Heavy History

A holiday display at the Keulen train station of the city in ruins after World War II bombings. A manger scene was placed in the middle.

When we were asking fellow travelers about what to see in Keulen, they would mention the Cathedral, the view of the river, the Christmas markets, the shopping district. And somewhere along the way, through the course of the conversation, they would casually mention the ambiance of the city as a whole: Well, you know, because practically the entire city was destroyed during the Second World War, all the buildings are new. I mean, it's a great place to live, but if you want old Europe charm, you won't find it there. Old Europe charm you might not find, but it's amazing to me how quickly such a city brought itself back after being reduced to rubble. That in itself, really, is something to see.

History, as in a series of events that happened before the lifetime of you and everyone you know, as in lectures about dead people that school children are forced to listen to with their eyes half-closed, is certainly experienced differently across the world, and I think the time of the Second World War, and the decades leading up to it, are gradually becoming real history in the U.S.

My Great Uncle was an American soldier. He died about seven or eight years ago. I knew him only as a distant relative, someone I saw every few years growing up. He spent his entire life totally silent on his time at war until the very last year of his life, when he suddenly started pulling out boxes and dumping the contents on the living room floor - German helmets, swastika arm bands, photographs depicting things so horrific that even holding the small gray images seemed like an act with the weight of lives behind it. As a teenager, I didn't know these things were apart of our family at all. It is stunning to me beyond words that this simple mid-western family man carried this with him silently for so long, and that he still recalled even the objects of this life chapter with such heavy distinctness that he would come back to them, like a frantic last confession, before he passed away.

But I tell this not to pull at your heart strings, only to relay the potency of seeing past events not as history, but as something urgent and real and affecting. I am among the last of the generations that will know people who were apart of that time, and when I was a child, we often would lean over desks and compare family histories too eagerly - I know someone who had one grandfather that was an American soldier, and the other was a German soldier, and they were stationed at the same place!... I know someone who knows someone who was a survivor of the Holocaust!...We may have been flippant at the time, but we were at least interested in our own connections. If my children are educated in the U.S., I imagine with a touch of apprehension that their eyes will droop a bit more when the lessons of the Second World War begin. They will have fewer living stories to fuel a different reaction.

In Europe, though, I'm school children even of the next generation will feel that history more personally. Particularly, of course, in Germany, the relics of war are still evolving (we visited a Gestapo house in Keulen, notes of the victims who were tortured there still etched on the walls), and the cities themselves, at least, are still testifying to thick and heavy memories (the newness of most of the city contrasted to the Cathedral, which began construction in the 13th Century, resonated with me). Perhaps some Germans are ready to move on, and I'm sure the daily lives of those who live in Keulen aren't affected at all. But as an outsider, especially coming from elsewhere in Europe, I still see a potent history etched in Germany's landscapes. Even in cities and economies that are thriving. And that is, I would think, both a burden and a blessing.