CONTEXT: Originally posted online, October 15, 2018: I composed this shortly before U.S. Congressional elections in 2018 to suggest the duty Americans have to follow our ideals, evoked exactly a century earlier, when a world numbed by grief and horror might have collapsed beyond restoring without the example we then offered.  I felt it urgent to point out how the centennial of America’s first having global influence was coinciding with elections that might – considering those who craved power in 2018 – have irretrievably impaired our Democracy.

[Image: Rapturous crowds in Paris’ Place de la Concorde greet U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in 1919 as a virtual Savior after the end of the First World War (in which France herself had suffered beyond reckoning). Wilson had come to help negotiate the Treaty of Versailles, formally ending the war with Germany and trying to build ‘a just and lasting peace.’]

‘That the world be made safe for Democracy’

By November 1918, after four years of unimaginable violence in The Great War (now known as World War I), much of Europe had been bled white, wrecked, bankrupted and entire societies were disintegrating. Exhausted and gripped by despair, Europeans looked to America – the vigorous, visionary “New World” that had joined the War on the side of the western Allies in mid-1917 – to save the Old World.

President Wilson had said his country’s mission in sending its young men to prevent the defeat of France and Britain by militarist Imperial Germany was that “the world be made safe for Democracy.” American arms were crucial to the Allies’ eventual triumph, forcing the Germans to cease fighting by the Armistice of November 11, 1918.

(An unapologetic racist whose concern for equality and personal liberty was only for Caucasians, Wilson is less revered in our era. But ideals are often more inspiring than coarse reality, and the ones he promoted might help pull us all beyond his backward, disappointing underlying attitudes: A fitting irony.)

It was arguably the first time America had ever commanded the global stage, having been summoned to rescue Europe from the calamity of miscalculations by its traditional rulers. And even more than U.S. military help, many dazed, desperate Europeans (from both sides of the war) hoped for an advent of American-style governance: That ordinary people might be able to lead themselves better than those ‘traditional rulers’ ever could, with wisdom, justice and decency.

So this November, 2018, Americans should proudly recall the optimism that our great experiment in freedom offered 100 years ago to a continent prostrate with catastrophe. And we can show again, in deeds, the same luminous promise our nation once represented for humanity by acting consistent with our hopes of what we might build together, rather than have our passions, resentments and fears exploited by those who would control us (from the shadows) for reasons of their own.

Please reflect on this precious mission – Democracy made safe, again, by Americans – if you vote this November, 2018. You may help to reinvigorate the ideals for which the world once looked so urgently to us.
(Reposted in July 2022, as a still-relevant reminder of the importance of civic engagement)

CONTEXT: This picture is from my 2016 visit to Vienna, Austria with my friend Paul. It shows a modest, but deliberately, stridently unique building, created in reaction against the stultifying aesthetics and society of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire.

An exhibition hall in proudly non-traditional architecture, this was opened in 1898, to display the work of non-conformist artists, who had “seceded” from the academic official art of the Empire, which they found banal and sterile. This building is emblematic of a remarkable irony: in the early 20th century, as Imperial Austria stagnated, resisting political change happening elsewhere, Vienna was the site of some staggering innovations. Freud, Schiele, Klimt, Schoenberg and Zweig all lived and worked there, creating whole new sciences or paths of creativity. I don’t know why such immense novelty burst forth then, but it was likely one of the things Hitler – an impoverished provincial youth then living in the city, ferociously sensitive to affronts to traditional German culture – most hated about the place.

Further, the adulation painters like Klimt got must have inspired very personal jealousy in Hitler, himself a failed artist (of very limited imagination). I am frankly surprised the Nazis didn’t destroy this structure when they ruled Vienna, as it represented a freethinking Intellectualism that they lethally despised, a violation of their ideal of abandoning the ‘Self’ to the will of a single heroic leader – Fuehrer.

My friends know that many of my online posts advocate for hope and optimism. But the 20th anniversary today, of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks inflicted on peaceable Americans, is a very heavy lift for such advocacy. The horror and malevolence were too concrete; monstrous, unwarranted ambushes in settings whose safety we should take for granted.

