To ask a question because we after susans talk today she is taking questions and if you like to ask a question you are asked to line up at the microphone here. She will speak for about half an hour. Please dont ask your question from your seat but from your microphone. As someone who has written about civil rights in the south and my next book takes place in 1936 in nazi germany at the olympics. I cannot could not be more excited about being here in nashville with susan to hear about her new book. Shes one of the leading philosophers of the time. This is such an important book for these times. She studied at harvard. Shes taught at yale and tel aviv university. She is now the director of the Einstein Forum outside of berlin. Shes been in the u. S. On her book tour for about five weeks. I know shes looking forward to getting back home after a long book tour. Please join me in welcoming susan neiman to nashville. Thank you so much for coming. [applause] thank you. I am delighted to be here. And i want to start by saying a little bit about my own biography. The stuff that doesnt come in on the internet necessarily. Because theres a sense ive been writing this book most of my life. I was born in atlanta in 1955 but my parent were yankee jews who moved to atlanta before i was born. You can imagine, we werent really considered southerners be to make it worse or better, my mother got involved in the campaign to desegregate the Public Schools in atlanta. So i spent a lot of my childhood dreaming of leaving atlanta for europe. Which i knew about from the metal line books. Matta madeline books. [laughter] but looking back, your life starts to have a shape when you get to be a certain age. Im glad i grew up in the south at a time where they were clear ideas of right and wrong innocence of progress. Thats what probably led me to study philosophy although i probably wouldnt have admitted at the time and moral philosophy. I was working on a dissertation on for which it was easy to get a fellowship to spend a year studying in berlin in 1982. It was a time when very few americans and even fewer Jewish Americans set foot in the place. In fact, my mother told me, what will i tell my friends . [laughter] spending a whole year in germany. What i said at the time, now its trendy to say theyre doing their berlin year. At the time it wasnt cool. Isnt it just as racist, 40 years after the war to blame the entire german nation for what happened during the war as it was for the germans to blame one or another group of people . It wasnt just the jews they didnt like, there were a bunch of others. I will forget all that and concentrate on. I was pretty surprised when i got there because it turned out everybody i met in berlin, of course i was meeting a certain kind of person. People in their 20s and 30s. People who were usually pretty educated. Usually, writers or artists or musicians. All they wanted to talk about was the war. And i was struck even then by the difference between what they were doing. With their history. And what americans were doing with our history. Which was basically nothing. And i was already beginning to ask those questions at the tim. So theres a sense ive been writing this book for 40 years. 35, Something Like that. But there was and immediate impetus to writing this book. I was watching president obama give the eulogy for the nine churchgoers murdered in charleston. And i was in tears. As im sure many of you were. But i also felt hopeful as it seemed as if president obama was carrying the country with him. You saw nikki haley take down the confederate flag. You saw walmart saying they were going to sell confederate memorabilia anymore. I said wow, america really is starting to reckon with its history. At the same time, two months later, the german people welcomed 1 million refugees. When i say welcome, i mean literally standing on train stations. Thousands of people with open arms and signs saying welcome. You probably have heard theres been a backlash and there has been but it is still the case that there are more people actively engaged in Refugee Integration then voted for our right wing party. When i say actively engaged, i mean people spending their time to teach the refugees german. To help them with bureaucracy. To play music and soccer with their kids. I know people have taken strangers into their homes. When my son and i try to buy as many groceries. As we could carry. We had a hard time finding a place that needed them. That was how active and engaged the citizens of germany were. And you have to think, is america would have done something comparable, we would have welcomed within two months, 5 million refugees. [applause] on a fraction of the geographical space. So i decided to write this book and i thought, this is something i knew something about. And if america is going in the right direction, maybe theyre ready to hear some lessons from somewhere else. Before i thought i would give lessons to america, i thought, actually, i better find more about what americans now are doing with our history. So i went to spend half the year at oxford, mississippi at for racial reconciliation. I learned more about whats going on in the south. If i focus on the sound, its by no means because i think its only a problem in the south. It is not. But the south is kind of a magnifying glass. Those good and evil in the story. Thats why the book is divided into three parts. One part talks about germany. One part talks about the south and the last part takes general lessons we can learn about questions like monuments, reparations, things that i know we have been thinking about. I want to go on, i guess ive already started. Show you some images. You may have seen a picture of the holocaust monument in berlin. Whats not entirely clear from the pictures is that its in the center. This would be as if you would put a monument to slavery in the middle of the washington mall. This is the double is not just a symbol of berlin. It is the symbol of the country now. Its not my favorite monument. Though its the most famous one. This is the largest and one of my favorites. The monument to the 13 million Red Army Soldiers who died fighting fascism. We often i was just at the