Django Unchained and Historical Memory: Germany has Confronted the Holocaust, How Come White America Will Not Acknowledge or Take Responsibility for the Horrors of Slavery?

In 1999 the German parliament voted, after years of public debate, to build the official Holocaust memorial in the most prominent piece of empty space in Berlin. I prefer a more unsettling monument to the past — the thousands of Stolperstein or ‘Stumbling Stones’ that the German artist Gunter Demnig has hammered into sidewalks in front of buildings where Jews lived before the war, listing their names, and birth and deportation dates. 

As some opponents predicted, the uses to which the Holocaust Monument has been put are anything but appropriate. But given that the centre of Berlin has been rebuilt with bombast, a bombastic Holocaust memorial, sticking out like a stylised sore thumb amid the triumphalist architecture of the Brandenburg Gate and its surrounding embassies and institutions seems just about right. 

By comparison: can you imagine a monument to the genocide of Native Americans or the Middle Passage at the heart of the Washington Mall? Suppose you could walk down the street and step on a reminder that this building was constructed with slave labour, or that the site was the home of a Native American tribe before it was ethnically cleansed? What we have, instead, are national museums of Native American and African American culture, the latter scheduled to open in 2015.

A friend of We Are Respectable Negroes forwarded me this essay about Germany, the Holocaust, historical responsibility, and the movie Django Unchained by Susan Neiman in Aeon Magazine.

There are some other great essays in that publication including "How Could a Russian Jew Not Hate the Germans?"

Django Unchained is one of my favorite movies in many years. It is not perfect.

The racial politics of the film are far more sophisticated in some ways--and quite regressive in others--than most viewers and critics have yet to realize and acknowledge. Many articles and books will be written on Django Unchained. Such oversights will be remedied imminently.

As I wrote about on several occasions, Django Unchained is a black fantasy revenge film presented as mythologized fairy tale spaghetti western set during slavery whose intended audience is really white Americans.

For example, the slavers in Django Unchained are caricatures. The violence, and Tarantino to his great credit has said as much, was a G-rated version of the centuries-long institution of chattel slavery in the Americas.

Moreover, that a speculative fiction fantasy film had to be created by a white writer/director in order to "educate" audiences about the reality of chattel slavery speaks to the unwillingness of viewers to engage the unpleasant historic facts. Genre became a means for Tarantino to massage the truth of African-American enslavement in the United States into a product that would be palatable for the mass public, and as a work of "popular" film that could be given industry awards and earn a hefty profit at the box office. In all, a world that didn't really exist, but also did exist, is a neat and convenient way to deal with uncomfortable feelings in a psychologically safe space for both the black and white public.

As such, cartoon villains are far less disturbing and upsetting for white folks than a matter of fact depiction of racial tyranny where "good" white folks held human property, abused, tortured, raped, dismembered, and worked them to death for profit. Such an observation holds true for many black people as well, those born after the civil rights movement, and especially those "Obama kids", are drunk on a type of historical myopia because they do not want to acknowledge how even in a country where a black man is President, that race still over determines their life chances.

To own a slave (or slaves) was the primary means of upward economic mobility for most of American history. Slavery was central to America's rise to global power and not a sideshow or coincidence: American power was built on Black and First Nations blood.

White America is still not prepared to accept that its genesis came from two wicked events. The first was the genocide of indigenous peoples. The second was the enslavement and murder of millions of black people. This system morphed and involved into a racialized democracy where white success and wealth creation was subsidized by the exploitation and denial of full citizenship, as well as economic liberties and opportunities for black and brown people.

America wants to talk around and/or avoid such facts. Germans do not seem to have the same problem in grappling with the Holocaust and its history in the near and past present.

