alike.’ The question is whether we can, without doing violence to the past or the present, usefully take lessons from the German experience. Do analogies between the two countries work? In one sense they do: it is possible to make historical redemption a national project. And the same moral principles ought to apply. But after we put back the sharp corners and angles, once we take the details seriously, it becomes harder to learn anything from this particular comparative history. The reason lies in the corners and angles. What Neiman regards as mere ‘details of difference’ are more significant than that.

The more we restore detail to the German reparations project the less applicable it becomes to the American debate. The Luxembourg Agreement of 1952 – reached between Adenauer’s government and the state of Israel, along with representatives of the Jewish Claims Conference – and the legislation that followed it, the Additional Federal Compensation Act of 1953, didn’t apply to Jews in general, or to their descendants, or to the tens of millions of other victims of the Nazi regime. Under the agreement Germany paid Israel compensation for resettling half a million Jewish refugees. The use of the money was severely restricted: most of it could be used only to purchase goods produced in Germany – telephone systems, electrical generators, railway sleepers, chemicals. There is no question that this was good for the new Jewish state as well as for German business, and it improved the standing of the Bundesrepublik with its Allied occupiers. But it has little relevance for those in the US who want to think about how reparations for slavery could be arranged.'

(...)

'I need to declare an interest here: a coming to terms with my own past. As a child of the German Jewish diaspora I lived in some intimacy with the Wiedergutmachung, the German reparations. There was a lot of talk in my family and among our friends about finding documents that would establish eligibility and prove damages; there was a lot of talk about who got how much and what for. There was general agreement that the single biggest determinant of success in obtaining reparations was the effectiveness of your lawyer. I don’t remember there being any of the moral fervour that informs the debate about reparations to African Americans for slavery. But an elegiac sadness was attached to the country they had lost: every household in my parents’ circles in the US and England and Israel had copies of Goethe and Schiller. For them, an inner Germany remained: ‘Die Schweine’ – the swine – had captured their Germany, the real Germany, but it remained the home of the soul even if return was impossible, just as the South has remained home to some of the African Americans who left it.

My cousin Gunther emigrated to Holland with his mother, my father’s oldest sister, after Hitler came to power. In the summer of 1943, when he was 22 and she was 44, they were caught up in one of a series of raids on Amsterdam’s Jewish areas. Gunther, wearing a leather bomber jacket of the sort the SS favoured, started shouting abuse at his fellow Jews, was presumably mistaken for a German, and allowed to walk away. At least, that’s how he tells the story. He never saw his mother again. He lived underground for nearly two years until Amsterdam was liberated in early May 1945. His mother was murdered at Sobibor on 9 July 1943. Gunther fell between the stools of eligibility for reparations: too young for a profession, he couldn’t get reparations for his career being interrupted; being between high school and university when the war began, he couldn’t argue that his studies had been interrupted.

My grandmother never quite believed that her daughter had been murdered: she was somewhere in ‘the East’, she claimed. I’m not sure she was ever told what had become of her own older sister: the Yad Vashem database says only that she was ‘murdered in the Shoah’; according to Red Cross records, she received a care package in Terezín. Maybe she died there. My grandmother escaped to Turkey in December 1939 with all her possessions in a couple of suitcases. She had no documentation for her Bechstein grand piano, which had kept her in Germany until it was almost too late, or for the other possessions she’d left behind, and so had no chance of proving a claim for material losses. The law held that German citizens whose relatives could be shown to ‘have been killed or driven to death within eight months of persecution’ were eligible to apply for reparations, but only if the person killed had been the family’s primary breadwinner. My grandmother got a share of the pension due to her husband as director of the health insurance system in Hamburg.

On the scale of Holocaust suffering my family’s was modest. But those who had suffered far more got proportionally much less. My colleague Paula Fass, the child of camp survivors, has written about discovering her ghost family, the families her mother and father lost before they met in a displaced persons’ camp in Germany and started anew. These were the families of which they would not speak. Her mother sent off her nine-year-old son with a bit of bread in a sack she had sewn when he was taken from the children’s ghetto in Lodz to be murdered on 4 September 1942; her then husband was murdered later. Paula’s father, his first wife and four children – aged between ten and fifteen – were transported to Auschwitz when the Lodz ghetto was liquidated in August 1944. Only he survived, and there is no record of when the rest of his family was killed: ‘presumed murdered’ is all the Yad Vashem database says. By that point, in 1944, the Germans were murdering and burning Jews at the rate of ten thousand a day and their record-keeping had slipped. I asked Paula whether her parents received any reparations. They had: for impairment to their health. He was judged 40 per cent disabled; she 30 per cent, the lowest level for which compensation was available. Their eligibility had to be recertified every year by a German doctor.'

(...)

'Coming​ to terms with the past in the United States is a different temporal matter. At issue is the entire national past: it is four hundred years since African slaves came to these shores, more than a hundred and fifty since the Thirteenth Amendment made African Americans full citizens; almost sixty since the longest-lived legally grounded racial regime in world history ended with the legislation and judicial decisions of the 1960s. This is a past that demands we explain not, as in the German case, the reason we succumbed to an evil ideology, but the reason it has been so difficult to do what Lincoln hoped for at Gettysburg, to rededicate ourselves to the proposition that all men are created equal and to come to an agreement about what this might mean.

Ten years as against four centuries makes a big difference. Comparison is a mug’s game on this timescale. The presence or absence of victims’ descendants is also of huge significance in the comparative emotional history of atonement. The German public memory of the Jews who once lived among them is elegiac: thoughts of a bygone people and a bygone time. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the centre of Berlin takes the form of a monumental graveyard. The city’s much visited Jewish Museum documents a lost people, an eradicated civilisation. Its core exhibition, ‘Two Millennia of German Jewish History’, was designed by the team that was responsible for the Maori Museum in Auckland, specialists in portraying the history of a marginalised and denigrated group. (A new core exhibition is being planned that will, it is claimed, give ‘more space for the Jewish present’.)'

(...)

'In contrast to the Jewish Museum, Washington DC’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016, is a record of a past that is still present. It tells the stories not only of the African American experience in the US but of an ongoing relationship between Americans of many ethnicities and more than forty million of their fellow citizens. The ‘we’ who are working through the past and the ‘they’ who have been wronged share the present as well as a long intertwined past. It is a task of a different order to redeem a history with the dead. If we are to learn from the Germans and produce a better narrative for the United States, then we need to be clear about who constituted the ‘we’ and about what we mean by paradigmatic ‘Americans’. Again, once we put back the corners and angles, the possibility of a comparative history of redemption recedes. If we could get the narrative of the Civil War right, Neiman argues, it would mean we had learned something from the Germans. ‘Very simple truths, like the fact the Civil War was fought over slavery, need to be re-established again and again,’ she says. The South fought to defend a criminal system; the North fought for Truth. We also need to be told again and again that chattel slavery was replaced ‘by subjugation enforced by law’ – that is, by Jim Crow. The South did not learn the lessons of its defeat by the North in 1865 as the Germans did of theirs by the Allies in 1945.

If the ‘truth’ about the Civil War is still not established it isn’t for lack of effort by historians and teachers. Not since the publication of the central texts of the modern history of slavery, John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom in 1947 and Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution in 1956, has any serious history book claimed that slavery was a benign paternalistic institution. No one has argued that it was anything other than the great moral stain on the American conscience. The view that the Civil War was about Southern fears of Northern consolidation and states’ rights is dead. True, the war did not begin to get rid of slavery, and few expected that to be its result. As Lincoln said in his second inaugural address in 1865, right at the end of the Civil War, neither party ‘anticipated that the cause of the conflict’ – slavery – ‘might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease’. But it was a commonplace, he went on, that ‘slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest’ and that ‘all knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.’

Neiman mentions the so-called Dunning School, named after William Dunning, a professor at Columbia at the turn of the 20th century, who, with his followers, disparaged the efforts made during the Reconstruction to establish the civil and economic rights (forty acres and a mule) of former slaves and gave intellectual legitimacy to those who created and maintained Jim Crow. But the Dunning School was on the wane by the late 1930s and thousands of history books and tens of thousands of articles have been telling the ‘simple truth’ about the Civil War and Reconstruction since then. Scores of them have been on the bestseller lists and won prizes. They have been the basis of high school and college textbooks for the better part of half a century. It is not clear what more can be done on this front.

