World War II Fading Into History. . .

As I get older, my perception of time changes. Interestingly, things that once seemed “contemporaneous” and “permanent” slowly begin to fade into the past and lose their reality. I’ve noticed this particularly with regard to World War II lately, which no longer seems very real. On the one hand, this is probably a good thing, as it lets us abandon ancient grudges and move on fresh into the future. But on the other hand, this represents a dangerous loss of wisdom.

Although I was born well after WWII (1970 actually), WWII was very real for me. Not only did I visit Germany growing up -- where the war was still being played out in many ways, e.g. I vividly recall riding a bike on an abandoned highway that was cut in half by a border fence -- but the remnants of WWII seemed to be everywhere in America as well. Many of the people I ran into were veterans of the war, and people still talked about it a good deal in casual conversation. References to it came up all the time in politics and in the news. It even permeated our culture. For example, the networks regularly showed WWII films on Saturday afternoons, and prime time often touched upon it, see for example The Winds of War. Plus, whenever they wanted to give a character an interesting past, they just hinted at what the character “had done during the war,” which always meant WWII.

But this seems to be vanishing. I can’t think of the last time WWII was mentioned on the news, and WWII war movies are shown less often. Magnum P.I. was the first television character I recall who served in Vietnam rather than WWII, and he stood out for this. Today, I can’t think of any television or film character who served in WWII. Instead, these characters call themselves “Iraq War Veterans,” or they make up a string of wars -- “Bosnia, Desert Storm, Iraq.” Even the old, old, old guys only trace their histories back to Vietnam now. WWII as a movie setting also has largely fallen out of favor.

I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, it is great that our species is capable of putting its past behind itself and moving forward. This should, except in rare circumstances, allow us to forget and to forgive and to move on without carrying around ancient grudges -- though some groups, e.g. the Balkans, simply refuse to give up these grudges and they pay a heavy price in continuous violence for it. This ability to move on is what helps us look forward to a better future rather than dwelling on the past.

But at the same time, as history becomes less real, i.e. personal, to us, we are losing a great deal of hard-won wisdom. In the 1990s, I visited Germany and, for the first time, found the Germans willing to talk about the war. My grandfather died when I was young, so he never spoke to me about it -- he had been drafted out of medical school and sent to Russia. My grandmother never wanted to talk about it until near the end of her life. But when she did finally talk, the stories were unforgettable. These were the kinds of stories you just don’t hear in America, because nothing like this has ever happened here. She spoke of friends who disappeared during bombing raids, never to be seen again -- not even a corpse was found. She spoke of the random event (an unexpected patient) that kept her working later than expected one night, causing her to miss a meeting which would have resulted in her dying the night the Allies destroyed Dresden. She spoke of the Russian soldier who, for reasons unknown, did not shoot her even though he found my grandfather’s uniform when he searched her apartment -- this normally led to summary execution. I met an old German farmer who drove a tank across Russia and told stories that were truly horrific. And there were others. But all of these people are gone now, and with their passing goes their perspective.

We can remember history through documentaries, but those are sterile and impersonal. They don’t convey the horror and the randomness of war like these stories do. Indeed, unlike a documentary, which is abstract to us, these stories personalize what happened, and they help give us pause whenever we start thinking too casually about blowing each other up. And when these stories are gone, all that we have left are facts, figures and a few photos that will never make these events as real to us as hearing about them first hand.

Moreover, these same people provide a perspective on when war is absolutely necessary that is utterly lacking in the modern debate. People who lived through WWII knew what was at stake, the life and the death of it, and they saw the consequences of letting someone like a Hitler or a Stalin come to power. To them, these were not abstract issues. Today’s generation, however, has lost touch with the wisdom that was earned at such a high price during WWII. They now think nothing of flirting with dictators and with the economic/social models that brought about hundreds of millions of deaths during the past century because they have no concept of what these types of evil men and evil ideas wrought. And if they have no grasp of the real differences between a Bush and a Hitler, then they are blind to the Hitlers in their midsts.

So while we should celebrate the human ability to move on and start fresh, it should also give us pause that we are losing so much hard-earned wisdom, and we should take great care not only to remember the big facts and the abstract concepts, but also the personal experiences.