Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (31 page)

Landrieu was moved by this and was further awakened by his friend, the jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, to the perspective of the descendants of enslaved people who had been terrorized under the Confederate banner.

The monuments in question included one for Confederate president Jefferson Davis and one for Gen. Robert E. Lee, the latter of whom had no direct connection to New Orleans but whose statue was erected by the city as the Jim Crow regime took hold after the end of Reconstruction.

Now, more than a century later, the city was within its right to remove its own property, and Mayor Landrieu thought it would be
a fairly straightforward process of public hearings and a vote by a city council as progressive as the city it represented. With the country newly reminded of the enduring nature of white supremacy, supporters came forward, including an influential citizen who pledged to donate $170,000 toward the cost of removing the monument as long as he could be assured of anonymity.

The city tested the idea with the public. At one hearing, a Confederate sympathizer had to be escorted out by police after he cursed and gave the middle finger to the audience. A retired lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps, Richard Westmoreland, came at it from the other side. He stood up and said that Erwin Rommel was a great general, but there are no statues of Rommel in Germany. “
They are ashamed,” he said. “The question is, why aren’t we?”

As time wore on, though, things got ugly. The city had trouble finding a contractor to remove the statues. Every contractor who considered the city’s request got threatening attacks at home, at work, and on social media. It turned out that
not one construction company in New Orleans wanted to touch it. Finally a contractor in Baton Rouge agreed to do it, but he pulled out, too, after his car was firebombed. The Confederate sympathizers made it clear that “
any company that dared step forward,” Landrieu wrote, “would pay a price.”

The faithful of the old Confederacy held candlelight vigils at the monuments and clogged the city hall switchboard, cursing and threatening the receptionists. Soon the benefactor backed out of his promise of donating money for the removal effort. If it were ever discovered, he said, “
I’ll get run out of town.”

The issue was now dividing all of New Orleans. “
People who had served for years on civic boards quit,” Landrieu said. “There was a “deep, mean chill we felt when we entered a room for a public event.” Some of the mayor’s own neighbors and some of the people he thought of as friends averted their gaze when they saw him. He had not anticipated “the ferocity of the opposition.”

Finally, the city found
a construction company willing to take on what had become hazard duty in a virtual war zone. It could be seen as karma that the only construction crew willing to risk their lives to remove the Confederate statues was African-American. Due to the dangers of the operation, the company charged four times what the city had anticipated to remove the three largest monuments, and said the company would only go in if there was police protection. By now, the city had few other options if it wanted the statues gone.

The mayor decided first to remove a monument to a supremacist organization called the White League because white citizens seemed to have the least attachment to that one. Still, the city took no chances.

That night, the men wore long sleeves and masks both to protect their identities and to conceal their skin color. Cardboard covered the company name on its trucks and cranes and hid the vehicle license plates. Still, the pro-Confederate forces poured sand in the gas tank of one of the cranes. As the workers proceeded to remove the obelisk in pieces, drones lurked above them taking unauthorized photographs of the operation. People in the crowd trained high-definition cameras on the workers to try to identify them. Finally, the pieces of the obelisk were down and driven to a storage shed.

The next month, the Robert E. Lee monument, a larger-than-life bronze likeness, arms crossed, standing on a sixty-foot marble column in a manicured circle in the center of town, was the last of the four to be removed.
His figure dangled from a crane in full daylight and, this time, to cheering crowds.

Mayor Landrieu gave a speech that day to remind citizens of why this needed to happen. “
These monuments celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy,” he said, “ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for.”

They were more than mere statuary. “
They were created as political weapons,” he would later write, “part of an effort to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side not just of history, but of humanity.”

The day that New Orleans wrested Robert E. Lee from his column, the Alabama state legislature sent a bill to the Alabama governor, Kay Ivey. As in most of the former Confederacy after the post-civil-rights realignment, Republicans now dominated Alabama. They were now
fighting to keep monuments to the very cause that the one-time party of Lincoln had fought in the Civil War. The new Alabama bill sent to the governor that day made it illegal to remove any monument that had been in place for twenty years or more, which in effect meant that nobody could lay a hand on a single Confederate statue in Alabama.

