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For our December cowl story, our workers author Clint Smith—who has written a ebook about historic websites and memorials of slavery in America—frolicked in Germany, visiting websites of Holocaust reminiscence and learning the debates round them. I known as him to debate how acts of atonement differ within the two international locations.
However first, listed below are three new tales from The Atlantic.
Stuffed With Stones
Isabel Fattal: What stunned you as you frolicked with Germany’s Holocaust memorials and commemorative spots?
Clint Smith: Like many individuals, I learn books in regards to the Holocaust in grade faculty. I learn Anne Frank’s diary and Elie Wiesel’s Evening; I frolicked with loads of these narratives that gave me a small perception into what occurred. However I’m a giant believer within the energy of placing your physique within the place the place historical past occurred. It provides you a distinct sense of your personal proximity to that historical past. I feel I felt that the majority on the Dachau focus camp.
I’ve been to plantations. I’ve been inside execution chambers. I’ve walked the halls of loss of life row. I’ve been to loads of locations the place loss of life and violence are, and have been, enacted on individuals. However I’ve by no means skilled the coolness in my physique and in my spirit that I did once I was strolling by the fuel chamber at Dachau. I used to be startled by how deeply I felt it in my physique, how deeply unsettled I felt in my spirit. And then you definately understand how current it was. This was lower than 80 years in the past.
Isabel: What are the teachings America can take from Germany about acknowledging and atoning for the harms of the previous?
Clint: One of the crucial shifting memorials that I encountered had been the “stumbling stones,” an English translation of Stolpersteine. There are greater than 90,000 brass stones unfold throughout 30 completely different international locations in Europe, and so they’re sometimes positioned in entrance of the houses, residences, synagogues, and colleges the place Jews and different teams had been persecuted and murdered by the Nazis, or the place they final lived earlier than they had been despatched to their deaths. I used to be speaking with a Jewish lady I frolicked with who lived in a house that had two stumbling stones in entrance of it, and he or she stated to me, “Are you able to think about what it will be like in case you had this for slavery in your hometown, in New Orleans?” And I had a second the place I seemed down on the stones and imagined what it will be like.
She stated, “It might be packed.” And it’s true, proper? Total streets can be crammed with stones. I take into consideration what it will be like if we did one thing commensurate with that right here. What wouldn’t it be like if we had stumbling stones or markers in each place the place enslaved individuals had been bought or held or rendered captive? What may it do to our collective understanding of our historical past? Would we now have such a distorted sense of what America has been and what it’s if we had been recurrently reminded of what it has carried out?
Markers and stumbling stones aren’t a panacea by any means. However the factor about Germany is that these websites of reminiscence are ubiquitous. There are such a lot of reminders, in every single place you flip, of what Germany did, that it turns into an indelible a part of the nationwide psyche.
Isabel: One of many factors that caught out to me in your story was that in Germany at the moment, Jews are extra of a historic abstraction than an actual group of individuals. That makes the act of memorializing the Holocaust in Germany very completely different from that of memorializing slavery in America.
Clint: In Germany, Jewish persons are lower than 1 / 4 of a % of the inhabitants. There are extra Jewish individuals in Boston than there are in all of Germany. As one Jewish lady put it, Jewishness is an empty canvas upon which Germans can paint their repentance. It’s extra of an thought upon which contrition is projected than it’s an precise group of people that should be engaged with. Many Germans don’t know, spend time with, or interact with Jewish individuals.
In america, there are 41 million Black individuals on this nation. And so you’ll be able to’t merely construct a memorial to slavery or put a wreath down every year on Juneteenth and say, We did this horrible factor. We gained’t do it once more, with out accounting for the fabric implications of what occurred for the people who find themselves proper in entrance of you. Contrition with out reparation would really feel empty or incomplete. Throughout the nation, we see the manifestations of a scarcity of reparations within the pervasive inequality between Black and white individuals.
In Germany, many Jewish individuals consider that it’s simpler once you don’t truly should account for or interact with the individuals you probably did this factor to, as a result of there are so few of them left. I feel it creates a basically completely different set of social and political realities from america, the place in case you say you’re sorry however then don’t do something for the people who find themselves the descendants of that hurt or who expertise that hurt now, then what are you truly doing?
Isabel: To finish on a considerably hopeful notice, you argue that residents don’t should depend on authorities help to acknowledge the previous. “Peculiar persons are the conscience,” you write. What recommendation would you give individuals who hope to develop into part of their neighborhood’s makes an attempt to recollect?
Clint: There are examples of communities within the U.S. that aren’t ready for the federal government to inform them that they need to construct a memorial or they need to create websites of public reminiscence. I feel some of the compelling is a bunch in Connecticut that’s doing a Witness Stones Venture, primarily based on the stumbling-stones challenge in Germany. Center- and high-school college students are putting stones to mark the areas the place enslaved individuals lived, labored, and worshiped.
What I discovered in Germany is that the stumbling stones weren’t began by the federal government. It began with one man, Gunter Demnig, an artist who determined to start out placing these stones into the bottom. So he did. At first, authorities officers tried to cease him, however after seeing how a lot help there was for the challenge, they relented, and even finally started supporting his efforts. Generally it’s about being proactive and making an attempt to inform the tales in your neighborhood that no one else is telling.
Associated:
As we speak’s Information
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Dispatches
Night Learn

Do You Actually Wish to Learn What Your Physician Writes About You?
By Zoya Qureshi
You will not be conscious of this, however you’ll be able to learn every thing that your physician writes about you. Go to your affected person portal on-line, click on round till you land on notes out of your previous visits, and browse away. This can be a current improvement, and a giant one. Beforehand, you all the time had the precise to request your medical document out of your care suppliers—an typically costly and typically fruitless course of—however in April 2021, a brand new federal rule went into impact, mandating that sufferers have the authorized proper to freely and electronically entry most sorts of notes written about them by their medical doctors.
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P.S.
I requested Clint what he may advocate for additional studying on the topics of historical past and public reminiscence. “When it comes to pondering by the reminiscence of slavery in america, there is no such thing as a one higher than historian David Blight; his Pulitzer Prize–successful biography of Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom, is a must-read,” Clint stated. “I’d additionally encourage individuals to learn W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1952 essay on his go to to Warsaw, which in some ways served as a supply of inspiration for my journey to Berlin and Dachau.”
— Isabel
To listen to extra about our December cowl story, be part of Clint in dialog with The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, on Friday, November 18, at 1 p.m. ET. Register right here.