Summary of Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 I began life as a white girl in the segregated South, and I’m likely to end it as a Jewish woman in Berlin. I was never a victim of a concentration camp or pogrom, and I learned about the Holocaust as a child, but it did not impact my own life.

#2 I have a deep connection with the South, and I miss it. I miss the newness of green, and the promise that it brings.

#3 I had a difficult time making friends as a child, but I did meet some liberals who shared my political views at the Actors and Writers Workshop, an integrated youth group in Atlanta.

#4 I came to Berlin not to get over the Nazis, but to understand them better. I was writing about the nature of reason, and they provided a world-historical question mark. I felt exalted by the heady sense of abandon, and I loved being forgotten in a city in limbo.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Jun 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822529410

IRB Media

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Insights on Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I began life as a white girl in the segregated South, and I’m likely to end it as a Jewish woman in Berlin. I was never a victim of a concentration camp or pogrom, and I learned about the Holocaust as a child, but it did not impact my own life.

#2

I have a deep connection with the South, and I miss it. I miss the newness of green, and the promise that it brings.

#3

I had a difficult time making friends as a child, but I did meet some liberals who shared my political views at the Actors and Writers Workshop, an integrated youth group in Atlanta.

#4

I came to Berlin not to get over the Nazis, but to understand them better. I was writing about the nature of reason, and they provided a world-historical question mark. I felt exalted by the heady sense of abandon, and I loved being forgotten in a city in limbo.

#5

In 1982, most Americans in Berlin were members of the occupying army, and I was the first Jewish person many Germans had ever met. They found it funny that I was Jewish, and didn’t notice color.

#6

I had planned to spend 1982 in Berlin, but instead, I stayed there and became obsessed with the city. I had married a Berlin poet, and after their son was born, I began to long for a place where a Jewish child could be ordinary.

#7

I spent my second night in New Haven drinking an entire bottle of wine, in tears. The difference between Berlin’s intensity and New Haven’s dismal mixture of suburb and ghetto was screaming. But a contract had been signed, an apartment abandoned, and I settled in to enjoy what there was to enjoy.

#8

I was lucky to find a nice apartment in Berlin, which was close to the Einstein Forum. On sunny summer days, you might think you were in multicultural heaven. But on my block there was a Kurdish, a Finnish, and a Brazilian café.

#9

In 2018, there was a spike in anti-Semitic incidents in Germany, but the country responded by creating a new, high-ranking office to combat anti-Semitism. In the United States, after Charlottesville, Nazis were excused, and in Britain, the Labour Party response to charges of anti-Semitism was self-destructively slow.

#10

The Jewish question has been solved in Germany. The Jewish culture festival that I attended this year was hosted by the German Historical Museum, which is led by a Jewish historian.

#11

The crisis that gripped America was not just about the fact that the shooting took place in a sanctuary, but also the voices of many victims’ families declaring hate would not win.

#12

The video that showed massive goodness responding to purest evil lowered the flag and moved President Obama to Charleston to deliver one of his most powerful speeches.

#13

The first two parts of the book are empirical. Part One examines the history of Germany’s attempts to come to terms with the Nazi period, both before and after reunification. By comparing the different flaws that riddled the ways each half of Germany faced and avoided its Nazi past, a deeper reunification is possible.

#14

There are many books that examine Germany’s confrontation with its past, as well as American responses to Reconstruction or the age of racial terror. I make no attempt to add to these historical records.

#15

The rise of the AfD has led many to doubt the progress Germany has made in the past several decades, and even to lament that we’re living through a Nietzschean eternal return. However, it is important to remember that Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung isn’t a foolproof inoculation against