An ocean away, in the former capital of the Third Reich, Nigel Dunkley, a former British officer and now a historian of Nazi Germany, drove along a curve of what is left of the Berlin Wall. He pointed to the neoclassical buildings of the old Weimar Republic that were for a time run by the Nazis and have been reclaimed since the reunification of Germany. We drew near the Brandenburg Gate, which survived the Allied bombing in the Second World War, and then reached a wide-open space in the very center of downtown.

The office towers and government buildings came to a halt and gave way to a modernist Stonehenge on 4.7 acres, the size of three football fields, where once there had been the death strip to catch defectors in the Cold War. Two thousand seven hundred eleven concrete rectangles, as if a field of chiseled coffins of varying heights, stand in formation, separated by just enough space for people to walk between them and to contemplate their meaning. The stones undulate and dip toward the center, where the ground hollows out, so that when a visitor reaches the interior, the traffic noise dies away, the air grows still, and you are trapped in shadow, isolated with the magnitude of what the stones represent. This is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe who perished during the Holocaust. There is no sign, no gate, no fence, no list of the 6 million. The stones are as regimented as the Nazis and as anonymous as the captives shorn of identity in the concentration camps. Since 2005, the memorial has borne mute witness to anyone who wishes to come, day or night.

The designer of the memorial, Peter Eisenman, a New York architect, chose not to explain the meaning of the number 2,711, or very much else about the installation. “
I wanted people to have a feeling of being in the present and an experience that they had never had before,” Eisenman told
Der Spiegel
the year it opened. “And one that was different and slightly unsettling.”

The company that once produced cyanide gas for the concentration camps now provides the protectorate applied to the concrete stones to prevent graffiti and defacement, which might be seen as either an act of atonement from the perspective of some or the very least they could do from the perspective of others. The installation is the most imposing of a series of memorials to the people killed under Hitler’s reign. “We have a memorial to everyone victimized by the Nazis,” Dunkley said. “There is a memorial to homosexuals who perished. There is a memorial to the Sinti and Roma right outside the Reichstag. We have lesser memorials to lesser groups. And then we have the stumbling stones.”

These are the micro-memorials of discreet brass squares the size of one’s palm inscribed with the names of Holocaust victims and placed throughout the city. More than seventy thousand of these stumbling stones, known as
Stolpersteine,
have been forged and installed in cities across Europe. They are embedded among the cobblestones in front of houses and apartment buildings where the victims whose names are inscribed on them are known to have last lived before being abducted by the Gestapo. “Here lived Hildegard Blumenthal, born 1897, deported 1943, died in Auschwitz,” reads a stumbling stone clustered among others outside an apartment building in western Berlin. Nearby are the stones for Rosa Gross and Arthur Benjamin, who were deported in 1942 and who perished in Riga.

The stumbling stones force the viewer to pause and squint to read the inscription, force the viewer to regard the entry doors the people walked through, the steps they climbed with their groceries and toddlers, the streets they strolled that were the everyday life of real people rather than abstractions of incomprehensible millions. Each one is a personal headstone that gives a momentary connection to a single individual. Leaning over to read the names on the stumbling stones forces you to bow in respect.

Nigel Dunkley made a slow turn near the site of the Reich Chancellery in the Mitte of Berlin and pulled his old Volvo up to a parking lot off Wilhelmstrasse. It was an asphalt square at the base of some concrete office and apartment buildings, and it had a low guardrail around it, like parking lots everywhere.

“You see that blue Volkswagen parked next to the white minivan?” he asked me.

From the car window, I looked past a recycling bin on the sidewalk and then over to the asphalt lot, the white lines separating each car, and saw the Volkswagen he was pointing to. It was parked in front of the low, straggled branches of untended barberry bushes.

