Dialogue with the Movie “Downfall”
Part Two:
“Historie” and “Geschichte”
Written by Dan McDonald
Keywords for
today’s blog:
Historie – All the stuff that happened from creation and big bang to the socks
you wore today. I mean everything, yes
that too!!
Geschichte –
The story and the stories we hear and tell to make sense of the
everything existing in Historie.
Most of us once upon a time History
majors learned at some time how the German language has two different words
pointing to different aspects of studying history. There is “Historie” which is said much like
our word “history” with a slightly stronger long e sound in German and there is
Geschichte. I have seen some attempts by
some conservative American Christian writers to describe how the German concept
is problematic. But I have always
thought the distinction between Historie and Geschichte is a very useful
distinction. I could readily see how the
creators of “Downfall” understood and made use of these distinctions.
In modern German usage “Historie”
refers to the past as it was. If I speak
of the year 2013 as a year in “Historie”, then the scope of what I refer to is
every event fitting within the boundaries of the year 2013. It would include the death of former major
league baseball player, Stan the Man Musial, and also what socks I wore on July
8, 2013. It would also include a dirt
clod that was washed by the rain into the Mississippi River near New Boston,
Illinois. When you think of “Historie”
in this sense it is just too big for any of us to understand. Most of us believe that history has something
to teach us. Nevertheless in any given time
period the number of events of the period far outnumber the events we are able
to set forth as having important value for us to consider. The German word “Geschichte” has a different
meaning from the German word “Historie”.
“Geschichte” is applied to the study of history but it can also mean the
study of literature. It basically means “story.” From the times of Moses and Herodotus until
today, there have been people looking at the past and telling us the
significance of the stories of history. We
have varied compilations of stories woven together to try to tell us the “Geschichte/story”
of “Historie”. Perhaps our human sense
that history is important is rooted in our childhoods. We were mesmerized as our parents told us
those stories from their lives which somehow seemed to have importance for our
lives. We were connected from one generation
to the next by the stories we shared.
I want to tell you about a story, a piece of
Geshichte, my dad shared with me in my summer between high school and
college. I was a bit rebellious in those
days. I had a summer job for a local
farmer cutting weeds out of his soybean field.
There were several of us that worked in the field. The night before I was supposed to get up and
work in this field, there was a big event in our town known as the Polish
picnic. There was lots of polkas, music,
and beer and very little checking of identifications or ages when somebody went
to a tent to get a brew. I got home
somehow after the picnic was over, but the next morning I was kneeling before
the ceramic throne sacrificing heave offerings.
It wasn’t the sort of thing you could hide and when I came out and told
my dad “I think I’m sick” he said, “I’ll bet you went to the Polish Picnic last
night.” I answered “yeah.” He said, “You’re supposed to walk beans this
morning you know?” I said, “yeah I know,
I don’t think I’m going.” He answered me
saying, “Yes you are. I got drunk plenty
of times when I was younger, but never missed a day of work because of it. Hank and I used to stand over the batch at
the glass factory and throw up. But we
never missed work. So today when you go
to work you maybe will want to think how often you want to get drunk the night
before you go to work.” My dad was being selective in regards to the “Historie”
that had taken place surrounding his life.
He was drawing one small item of “Geschichte” to help enlighten his
drunken son’s journey through life. To
be honest I did something I never told my Dad.
I went to the soybean field where the others were working and I told the
farmer’s son who was recording the times we worked that I wasn’t working that
day but not to tell my Dad. I then
sprawled my carcass across the soil between the soybean rows and threw up a few
times, sobered up under a hot summer sun, and I think got wasted only one more
time in the forty odd years since that morning after the Polish picnic. Somehow though I never knew Hank I still have
an image of Hank and my dad when he was young throwing up into the batch at a
glass factory. There was on that day a
sort of connecting my life to their lives through the story of history as told
by my Dad.
The professional historian, like anyone who uses
knowledge more formally distinguishes “Historie” and “Geschichte”. A paragraph written by the Austrian economist
Ludwig Von Mises, captures how what we know about a field of knowledge is
never more than a pittance of what there is to be known. So the professional in a field of knowledge must bring what he does know together even though he can never be all knowing. Von Mises' description of Economics applies to history as well as he writes:
“Now
it is quite obvious that our economic theory is not perfect. There is no such thing as perfection in human
knowledge, nor for that matter in any other human achievement. Omniscience is denied to man. The most elaborate theory that seems to
satisfy completely our thirst for knowledge may one day be amended or
supplanted by a new theory. Science does
not give us absolute and final certainty.
It only gives us assurance within the limits of our mental abilities and
the prevailing state of scientific thought.
A scientific system is but one station in an endlessly progressing
search for knowledge. It is necessarily
affected by the insufficiency inherent in every human effort. But to acknowledge these facts does not mean
that present day economics is backward.
It merely means that economics is a living thing – and to live implies both
imperfection and change.[i]
This is something the creators of “Downfall”
understood about history. People my age
grew up on stories of World War II.
People in Germany in the last half of the Twentieth Century grew up also
on stories of the war years. Our American
story tellers told the stories of the greatest generation or tried to tell the stories of the men who
planted the flags of our fathers. But
Germans learned the stories of World War II from the perspective of “why” and the hollow non-answer
to the question “and to what end.” Many of them lived in a
divided Germany where East met West with a barbed wire fence running down the middle of
Germany symbolizing the possibility of a story like that of 99 red
balloons would be followed by one survivor standing pretty over the dust where a city once stood. German men and women growing into adulthood when I did looked back at their nation's story with a profound sense of a shared guilt.
But today that generation that
fought in or knew the horrors of that war from 1939 to 1945 are settling down into that rest as they return to dust and
ashes. Their stories about which my
generation were always thinking and learning about are themselves likewise often returning to the graveyard of Historie. My generation thought of World War II as the war fought by our fathers, uncles, the mailman, the farmer down the road. A child growing up might only know a grandfather or great grandfather who has passed away, is in a nursing home, or has lost his ability to speak in full sentences. In ten more years it will be a war thought of by children much like we thought of the Napoleonic wars. The creators of “Downfall” have
thought it important that we remember a generation’s story, the painful story of the German generation that lived during and with Adolph Hitler. They wanted us to understand that even the
monsters of their generation had human faces. They wanted us
to remember that many who were not villains failed to see that they were living
lives in service to monsters. They wanted
us to know that something happened that ordinary people thinking they were
serving their country with honor had to live the rest of their lives knowing that they
served evil. I think the makers of "Downfall" wanted to tell this story because many of that generation's dying hopes were that we would learn from their past faults to live a better present to avoid in our futures what they did in their past. The creators of "Downfall" wanted to give Germany's generation of regret their voice while these stories were still fresh in the mind of the children who heard these grievous stories. For these stories were part of our human story, whether we were German or some other race. These who made this movie have given us the chance to not allow this Geschichte, this story to be buried in the ashes and dust of that vast unknowable forgotten place we call
“Historie.” For the truth is we know nothing of Historie. We only know the Geschichte, the stories, preserved for us and told from one generation to the next.
[i]
Ludwig Von Mises; Human Actions, Ludwig Von Mises Institute
Publications, Auburn, Alabama 1998. P.7
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