Ellen

“You can’t accuse the Germans, or at least Berliners, or at least intellectuals in Berlin, or at least the intellectuals at the Freie Universität that I came to know—you see? I learned from them to qualify my statements down to the point of the granite and the unassailable—of trying to pretend the Nazis never happened. They even guard against the idea of getting angry at having to be so thoughtful and conscience-stricken all the time. There’s a kind of unwavering discipline about their watchfulness about conscience fatigue. Consciousness fatigue. Conscientiousness—no; they wouldn’t say conscientiousness; that suggests something of ‘good manners.’ They’re almost brutal to themselves in their unwillingness to feel good about the fact that they remember to feel bad about the evils committed in the past, before they were born. They admit their lack of discipline and prosecute it even when it’s not there. We could learn a thing or two from them about how to address the legacy of slavery, or the treatment of Native Americans, or the Japanese internment camps, or Jim Crow, or the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, or any number of atrocious episodes that leave a stain on the soul of America.”
― Matthew Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves