The Presence of the Past : History: Old sins aren’t dead and gone; they haunt us still, from Germany’s Nazi years to American slavery.

Ten years ago, a Romanian friend, noting the German roots of my family name, took me to task for the fact that we Shrivers had ceased to speak German a century ago; it was a betrayal of my culture, he claimed. I had difficulty explaining to him how anti-German most of my family’s experience had been. My wife’s grandfather came here in flight from the Kaiser’s draft in 1870. My uncle was wounded in the Argonne. My high school chums suffered death and imprisonment in the European battles of 1944. And the first live German-speaking people I ever laid eyes on were prisoners of war at Ft. Meade, Md., in 1946.

In 1990, as the German people pull themselves together, officially confessing the sins of their Nazi past, I am a bit shocked at the power of these memories in myself. Who am I to dread German reunification? It seems somehow unprogressive, unreasonable, old-fashioned of me. Times change; new generations are born; the past is not always repeatable. I know that. But deep inside me, I, too, fear the Germans, even as they embrace democracy and repentance.

It’s just your age, I tell myself. Any American, Jew or Russian over 60 is too caught up in his or her youthful history to feel any other way. This past is fading. The future belongs to people not dragged back by memories.

There is something very American in this little self-lecture, I suspect. Europeans frequently accuse us Americans of being shallow in historical awareness and too easily seduced by our pragmatism into expecting “bygones to be bygones.” But they do not speak about all Americans when they say that.

Am I not one of those Southern-born New York residents who, every time he passes the (recently re-gilded) Central Park equestrian statue of William Te-cumseh Sherman, says to himself, “Yes, ‘war is hell,’ and you were one of its devils”?

I have Yankee friends who consider this very quaint of me. And a certain rational, progressive side of my mind agrees with them. Drawing on that side, I asked an Atlanta church audience, in the early 1970s, “Isn’t it about time that we forgave General Sherman for his sins against Atlanta?” “No!” they responded vociferously, somewhat in good humor, somewhat in dead seriousness. Contrary to what my Yankee friends think, the Civil War is not completely over.

But reflection on Germany switches this train of thought onto another track of my 1990 awareness. Unscathed as I am by some of the more hideous scars of war and other historical suffering, I am neighbor to many Americans who cannot remember their own past without very sharp stabs of pain. A reading of Toni Morrison’s 1988 novel, “Beloved,” is enough to jog any white American’s consciousness radically on this point. Here is slavery as it can now be remembered by a black American novelist, remembered with vividness and pain such as no white American could possibly remember it.

The truth about slavery is probably only just beginning to get into books. “Slavery in America,” said a distinguished black scholar a few years ago, “is a pit into which most Americans have never dared to look.” The television version of Alex Haley’s “Roots” helped some. But it was tame alongside “Beloved.” One of these days, perhaps, we will all know better how the vestiges of slavery in 1990 America bring tears of renewed rage to the eyes of some of our black neighbors, however forgiving they want to be.

And, if the sufferings of ancestors stirs so deeply in the memory of this one segment of modern Americans, what about the other segments--Latinos in the Southwest, Japanese and Chinese on the Pacific Coast, American Indians everywhere? And, if unassimilated memory haunts many an American, how equally haunted are those peoples of the world who have some bone of hostility toward us rattling in the closets of our common history? Modern Germans have a few such bones to pick with Americans. Above all, I would guess, they tire of American self-congratulation for all the good we have done in the world since 1917.

During the surrender ceremonies that ended our Civil War, Grant introduced Lee to his military secretary, Ely Parker, a Seneca Indian. Lee said cordially, “I am glad to see one real American here.” Parker’s reply summarized what the war had been about: “We are all Americans.”

In 1990, I live in a time when many of us yearn to say, “We are all humans.” But it is a mere pious hope, if we utter it while forgetting the resentments we all drag with us from our histories. Our way into the future lies through the past, not around it. For, as William Faulkner said, “The past is not dead and gone; it isn’t even past.” It is going to be with us for a long time to come.