Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans and Working Off the Nazi Past and the American Racist Past: A Report with Excerpts

In February, I blogged a number of times about Susan Neiman's book Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019). As I told you in one of those postings, one reason Neiman's important book caught my attention and made me decide to read it is that Susan Neiman grew up in the American South during the Civil Rights era, as I did. Neiman is, however, Jewish, and she saw the struggles for African-American rights in Atlanta through the lens of her own marginalization as a Jew, an experience I did not have growing up as a white Anglo Southerner descended from slaveholding ancestors. 

Quote for Day: "People Voted for Hitler as They Voted for Putin and Trump, Because They Didn't Want to Give up Their Own Privileges"

PRRI, "Despite Chaos and Controversy, Trump Favorability Stable Throughout 2019," 26 Feb. 2020

In her book Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019), Susan Neiman cites German philosopher Bettina Stangneth, author of Eichmann Before Jerusalem (NY: Knopf, 2014; German edition, 2011):

Was Dietrich Bonhoeffer Gay? Diane Reynolds' The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the Biographical-Theological Evidence

Diane Reynolds, The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Women, Sexuality, and Nazi Germany (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016)

When I reported to you (and here) a month ago regarding Charles Marsh's biography of theological Dietrich Bonhoeffer entitled Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (NY: Knopf, 2014), I mentioned to you that, as Marsh does, another recent biographer, Diane Reynolds, sees Bonhoeffer as a gay man in love with his colleague Eberhard Bethge. Reynolds' biography of Bonhoeffer, The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Women, Sexuality, and Nazi Germany (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016), proposes that as a man aware that his erotic inclinations moved in a forbidden direction in the savagely homophobic culture of Nazi Germany, Bonhoeffer lived a double life, often pretending to be who and what he was not (p. 4) — while he began to develop, especially in the latter part of his tragically truncated life, a "nascent queer theology":

Charles Marsh's Biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Strange Glory, on Bonhoeffer's (Highly Contested) Homosexuality

Here's another set of excerpts I'd like to share with you from Charles Marsh's excellent biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (NY: Knopf, 2014). Marsh ruffled feathers of conservative Christians (and the ruffling goes on and has become even more agitated with Diane Reynolds' 2016 Bonhoeffer biography The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Women, Sexuality, and Nazi Germany) by concluding that Bonhoeffer was a gay man deeply in love with fellow Lutheran pastor Eberhard Bethge.

"The Same [Bible] Passage Sessions Cited Has Been Used to Justify Slavery and Nazism": Valuable Commentary on Sessions' and Huckabee-Sanders' Use of Romans 13

Dear Jeff Sessions, are you aware that the argument you made today from Romans 13 was a central argument of the German Christian (Pro-Nazi) movement over and against the Confessing Church? Im not saying you are a Nazi, but you’re interpreting the Bible like one.

— frsimmons (@frsimmons) June 15, 2018

Tara Isabella Burton, "The racist history of the Bible verse the White House uses to justify separating families": 

As Neo-Nazis Celebrate Murder of Gay Jewish College Student, Where Are the Churches? (When They're Not Firing Queer Employees and Supporting Anti-Queer Discrimination, That Is)

Members of the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division have been linked to five murders—most recently the stabbing death of a gay Jewish college student in January. They also have a secret chatroom.

Here's our story: https://t.co/nZPTHUvNGP pic.twitter.com/cOUTqIZzNK

— ProPublica (@ProPublica) February 24, 2018

In an article entitled "Inside Atomwaffen As It Celebrates a Member for Allegedly Killing a Gay Jewish College Student," A.C. Thompson, Ali Winston, and Jake Hanrahan report on behalf of ProPublica:

Vice's On-the-Ground Video Footage from Charlottesville: You Need to Watch

After Charlottesville, Twitter Makes Lists and Names Names: "It Was the Silence of Good People That Allowed the Nazis to Flourish the First Time Around"

Every single person who showed up at that torchlit rally on Friday night will forever be identifiable as a person who attended that rally. It's going to end up being important that they all showed their faces. They were all very well-lit. They were all very, very well-photographed. 

~ Rachel Maddow

Continuing Moral Witness: Churches and Their Apologists Offer Language of Healing in Face of Trump Presidency. We Need Language of Resistance.

"The Further A Society
Drifts From The Truth,
The More It Will Hate
Those That Speak It."
~George Orwell pic.twitter.com/CgIxTakB3n

— relombardo (@relombardo3) January 11, 2017

Things I have read Trump supporters/apologists saying on social media today:

"One Wonders If These People Are People at All": Catholic Pro-Life Response?

Grace Wilson, "CNN Segment on Anti-Semite Sparks Backlash"

One wonders if these people are people at all: thus white nationalist Richard Spencer in a speech at the National Policy Institute in D.C. last Saturday in the Ronald Reagan Federal Building a few blocks from the White House. It was in this speech that Spencer shouted, "Hail Trump!," eliciting Nazi salutes among those in attendance, as he lambasted the Lügenpresse, the Nazi word for the "lying press" that sought to expose Hitler. 

Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen's Diary of a Man in Despair on Hitler: "Is There a Nation Today So Lacking in Perspective As to Deny the Possibility That Such a Mass Psychosis Could at Some Time in Its History Occur?"

Reading Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen's Diary of a Man in Despair, trans. Paul Rubens (NY: Macmillan, 1970), as Donald Trump campaigns for the American presidency is a minatory, instructive experience. Reck-Malleczewen was a conservative writer from an East Prussian family of high social standing. He kept a journal from May 1936 to October 1944 chronicling Germany's descent into hell under Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party. The diary ends with his account of being arrested by Nazi officials. Though he was acquitted in October 1944 of charges of undermining the morale of German troops, he was arrested again in December and sent to Dachau, where he died the following February.

Why Was "This Mixture of Arrogance and Hankering for Advantage Breaking Out in Germany, of All Places?": The Testimony of Joachim Fest's Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood As Donald Trump Rises to Power

In his memoir entitled Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood (NY: Other Press, 2012) (trans. Martin Chalmers), Joachim Fest talks about how his family in Berlin chose to resist Hitler and the Nazi regime, while all around them, people acclaimed Hitler and regarded him as a savior figure who would make their nation great again. Among other dissenters with whom they talked as Hitler rose to power — always with great caution — the burning question was how this could happen in Germany, a nation devoted to law and order.