The banality of evil was not just that of Germans in the Holocaust; the deeds of white Americans who supported, either actively or passively, a slave society and American Apartheid should be described in a similar light:

Contemporary Germans understand collective responsibility as meaning a commitment to avoiding in the future the sins their fathers and grandfathers committed in the past — but this raises fresh moral tangles. Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and a few others offer clear cases of guilt and responsibility: they planned and carried out crimes with malice and forethought. What about those who didn’t plan them, but merely carried them out without much thought of any kind? Were those who signed orders on desktops more guilty (because further up in the hierarchy) than the guards who herded naked Jews to their deaths? Or is a human being who is capable of doing that to another human being more depraved than a bureaucrat such as Eichmann, who claimed that watching a mass execution made him sick? And what about the voters who put the Nazis in power, hoping it would stop the inflation, streetfighting, and general chaos that threatened to engulf the Weimar Republic?

The United States is a relatively young country which (conveniently) does not have a history except for the one it (re)imagines for itself in the service of any given political project. The United States is also not alone in that regard: what is the nation state if not an imagined community that selectively remembers and forgets its own history?

In Germany, the Nazis and the everyday folk who were complicit with the Holocaust are still alive. They are real. By contrast, the United States paints cartoon images of those "rednecks" and Southern bigots to mock and run out of the public square as a means of furthering a narrative that white supremacy is a thing of the past and a living anachronism when it does surface in the present.



Again, it is easier to focus on those bigots from central casting than to think about how one's own nice, gentile, and respectable parents, grandparents, and other relatives signed restrictive housing covenants, harassed black people moving into their neighborhoods, likely did not support the civil rights movement, created a hostile workplace environment for people of color, and were given opportunities and privileges denied those not white.

America never had a truth and reconciliation commission to work through how white supremacy and the colorline was an institution that worked through white people committing day-to-day acts of cruelty against those marked as non-white. The United States has never given reparations to African-Americans who were held as slaves, and their descendants for the wealth, income, and labor stolen from them (black slaves were the single greatest capital good in the colonies and then United States).

White America was, and remains, unwilling to take responsibility for its crimes--and the direct inter-generational privilege which accrued between and among members of the white community--because of that fact:

We all of us benefit from inheritances we did not choose and cannot change. Growing up involves deciding which part of the inheritance you want to claim as your own, and how much you have to pay for the rest of it. This is as true for nations as it is for individuals. 

A Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung must force emotional confrontation with the crimes it concerns, not just a rational assessment of them. This confrontation was notably missing in the first decades of the Federal Republic of West Germany, which used reparations payments to the State of Israel as a substitute for facing up to what it meant to have caused the murder of millions. 

The country thus assumed forms of legal responsibility without really assuming moral responsibility until the slow, fitful turmoil of the 1960s. Mutatis mutandis, something similar has happened in America. Affirmative action measures are a way of taking collective responsibility for slavery and the blackface minstrel Jim Crow, but few white Americans have been forced to face just how awful slavery was.

I have long argued that the notion of a "national conversation" on race is empty, tired, and weak.

It is language which does no political work except to deflect and distract from a real and substantive engagement with white racism's impact on the life chances of people of color in the present. Moreover, what is there left to talk about? The reality of white racism, both institutional (what we call "colorblind" or "symbolic racism") and personal in the present is a repeated finding and conclusion in the social sciences.

Denying racism and making it a hypothesis or speculation to be "proved" in a manner sufficient to satisfy those white folks who disagree with its semi-permanence in American life is a ploy and a trick that only furthers white supremacy. Here, white privilege works in many ways--one of its most pernicious tricks is forcing people to debate facts that should otherwise be self-evident.

For thinking, reasonable, and considerate people with any fair knowledge of American society and culture, racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia should be assumed priors; the onus is on those who want to disprove that reality, not the other way around.

Are the Germans a "better" people in terms of owning and acknowledging their wicked history than (white) Americans? Do the twin cultural myths of American Exceptionalism, and America as a country of immigrants/settlers, make impossible the type of honest soul searching about slavery, Jim and Jane Crow, and their shadows in the present?

Ironically, is Barack Obama a type of post racial wunderkind who makes such conversations even more impossible?