Events as ghastly as the ones remembered today are abhorrent to what we would believe is both people’s basic decent Nature, and our ability to evolve for the better. So much so, they may seem to call into question how different we really are from creatures with fangs and claws, obviously designed for killing. But I will suggest a way we may try to evoke light out of a dark calamity in which it is not, otherwise, to be found.

Of all the heartbreaking images that emerged in the unspeakable aftermath of the New York attacks, the one that struck me hardest was a photograph showing masses of portraits – smiling, relaxed, unsuspecting of their Fate – of people who had died at the World Trade Center just for going to work that Tuesday morning. They appeared to be all small (but uniform) posters on standard office paper. The victim’s name appeared below the image with a simple directive: ‘REMEMBER ME,’ printed above.

This was apparently an organized memorial. Hundreds of such posters were put up in Lower Manhattan, grim pleas to onlookers not to let these slaughtered innocents simply dissolve into forgetting, as they had vanished into the flames and dust of the attacks. I have not been able to find that specific picture, but the one shown here is very close, minus the ‘REMEMBER ME’ headings.

Much could be said about the moral, political and cultural implications of this act of consummate ferocity, but if there is one profoundly personal lesson we should all take from the infamy of September 11, it must be how precious, frail, transient and uncertain life is. How it can placidly glow like a rainbow of motes of dew, only to be swept away as abruptly as it had appeared. And to treat our own lives and those we love as the incomparable treasures they are.

Yet perhaps we may also ‘evoke light’ by helping those murdered so terribly to avoid a second passing away: By being utterly forgotten.

Most of the dead presumably led ordinary lives, and the world would likely never otherwise have heard of them. But if their lives were ordinary, their deaths were the very essence of tragedy. And that alone should entitle them to more than that all memory of them should just be swallowed by the gray maw of Time and disappear.

Thus, if we strive to think upon these dead strangers, even occasionally, we rise above the maniacal self-absorption of the terrorist bandits who stole their very existences. Paying such attention is a gift of our own Selves – our time and memory – which restores a vestige of ‘being’ to them instead of sheer, bereft absence.

Remembering the dead of September 11 is a relatively small task but it ensures that the annihilating intent of that nightmare on a sunny day in New York does not fully succeed. We may thwart their killers’ wish to destroy utterly by doing the duty of the righteous: To help build. And to sustain. So please:

Remember them.

CONTEXT: As a self-styled historian, for me, going to Berlin was the linchpin of my 2016 visit to Europe, due to the city’s (not entirely willing) role in Nazism. Fellow traveler Paul and I visited Charlottenburg Palace, seat of Prussian kings, just west of central Berlin. The palace had no connection to the Nazis, but I used this statue – similar in spirit to ones I’d seen elsewhere in Austria, another German-speaking land, and at a Hapsburg castle in Prague – to propose a rarely-noted factor in why a flower of evil like Hitler might have sprung – germinated? – in German soil.

This statue of King Fredrick William I of Prussia, in Charlottenburg Palace’s courtyard was, of all the monuments I saw in Austria or Germany, the one that seemed to most bluntly portray strength as the greatest (or only) virtue.  The captives below the king’s horse writhe in terror at his sway, but he does not even bother to look at such wretches; instead, he gazes off to infinity in search of something more worthy of his noble eyes.

When this statue was made, kings were seen as bulwarks against the inherent chaos of life. However, the fact that Germans, in particular, seemed to not only accept such arrogance and menace from their rulers, but to approve and admire them, may obliquely help explain the attraction of Hitler.

This attitude may be rooted in the fact that the deepest national trauma of the German people before World War II was the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648, the worst of which was fought in their territory (there was no single “Germany” then, just dozens of small German-speaking states).  That ghastly conflict was even more destructive than mechanized warfare; what troops then lacked in lethal technology, they made up in vigorous bloodlust. 

In addition to soldiers’ deaths, about a third of the civilian population of “the Germanies” is thought to have perished, killed outright, or died of starvation, epidemics, and other miseries that flourished in the general pandemonium.  Crops went unharvested or could not get to hungry markets via roads infested with bandits, commerce and crafts collapsed in the turmoil, etc.  Civilization in these lands broke down then about as much as it possibly could.