“Right there, underneath that Volkswagen, was Hitler’s bunker,” Nigel said. The hideout had been built thirty feet underground and protected by two meters of reinforced concrete, in the event that Hitler should ever need a secure location.
This is where Hitler spent the last weeks and hours of his life, hiding out from enemy shelling as the Allies closed in on them, where he heard that Mussolini had been executed and his Wehrmacht overcome on every front, where he married Eva Braun at the last minute as his closest confidants turned on him, where he shot himself in the head after biting into a cyanide pill, and where his hours-long wife had bitten into a cyanide pill just before him, on April 30, 1945. His body was unceremoniously dragged to a nearby lot and set afire.

In America, the men who mounted a bloody war against the United States to keep the right to enslave humans for generations went on to live out their retirement in comfort. Confederate president Jefferson Davis went on to write his memoirs at a plantation in Mississippi that is now the site of his presidential library. Robert E. Lee became an esteemed college president. When they died, they were both granted state funerals with military honors and were revered with statues and monuments.

An American author living in Berlin, who happens to be Jewish and to have been raised in the South, often gets asked about Germany’s memorials to its Nazi past. “
To which I respond: There aren’t any,” Susan Neiman, author of
Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil,
has written. “Germany has no monuments that celebrate the Nazi armed forces, however many grandfathers fought or fell for them.”

Rather than honor supremacists with statues on pedestals, Germany, after decades of silence and soul-searching, chose to erect memorials to the victims of its aggressions and to the courageous people who resisted the men who inflicted atrocities on human beings.

They built a range of museums to preserve the story of the country’s descent into madness. They converted the infamous villa at Wannsee, where fifteen men worked out the details of the Final Solution to kill the Jews of Europe, into a museum examining the consequences of that fateful decision. The country converted the Gestapo headquarters into a museum called the Topography of Terror, a deep dive into the founding of the Third Reich. As for the man who oversaw these atrocities,
Germany chose quite literally to pave over the
Führer
’s gravesite. There could be no more pedestrian resolution than that.

In Germany, displaying the swastika is a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. In the United States,
the rebel flag is incorporated into the official state flag of Mississippi. It can be seen on the backs of pickup trucks north and south, fluttering along highways in Georgia and the other former Confederate states. A Confederate flag the size of a bedsheet flapped in the wind off an interstate in Virginia around the time of the Charlottesville rally.

In Germany, there is no death penalty. “We can’t be trusted to kill people after what happened in World War II,” a German woman once told me. In America, the states that recorded the highest number of lynchings, among them the former Confederate States of America,
all currently have the death penalty.

In Germany, few people will proudly admit to having been related to Nazis or will openly defend the Nazi cause. “
Not even members of Germany’s right-wing Alternative for Germany party,” wrote Neiman, “would suggest glorifying that part of the past.”

The Germans who may “
privately mourn for family members lost at the front,” Neiman wrote, “know that their loved ones cannot be publically [
sic
] honored without honoring the cause for which they died.”

In America, at Civil War reenactments throughout the country, more people typically sign up to fight on the side of the Confederates than for the Union, leaving the Union side sometimes struggling to find enough modern-day conscripts to stage a reenactment.

In Germany, some of the Nazis who did not kill themselves were tracked down and forced to stand trial. Many were hanged at the hands of the Allies for their crimes against humanity. The people who kidnapped and held hostage millions of people during slavery, condemning them to slow death, were not called to account and did not stand trial.

In Germany, restitution has rightly been paid, and continues to be paid, to survivors of the Holocaust. In America, it was the slaveholders who got restitution, not the people whose lives and wages were stolen from them for twelve generations. Those who instilled terror on the lowest caste over the following century after the formal end of slavery, those who tortured and killed humans before thousands of onlookers or who aided and abetted those lynchings or who looked the other way, well into the twentieth century, not only went free but rose to become leading figures—southern governors, senators, sheriffs, businessmen, mayors.