Book Launch
Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

Susan Neiman in Conversation with Kazembe Balagun

09/26/19
7:00pm
Goethe-Institut New York

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 past.
 
In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Neiman’s Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) 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 the country’s violent history.
 
Susan Neiman is Director of the Einstein Forum. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Neiman studied philosophy at Harvard and the Freie Universität Berlin, and was professor of philosophy at Yale and Tel Aviv University. She is the author of Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant, Evil in Modern Thought, Fremde sehen anders, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists, Why Grow Up?, Widerstand der Vernunft. Ein Manifest in postfaktischen Zeiten and Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil.

Kazembe Balagun is a writer and cultural activist. He is the Project Manager at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung–New York Office and, from 2007 to 2013, he was the Education and Outreach Coordinator at the Brecht Forum, Brooklyn. He has organized programs at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Maysles Cinema, among others. His writings can be found in Imagine Socialist USA, Conversations with Octavia Butler, and most recently Finally Got the News: The Printed Legacy of the Radical Left 1970-1979.​