How do we prevent history from becoming just a story after those who experienced it are gone?

“My Tour Through Europe (1944–1945)”

Last winter, I digitalized a list for my grandfather. The original, typed on weathered paper in a classic American typewriter face, was of each city he traveled through en route from Normandy to Munich. I carefully structured the columns, copied the odd indents of mechanical typewriters, and used Xs over the same misspelling he did. I did not do this flippantly, there was true weight behind his request to preserve a document that kept record of the most difficult year of a single man’s life. And yet it was still just a single year in a single life, a short word in a sentence of the paragraph that describes an unconscionable chapter in human history.

My grandfather was a jeep driver in the European theater of World War II. He and his brother are just two of the many tales, told and remembered, of that hell. The age of extremism: of fascism and communism; of genocide and famine; of rape and brutalization of those whose stories have yet to be told. When we say never again, we do not just speak for the Jews who lost their lives in the concentration camps or of the Japanese civilians at Hiroshima; we speak for all those that suffered under the weight of oppression and death and war. Never again became a family heirloom of the collective world. One passed down from parent to child. More important than any gold, any treasure, any fortune, was the promise that never again would the world face such a clash of extremes.

It’s said that wealth lasts three generations. The first, the makers, toil their way to fortune; the second, the takers, watch the first with respect and learn their lessons; the third, the squanderers, throw away their fortune because, alas, they never knew their grandparents. I’ve been blessed to have spent life into my early twenties with my grandfather. I’ve seen the direct impact of living through such times in his eyes as he quickly shifts the conversation to post-war life in Munich instead of dwelling on war. As far removed as I am from the shrapnel shells, I can still feel their impact on my values. I don’t need to question his experiences to understand why we cannot return there.

But there’s an even more important question. Is the current canon of history set to handle the transition from direct communication of experiences by those who lived them to an era without those individuals? It is one thing to read a book from the highest levels of analysis and another to talk to a human that went through those experiences. One that the impressive dissemination of media aided in the post-War years were those individual experiences to shine through but will it be enough for the following generations?

Time flies, so they say. I stopped scrolling on my Facebook feed a few weeks ago on a notice of the 75th anniversary of the death Sophie Scholl; the German university student who sought to stand up to Hitler’s regime. She was 21 when they beheaded her in Stadelheim Prison. It moved me because I knew my grandfather too, around the same age, was seeking to bring down Hitler’s regime. I felt scared trying to imagine myself of in that position, of either one, and hoping I would fight for freedom and liberalism, even if just in retrospect.

Another anecdote: I sat in a class describing the beheadings of Frenchmen during the Revolution. I felt nothing. They were just stories.

I worry for the generation that never knew their grandparents. I worry as politics moves into a realm disconnected from the human condition of World War II. It’s so often believed that knowledge of history prevents repetition of the past but I think it’s more than that. After all, Hitler knew all too well the exploits of Napoleon in Russia; he just thought he could do it better. Especially in the digital era, we feel that if we can amass enough information we can reach a culminating point of history, a progressive utopia where we know exactly what to do and what not to do.

There simply will not be, and cannot be, a culmination of history. Far removed from economics courses with perfectly rational actors, individuals are as flawed as they are beautiful. The world is a mosaic of cultures with no one piece or section able to sustain the vast wealth of information and knowledge for such a dream to occur. The technological revolution was supposed to streamline the process, allow the individual that information, but instead it has done the opposite. The average person doesn’t use history to learn lessons; she uses it to validate preconceptions. Where people were meant to find knowledge, they have overwhelmingly picked confirmation bias.

This betrays an essential truth of Western societies: we have become spoiled on the idea of progressive growth. The idea of a liberal society as the ultimate plateau of humanity was generally the propelling idea through the Cold War and people felt comfortable declaring its victory when the Soviet Union fell. Western Liberal societies, and those who support it as an exemplar to all, became complacent. Economies would always grow. Illiberal values and supporters would die off. Given enough time, the direction of human history would point in the direction of progressive values: freedom for all, liberal democracies in each nation, and acceptance. In short, historical progress was set.

