FEELING GUILTY? From Dante to Freud, guilt is a ripe subject for exploration. More often than not, the sentiment is understood in personal terms, as the responsibility assumed by an individual for a wrongdoing. It is Raskolnikov, not Mother Russia, who splits open the heads of the sisters with an axe at the outset of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s mid-nineteenth-century novel, Crime and Punishment, and it is his lone task, no one else’s, to atone for his crime.

In the twentieth and now the twenty-first century, though, guilt has enjoyed a different connotation. It’s become attached to the deeds of nations and even of civilizations. The French writer Pascal Bruckner, for example, took up this theme in The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, published in French (La tyrannie de la pénitence) in 2006 and in translated English in 2010. His subtitle notwithstanding, Bruckner insisted on a crucial distinction between America and Europe. “America is a project, Europe is a sorrow,” he said: “one broods on the past, the other starts over again.”

No longer. Today, America is experiencing what is popularly called a reckoning—a return to the past with an eye on crimes related to race, the crime of slavery especially, charged not only to particular individuals or institutions but to the nation as a whole. It is a backwards voyage with an avowed forward purpose: to make America a better, more just society. Still, even if intentions are laudable, the question can be posed: What does it profit a nation to embark on what might aptly be called a guilt trip? Is the hoped-for destination likely to be the actual point of landing?

A PLACE to begin to look for an answer to that question is with one of those long, nearly impossible for the English speaker to pronounce, German words: Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. This word, for which (of course) there is no ready English substitute, can be translated as “working-off-the-past,” Susan Neiman, director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, tells us in her 2019 book, Learning from The Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil. Neiman, a Jewish native of the American South who has lived in Tel Aviv and now lives in Berlin, offers a guide to this territory. In her book, she notes a marked generational dimension to Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung:

Working off Germany’s criminal past was not an academic exercise; it was too intimate for that. It meant confronting parents and teachers and calling their authority rotten. The 1960s in Germany were more turbulent than the ‘60s in Paris or Prague—not to mention Berkeley—because they were not focused on crimes committed by someone or other in far-off Vietnam, but those considerably closer to home, committed by the people from whom life’s earliest lessons were learned.

And the spirit of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, Neiman takes care to remind, was not a one-off of the 1960s, but continued to express itself for decades to come. In Berlin, in the autumn of 1982, she recalls:

…those who came of age in the ‘60s were … working-off-the-past with special intensity, for the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler’s election was approaching. There seemed no end of books and speeches … The arts academy offered workshops on making films about the Third Reich. There were performances of music the Nazis banned and performances of music they promoted, with lectures accompanying each. Neighborhoods competed with each other to explore their own dark history.

That last sentence bears repeating, followed by a question mark: “Neighborhoods competed with each other to explore their own dark history?” To come to grips with personal guilt, as seen in Raskolnikov’s paradigmatic experience, tends to be a wrenching, anguished, deeply private matter—in his case the occasion for a conversion from a sort of casual nihilism to hard-won religious belief. The spectacle of neighborhoods in left-tilted Berlin vying with each other to exhume crimes of the past hinted at a cultural or political fashion. To parade guilt, was this to be a public badge of authenticity in the new Germany?

Still, Germans were right to reject the tempting idea, all too tempting, that, somehow, only Hitler was responsible for the evilness of the Nazi period, a point made by the ironically-titled play, It Wasn’t Me, Hitler Did It, that opened in Berlin in 1977 and continued on for thirty-five years. Even Bruckner accepts this lesson: in The Tyranny of Guilt, he commends Germany for its “exemplary effort to reflect on itself.” In his framework, guilt becomes oppressive, an exercise in “masochism,” in sweeping self-indictments of Europe as essentially a criminal enterprise and no more than that. He may sound like he is exaggerating but there are many such examples. In the 1990s, the Swedish writer, Sven Lindqvist, pronounced that extermination was “at the heart of European thought,” with the Holocaust properly understood as a culmination of Europe’s imperial and colonial crimes in places like Africa. This refusal to acknowledge Europe’s accomplishment as the pioneer of the Enlightenment in the thicket of the obscurantism of the Middle Ages—the trailblazer for what became known as modern Western liberal values—was more than just warped history. In this original-sin rendering of an entire civilization, here was a past that could never be worked off. Picture this Europe as a character consigned to Dante’s eighth circle of hell, head plastered with excrement.

