A compulsion to find meaning in chaos has produced many Theories of Trumpism. Initially shocked by such an erratic candidate and a startlingly racist campaign immediately following the United States’ first black president, some observers have, with hindsight, deemed the anomaly not only explainable, but even predictable. Backlash to Obama, to urbanization, to globalization were all bound to happen, some say.

LEARNING FROM THE GERMANS: RACE AND THE MEMORY OF EVIL by Susan Neiman Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 434 pp, $30.00

Other narratives take a longer view. And one in particular has gained favor in the past few years: Whatever Trump the person himself signifies, Trumpism as a phenomenon—interpreted as an expression of largely white male resentment—is the second coming of America’s original sin. The United States, built on slavery and genocide while preaching egalitarianism, has never fully addressed its racist past. Now, like a deranged poltergeist, that past is bringing up its unfinished business.

American philosopher Susan Neiman is one proponent of this narrative. She sees the murder of nine black Charleston churchgoers in 2015, and the events of the following years, as prime examples of conservative backlash in white communities: “The 2016 election resulted, in large part,” Neiman writes, “from America’s failure to confront its own history.” Her book, Learning From the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, offers a possible answer to one of the questions The New York Times’ 1619 Project, published in the same month and focusing on slavery’s centrality to the American nation, has prompted: What now? It is a book about how Americans could better confront their racist past, by looking at the way Germany has come to terms with Holocaust guilt.

In the decades following German defeat in World War II, a significant number of Germans originally saw the Nuremberg Trials as victor’s justice. Only in the 1960s, when the postwar generation came of age and began to confront their parents’ pasts, combining debates over free love and anti-imperialism with questions of their elders’ complicity, did many start to undertake a broader reckoning. The crucial moment, Neiman argues (as do many others), finally came with a controversial exhibition beginning in 1995, 50 years after the war’s close, on the crimes of the German army—previously assumed to have been apolitical conscripts uninvolved in the SS’s crimes, but whose soldiers in fact were demonstrably involved in atrocities, including exterminations of entire villages on the Eastern front.

“No one in Germany denies there’s more work to be done,” Neiman acknowledges. But she herself now finds Germany a remarkably congenial place to live as a Jewish woman, contrary to her experience living there in the 1980s. And there are lessons, implicitly, for the United States.