Nehaveigur

To the degree it is possible for any one born in the 1980s, I have a sense for what occurred in Germany in the run-up to World War II. In high school in Austria, several years of history classes were about the rise and rule of the Nazis. We read dozens of books written during that period. I remember Ödön von Horváth in particular. Holocaust survivors visited our school and told us what it was like. One school trip was to a concentration camp that had been preserved as the Soviets had found it in 1945.We saw the dark barracks with the bunk beds the prisoners, the oven where their bodies were burnt and the quarry where they were forced to work. There was a table where they tore out their gold teeth to sell to fund their war, with straps to hold their bodies down and a groove around it for the blood.

Here is the punchline: All of this doesn’t permit me any insights into what is going on in America right now. What’s happening is too different. It’s not good, and there are some superficial similarities, but that’s it. I don’t have more understanding of how this is going to end than anyone else. It’s not so much that history is a bad teacher, but that that the subject can’t be taught.