But historical progress does not exist. There is no utopia, no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., the arc of moral universe is long but it only bends towards justice under the weight of the hammer blows seeking to temper it. These are fights, fought by the best the world has had to offer and whose wealth we’ve drunk from the last 70 years. To many, though, this history has begun to become just that, history, the stylized mythos that defines states and peoples. The view of an ever present, dramatic progression towards a better world is, ironically, the same deterministic argument liberals claimed to have defeated with the fall of the USSR and the rejection of Marxist historical analysis.

The progress that has been made towards equality and liberal values is inherently tied to the experiences of those who experienced the calamities of the 20th century. As time progresses, however, the casual dissociation of the people from history allows these events to become nothing more than stories of old that impact the average person little today.

This has a twofold effect. First, people are increasingly likely to turn their backs on systems like representative democracy and liberalism. In a poll released by The New York Times, only 30% of Millennial respondents believed that it is essential to live in a democracy compared to 75% of Americans born in the ‘30s.[1] Secondly, the emphasis has seemingly shifted from the human suffering towards the heroism and accolades of war, especially that of World War II. While there’s no definitive link between video games and movies with increases in violence, it does reframe the context of war and violence. Instead of a last case scenario, war is a place where the young men (and women) of the great generations find glory. It’s not a hard leap to make that a generation raised in this fashion finds the preservation of peace through liberal democracy less important than the ones before it.

The rise of this more radical anti-liberal faction has gained a foothold in numerous countries where the very institutions that enable this peace are blamed for their individual struggles. Prior to 2016, this could be understood and found if one looked hard enough but for the average liberalism supporter, it was unimaginable. We stood blinded by the notion that progress always moved forward — never laterally or backwards.

So long as people believe the notion of historical progress divorced from specific sacrifice, anti-liberal forces will continue to erode the victories that have been enshrined as progress. It is not enough to simply learn the history and connect the dots in a specific way. The cost and struggle of the people who achieved those victories is what must be remembered in order to safeguard the rights and liberties they attained. Our approach to history and the canon of literature must reflect the truth of sacrifice, not simple overviews.

To quote the historian Lionel Trilling, “seen from a sufficient distance…the hacked limbs are not so very terrible, and eventually they begin to compose themselves into a ‘meaningful pattern.’”[2] Is the solution to force LiveLeak videos of the Syrian Civil War on our schoolchildren? I don’t think that’s realistic or wise from any standpoint, either. Videos of combat decontextualized provide an easy way of staring into the void from the comfort of our homes but it also doesn’t solve the problems posed above. They work to provoke pure emotional response devoid of analytical analysis. These videos no more allow for shared understanding and sympathy than overviews that ignore the individual altogether. Therefore, the solution must rest somewhere between the gratuity of combat footage and the completely neutered historical overviews we’re often exposed to.

There are key components of the canon today that should be more exposed and similarly replicated to better connect and teach future generations about this time period. Literary accounts of tragedy like John Hersey’s Hiroshima are able to convey the human condition of history and value of each of those lives, while still maintaining necessary context. Examples of good documentary pieces would be Restrepo, about the time spent by soldiers in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan, and the follow Korengal which digs deeper into the long-term effects of that combat. While not about the themes of the value and victory of liberalism in the long-term over Nazism and Communism, it’s this model that should be exemplified in visual media. The goal is to reach a point in which media can act as a substitute for direct contact with the people who lived through those time periods. As we lose that generation, all that will be left are words and they need to be able to carry the burden. Just as I will hold onto this small one-page of city names, a simple look at a life I cannot fully comprehend, so too must our historical canon reflect that to others; the human cost of it all.

[1] Amanda Taub, “How Stable Are Democracies? ‘Warning Signs Are Flashing Red’,” The New York Times, November 29, 2016. Accessed April 01, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/world/americas/western-liberal-democracy.html?_r=0.

[2] Lionel Trilling, “Tacitus Now,” in The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York, 1950: Viking Press).