I opened yesterday with the fact that I have only questions and no real answers when it comes to reconciliation between parties where one wronged the other. That has not changed.

For today I picked a podcast that brings together descendants on both side of the Dred Scott decision, generally seen as the worst decision by any US Supreme Court in history. Dred Scott, a slave, sued for his freedom across all instances, ending up in the Supreme Court, (Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857,) which came down in a 7-2 landmark decision on the side of those who considered Blacks inferior: all people of African ancestry — slaves as well as those who were free — could never become citizens of the United States and therefore could not sue in federal court. The court also declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (legislation that restricted slaveholding in some territories) as unconstitutional. Well, what would you expect from 9 justices, seven of whom had been appointed by pro-slavery presidents from the South, and of these, five were from slave-holding families.

Scott was bought by the man who had supported him financially and morally throughout the legal proceedings, and then set free. He died 9 months later.

Here is the conversation between Scott’s descendants and those of Chief Justice Taney who wrote the decision. Is this what you consider reconciliation?

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/american-pendulum-ii-dred-scott/

Let’s add one more statistical bit to question many Americans’ assumptions about how much better things have gotten.

Racist violence in the US has increased by a mind-blowing 45 % in 2017.

https://www.thenation.com/article/trumps-xenophobic-vision-of-america-is-inciting-racist-violence/

No wonder then, that there is actually talk about reissuing the Green-Book….which helped Black motorists to traverse the US as safely as they could, particularly with regard to naming locations where no food or restroom or hotel rooms should be requested. Driving while Black is not a new phenomenon. http://www.history.com/news/the-green-book-the-black-travelers-guide-to-jim-crow-america

Photographs are from South Carolina.

This week is devoted to the topic of reconciliation. I have only questions, no answers when thinking about reconciliation in numerous contexts. In this regard I seem to be in the company of minds smarter than mine and outside of the realm of souls more generous than mine. I will try and present conflicts that are between people, between groups, and within a single person. As far as I can tell, all of the conflicts I picked have a monumental structural component.

Since January 27, last Saturday, was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I’ll ask if reconciliation between Germans and Jews is possible when antisemitism is not only alive and well, but on the rise in both frequency and intensity of acts that attack and hurt Jews. Let me add right at the start, that antisemitism expressed by Muslim migrants and refugees in Germany is part of the story, but that 90% of the factual crimes are committed by Germans, as government statistics show.

I will report what I read in my daily dose of German news on 1/27.

On this day you found Angela Merkel expound on the shame that Jewish institutions, be they synagogues, kindergartens, community centers or schools in today’s Germany need constant police protection. She warned against rising antisemitism and xenophobia and announced the creation of a bureaucratic office in the new administration that is going to be in charge of these issues. It fell to Charlotte Knobloch, the past president of the Zentralrat der Juden, to point to the fact that the third largest elected party in that administration not only tolerates antisemitism and historical revisionism among its members, but encourages racism, rightwing extremism and populist nationalism.

http://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2018-01/holocaust-gedenktag-angela-merkel-antisemitismus-fremdenfeindlichkeit

A commentary in one of the largest daily’s on 1/27 was titled: What happened to us?  It pointed to the fact that from early on Germans lacked the courage to address justice: of the 70.000 concentration camp SS personnel only 1650 received punishment by the courts after the war, often ridiculously small sentences with probation granted. And today’s acceptance of genocide across the world and of hate speech and violence within our own societies indicts us as having learned nothing from the Shoah.

http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/auschwitz-befreiung-was-ist-mit-uns-passiert-15416733.html

Also on 1/27 a left-leaning daily interviewed Michel Friedman, member of Merkel’s conservative party, lawyer and TV moderator, who lost large parts of his family in Auschwitz. I found two of his arguments particularly resonant: Most Germans condemned the endpoint,  the final solution, after 1945, but continued to be silent on what happened in the beginning. Millions of Germans were enmeshed in the looting, the destruction of synagogues and stores, the turning a blind eye to deportations. Do we find echoes of that silence in our own times?

