A thought-provoking work of ‘moral atonement’ and ‘comparative redemption’

No nation’s defeat is ever quite straight-forward, and sometimes downfall can bring its own kind of posthumous victory. By the end of the American Civil War in 1865, for example, the Confederates had managed to recast themselves as Christ-like victims, exalted by the myth of a noble lost cause. The South had lost 20 per cent of its white male population to the Union armies, but that only confirmed its moral superiority over the money-grubbing Yankee.

According to Susan Neiman, postwar Germans approximated the vanquished Confederacy in their inability to imagine their own defeat. Attempts were made to recompense the Jewish community, but most Germans, East and West, refused to accept responsibility for the war at all. Auschwitz survivors received a smaller pension than former SS guards and their widows. Everything was blamed on Hitler. In Neiman’s formulation, the slave-holding Confederates had been no less blindly defiant in their self-image as wronged victims.

Neiman was born in 1955 in Atlanta, Georgia. She was brought up there as a white Jewish girl amid the iniquities of segregation, but for much of her adult life she has lived in Berlin, where she teaches philosophy. Berlin might seem a questionable choice of home for a Jewish woman whose people had been caught in the Nazi dragnets in far-distant Europe. However, Neiman believes that Germany is no longer at heart anti-Semitic. For as long as ‘good’ Germans are at the helm of Germany today, moreover, a Fourth Reich remains unlikely.

German attitudes to the war changed decisively in the late 1960s, when the children and grandchildren of Nazis began to ask troubling questions about their nation’s past. Some Germans turned guilt into a national virtue and performed Trauerbeit, or the ‘labour of mourning’; others sought to renew themselves spiritually by undertaking pilgrimages to Israel.