Germany faced its horrible past. Can we do the same?

There's a lot to admire about Germany's reckoning, especially the Stolpersteine, but the American history is so different that it's a lot harder to apply.

Germans are able to view National Socialism as a horrific 12-year aberration. But in America, slavery was long-term and pervasive. Its presence infects all of our founding myths. Germans can easily denounce and discard Hitler, but it's much harder for us to do that with the likes of Jefferson and Washington.

So much of our American identity is tied up in the founding fathers. Is it possible to celebrate their heroics while denouncing the atrocities they took part in? Washington is the model republican leader, the "American Cincinnatus", and "father of his country". He was courageous, impartial, prudent, and dedicated to the American project. Americans want to see those attributes in themselves and their leaders. Yet he was also a slaveholder and there's no excuse to be made for that.

Jefferson was even worse. Not only did he own slaves, but raped them. He's also the writer of the unofficial American motto and inspiration of many other human rights declaration "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Lincoln later used those words in his denunciations of slavery.

These men don't deserve to be worshiped - frankly no president does - and we do need to have a reckoning with their atrocities rather than brushing them under the rug, but we should not discard their principles which are core to our nation.

America is fairly unique, being a nation of immigrants. "Americanness" doesn't (or shouldn't) represent any ethnicity or religious group, but rather belief in American values like individuality, industriousness, equality, forward-looking and so on. And also the carrying of the original sins of slavery and genocide that the nation was built on top of.