She Calls It Evil: Susan Neiman on Germany, Capitalism & the Banality of Trump

Andrew Keen (0:00)

Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.

Hello, everybody. It is Monday, the 14th of September, 2026 Couple of weeks ago, we had the Berkeley and Berlin-based writer Wendy Lesser on the show, talking about what Berlin teaches us about resisting tyranny. She has a new book out, Berlin Before and After, A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times. Of course, she had one eye on Donald Trump and seemed to have a particular perspective, maybe a wisdom of looking at Trump from Germany.

My guest today is also looking at Donald Trump in America from Germany. Susan Neiman is a very distinguished political philosopher and writer. In fact, she even has a book out from several years ago called Learning From the Germans, Race and the Memory of Evil. She has a new book out, it's coming out tomorrow. It's called Call It Evil, Understanding the Trump Era. She's actually spending this year in New York City as a fellow at New York University. She's joining us from her empty office. There are going to be many books, Susan, I'm sure on those shelves behind you in the next few weeks. Coming back, I know you haven't read the Lassa book, but you know about her work. Do you think it-

Susan Neiman (1:50)

Sure.

Andrew Keen (1:50)

In your experience in terms of this new book in particular, not the German book, Call It Evil, Understanding the Trump Era. Do you think it helps to look at America and Trump from Germany? You've lived or you had lived it for many years in Berlin.

Susan Neiman (2:11)

I do think it helps. Although when you flash that on the screen, I started thinking, my God, people will think I read about nothing but evil. I make a point of writing about lots of other things. So those are two of 10 books. But yes, to answer your question, first of all, I think it is always good to look at American politics from outside of America. It's enormously important to get some perspective and some distance on it, and also to see what kinds of assumptions other people take for granted that are very different from American assumptions. We can talk about some of those later. I talk about them in the book.

Berlin, I think, makes it extremely hard not to think about evil.

The history is all over the place. It's in your face or at your feet in the form of these stumbling stones, which mark places where people who were deported and murdered used to live. So it's very much a part of daily life in Berlin, and it lends itself to reflection in a way that I think Americans and not only Americans, people from other countries have a habit of sweeping certain things under the carpet. But I should say here publicly that that book Learning from the Germans, which I wrote in 2019, I published in 2019 and was translated into a number of languages and very well taken up in the States. I have partly repudiated it in a couple of essays in the New York Review, should anyone be interested in looking at my website. Because I used to think that Berlin had done or Germany had done a much better job than it now appears that they have.

Andrew Keen (4:05)

Well, we'll come back to that later. So maybe you're not in the lesser camp when Berlin can be a cautionary mirror for our times. You noted earlier that you're not only associated with the E word evil, but perhaps your best known book. You don't need me to tell you this. Susan is Evil in Modern Thought. So you spent a great deal of time thinking about evil in the new book, which I very much enjoyed.

You write, evil is the most explosive word we have.

I think that's why it's such an important word.

I know it's a hard word to define. Everyone asks you to define it. But can you help us? What does evil mean? What does that word tell us?

Susan Neiman (4:55)

Let me first tell you what it isn't. It's not a theological concept. That's the first response that I always get, that it's a theological or demonizing concept.

One of the places to understand that it's not a theological concept at all is the Bible itself. That is, moral concepts are prior to theological concepts. Religion is one way of dealing with the evil we experience. Even as children in a small portion, I don't think definitions are particularly helpful in philosophy in any interesting concept at all. You either read a book about something, whether it's justice or beauty or evil, or you stay away from definitions.