I have returned from my time in Europe, studying World War II with some of my students and my wife. It was a remarkable, painful, enjoyable experience--one that I tried to carefully document, in the hopes of remembering it better and longer.
Returning home to a snow-drenched Utah was difficult, particularly when I remember that not 48 hours ago I was standing in Stratford-upon-Avon and feeling whole. It was illusory, of course, and temporary. Nevertheless, I'm glad I went. I'm happy to be home safely.
There's much to return to, much to recall and to rebuild. I wrote in my journal daily whilst away, but I haven't put a lot of time into essays, save one on Sachsenhausen and another on Normandy. Being away from the daily effort of trying to improve my writing via the radical practice of writing more ended up a larger hardship than I expected. It was one thing to write, in the exhausted fugue of a jet-lagged tourist, the broad strokes and quick details of my day. It's another to write something substantial and worthwhile. Having my own doubts as to how often I've written either of those types of things, it's little surprise that I didn't feel as though I have written anything at all lately.
Except for those two essays I mentioned above.
Both of those were new scars in me, new wounds on old sites. I have been teaching about the Holocaust and the World Wars for eight years, now, and I've learned that there's always something new to learn about that time period. I don't think anyone could ever know it all, so that doesn't bother me. It's the fact that these experiences are so fraught with ambiguity, pain, suffering, hope, heroism, contradiction, and (in)humanity that makes them areas of such intense interest. So walking in those places--areas made sacred through suffering--has recast some of my soul.
I once wrote a little about how I go about teaching the Holocaust, and I still teach that way. From now on, however, it will be different; it will be personal.
One of the biggest problems with teaching the World Wars in any sort of detail is that, in the broad scope and enormousness of the suffering, it can become abstract. The job of the historian is to make history felt, and that can only be done with care. And it's not really possible to do this with everything in history. The misery of Napoleon, the tragedy of imperialism, the perversity of slavery--indeed, the great crimes for which nations ought to mourn and be ashamed, from genocides to conspiracies to condoning the unacceptable--all of it ought to be felt with the same passion, conviction, and tremors of sadness that one gets while passing through Sachsenhausen or visiting the too-still graves of fallen soldiers on the coastline of France.
But when the abstract becomes too personal, too sharply focused, too concrete, it can overload a person. I worry about this all of the time: My students are 15 and 16 years old when I start describing the bloodbath that was the first half of the twentieth century. They usually walk away feeling different, but the whole, broader picture? Lost.
Though I'm home and understand the wars better, I fear that these new scars of mine will fail to find meaning in their minds. And if I can't use this experience to better myself and others, the experience will be lost, too.
Returning home to a snow-drenched Utah was difficult, particularly when I remember that not 48 hours ago I was standing in Stratford-upon-Avon and feeling whole. It was illusory, of course, and temporary. Nevertheless, I'm glad I went. I'm happy to be home safely.
There's much to return to, much to recall and to rebuild. I wrote in my journal daily whilst away, but I haven't put a lot of time into essays, save one on Sachsenhausen and another on Normandy. Being away from the daily effort of trying to improve my writing via the radical practice of writing more ended up a larger hardship than I expected. It was one thing to write, in the exhausted fugue of a jet-lagged tourist, the broad strokes and quick details of my day. It's another to write something substantial and worthwhile. Having my own doubts as to how often I've written either of those types of things, it's little surprise that I didn't feel as though I have written anything at all lately.
Except for those two essays I mentioned above.
Both of those were new scars in me, new wounds on old sites. I have been teaching about the Holocaust and the World Wars for eight years, now, and I've learned that there's always something new to learn about that time period. I don't think anyone could ever know it all, so that doesn't bother me. It's the fact that these experiences are so fraught with ambiguity, pain, suffering, hope, heroism, contradiction, and (in)humanity that makes them areas of such intense interest. So walking in those places--areas made sacred through suffering--has recast some of my soul.
I once wrote a little about how I go about teaching the Holocaust, and I still teach that way. From now on, however, it will be different; it will be personal.
One of the biggest problems with teaching the World Wars in any sort of detail is that, in the broad scope and enormousness of the suffering, it can become abstract. The job of the historian is to make history felt, and that can only be done with care. And it's not really possible to do this with everything in history. The misery of Napoleon, the tragedy of imperialism, the perversity of slavery--indeed, the great crimes for which nations ought to mourn and be ashamed, from genocides to conspiracies to condoning the unacceptable--all of it ought to be felt with the same passion, conviction, and tremors of sadness that one gets while passing through Sachsenhausen or visiting the too-still graves of fallen soldiers on the coastline of France.
But when the abstract becomes too personal, too sharply focused, too concrete, it can overload a person. I worry about this all of the time: My students are 15 and 16 years old when I start describing the bloodbath that was the first half of the twentieth century. They usually walk away feeling different, but the whole, broader picture? Lost.
Though I'm home and understand the wars better, I fear that these new scars of mine will fail to find meaning in their minds. And if I can't use this experience to better myself and others, the experience will be lost, too.