The author said that she incorporated about 50% of the interviews in the book. In addition to interviewing people in Germany, as part of this task she traveled to the United States and conducted interviews there too she visited Mississippi in that process. She spent at least three years conducting research for the book that involved reading works about the post-Nazi Germany period, which describe how Germans initially did not feel guilt about the events. The idea came to the book when she noticed American society still celebrating the Confederate States of America even though President of the United States Barack Obama had publicly condemned racism while honoring the victims of the Charleston Church Shooting, which had just happened. She became a moral philosopher, and in Berlin she became the head of the Einstein Forum. Neiman resided in Berlin, Germany beginning in 1989 to study the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and resided there for a period of at least 22 years.
Neiman's mother, who originated from Chicago, had worked to ensure racial integration at Atlanta Public Schools during the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century. Neiman, a Jewish woman, who was born in the Southern United States, had lived there for a portion of her youth. She believes the United States would benefit from its own corresponding Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Neiman in particular believes that many Americans lack an understanding of the United States Civil War as well as the Jim Crow period, contributing to issues in American society present in 2019. Neiman stated that each country has its particular history but that studying the incidents in Germany shows that society can atone for past crimes and improve even though doing so is a difficult process.
The author argues that German society has largely accepted responsibility for and learned from actions done by the country in the past, particularly in World War II, while the United States had not done the same, particularly for Jim Crow violations. Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil is a 2019 non-fiction book by Susan Neiman, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States and by Allen Lane in the United Kingdom.
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