Charlottesville, Virginia, has finally received the green light to remove our spurned Confederate statues. After enduring years of legal delay and violent white supremacist attacks, on April 1 the Supreme Court of Virginia decided in favor of the city’s effort to rid its downtown parks of Jim Crow–era propaganda art. It is a fitting time for this ruling: April is Confederate History Month in many Southern states, although increasingly progressive Virginia ended the observance some years ago.
Early April also marks the anniversaries of two pivotal wartime events that spelled the end of inhumane practices: the Union Army’s 1865 victory at Appomattox, Virginia, which catalyzed the end of the U.S. Civil War and the abolition of the institution of chattel slavery; and American forces’ 1945 liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, which revealed the evils of the Holocaust. After both wars, these societies faced a crucial question: How was the brutality of the past to be remembered? The descendants of defeated Confederates and those of defeated Nazis took very different approaches to that question, corresponding with their obstinacy or contrition about the war. These postwar nations’ varying levels of empathy for and democratic inclusion of persecuted groups—African Americans, Jews—who had had the most at stake in the outcome of these respective wars are reflected in the dissimilarity between American and German commemorative practices. In this country, we can learn from the path taken by Germany.