It’s tricky to argue that the three-quarters of a million ordinary Confederate soldiers memorialised on courthouse lawns in the South were fighting to defend a criminal system, even if objectively that is what they were doing. But a similar problem exists for Germany. The Wehrmacht has been shown definitively to have played a part in mass murder, but the names of ordinary German soldiers remain on memorials throughout the country. Most soldiers fight less out of zeal for a cause than because they have to.

There is also the uncomfortable truth that the most primitive fears of the white racist imagination were not held only by defenders of slavery. Henry A. Wise, a Southern member of Congress and a future Confederate general, called John Quincy Adams ‘the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed’. Adams would have subscribed to the view that ‘all men are created equal’ – but, as James Shapiro recently showed in Shakespeare in a Divided America, he also thought that Desdemona’s ‘fondling with Othello is disgusting’ and her passion for him ‘unnatural solely and exclusively because of his colour’. It would be convenient if such views were an aberration, held only by the Southern lynch mobs that murdered black men for allegedly violating white women. But this is not the case. Only nine states never had anti-miscegenation laws; 14 repealed them between 1948 and 1967; 16 states retained them until 1967, when the US Supreme Court struck them down in Loving v. Virginia. This part of our past will not be mastered by a better interpretation of the Civil War. In 1967, only 3 per cent of marriages in the US were between people of different races or ethnicities; in the year Hitler came to power, by contrast, 33 per cent of marriages involving German Jews were to gentiles. The Nuremberg laws remained in effect for ten years, their US equivalents for centuries.'

(...)

'On a smaller scale, the local history museum in Edmond, Oklahoma should tell the story of the racist postcard advertising ‘No Negroes’ rather than saying only that Royce’s Café was famous for its hot Dr Pepper. A sign put up by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission on the road into Levittown says that it ‘was a landmark in the development of suburban housing in the United States’. It needs another sign that says: ‘There were nine days of riots here in 1957 to expel the first black family that moved in.’ But there has been progress. Overtly bigoted signage has been removed; the National Park Service has worked with the Organisation of American Historians to reinterpret the history of race and slavery in its sites; civil society has begun to come to terms with the past.

Back to Nietzsche: if we return the corners and angles to the past and acknowledge that more than ‘details of difference’ separate the German case from the American one then simply copying the German example won’t work. But attending to those differences may help us figure out what can be done. Holding up an idealised image of the German case and a hazy one of a United States in need of tuition only makes that more difficult.'

Read the article here.

Importantly, Thomas Laqueur informs us about the differences between the German and American approach to compensation without falling in the trap of: what's worse?

There are some good things to be said about the (West-)German culture of remembrance (Erinnerungskultur) and I have defended Germany for its dealings with the past, it's for good reasons that despite everything (Neo-Nazism, racism, AfD et cetera) Germany is a country that appears to be serious when it says that it won't repeat the mistakes of the past. And yes, the financial compensations for the victims were not as generous as widely believed and the dealings with not so benign bureaucracies in order to qualify for these compensations were less than pleasant. But still, my parents received Wiedergutmachung and also because of that we could live a decent middle class life in post-war Amsterdam.
One detail that struck me as awkward in Lacqueur's article is the notion that the parents of Paula Fass had to prove that they were eligible for German compensation by seeing a German doctor every year. I remember that my parents had to go to the German consulate each year in order to prove that they were still alive. And they received money to visit a German Kurort (spa town) every two years, part of this trip was a mandatory check-up by a German doctor in the spa town. Standard practice if you 'go on a Kun'. See here,

Mr. Laqueur is rather silent about financial compensation for the descendants of the victims of the ugly American past. That's realistic, because where to begin? The US was never keen on confronting its own sins. The victims of the Japanese-American 'purge' during World War II received some financial compensation in the Reagan years, but even then the US never came even close to an official culture of remembrance as Germany has developed, slowly and hesitantly.
And the German history is so different from the American history, for one, because Germany was defeated twice in the 20th century.

Defeat seems to be an important step in order to acknowledge your own sins.