Learning From the Germans by Susan Neiman (Allen Lane, £20)

What is the point of memorials and museums? To celebrate the heroes of the national past? To mourn “those who died that we might live”? Should each generation rethink the memorials erected in the past, replacing those it disapproves of with those of people and events newly admired?

What about a nation’s “dark past”? should this be memorialised by statues and museums — or obliterated from history? Such issues lie at the heart of Susan Neiman’s new book.

A Jewish American brought up in Atlanta, Neiman is a philosopher and writer, has held posts at Yale and Tel Aviv universities and has long been settled in Berlin where she is Director of the Einstein Forum. By and large, she argues, Germany came honourably to terms with its appallingly dark past within a few decades of the end of Nazism while, by contrast, many in the “Old South”, in which Neiman was raised, still try to retain the self-righteousness and crude racism of earlier times by perpetuating the flag and other symbols of the antebellum Confederacy. America, Neiman feels, can and should learn from the Germans.

It is a thesis she examines at length, visiting countless sites across both countries, interviewing local experts and raising controversial questions as she goes. Is it true, and if so, why, that East Germany was earlier and more successful in confronting and memorialising its Nazi past than was West Germany? How far can one compare slavery and segregation in the American South with the industrial-scale mass murder of the Holocaust? Is history necessarily the story of the victors? Maybe the brutalities of the northern armies during the Civil War, or the Allies in the Second World War (the burning of Atlanta, the bombing of Dresden) could be considered war crimes.

One of the sites Neiman visits is that of the Dachau concentration camp just outside Munich. I remember going there in 1979 for a BBC series about what the War meant to those born after, and encountering a group of army recruits present for an educational session. One young lad, abhorring Nazism, asked whether it wouldn’t be better for places like Dachau to be demolished, with perhaps just an inconspicuous plaque to mark what once went on there. No, argued another; the world must know what was done here or we’d be guilty of obliterating the truth about the past. “So if there had been a statue of Hitler in Munich,” responded a third, “would it have been wrong to remove it?”

Today, the debate continues, as denizens of the American South argue fiercely about whether to retain or remove long-extant statues of such Confederate heroes as Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. As Neiman suggests, what we call “history”, once a matter of pride (or consolation), can all too often nowadays embody an element of shame – or of warning.

Daniel Snowman is author of ‘The Hitler Emigrés: The Cultural Impact on Britain of Refugees from Nazism’, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research (University of London).