National World war ii museum. They know it was not just one at normandy. Won at normandy. There were a lot of other things going. Its a moving monument. I didnt show the slide did you walk in, you see a whole huge statue of a woman in morning. Then you go to this gateway to soldiers kneeling in honor of their fallen comrades. You walk down this park. It is gigantic. I urge you to see if you go to berlin. There are 7000 Red Army Soldiers buried here. Died in the last battle days of berlin. You see this huge statue. When it was built, it was the largest statue in the world. I will show you where i would be. That would be me. And in one hand, he holds a child who hes rescued from the ruins. And then the other hand he holds a sword with which he smashed a swastika. Another one of my favorite monuments, sometimes people say, nonviolence worked in america or with gandhi because they were civilized. But it wouldnt work against totalitarian regimes. Well, actually, it did. At least once that we know of. The passed in 1936 forbade jews and nonjews to marry. But they couldnt absolutely force those who were married before then to divorce. Although they put a lot of pressure on them. They usually lost their jobs. Some people stayed faithful to their jewish browsers. In 1943, in february, one of the darkest hours of the war. They decided to see if they could do a trial run and round up and deport 400 jewish men who were married to nonjewish german women. Up until then, theyd been safe from being deported. So they rounded up these men and they put them in a Holding Space that has now been destroyed. The women, most of whom didnt know each other, came down to the place where there were being held and said give us back our husbands. The gustaf and trained their guns on them. They said you can shoot us but were not leaving until you give us our amendment. And then they backed down and release the men. All of those people survived the war. This sculpture, which is another very moving sculpture. This sculpture was made by a daughter of one of those marriages. This is a monument to the book burning which take place in april 1933 before they actually started killing people. They burned books. Its quite striking monument. You can see the scale on the left. It is a hole in the ground with empty bookshelves. Because the nazis built burnt some of the great works of german literature. Whats important to know, because we tend to think that the nazis were you know, ignorance. Mob. People who didnt know any better. In the back on the left is the university. The biggest university in berlin. The highest proportion of nazi Party Members were educated. Had college educations. It was students and professors who walked out of that university and brought those books right on that square. Now, there are for 23 monuments in berlin alone. Im not going to show you all of them but i will show you one. These are called the stumbling stones. They were started by this artist on the right. About a four inch square brass plaque that are put in front of houses where mostly jews but other prisoners lived and were deported. Eachplaque has a name , date of birth and date of death if known. People are required, if they want a stumbling stone. Theyre required to do some research. They cost about 125, which is not beyond the means of most people if they want to do it. They also to research the lives of the person being commemorated. They have to get permission from city planning. Thousands of people have done this. So its scattered all over the city. To stumble over when youre on your way to the dentist or the Grocery Store or wherever youre going. To remind you that this terror took place in the middle of ordinary life. I particularly wanted to show you this one because Brian Stevenson told me he was inspired by that when he went to germany. That it was an important inspiration for his monuments but if you havent seen it, go down next chance you get the i have read about it and send pictures but when i interviewed him in 2017, the monument was still under construction. So i was finally able to see it yesterday and i have never seen a finer memorial to anything. Whats interesting and where the stumbling stones inspired him, those of you for nodding and have seen it probably saw outside, there are parallel markers to the ones hanging up. The idea is for each county where the ej i has researched and found a lynching, each county should take back there are and change the iconography of the south. So that wherever, if you drive two miles, a plaque for another confederate battle. In addition to this, Brian Stevenson wants to have those memories as well. Now, this is berlin right after the war. The question is, why did germany do all this work when we are just beginning . Since i dont suppose you think they are better people than we are, you might think they are worse. And you might think since not too many people know very much about the nazis. They have an image of their mind in their mind of cattle cars and gas chambers. And thats absolute evil and anything that doesnt rise to that level is not something we think about. We dont think about how it began. We dont know much about how it ended. So the view is, the minute before was over, the german people realize, oh my god. What have we done. And they fell on their knees and asked for forgiveness. Well, it wasnt like that at all. Here are in some places, allied troops made germans walk through gas chambers. Sorry, not gas chambers but concentration camps. You can see them smiling. And the view was that the germans were the worst victims of the war. Its quite funny. When it first came to germany in 82, i had a lot of friends who would tell me their parents have been not sees and they were ashamed and estranged from their families when they decided not to have children of their own. But nobody actually would tell me, my parents were nazis and they thought they were the worst victims. It took me a long time to realize that that was the general view. And they would say, we lost 7 million of our best and brightest. Our country was divided. We lost a lot of territory. Our cities were destroyed. We were hungry. Just barely alive. I hope you get the reference. And