It wasn’t surprising that the anger first exploded in the US. The Black Lives Matter demonstrations weren’t only sparked by the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Poverty and poor health in black communities – the reason why African Americans have died from Covid-19 at three times the rate of white people – also contributed to rage. But the problem goes deeper: the falsification of history.
That falsification is especially galling to Americans because, unlike most countries, the United States was built on a set of ideals. Every American schoolchild knows the famous line from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” That most of the men who drafted it were slave owners is a truth that was long ignored.
The cruelty that reigned between the end of the civil war and the beginning of the civil rights movement, when racial terror was not only the rule but the law, was veiled by the obfuscating name “Jim Crow”. It isn’t clear that era has passed. On 4 June, 2020, the day of the first memorial service for George Floyd, a Republican senator sought to narrow a national bill outlawing lynching. Neither lynching nor the ideology of the Confederacy have been confined to the South. When the South Korean film Parasite did well at this year’s Oscars, Donald Trump complained: “Can we get Gone with the Wind back please?” Though Trump comes from New York, he knows the film not only falsifies the reality of slavery but glorifies the Ku Klux Klan. Many of the armed anti-lockdown protesters who occupied the state capitol building of Michigan – a northern state – carried Confederate flags and nooses.
The revision of US history was broad and deliberate. The south lost the war but it won the narrative. Beginning in the 1890s, across the US, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of the Confederate Veterans erected monuments to their fallen heroes, and vilified the era of Reconstruction that granted civil rights to freed African Americans. They received support from the early film industry in Hollywood, which produced hundreds of movies that valorised southern rebels.
The US began a broad and public reexamination of its history in 2015, after a white supremacist murdered nine people in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Delivering a eulogy for the victims, President Obama called on the nation to take down its Confederate flags. The Republican governors of South Carolina and Alabama removed the flag from their state capitols. The country’s largest retailers promised to stop selling Confederate memorabilia. Similar efforts have increased during Donald Trump’s presidency, precisely because Trump and his supporters have shown how much the unexamined past forces its way into the present.
Until the past week, Europeans have been slow to examine their own histories of racism and colonialism. In the New York Review of Books, Gary Younge decried the “toxic nostalgia” that tainted Britain’s misunderstanding of history: only one in five Britons regards their former empire as something to be ashamed of. Such nostalgia for empire played a toxic role in Brexit fantasies.
Last autumn I published a book that argued that other nations have much to learn from the ways in which Germany has faced the evils of its past. Since Trump’s followers wave swastikas as well as Confederate flags, Americans now know that Nazis are not just a German problem. Most Britons, however, were perplexed by my claims. Two talkshow hosts indignantly insisted that Britons had nothing to learn from the Germans since “Hitler was about world domination”. I managed to reply that I’d learned that the sun never set on the British empire. As Neil MacGregor remarked, Germans use their history to think about an uncertain future, while Britons use their history to console themselves for a less glorious present.
Yet Britons and others are making up for lost time: just after a statue of Edward Colston was dragged into Bristol’s harbour, a statue of King Leopold II was removed in Belgium. Monuments are not just a matter of heritage; that’s why we don’t memorialise everything. Monuments are values made visible, embodying ideals we choose to honour. Unless we choose to celebrate their values, statues of slave owners belong in museums, not public streets. We cannot have a just and decent present as long as we refuse to face our pasts.
It took Germans some time to learn this after the second world war, but they finally invented a concept for it: Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, which translates as “working off the past”. Now Berlin has a dizzying number and variety of monuments to the victims of its murderous racism. By choosing to remember what its soldiers once did, Germany made a choice about the values it wants to reject. Other choices, such as erecting glass walls in government buildings, reflect the values it wants to maintain: democracy should be transparent. The rebuilding of Berlin – a long, discursive process in which historians, politicians and citizens debated for more than a decade – was aspirational. No one, least of all a German, would claim the rebuilding and renaming of Berlin’s landscape eradicated the roots of racism. The city’s public space represents conscious decisions about what values the reunited republic ought to hold.
In addition to reimagining public space, Germany paid reparations, rewrote school lesson plans to include material against racism and filled its museums with exhibits about the worst aspects of its history. Can the magnitude of Germany’s murderous history be compared with others? The differences are easy to enumerate but comparisons are possible, sometimes even necessary. Toni Morrison dedicated Beloved, her novel about slavery, to the “60 million and more”, referring to the Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the slave trade. As Germany has confronted the terrors of its past, so should other nations.
From Baltimore to Bristol to Brisbane, thousands are standing in solidarity with black Americans and calling for a reexamination of their own local histories. Perhaps the coronavirus has given us a chance: to see how deeply we are connected, and vulnerable to the same diseases, as well as how inequalities persist even in cultures that purport to condemn them. Facing history is not a vaccine against racism; the existence of rightwing parties in Germany shows what a long and complex process it can be. It is, however, a necessary beginning.
Susan Neiman is the author of Learning from the Germans. She is the director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.