Reckoning with the Past in Germany and the United States: Vergangenheitsbewältigung
The Bundestag building in Berlin. Photo by Kevin Schneider.
I grew up in the United States, but as a dual German-American citizen, I have spent significant time in both the U.S. and Germany. This past summer, I studied German language and history at the Humboldt University of Berlin. On one occasion, my professor posed a question to the class that received a response that has resonated with me to this day. He asked, “Wer ist hier stolz auf sein Land? Who here is proud of their country?” The classroom, full of German students, was silent, and not a single person raised their hand.
There is a term in German, “Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” which literally translates to “coping with the past.” The term has come to define Germany’s attempts at dealing with its problematic 20th-century history––from Nazism to the human rights violations that took place in East Germany under Communist rule. The German people take these legacies very seriously. Even today, Germans continue to feel a strong sense of national embarrassment regarding their country’s role in these events, as demonstrated by my own experience in a German classroom.
Germany has worked hard to enact Vergangenheitsbewältigung by placing the legacy of the Holocaust at the forefront of its national agenda in education, art, and law. Starting in fifth grade, young people learn about Nazism in politics, religion, and history classes in all German schools. Most schools go above and beyond this classroom education by taking their students on trips to concentration camps and giving them the opportunity to speak with Holocaust survivors. Germany has even criminalized acts of Holocaust denial and banned all Nazi symbols. Symbolically, the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin is located only a short walk from Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag—a physical demonstration of how Vergangenheitsbewältigung has taken on the highest level of national importance. Through these efforts, the German people hope to prevent history from repeating itself.
The United States has never addressed its own shameful record of slavery, genocide, human rights violations, and racism in the same manner as Germany has done. It needs to.
To be clear, Germany is by no means cured of racism and antisemitism—especially given the resurgence of hate crimes after the influx of refugees in 2015. Tensions remain especially high in former East Germany, where Vergangenheitsbewältigung was less thorough on account of Soviet rule. However, by confronting its past head-on, Germany has emerged as a stable, liberal force in a tumultuous, increasingly nationalist Europe. Although far-right political groups like the Alternative für Deutschland exist in Germany, their political influence in the Bundestag is minimal.
In contrast, the number of violent, hate-driven incidents in the U.S. has surged from 5,850 in 2015 to 7,227 in 2016. One of the most prominent incidents occurred in August 2017, when a group of Neo-Nazis took to the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia to protest the removal of a statue of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The protest escalated until the self-identified white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. deliberately rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 19 other people. This incident illustrates an insidious truth about the divided and broken state of race relations in America—equal protection and rights are not a reality in this country. A visceral reminder of this country’s inequality comes from this jarring statistic: in 2016, one in thirteen African Americans in the United States were disenfranchised, a rate more than four times greater than non-African Americans. This disparity stems from an unjust system of laws that targets low-income communities of color and a criminal justice system with racially discriminatory practices.
Racism in America today is strongly tied to the country’s history of slavery—a legacy that is so deeply embedded in our country’s DNA that it resides in our founding documents. Although the United States during Reconstruction attempted to reconcile the wounds of slavery and the Civil War, the Southern states’ establishment of Jim Crow laws quickly stymied those efforts. It’s no accident that Nazi lawyers studied Jim Crow as a model for the Nuremberg Laws.
Mass incarceration today has continued this systematic disenfranchisement of people of color. Bryan Stevenson, a New York University Law School professor, writes in his analysis, Policing the Black Man, “America has never systemically and publicly addressed the effects of racial violence, the criminalization of African Americans, and the role these phenomena have played in shaping the U.S. criminal justice system.”
Tackling the legacy of slavery in America is a daunting task, but it is not an impossible one. If we are serious about fixing these systemic issues, we will come to realize that America must adopt a Vergangenheitsbewältigung of its own.
One notable policy to help America’s racial divide is monetary reparations for the descendants of slaves. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s powerful 2014 essay, “The Case for Reparations,” highlights this proposed solution. Incidentally, Coates cites Germany’s response to the Holocaust—granting more than $70 billion to Jewish victims since 1952—as a model for American reparations. The idea of reparations is not new, but only one major bill relating to slavery reparations has ever been presented to Congress. The late Representative John Conyers Jr., a Democrat from Michigan, presented to Congress the "Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act" every year from 1989 until his resignation in 2017. The law has never passed, demonstrating our government’s unwillingness to even engage with the idea.
As I have learned from Germany, Vergangenheitsbewältigung is necessary for a country to reckon with its human rights violations. Reparations, in whatever form they take, would be a critical first step towards legitimizing the black struggle in America and recognizing the U.S. government’s historic role in maintaining systematic oppression. Coates makes the point that American prosperity was built upon slavery and the exploitation of black families. Reparations, then, would be a tangible and necessary form of Vergangenheitsbewältigung for a country that has continued to turn a blind eye to the persistent issues of racism.
Julia Schreder is a staff writer at CPR and a junior in Columbia College studying Political Science and English. You may know her from her satirical articles at the Columbia Federalist or from the Facebook group that she started, called Ref Spotting @ Columbia. She is from Weston, Connecticut and is a German-American dual-citizen.