Much of this horror happened at the behest of powerful neighbors, especially France (already a united realm), which wanted Germans to stay divided and feeble. From then on, the terrible cost of weakness was embedded in their folk memory, leading to an ingrained assumption that to be strong was to be “good.” The lesson the nation seems to have absorbed at indescribably dreadful cost in the 17th century was that without power, nothing else mattered.  In fact, the King portrayed here was pivotal in giving Prussia a pervasive military disposition, partly in response to dire experience: helplessness had yielded horror.

In 1871, German lands that had so often been at the mercy of others, were finally united under a single Prussian-led regime, as the German Empire: The Second Reich (the First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire).  But when the still relatively new unified ‘Germany’ was defeated in the Great War (World War I), many Germans wouldn’t accept that their talented, progressive nation, a major driver of the Age of Reason and Industrial Revolution, a dream unfulfilled for centuries, was not invincible.

Such people were susceptible to sinister explanations – especially to ones hissing that if their mighty Fatherland had been defeated in battle, it could only be due to some treachery.  This suspicion was the mud onto which Hitler would cast seeds alleging a Jewish conspiracy – called ‘a stab in the back’ – to keep Germany from attaining some glorious destiny. (In this implausible telling, the pivotal intervention of the U.S. in the war in 1917 did not affect its outcome; only betrayal led to defeat.)

Added to that resentment was the factor that democracy, post 1918, was still relatively new to this society.  The Kaiser’s abdication had led to the country becoming a republic, but many Germans reacted that perhaps they were culturally better suited for their prior authoritarian rule than parliamentary self-government. Especially when democratic politics did not solve their grievous economic woes during the Great Depression.  And if they couldn’t have another Kaiser, they would have a Fuhrer – Leader – to dominate them.

All this may seem like a lot to extrapolate from one statue.  Of course there were other factors in the rise of Nazism: unjust provisions of the Versailles Treaty (which was negotiated by the spineless ‘Weimar’ republic) – valid grievances Hitler exploited ruthlessly.  But this statue, and monuments in the same vein throughout Germanic lands, suggest an undercurrent of power worship, which may well be at least part of why Nazism appeared, then broadly appealed, there. 

Any culture that would consider an image like this normal – even praiseworthy – probably needed less convincing than most that Might Makes Right.

CONTEXT: A post about my visit to Europe in 2016. ‘The Night Watch’ mentioned here is one of Rembrandt’s greatest paintings, referred to in depth in other online posts (which I may re-post here later) from my trip. I’d decided to return to the U.S. via Amsterdam explicitly to see it, at the city’s Rijksmuseum.

How very ordinary this renowned building looked, as if to emphasize Fate’s apparent indifference to the desperate fear, wrenching malice and now sorrow forever it has seen. I got here soon after viewing ‘The Night Watch’; a summit and an abyss of human endeavor – creativity and calculated cruelty – separated by a brief walk, yet from different worlds.

The relative nearness of this poignant shrine of barbarism to Rembrandt’s sublime intimations of what it is to be human called to mind the grinding of the tectonic plate of the Self’s will to power against that of its will to create, and to love. Never in Europe was I more aware of that primordial friction than as I stood before this door.

I would have liked to go inside, but hadn’t made the needed pre-reservation to do so. Instead, sentiments like those above flowed out of me here as silent, unbidden prayers.

CONTEXT: From my 2016 Europe trip. My only picture from Prague from a great many I took in an overnight stop there in 2016, I include as one of my Introductory blog posts, considering it a semi-sacred duty to put this one here, for reasons explained in the text.

This is a last picture from my visit to Prague, posted separately from all the others to call special attention to the long Jewish presence there. It is my small contribution to helping to thwart Hitler’s dream that not only all of the world’s Jews, but any memory of their very existence, should be obliterated.

Long before the Nazis definitively eradicated it, the venerable Jewish community there had a tempestuous and often violent history. The tale of the “Golem,” a mythical monster created to protect Jews from persecution, originated in Prague.

These tombstones had a calm dignity that made them very different from the only other graveyard I made a point to visit in Europe, Pere Lachaise in Paris. That place is far newer; its first graves seem to have been from around the time this one accepted no more. There have been no burials at this location for some 200 years, and many of the stones are so old they are slowly sinking into the soil, as if to mimic the “dust to dust” return to Earth of those who lie beneath them.