SO, WHAT is it to be for America, circa 2020: A narrowly-cast Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, in the purposeful and bounded (if not always pristine) German manner—or something a good deal messier than that?

An answer is suggested by two defining differences between the German experience with Nazism and the American experience with slavery and racial injustice generally. First, on the dimension of time, the Germans have less past—a lot less past—to work off. The Nazis became a national force on their party capturing nearly twenty percent of the vote in parliamentary elections held in 1930. Just fifteen years later Hitler committed suicide in a Berlin bunker, his ambitions, his regime, the thousand-year-Reich, obliterated for all time. By contrast, slavery in America began with the arrival of a slave ship in the British colony of Virginia in 1619 and was not abolished until 1865, on the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment by the U.S. Congress and ratification by states of the American republic.

Second, the American reckoning of 2020 occurs a century-and-a-half after slavery was formally outlawed. The American South, home of the defeated Confederacy, did not experience, post-Appomattox, a Berlin Sixties type moment, a new generation rising up to confront the sins of the fathers. To the contrary: defiant Southerners established the Ku Klux Klan to terrify freed slaves and perpetuate white supremacy, and they built monuments to honor Confederate leaders as martyrs to the Lost Cause. And even with slavery made illegal, African Americans were kept from fully participating in American society well into the twentieth century by a variety of measures, from the institution of sharecropping to the practice of voter suppression.

For these two fundamental reasons—the sheer amount of past that America has to process, and the long-delayed nature of the reckoning—an American attempt at Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung is bound to be less tidy than the German original. And so it is indeed proving.

Consider The 1619 Project. This “major initiative” of The New York Times, an ongoing collection of essays and educational materials, is intended, as the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jake Silverstein, said on inaugurating the project last year, “to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.” What it would mean requires no strenuous exertion of the mind: it means a reductive, racialized understanding of a dichromatic America, divided into black and white. It is, in short, bunk.

To see race as the one recurrent thread in our history is, well, to see race as the one recurrent thread in our history. That insistent view translates, inevitably, into a flawed understanding of our past, including some of our most important moments. “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery,” Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote in the first package of Times essays for The 1619 Project. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her essay even though she had her facts wrong. “The idea that the Revolution occurred as a means of protecting slavery—I just don’t think there is much evidence for it, and in fact the contrary is more true to what happened,” the historian Gordon Wood, his career devoted to the study of the American Revolution, has countered. He offered that remark in an interview given to one of the few media outlets in America committed to a rigorous, dogged challenging of the 1619 narrative: a website operated by Trotskyists, a clan wedded to class, not race, as the motive force of history. “The Revolution,” Wood added, “unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world.” In response to this correction of the record, the Times made a modest “update” to the Hannah-Jones piece.

And to see slavery as original sin, as The 1619 Project does, is to have only one answer for the question, posed in a recent Times magazine cover story, of “What Is Owed” to today’s African-Americans. The solution, Hannah-Jones said in this piece, a companion to her article of the year before, is financial reparations. Cash payments “would go to any person who has documentation that he or she identified as a black person for at least 10 years before the beginning of any reparations process and can trace at least one ancestor back to American slavery,” she proposed.

As Hannah-Jones noted in a conversation about her cover piece on NBC News’ “Into America” podcast, “the model that everyone talks about is Germany, where Holocaust survivors and their family members received reparations.” But Hitler’s Germany was vanquished by foreign armies. In America, at least 360,000 Union soldiers died in a war that was caused by the South’s insistence on keeping slavery and that became, as the fighting ground on, largely about the emancipation of the slaves. This expended blood represents a kind of reparations, America’s cemeteries stocked with the bones of the fallen payers. Then, too, while some white citizens of today can trace ancestors back to the Confederates, twenty-first-century America is largely the product of waves of immigration which mounted in the years after the war was fought and which came from virtually every corner of the planet. The Jews seeking refuge in the United States from the Tsar’s Russia and later the Soviet Union, the boat people fleeing Communist Vietnam, the migrants coming across the southern border from crime-plagued Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—none of these peoples, and many others like them, has any moral or historical tie to the practice or institution of slavery in America.

