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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 pastIn 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.
About the Author
Susan Neiman is an American writer and philosopher. She has written extensively on the juncture between Enlightenment moral philosophy, metaphysics, and politics, both for scholarly audiences and the general public. She currently lives in Berlin.Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Neiman dropped out of high school in the general ferment of the late 60s. Reading Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre led her to study philosophy, first as a night student at City College of New York and later at Harvard University, where she earned her Ph.D. under the direction of John Rawls and Stanley Cavell. A Fulbright fellowship took her to Berlin, where she spent six years in the 80s. Slow Fire, a memoir about her life as a Jewish woman in Berlin at the time, won the PEN prize for a first work of non-fiction in 1992. From 1989-1995 she was an assistant and associate professor at Yale University, and from 1996-2000 she was associate professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University. In 2000 she became director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany. Neiman's books have been translated into many languages. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the Berlin-Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaften, and the mother of three grown children. For further information, reviews and pdfs of shorter works see: www.susan-neiman.de
