Germany Has Lessons for the South

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/07/world/americas/germany-has-lessons-for-the-south.html

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The setting is Germany after the Second World War. The defeated ask this question of Roi Ottley, an African-American correspondent covering the occupation: “How wrong was the Führer in his hatred of the Jews when your white Americans encourage us to hate the blacks?”

This was the paradox of the United States and Germany then — as Mr. Ottley put it, “The indecent inconsistency in a Jim Crow army occupying the Third Reich of Hitler.”

But as the arguments over the Confederate battle flag remind us, two generations later, Germany and the American South have different stories to tell about defeated racist ideologies and about societies reinventing themselves. Germany has come to be regarded as a historically rare case of atonement and becoming its own opposite. The American South, meanwhile, retains significant pockets of nostalgia for the Confederacy — its flag still flutters above the South Carolina State House grounds, and its cause is often called “heritage.”

Can the American South, still grappling with the legacy of slavery and segregation, learn something from Germany’s grappling with Nazism? I asked a few scholars who know both places well.

Werner Sollors was a young boy in Frankfurt when the American G.I.s rolled in, and he was struck by the particular kindness and comportment of the African-American soldiers. He partially credits them for a career in which he became a literature professor at Harvard and a pale-skinned chair of its African-American studies department.

Mr. Sollors, whose fine book on postwar Germany, “The Temptation of Despair,” told the Roi Ottley story, said a major difference between the Southern and German approaches is what became honorable after defeat. In the South, a failure to own up to the crimes of white supremacy left feelings of “heroism about a lost cause that you adhere to because it becomes part of your honor.”

Visitors to Germany often remark that honor there is the other way around: It has become honorable to bring up the historical error; to speak of the importance of becoming the opposite of that error; to be more unsparing of your country than foreigners are, even if you were born in the 1980s.

Part of what allowed Germans to get there, Mr. Sollors said, is their inclusive notion of “collective responsibility” rather than the blame-filled notion of “collective guilt.”

Michael L. Meng, a historian of modern Europe at Clemson University in South Carolina, argues that the South must learn from Germany’s “self-critical memory culture.” He is co-teaching a new and innovative history course this fall that centers on a controversial campus building. The structure, Tillman Hall, is named for Benjamin Tillman, a 19th-century South Carolina politician who was a hate-mongering white supremacist even by the standards of 19th-century South Carolina politicians. The course will examine spaces like Tillman Hall comparatively, with a focus on the American South and Germany.

Daniel E. Rogers, a historian of postwar Germany at the University of South Alabama, said a “German approach” for the South might look “to memorialize more openly.”

But should those memorials to white supremacy’s victims exist alongside or supplant all the ones to white supremacy’s defenders?

Jill Ogline Titus, associate director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, says the South could learn from Germany’s “‘counter-monuments’ that challenge the interpretation and authority of traditional bronze and granite memorials.” She mentioned the artist Shimon Attie’s projection of images of vanished Jewish life onto the facades of districts where Jews once lived.

That example called to mind an idea from Bryan Stevenson, an Alabama lawyer and civil-rights activist, who has proposed holographic memorials that pop up and deliberately startle passers-by at sites where lynchings occurred.

Many Americans boast, rightfully, of having saved the world from Nazism. Perhaps it is time for Germany’s example to help save America from certain dark parts of itself.