Secondly, he argues that we need to educate the next generation to know how to engage in conflict. Rather than being silent in the presence of mental arson, as he calls it, latent or expressed antisemitism and xenophobia, people need to speak up and argue to avoid becoming a collaborator. Verbal sparrings solidify your own orientation, your political point of view, they need to be practiced in schools and at home, acknowledged as valuable tools against conformism.

https://www.taz.de/Archiv-Suche/!5477285&s=holocaust&SuchRahmen=Print/

I can only think of what Adorno wrote in 1959 when trying to point to the difficulty of internalizing the horror associated with German guilt (in my mind a prerequisite for reconciliation.) Loosely translated: You want to leave the past behind: rightfully so, since it is impossible to live under its dark shadow, and because the horror is unending …. wrongfully so, because the past you want to escape is quite alive and well.

Finally here is a new documentary that looks at the relationship between Germans and Jews. It can be seen in full on the web with registration or a small price at iTunes.

Photographs are from last Friday at the Portland Holocaust Memorial which is a strange beast, but obviously visited;  I found freshly picked flowers stuck into the spaces in the wall.

I meant that title: decisions can be reversed; what lasts are the possibilities to choose from.  Or more precisely, what lasts is the fact that there always are more possibilities, as long as we are not risk averse.

The reason this is on my mind has to do with my stumbling over a decades-old, short correspondence with Masha Gessen. Many of you know Gessen as a Russian/American journalist, queer activist and writer who documented the evolving political landscape under Putin’s regime and is highly critical of the Trump presidency.

After having left Russia in 2013 for the second time, likely endangered by being a critical voice in particular for LGTB issues, Gessen now teaches as a visiting professor at Amherst College and contributes regularly in the New Yorker, the NYT, and many other publications and is a recipient of a Guggenheim, an Andrew Carnegie and a Nieman Fellowship.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/11/a-mafia-state-within-a-totalitarian-society/546848/

As a Russian (the parents emigrated with a young Masha) and a Jew, Gessen tackled issues of (not)belonging since a young age. As someone who had inherited genes predisposing of serious cancer, a decision to take preventative measures to fight the disease was on order some 14 years ago, given that many relatives had died of the scourge. Here we were two complete strangers and yet writing about the pro’s and con’s of preventative ovary removal, something I championed, something Gessen, who also already had children) declined, until just recently when it became unavoidable.

I have, I believe, managed to avoid pronouns up until this point because Masha Gessen, who used to be a woman, is now in transition to becoming a man. And rarely have I read a more eloquent and thoughtful description of the tackling of choices  – from emigration to medical decisions to sex change – than in a recent article by him in the New York Review of Books.

The way he seeks out the world as an expanding universe that might hold a promise of belonging when one is open for change stands in stark contrast to what I believe underlies the populist, nativist movements of our time. I have written about it here last October, when discussing Heinrich Mann’s Der Untertan in the context of the German elections. (Germany, by the way, STILL has no government since the parties seem to be unable to form workable coalitions.)

If you look at it closely, populist movements are against anything that represents pluralism – the coexistence of multiple options. Diversity is not only not desired, it is actively feared. To have too many options is seen as overwhelming; there is a longing for simplicity, redux, a singular structure that is preferred to the complexities of gender, nationality, culture and political movements.

Unfortunately such preference is not only voiced by those who lost status due to an increase in societal diversity and might regain it, but also by many who will be hurt if such a revisionist dream becomes once again reality. Clarity and structural regimentation are seen as antidotes to the chaos of an evolving world where national, cultural and gender boundaries are but in flux.

I hope the fact that so many fought for so long and so hard to implement changes means they won’t easily yield to the other half that wants to return to the old ways, (good old ways only in their imagination, if you ask me.) To have people like Gessen model the courage to radically reinvent ourselves gives me hope.

Photographs are of some of the many paths one could choose.