On the Charm of History

“After all, that’s where the charm of history lies,” said a student of mine, a ninth grader whom I had the pleasure of teaching in Berlin, Germany.

She was reacting to the documentary Party on the Death Strip, a beautiful and somewhat nostalgic depiction of the wild and anarchic techno scene in Berlin after the fall of the wall: a happy “short summer of anarchy,” of spontaneous raves in the backyards or apartments of derelict buildings, of abandoned factories and power plants—or so the documentary suggests. It was the last lesson before the Christmas break, my students’ minds were perhaps already somewhere else, and I had wanted to do something unconventional and relaxing. Showing the documentary turned out to be a good choice. It captivated at least some of my students. I could see them smiling, and those who had otherwise shown little interest in history suddenly paid attention. Perhaps it was a welcome alternative to the topics we had covered before: the canonical events of 20th-century German history, including the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, and the atrocities of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Or perhaps the documentary spoke to them because they were into techno music.

Photos were usually not allowed inside the nightclubs such as Tresor, one of the hot spots of the Berlin techno scene after the fall of the wall (pictured here in 2016). Michael Mayer/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.0

“Should such stories have a place in history lessons?” I asked these ninth-grade students at the end of the documentary. Students were hesitant at first. Of course, one of them said, it is important to remember the catastrophes, the violence, and the crimes of the 20th century, but maybe a tiny bit of space, some “niches,” as she put it, might be given to such stories usually not taught at school. Then another student chimed in, emphatically agreeing that stories like those shown in the documentary should have a place in the curriculum. After all, as she said in quite a poetic manner, that’s where the “charm of history” can be found.

My student did not elaborate on what she meant by the phrase, and I failed to inquire further. But her words stuck with me. They imply, it seems to me, that there is something beautiful, perhaps even seductive, in history, a joy that can be found in stories from the past and that resonates in the present. How this past speaks to the present of teenage students had, in fact, been the subject of the first question I posed to them: “Do you think that was a good time to be young in Berlin?” Many thought so: You could be free; you could enjoy life without the omnipresence of smartphones recording every moment and every move you made; you did not have to worry about the future. Yet there was also a concern about romanticizing the moment the wall came down. One girl legitimately wondered how those who did not enjoy techno music might have felt; I would add those for whom the fall of the wall turned into a moment of suffering, including refugees and people of color in East Germany who experienced racist violence and the many East Germans who lost their jobs.

There is something beautiful in history, a joy that can be found in stories from the past and that resonates in the present.

My students’ reactions to the documentary got me thinking again about the perennial question of why we should engage with history, whether it’s in the classroom, through academic research, or by addressing a broader public. Perhaps the most conventional—though by no means only—answer to this question is that studying history can help us prevent replicating the mistakes of the past. In the current political predicament, as we witness the resurgence of authoritarian right-wing (if not fascist) politics, understanding historical fascism might help us fight the current threats to democracy, might show us the perils of standing idly by as regimes dismantle democratic institutions. Countless books and articles have been published in that vein, seeking to enlighten electorates around the globe about roads to tyranny, about strongmen from Mussolini to Trump, about how politicians (and their allied “techbros”) from Viktor Orbán in Hungary via Björn Höcke in Germany to JD Vance in the United States employ fascist symbols and language, how movements like Make America Great Again resemble historical fascism. It’s an ongoing list.

As timely and important as they might be, such works surely don’t make you smile. If anything, the commercial success of some of those books should give cause for sadness. In light of the dangers we face, telling the story of Berlin’s cheerful and exuberant techno scene might seem untimely, irrelevant, perhaps even inappropriate. Yet it is exactly this seeming untimeliness of the story that makes it worth dwelling on and that arguably stirred my students’ curiosity.

