A negative Covid test under any circumstances is cause for celebration but I was especially thrilled to see only a marked C strip on the test card after a week of Covid symptoms. It meant that I was clear to take a long-planned trip to Berlin as part of the Visiting Program of Widen the Circle. Widen the Circle’s mission is to combat hate through a shared understanding of the past. The Visiting Program is one of their signature initiatives designed to build bridges between educators and activists in the U.S. and Germany. Thought leaders on both sides of the Atlantic are invited to the program to use the power of the local history to learn how to combat racism and prejudice as well as deal with the historic legacies of injustice.
I was honored to be a part of this learning and personal growth experience, but I gotta tell you, the program was intense—not only in its schedule but in the learning. We visited numerous memorials and historical sites. The week-long program included a visit to Anne Frank museum, a walking tour of central Berlin Jewish quarter, a tour of West Berlin Jewish history, a visit to the House of the Wannsee Conference (the site of the meeting where senior Nazi bureaucrats organized “the Final Solution to the problem of the Jews”), an inspiring and moving visit to community school and a deportation site memorial with Sabeth Schmidthals, walking tour of Leipzig and Erich Zinger House, a hike (literally) of historical sites related to the Nazi period deportation of Jews, a visit to Döbeln meeting young activists, seeing the award-winning Yellow Brick Memory Project that inspired the work of Bryan Stevenson and others in the U.S., meeting with Citizens for the Badehaus (one of the largest displaced persons camps for Jewish survivors in post-war Europe), and visiting a center for refugees. WHEW!
Our program text was Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans, which I would highly recommend and a number of other books, podcasts, and articles. Although I am still unpacking the experience, here’s a bit of what I learned from the program:
The Power of Memory Work Lies in Connecting the Past to Present: As a psychologist, I conceptualize memory work as a process for how we acquire, store, retain and retrieve information. As a methodology used by German researchers and activists, memory work is a process of engaging with the past in an accurate and ethical way.
For memory work to have sustainable impact, accurate recording of history not only has be available in books, memorials, and artifacts, but we have to experience the learning in such a way that we connect the past to the present. Connecting the past to the present isn’t a cerebral exercise. We have to have meaningful dialogue with others about how we’ve received, interpreted, and connected that information to our own lived experience.
The power of memory work lies in identifying the similar threads from the past in order to create a better future for all of us. We need to ask, How does this historical pattern show up today?
Susan Neiman’s book does a masterful job of showing how Germany’s efforts to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust are being, and can be used, in the U.S. as we deal with our horrid history of enslavement of people of African descent and the colonization of Indigenous People.
Felt History or Emotional History Remind Us That People Make History: In many ways, keeping the memory of the people who lived these truths alive is just as important (or even more important, in my humble opinion) as what gets recorded in history books. The bios behind each of the Stumbling Stones found in Germany and all over Europe are gentle and powerful reminders that people make history. Keeping the memory of those who walked the paths in those traumatic and horrific times is critical to our understanding of how communities are shaped today.
In many ways, the U.S., particularly the Deep South, is still working through the strong and intense emotional reaction to the brutally murdered, 14-year-old Emmett Till by White Supremacists, and whose body was left disfigured in his open casket at the insistence of his mother, Mamie Till Mobley.
“I couldn’t bear the thought of people being horrified by the sight of my son. But on the other hand, I felt the alternative was even worse. After all, we had averted our eyes for far too long, turning away from the ugly reality facing us as a nation. Let the world see what I’ve seen.”
Just as the Stumbling Stones are a reminder of the individuals who were brutally murdered, we need to keep fixing our gaze on the ugly reality of racism and bigotry and see the face of Emmett Till in every injustice.
You Cannot Remember Alone: I learned this truth from Gabriele Hannah who uses the power of narrative to fight bigotry and hate by keeping the memory alive of German Jews in the Rhine-Hesse district region whose communities were destroyed by the Nazis. She told us “you have to come together to understand the other side—that is the only way we can reconcile. I am not responsible for what has happened in the past, but I am responsible for what is going to happen in the future. Bigotry didn’t end in 1945 . These people had families before that and have a family now.” “ It’s not about forgiveness,” she continues, “pity is feeling sorry that they were subjects of this horrid history. Empathy is required. You can’t understand the death of 6 million unless you know one of them.”
Keeping collective memory alive in our minds and hearts changes how we act today. Those who remember and know, don’t act like those who don’t know.
Arts and Culture are Important Memory Markers: As an effort to align German arts and culture with Nazi ideas, thousands of books considered to be “un-German” were burned by the Nationalist German Student Association at Bebelplatz in 1933. We visited The Empty Library memorial on the grounds of Humboldt University. The square memorial symbolizes knowledge that was destroyed. Heinrich Heine, one of Germany's greatest poets, who was of Jewish origin, wrote “Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.”
I was reminded that scholar and civil rights activist W.E.B Du Bois studied at Humboldt University for two years and there is a memorial marker there in his honor. As Germany continues to recognize and honor his legacy, book banning efforts by right wing extremists targeted at racial and sexual identities are spreading across the U.S. May the Empty Library be a not-so-gentle reminder for why we need to pay attention to the book banning efforts in the U.S, and take them seriously.
Memory Gets Translated into Law, Politics, and Culture: History lives in our laws, political ideologies, and especially in our culture. It’s debatable if history is written by the victors or by those trained in documentation. Either way, history lives most vividly in culture. Historical facts can be downplayed or reinterpreted or even denied, as the horrific acts of the Holocaust have been. We can diminish reality or omit facts or promote inaccurate interpretations as the United States has done with much of its written account of slavery, but the memory of this history still lives on in the culture.
In Germany, public denial of the Holocaust is criminalized. This includes sharing images such as swastikas, wearing an SS uniform, and making statements in support of Hitler. These laws are rooted in the memory work of Germany’s history and identity and are in response to resurgence of far right extremist ideology.
In contrast, there are states in America working to ban discussions of Critical Race Theory The discussion bans also extend beyond race to LGBTQ+ issues. Banning these discussions do not change our racist history and contemporary manifestations of systemic racism, heterosexism, homophobia, and transphobia. Without doing psychological and cognitive memory work, these isms and phobia only grow.
For example, many confederate statues and flags, symbols of White Supremacy and White Nationalism, have been removed following the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville and the murder of George Floyd. Yet, over 700 statues remain and confederate flags are widely flown all of the South and in the North. There are those who claim these statues and flags simply commemorate Southern history and culture. Yet, there is little doubt that these memorials serve to sanction and keep alive racist attitudes in U.S. culture.
Just as the Holocaust memorials serve to impact the state of liberal democracy present in Germany today, building the capacity as a nation for important discussions about Critical Race Theory and LGBTQ+ rights. as well of the presence of Confederate statues and flags are foundational to understanding our American identity, These discussion should not be denied, dismissed, or side-lined in public spaces, especially in educational settings.
My Learning from the Germans
We can learn from the Germans that first you have to acknowledge, then you can heal, then you can connect across our shared humanity. Widen the Circle’s Visiting Program taught me that memory work is not a step-wise, one-and-done process. We build social trust with every cycle of acknowledging, healing, and connecting. Memory defines who we are in our individual and collective identities. Learning these truths with the thought leaders and activists in Germany provided me not only with a better shared understanding of history, but brought me closer to our shared identity as humans. That’s the power of memory work.