Prophecy and REMEMBRANCE

1’Das war ein Vor­spiel nur, dort wo man Bücher ver­brennt, ver­brennt man am Ende auch Men­schen’

Hein­rich Heine (1797-1856), Ger­man poet

AThe first time I heard Ham­let pro­claim on stage that ’the time is out of joint,’ I thought he was being rather histri­onic. And, some­how, I am now be­gin­ning to un­der­stand his con­cern. Are we not liv­ing through trou­bled times when his­tory ap­pears to be spin­ning out of con­trol?

The final decades of the past cen­tury brought hope to many of us. We wit­nessed the progress of women’s and gay rights, the ad­vent of democ­racy in South­ern Eu­rope and the re­turn of self-gov­ern­ment to Cat­alo­nia, as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the re­sult­ing re­uni­fi­ca­tion of Ger­many. Our en­tire con­ti­nent seemed to wish to es­tab­lish closer fed­eral ties, as if in­spired by Kant’s dream of per­pet­ual peace. But the il­lu­sion of the un­stop­pable ad­vance­ment of hu­man­ity was shat­tered when, one sad Sep­tem­ber 11th, Babel was con­founded not by lin­guis­tic di­ver­sity, but by un­speak­able de­struc­tion.

We have cer­tainly seen many bad things since then, in­clud­ing a global pan­demic, but the last few weeks and months have been par­tic­u­larly desta­bil­is­ing from a moral stand­point. Per­son­ally, I have found it dif­fi­cult to ac­cept that a for­eign leader can be pub­licly re­buked by his host, when we have known since Home­ric times that hos­pi­tal­ity is one of our most im­por­tant du­ties to vis­i­tors. Or that a de­sire to annex Canada and Green­land can be ex­pressed with­out shame or em­bar­rass­ment. Or that thou­sands of civil­ians can be killed in Gaza with im­punity. Some­thing is ev­i­dently rot­ten in the state of… No, not Den­mark.

Which takes me to the im­por­tance of the teach­ing of his­tory at school. Those stu­dents who know about the Mu­nich Con­fer­ence in 1938 will agree that a pol­icy of ap­peas­ing the ag­gres­sor did not bring peace to Eu­rope then, and will not nec­es­sar­ily bring last­ing peace to Ukraine now. Nor will they eas­ily for­get the pic­tures of the rit­ual burn­ing of un­pa­tri­otic books in Berlin’s Be­belplatz in 1933. I can only imag­ine that this dark episode was not known by the ac­tivists who, in re­cent years, purged a num­ber of North Amer­i­can li­braries of po­lit­i­cally in­cor­rect works, going as far as burn­ing them pub­licly in some cases.

In today’s con­text, it is more im­por­tant than ever to en­sure that school chil­dren learn and ex­pe­ri­ence his­tory in dif­fer­ent ways. When teach­ers tackle World War I, for ex­am­ple, they try to get their stu­dents to un­der­stand the com­plex is­sues lead­ing to the con­flict, the grue­some­ness of trench war­fare, and the dev­as­tat­ing long-term ef­fects of the Treaty of Ver­sailles. If in ad­di­tion a school or­gan­ises an as­sem­bly led by the prin­ci­pal to com­mem­o­rate the armistice on No­vem­ber 11th, ed­u­ca­tion takes on an eth­i­cal stance whereby one gen­er­a­tion en­sures that a mes­sage of great sig­nif­i­cance is passed on to the next gen­er­a­tion.

As a Head of School in Canada and the US, it was im­por­tant to me to chair our an­nual Re­mem­brance As­sem­bly, at­tended by the en­tire stu­dent body and fac­ulty. This in­cluded his­tor­i­cal ex­pla­na­tions, po­etry read­ings, short films from the bat­tle­field, and music of dif­fer­ent sorts. The most mov­ing mo­ment came to­wards the end, when I read the Act of Re­mem­brance, fol­lowed by a minute of si­lence. As tra­di­tion had it, the pres­i­dent of the Stu­dent Coun­cil read the Com­mit­ment to Re­mem­ber on be­half of all stu­dents: ’They were young, as we are young. They served, giv­ing freely of them­selves. To them we pledge, amid the winds of time, to carry their torch and never for­get. We will re­mem­ber them.’

In terms of our Holo­caust As­sem­bly, I never failed to show a pic­ture of the memo­r­ial plaque in Be­belplatz where a chill­ing, prophetic quo­ta­tion by Hein­rich Heine is in­scribed in bronze (the Ger­man orig­i­nal ap­pears at the be­gin­ning of this ar­ti­cle):

’That was but a pre­lude. Where peo­ple burn books, they also end up burn­ing peo­ple.’

Lest we for­get our his­tory in these dis­jointed times.

opin­ion ed­u­ca­tion