The preaching from the mountaintop approach to our past invites questions of hypocrisy on the part of the Times, our nation’s most influential media institution. Perhaps the Times is suffering from its own sense of historical guilt. As Michael Goodwin, an opinion columnist at The New York Post, points out, the modern Times dates to its purchase in 1896 by Adolph S. Ochs, owner of the Chattanooga Times. Twelve years later, his paper published a glowing profile of Jefferson Davis on the anniversary of the death of the president of the Confederate States of America: “it is meet that the remnant of the people he wrought and struggled for should teach their children what manner of man he really was,” the Times piece from December, 1908, began. And what manner was that? “Today,” the profile concluded, “the verdict of the world is that here is a just man who has gone to sleep.” It is perhaps because of this sort of maudlin treatment, suffused with false notes even at the time this remembrance was written, that America took so long to have its Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung moment.

Yet where the Times leads, others in American elites follow. Or perhaps, in the case of universities, the reverse is true, the Times taking its cue from the prevailing consensus of the academy. Racist ideas are Stamped From The Beginning, according to the title of the bestselling 2016 book by Ibram X. Kendi, a professor in the humanities at Boston University and the founding director of its Center for Antiracist Research. “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America,” Princeton faculty members in the hundreds wrote the university’s president in a letter dated July 4, 2020. This is overstatement: the Puritans made their “errand into the wilderness” in the early seventeenth century, not to undertake the business of chattel slavery, but to escape religious persecution in Europe. And to insist on “anti-Blackness” as the essential element of America’s story is to diminish the encounter between Native Americans and European settlers as a fateful aspect of our national experience.

THE GOOD news is that Americans, broadly speaking, appear to be rejecting efforts to recast the very founding of the nation as, in effect, a criminal act. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll thus found that eighty percent of Americans stood opposed to the idea of using “taxpayer money to pay damages to descendants of enslaved people in the United States.” The public correctly senses that the reparations debate represents a precipitous descent, in Bruckner’s terms, into masochism.

At the very same time, Americans also are embracing constructive remedies to blights of the past. A model example is the approach of the city of Charleston, SC, to its monument of John C. Calhoun. The monument began as a civic project undertaken in the 1850s, after the death of Calhoun, by the Ladies’ Calhoun Monument Association. White Charleston worshipped Calhoun, who glorified slavery as “a positive good” and advocated the right of states to nullify any federal law deemed unconstitutional. A bronze statue finally was put up in the 1890s, and there it stood, towering over downtown Charleston, a symbol of Southern defiance on civil rights—until this past June, when a construction crew, enforcing a unanimous vote by the city council, carted Calhoun away. Dozens of bystanders exchanged hugs to honor the moment. Here was the functioning, not of a mob, but of orderly, small “d” democracy. The lesson, perhaps, is that the past is best worked off one piece at a time.

Nor is this task limited to symbolic rituals like civic removals of discredited monuments. Even as Americans overwhelmingly reject reparations, Reuters/Ipsos pollsters also found that seventy-two percent said they understood “why Black Americans do not trust the police.” In the first instance, that number undoubtedly reflects national horror at seeing on videotape a white Minneapolis policeman press a knee onto the neck of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, for nearly nine minutes as the victim repeatedly cried out he could not breathe. The county medical examiner ruled Floyd’s death a homicide. In a broader context, Americans are showing they can locate this episode as part of a historical pattern of police brutality towards African Americans, a pattern that dates back to white mobs lynching black men as police stood by. This grasp of chronic injustices is propelling a drive in Washington and at the state and local levels for needed policing reforms, as in removing legal barriers that keep victims of police brutality from filing civil lawsuits against the offenders.

In turn, the Black Lives Matter movement, which began in the Obama era with a sharp focus on harsh police conduct, is spawning a wider conversation about racism in America. That discussion threatens to become confusing and unanchored, as school districts anxiously purchase copies of White Fragility, the best-selling advice book that Columbia University professor John McWhorter, an African-American and a language specialist, has labelled a “racist tract”—a book that “diminishes Black people in the name of dignifying us.”

