I'm reminded of this now, as I'm reading an extraordinarily written history of violence during the first world war, and my old complaints from high school resurface, and I can begin to look back at my academic career and locate a running theme: taboos and popular constructions of history. This (epiphany!) is why I'm so preoccupied with the images of Hitler playing nicely with a dog--that view of Hitler, that his public 'madness' and private persona can at all be separated, is rarely included in standard histories. And yet, it's been there for all to see. What does it say about us that we choose to ignore it?
After World War I, Norbert Elias wrote a book called "the civilizing process," which , whether you've heard of it or not, probably influenced your attitudes towards your ideas of the West. His thesis (and he's not alone) was that the Western world has increasingly turned its back on violence and brutality, thus becoming more civilized, and so forth (he was a sociologist, not an historian). This idea plays nicely with the popular impression that Europe and "the west" is innately suited to democratic organization, and more generally, that history is essentially a story about progress (which itself is an idea that comes at the beginning of what we call modernity, but it's stuck around). I'll leave it to you to debunk Elias' claims, but I will point out that contingency is key, and progress as a thesis only works with an end in mind.
This brings me back to violence as an underexposed factor of human life, particularly in the history books. How can we expect children to understand the importance of this century (apart from homages to victims, which is all well and good, but insufficient) while "shielding" them from the realities of the very wars they study? Obviously, the example of the first world war teaches that simple awareness of the brutality of modern war doesn't necessarily prevent another one from starting. That said, the tendency to sanitize depictions of armed conflicts could only have helped the rush to war in Iraq, to take a prominent contemporary example. I have a friend who went to Iraq, and through my conversations with him, I've been able to experience personally what Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker note as the major impediment in this kind of scholarship in the historian's conscience: how can you pick apart the first-hand accounts of an event that must be absolute hell to live through, without having yourself ever made that kind of sacrifice (note: I'm uncomfortable with use of the word sacrifice, but can't help myself)? This friend of mine called me a few times from Iraq. When I asked what he was doing there, he'd respond with an anecdote about scraping someone's face off of the inside of a car with a shovel, and how that kind of work "sucks." He said it matter-of-factly, after I'd finished telling him about applying to graduate schools. Most of what he described were accounts of cleaning up the aftermath after someone blew themselves up in their cars--I also learned about the heat in Baghdad, and how shady the military can be in assessing the health of their officers (he was told that his coughing up blood regularly was gingivitis, so that the army could keep him posted instead of letting him go get medical help), but never anything personal...there were no accounts of anything he personally did to someone else, no being uncomfortable with the morality of his situation, in other words, no indication of what it might really be like to be there. Maybe he'll spill it in time, but I suspect not. Mostly, I'm sad for my friend, as I suspect he had no idea what he was getting into when he went into the army to begin with, and as a novice historian, I feel more than a little personal responsibility to try to tell more of the truth to more people.
So, current ideas for further research for me include a study of how people retold the story of WWI in the interwar period, to the generation that would grow up to fight in the next war.
Finally, it should be noted that the title for this post has little to do with the content, but it's a tonyism that I'm finding particularly amusing at present.
Otto Dix, Der Krieg 1924, "dead sentry in a trench."