My student’s spontaneous comment about the “charm of history” offers a different reason for engaging with the past. It echoes pleas by scholars urging us to look beyond history as a warning but adds a joyful twist. Martin Jay, for example, has reminded us that the purpose of studying history is not only to avoid repeating past mistakes but also to find inspiration in the “institutions, practices, acts, and ideas” of those who lived before us. In a similar vein, Joan W. Scott has called attention in On the Judgment of History to the “multiple temporalities whose time is not exhausted, whose possibilities are not foreclosed by their (politically motivated and arbitrary) assignment to ‘the past.’” The “archive of human endeavor” provides us with, as she quotes from Massimiliano Tomba, “arsenal[s] of possibilities,” of practices that can challenge the injustices of the present and have the potential to change the world, even though success is never guaranteed. History, that is, can give us hope, as French historian Ludivine Batigny writes in a letter addressed to Louise Michel in the famous Paris Communarde: “We can thank you, and all the others, for having that hope,” that hope for a better life. It is for that hope, Batigny holds, that we do history; paraphrasing Howard Zinn, she argues that the point of studying the past is “to capture in history what allows us to imagine a better life.” I myself wrote a book on protest movements in post-1945 Europe that would, I hoped, inspire readers “to imagine alternatives, to have the courage to struggle, to experiment, risk failure and try again.” If teaching is, as Kevin M. Gannon writes, “a radical act of hope,” a hope that our students may have a better life, then engaging with the past may yield such hope.

The documentary about Berlin’s techno scene after the fall of the wall was not about struggles against the injustices of the present; it did not tell a story of those refusing to obey a legal system of modernity, in Scott’s words; it was not about a political movement with Jay’s “laudable aspirations” not yet fulfilled. Those ravers were hardly the revolutionaries of the Paris Commune that still figure so prominently in the pantheon of today’s radical left. But perhaps what they did, the wild dancing in derelict buildings, was and is part and parcel of that “arsenal of possibilities” the past provides us with.

It is this joy that can be found in the past that speaks to the present. If the future looks bleak, if nothing but a permanent catastrophe seems to be lying ahead, prolonging the catastrophes of the past, then a different look into the past could help: a look into moments like the few months in Berlin in 1989–90, when the fall of the wall facilitated the flourishing of its exuberant techno scene. Such a look might give a sense that a better life not only is possible but was indeed possible—and might be possible again. It allows us to ask what made life better then, and what might make life better again. In Berlin, it might have been mundane things like the absence of smartphones. It might have been grand but vague sentiments like the sense of freedom and possibility that reigned on improvised dance floors. It might have been the cheap access to urban space, the chance to explore and play without worrying too much about the future. In other historical moments, other things might have made life better: organizing work democratically and collectively, creating cooperative forms of housing both to make it affordable and to foster a sense of community among residents, being able to freely express thoughts and feelings.

If the future looks bleak, then a different look into the past could help.

Finding such moments, studying and teaching them, is one reason that makes engaging with history worthwhile. They bring the joy of the past to the present and perhaps allow us to imagine a future of joy as well. This is not to deny the validity of other reasons for studying the past: that history can serve as a warning, and that suffering, too, needs to be commemorated. But precisely because of the catastrophes that are looming right now, it might be worthwhile to find a mode of engaging with the past that gives us reason to smile, whether it’s the combative smile of revolutionaries fighting for a better world, the exuberant smile of ravers, or the calm smile of being at home in a community, with neighbors new and old.

Postscript

The story of my student’s reaction, her—at least I thought so—poetic words, provide a lesson that will ring true to anyone teaching: that it’s worth listening to what those “ordinary people” we often write about, whose voices we seek to recover, like my teenage student, have to say about history and why we should study the past. We tend to cite more or less famous scholars and intellectuals reflecting on the purpose of history for our present. But we should include the voices of those we, as scholars and teachers, try to reach, in the classroom or with our books, as well. Perhaps by virtue of our discipline, we are “charged with making sense for the present of the past” (as Scott argues), but sometimes those for whom we make sense of the past, our students and readers, are pretty good at doing it themselves—and for us. After all, the past has to make sense to them, and it does, in unforeseen and indeed beautiful ways.