2026 Gerald D. Feldman Lecture | Reckoning with the Past in Germany and the United States: The Case for Thinking Comparatively about Reparative Justice

German atonement for the Holocaust has been widely hailed by the international community as a paragon of national reckoning, and over the last decade, African American intellectuals such as Ta-Nehisi Coates have explicitly invoked Germany as a useful model in their calls for Americans to confront the legacy of slavery and other forms of state-sanctioned racism. In this lecture, Rita Chin will trace the complicated, fraught 80-year process by which Germans have dealt with the Nazi past, focusing on developments and debates in the Federal Republic. She will consider the specific ways in which the German case is instructive for Americans seeking to pursue redress but also explore how Germany's vaunted memory culture has become fossilized such that it has sometimes become a stumbling block for a German society struggling to respond to contemporary challenges.