There is a better way: To work off the past—study it. Americans of high school age on up can profit from a book like historian Jill Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the United States, a wide-angled survey, published in 2018, that opens with a full-page photograph of Americans gathered on the National Mall for the 1963 March on Washington, the occasion for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. In a textured treatment of John Locke, she notes, as historians of America have observed for centuries, that his theory of “the natural liberty of man” is at the heart of American ideals. But she proceeds to point out, as many historians have neglected to do, that in Locke’s Constitution for the British colony of Carolina in the seventeenth century, he decreed that “Every freeman of Carolina, shall have absolute power and Authority over his Negro slaves.” That’s the sort of rounded history that Americans should ponder.

SO VERGANGENHEITSAUFARBEITUNG can be educational for the American mind, healing for the American soul—and potentially life-saving for African Americans and indeed all Americans. Is there also a case for working-off-the-past as a means of bolstering the standing, the influence, of America in the global arena?

“German efforts to confront its own crimes,” have made the nation “far more trusted, even occasionally admired, by the rest of the world,” Neiman concludes in Learning from the Germans. “Now many other nations ask Germany to play a more powerful role in world affairs, a request that would have seemed incredible just thirty years earlier.” Survey data collected over the last decade confirm Neiman’s observation of Germany as having arrived in the ranks of globally-esteemed nations—in fact, better liked than America even during the years of Obama, a popular president, unlike Trump, in many parts of the world. In a 2012–2013 BBC survey of 26,000 people in twenty-five countries, for example, 59 percent expressed a “mainly positive” view of Germany, higher than for any other nation, and well ahead of the United States, in eighth place with a 45 percent “mainly positive” score. Germany earns respect as an economic powerhouse, surely, but it is reasonable to think that its working-off-the-past effort also has something to do with the nation’s enhanced global prestige.

Whether American can reap similar benefits from its Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung moment is a more complicated matter. Germany’s negative image owed largely to its increasingly distant Nazi past. America’s global standing plummeted over fresh misadventures like George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, pursued despite vigorous opposition from many countries and without the approval of the United Nations Security Council. Back in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, America enjoyed enormous global approval as the victor in the Cold War, even with all those Confederate monuments still standing.

Nevertheless, the eyes of the world are inescapably on the fractious political and cultural battle raging within America on how to deal with stains of the past. When Richmond ordered the removal of Confederate statues on city land, it was a story in the New Delhi Times. When Trump tweeted that U.S. military bases named for Confederate leaders were “part of a Great American Heritage,” it was a story on France24. For Trump to get his way surely would cost the United States something in the court of world public opinion. If Germany can work off its soiled past, jurors might wonder, why can’t America? Is this yet another thing, like health care, a middling United States is no good at? Peoples living in autocratic societies like Russia and China, neither of which has shown much inclination to face the crimes of the Stalinist and Maoist eras, respectively, might think more highly of America for following the German path—the path of liberal, democratic societies, strong enough to look back at the past with an unblinking admission of the wrongs.

Perhaps the answer to whether Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung will be of lasting benefit to America—to its soul, to its police practices, and to its global standing—will come in the treatment of our founding fathers. The trio of Virginians—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison—are under persistent attack as slave owners. Take down the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, Lucian K. Truscott IV, a sixth-generation direct descendant of Jefferson urged in a recent opinion piece in the Times, and replace this monument, he suggested, with one of Harriet Tubman, the escaped slave who became a conductor along the Underground Railroad. To see Tubman “in place of a white man who enslaved hundreds of men and women is not erasing history,” Truscott said. “It’s telling the real history of America.”

Jefferson, as we have known for years, was not only a plantation slave owner but also the father of children by one of his slaves. Yet he remains, eternally, the leading author of the Declaration of Independence as well as the writer of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the precursor to the protections for religion enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution. Without those protections, a product of Enlightenment thinking, the young republic might have plunged into sectarian warfare. To honor Jefferson’s achievements is also to tell “the real history of America.” A reckoning that devolves into an orgy of guilt over our origins sounds like a good formula for an unmoored nation. It is one thing to reexamine the roots of the nation. It is another to sever them altogether.

Paul Starobin is the author most recently of A Most Wicked Conspiracy: The Last Great Swindle of the Gilded Age (PublicAffairs: 2020).

Image: Reuters