on top of that, these boger yankees want to say it was all our fault. Who does that sound like . This was not just a view right after the war. In 1995, there was a very famous exhibit. Exhibit which showed the committed war crimes on a systematic basis. Up until then, many people in germany could say, it was the ss. A few bad apples. But the which had a few million men. If you werent, you were doing something worse like guarding a concentration camp. The idea was the was clean, gallant. And when this exhibit ran through germany from 19951999, you have thousands of people demonstrating against it. That science is our grandfathers were heroes. And the other says similar things. Im standing with my grandfather. Some of you caught the reference. But they did sound just like the defenders of the lost cause. Why is this good news . I decided this is good news. And the good news is one of the most important things we can learn from the germans is that facing up to your shameful history is really hard. Nobody wants to do it. We prefer to remember the good stuff. Even at a personal level, i forget a lot of stuff thats happened in my life that i choose to dwell on the nicer parts. My kids remind me, did you really forget about that . Yeah i did. Why dwell on it . But, as i like to say, a nations relationship to its history is like a grownups relationship to her parents. When youre a kid, you believe everything they say. When youre a teenager, maybe the opposite. But, if youre going to grow up and be a reasonably Healthy Human being, you need to sort through the things you got from your parents. And be able to say, you know, this is what im proud of. And id like to pass it onto my children. Im glad my parents have those values. And on this one, im not so sure. I just assumed do without it. Seeing that even the germans had a really hard time going through that process. Should make us feel okay, its not surprising. The is the 1619 project. Of course Newt Gingrich will get upset and push back. Even the nazis pushed back. This is hard to do. And nevertheless, we are beginning to do it. These are germans pushing back at the demonstrators. Saying, fascism is not an opinion. Its a crime. Up above are people looking at all the pictures in the exhibit. So, the germans have a large compound word for this process. Words for a lot of things. Ill pronounce it for you but you wont get it right unless you spent a long time. [laughter]. Sorry. And it means working off your past. Okay. And this is a big process. It involves questions of justice. In west germany by the way, most of the criminals after did not get tried and did not get sent to jail. Anymore than edgar ray who murdered the three civilrights heroes in mississippi. Took them 40 years to bring him to trial. As we know, there are other people who need to be brought to trial. Or lets say, convicted. But i am getting hopeful because i do think, and im not going to mince any words here. Maybe in the last couple weeks, i dont have to. I think our Current Administration has forced white americans to be conscious of just how deep racism runs in this country. And theres not a blip, in an otherwise glorious history. We all knew there was slavery but then we fought a civil war. There was segregation but then we had the civil rights movement. Im not one of those people that thought president obamas election would create a postracial future. But i did like many people think the ark of the of the moral arc was bending in the right direction. Until this presidency. And i think the racism we have seen coming from that direction has forced americans to say wait a second, actually, the period between the end of the civil war and the beginning of the montgomery bus boycott is kind of a blank. For most white americans. Myself very much included before i did this research. Its funny, i have been saying this for a few weeks when people im a Silver Lining kind of a person. But believe me, ive been in as much despair as anybody these past few years. But i have been seeing change with the new times published an article just this morning saying, confirming this is exactly whats happening. We see things like Henry Louis Gates tv series in his book on reconstruction. Things like the 1619 project. Which is not just a commemoration of slavery, but an attempt to look at American History from the perspective of slavery. Not just as this unfortunate, unpleasant blip. But to talk about just how much america, for good and for bad. Good in the sense that it was a source of a great deal of our wealth. And for bad, affected and drove the history of this country. I was asked by someone, if i thought i dont think she read the book. If i thought americans should treat confederate sites or tree plantations the way germans treat not see sites . I started thinking, not the sites . The only not see not nazi sites are concentration camps. The idea of someone holding a party or a wedding at a concentration camp is just off the table. I know aoc got in trouble when she called the border concentration camps. Thats because americans tend to confuse concentration camps and death camps. People did die in concentration chance but the main death camps were in poland. Germany had hundreds of thousands of slave laborers worked and died. What was a plantation, for black people . I mean. When i wrote i saved the question of reparations for the next to last chapter of my book because i wasnt sure what i thought about it. There are arguments for and against. I was particularly struck by the arguments of two africanamerican thinkers who i think very highly of. Cornell west and will argue what the country needs is not reparations but democratic socialism. I live in a country that we have a conservative government. But Bernie Sanders is way to the right of angela merkel. Believe it or not. [laughter] because germany considers healthcare, education, parental leave, months paid vacation, workers rights, those are rights. Those are called benefits. Those are human rights. [applause] one call them rights instead of benefits, your head turns around. Its a completely different way of viewing them. Im all in favor for having those Things Considered rights. But i started thinking,