TEHRAN – American philosopher Susan Neiman’s 2019 publication “Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil” will be reviewed on Tuesday during a meeting at the Book City Institute in Tehran.

Mohammad-Mostafa Bayat, the translator of the Persian edition of the book, and Amir Saemi, a philosophy scholar from the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences, will attend the meeting, which will begin at 3 pm.

The session will also be screened live on the Telegram channel @bookcitycc and www.instagram.com/ketabofarhang.

The book has recently been published by the Tehran-based company Borj.

As an increasingly polarized America fights over the legacy of racism, Neiman, author of the contemporary philosophical classic “Evil in Modern Thought”, asks what we can learn from the Germans about confronting the evils of the past.

In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Neiman’s “Learning from the Germans” delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. 

Neiman is a white woman who came of age in the civil rights–era South and a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin. 

Working from this unique perspective, she combines philosophical reflection, personal stories, and interviews with both Americans and Germans who are grappling with the evils of their own national histories.

Through discussions with Germans, including Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who created the breakthrough “Crimes of the Wehrmacht” exhibit, and Friedrich Schorlemmer, the East German dissident preacher, Neiman tells the story of the long and difficult path Germans faced in their effort to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust. 

In the United States, she interviews James Meredith about his battle for equality in Mississippi and Bryan Stevenson about his monument to the victims of lynching, as well as lesser-known social justice activists in the South, to provide a compelling picture of the work contemporary Americans are doing to confront their violent history. 

In clear and gripping prose, Neiman urges us to consider the nuanced forms that evil can assume, so that we can recognize and avoid them in the future.

Photo: A poster for the Book City Institute’s review of Susan Neiman’s book “Learning from the Germans”.

MMS/YAW