In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments as well as the contested memories they evoke, Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country will come to terms using its historical wrongdoings. Neiman is usually a white woman who came old in the civil rights-era South and a Jewish woman that has spent a lot of her adult lifestyle in Berlin. Working from this exclusive perspective, she about Learning from the Germans: Competition and the Memory of Bad combines philosophical representation, personal tales, and interviews with both People in america and Germans who are grappling using 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 lengthy and difficult path Germans have faced in their effort to atone for the crimes from the Holocaust. In the United States, she interviews Wayne Meredith about his fight for equality in Mississippi and Bryan Stevenson about his monument towards the victims of lynching, as well as lesser-known public justice activists in the South, to provide a convincing picture of the work contemporary Us citizens are doing to confront our violent history.