Repeating History

There are universities where no one, as far as I can tell, teaches the Italian Renaissance. There are Liberal Arts Colleges where the origins of the liberal arts does not merit a faculty member devoted to its study.

History is not a matter that is finished once it has been explained.

Some universities may feel that the Renaissance in Italy has been well covered, and it has, but the reality is that education requires repetition. Someone needs to repeat history.

Cutting edge academic work often means working on subjects few have considered before, and if we were racing for a cure to cancer or marketing the next new thing, who could disagree. However, the lessons of the Thirty Year's War or the many Sacks of Rome are soon lost on the next generation. Unless some grey hair takes it upon themselves to return to the well-trodden field, it will disappear.

The lesson that history is really a repetitive performance is shown most obviously in Holocaust studies, a vibrant historical discipline constant rediscovering arguments made decades before. So much has been written about the German killing of the Jews, that there is little that has not been documented, but since Daniel Goldhagen the cycle of interpretation has turned to the zero point. At first Goldhagen revived that old thesis that the Germans had been for centuries inherently anti-semitic. This argument had been already presented during the war by Hans Kohn, but it received a revival in the 1990s.

Now there comes Timothy Snyder's claim we have forgotten the Einsatzgruppen who in the first Nazi invasion of Poland and Russian slaughtered Jews, Communists and resistance fighters of any stripe. Anyone familiar with Holocaust studies has read about the devastation of the Einsatzgruppen, but apparently there are NPR listeners and general readers who are so focused on the horrors of Auschwitz that they do not recognize the massive killings carried out by the earliest Nazi campaigns against Jews.

Who could really have really forgotten this supposedly forgotten moment in the Holocaust? The Einsatzgruppen have long been recognized as the hands-on brutal beginning of the Holocaust.

Even Bernhard Schlink's The Reader recounts the example of a notorious photograph of the EInsatzgruppen killing heartlessly in Poland.

So who has forgotten? Presumably an undefined group of younger scholars who never learned the story in the first place.

The point is that history needs to be repeated in order not to be forgotten: this applies to the Italian Renaissance as much as it does to the Holocaust. Courses need to be taught that repeat already documented history. The obvious needs to be restated, repeatedly, not just for the worst, but also for the best moments