But many tombs in Pere Lachaise were the virtual opposite, in spirit, of these simple memorials. Most were at least ostentatious, others over-the-top Gallic theatrical. Those Parisian monuments, made with wrought iron or intricately carved stone, are now deteriorating badly, no longer the proud spectacles their owners probably hoped would last forever. These in Prague, much less elaborate (usually just a Hebrew inscription and some image to mark the owner’s work in life, like grapes for a wine merchant) are much less liable to such decay.

I can only speculate on why there was such a stark contrast in how eternity was approached in these two places. It may just have been that the Jews of Prague couldn’t afford anything finer, or that religious authorities there prohibited ostentation. Or it may have been a resignation to mortality that the Parisians refused, trying to resist the anonymity of death with elaborate tombs. No such pretense is apparent among these gravestones of Prague and ironically, as the monuments at Pere Lachaise now rust and erode, they suggest the triumph of time more, not less.

I am still perplexed (though joyful) at why the Nazis, who despoiled evidence of Jewish culture everywhere they conquered, left this cemetery and several old synagogues nearby, alone. These are all in central Prague; the Germans must have known they were there. Perhaps it was just their absurd concern for ‘appearances’ – of imagining Gentile Czechs wouldn’t think they were utter brutes if they left a few familiar local highlights – but not live Jewish people – untouched.

Such logic would be comical, if it weren’t so monstrous.

CONTEXT: From my 2016 Europe trip, posted: Only completed to its original Medieval plans in 1880, this is considered perhaps the greatest Gothic church in the world. Cologne began as a Roman provincial capital, and has been a major city ever since. During World War 2, the vicinity of the cathedral was pulverized by Allied bombing, and most of its prewar buildings were not rebuilt, replaced with modern structures. However, some Roman remnants, which had been covered over centuries earlier, were exposed by the bombing, then fully brought back to light during the post-war reconstruction.

This is a closer view of the same side of the church as in my hotel room picture, here burnished by the setting sun. I believe the vertical pillar here was some ancient artifact from Cologne’s origins as Roman ‘Colonia.’

It would be interesting (though melancholy) to see photos taken from this spot before World War II’s catastrophic impact. It was probably a crazed network of largely unreformed Medieval streets and buildings, all now gone forever. It is worth noting that, in addition to being the site of two previous cathedrals, this spot has been a locus of pulsing urban activity since before the Colosseum was built in far-off Rome. By some accounting, Cologne was the largest city north of the Alps till ca. 1450 – long before today’s vast Berlin was of the least importance.

The warm solar glow on all this artful stone may be a metaphor for both change and constancy. There may be ‘nothing new under the sun’ – it shines, indifferent, on all our plans, triumphs and failures – but this city’s ancient, intricate story is an exceptional panoply for our steadfast star to overlay. This structure is one of the very finest works of man, yet sunlight floats on it effortlessly as golden mist, taking no note of the great shrine, just as it glows, unchanging, in the face of all human events. For me, there is an indefinable yet definite comfort in that sense of both chronological and physical continuity.

CONTEXT: The ‘we’ mentioned in this piece from my 2016 travels in Europe is my friend Paul from Boston, who was with me for the middle part of my travels, from Salzburg to Berlin. We traveled by train, and saw numerous ground-level points of interest that way; especially this one.

Our train made some stops in Czech lands, then several more in Germany before Berlin. At one station, a young man joined us in our compartment; he discovered we were American, and wanted to practice his English (I practiced speaking German to him; his English was far better than my German). I knew that Dresden, supposedly the greatest Baroque city on Earth till it was bombed to ashes near the end of World War II, was nearby, and asked him if we would pass through its center. He said we would not be in its heart, but that it would be visible from the station where we would stop (he also gave us helpful information for our arrival at Berlin’s mammoth central train station).

Here is a picture of Dresden taken while our train was stopped there. I recognized the dome at the left as the Frauenkirche (Lady Church). This is a restoration, the original having been wrecked in the 1945 bombing, along with most buildings in the city center (and an unknowable number of dead, estimated at 80000, one of the greatest number of people ever to perish in a non-nuclear bombing). Dresden lay within Communist East Germany, and until the end of the Cold War there was neither enough money nor inclination to try to restore all of it to its original splendor. Only after the reunification of Germany were additional historic structures rebuilt; no doubt, Dresden can never be what it once was, but is surely far closer to it now.

As noted, Prague, not far away, got accidentally bombed in that attack – but could have been utterly laid waste, had the Czechs tried to fight the Nazis in 1938.

Dresden was not so lucky, and can serve as a stern reminder – bearing in mind it was devoured in a whirlwind of conflict the Germans themselves had sown – that destruction is easy, but creation is hard. The exquisite beauties the city accumulated over 200 years of building were wiped out in a single day. Civilization, as the empowerment of the Nazis itself showed, is often no match for the brute force of primitive savagery. At least, not in the short term.

However, if stone cannot survive such violence, sometimes the human spirit can; for unlike stone, it may have the power of regeneration. In a gesture of reconciliation, the cross atop the new Frauenkirche dome was forged by a British blacksmith whose father had been a crew member on one of the bombers that had destroyed Dresden. Also, the church displays a “Cross of Nails” made of Medieval spikes taken from the ruins of Coventry Cathedral in England – itself devastated by German bombing – the gift of the people of Coventry.

The Nazis gave the world good reason never to pardon them, or Germany. Yet, it has been observed that bitterness is an acid that eventually corrupts any vessel used to store it. Sustained hatred – no matter how justified – may consume the humanity of those who contain it. Surely, that is what happened to the Nazis themselves, in their ferocious resentments of perceived enemies.

The scale of crimes they committed makes it impossible to exact adequate justice, but there are few better counter-gestures to the criminal pride National Socialism embodied than to at least try to forgive Germany (if not the truly committed Hitlerites). That is something the Nazis never would, nor could, have done, and thus may be the most practical repudiation of them one might make. That alone may make it a worthy goal – even if for many people, it is, understandably, an impossible one.

The Frauenkirche, once a refined expression of order and hope lost to the havoc of war, was a well-chosen place to suggest, tangibly, the restorative power of forgiveness.

CONTEXT: This was the first long post I ever put on the web, galvanized by my shock and outrage at the multi-pronged onslaught on Paris in November, 2015 by Islamic terrorists, rabid to strike at a city that is both a laboratory and exquisite emblem of Western Civilization. Far more than just its elegant architecture or being the background of many illustrious lives, Paris helps define the vitalizing ideals that both shaped and animated our shared culture; and still do.

Here, I try to defend France (an imperfect society, as they all are, but one I deeply admire) by invoking what all of us in ‘the West’ owe to her. Much of that is among the attributes that drove those fanatics’ murderous hostility. And what it could mean if the dark energies behind that hostility should prevail.

As my friends know, I rarely post online. However, I am a Gallophile; a lover of France and French culture. And today, in response to the barbarism deliberately just inflicted on Paris, it may be timely to bear in mind that France’s contributions to the modern, Western world are far more than (just) its many glorious expressions of the arts of living well.

So here, I post “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,” promulgated by the revolutionary French National Assembly in 1789, just a few weeks after the fall of the Bastille, generally considered the initiation of the French Revolution. Diametrically opposed to the arbitrary power of kings and hereditary privileged ruling classes, the common rights it lists and defines have parallels to the American Bill of Rights. But unlike that document, it was created in the most powerful society in Europe, not in a peripheral wilderness as America then still was.

The Revolution’s ghastly Reign of Terror, then Napoleon would come later than these glowing ideals. But while those aftershocks are long gone, the Declaration still resonates with us today, as an expression of hope for a freer, happier, better world, shared by all the children of the “Supreme Being” of which it speaks.

It is always easier to destroy than to build; contrast the behavior of those who have brought such havoc to Paris with (for example) the Muslims who built the glorious water gardens of Cordoba in Medieval Spain. The nihilistic wrath visited on Paris certainly doesn’t carry on that constructive version of Islam, but again: It is easier to destroy (including self-imposed ‘martyrdom’) than to build (create).

After all, that’s too much like work. Including the work of nurturing Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood.

The attacks in Paris targeted flesh and blood, but also tore at the sinew of civilization itself. That is, the precious desire of every person of good will to share our one world without fear, protected by law, reason and the better reflexes of humanity from lower passions that would destroy our world’s longed-for, uplifting – but delicate – harmony.