Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger…
…Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
- Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History
I.
“Europe”, said Napoleon, “ends at the Pyrenees”. This is, of course, incorrect. Perhaps a victory in Spain would have let him carry out the burning of maps and burying of geographers such reimaginings would require - but then had Spain been his he never would have asked to see it sent away. But he lost Spain and lost the Rhine and lost Europe in the end, and so the lines on maps stayed put.
Nonetheless, Napoleon proved in some sense accidentally right: what lies beyond those mountain passes might have been European once, but now, in his wake, what remained of the realm of the Franks belonged to all the world. Napoleon had, in betraying the revolution’s highest aspirations, confirmed for good its central core: there would now someday - far ahead, but forever on the way - be neither Jew nor Frank, neither bond nor free, but only Frenchmen, bound by nothing more than what they chose to be.
The Republic died, and took the Heiliges Römisches Reich with it. The levee en masse left no shortage of grieving parents in its wake - but they were citizens now, not subjects, and citizens they would remain. Citizens, for that matter, they had suddenly long since been - all their ancestors baptized fresh in a faith they never saw.
France fell far short - has fallen short by somewhat still - of what it swore to do. It was the Americans who proved more faithful friends (if still not so reliable) of la liberté et de l'égalité. Our democracy, though somewhat dimmer for at least its first four score and seven years or so, has burned steadier by far; our once-huddled masses, though hardly conscious of themselves as such, have more easily breathed free. But I would not be too quick to credit us for that: we have always had the thinner history, which is to say the better hand.
The Old World has been eight thousand years beneath the lash, and we would all be dead long before that blood could ever be matched by the sword. They have done better than we might have expected, given where things began; better, for that matter, than we might hope, given where they were not so long ago. Vichy remains within living memory, though only just; the anti-Dreyfusards are gone, but their heirs are with us still. And though the cordon sanitaire still holds, it must always be noted that it holds for now; it is a deep, thorough failure that we must think of it at all.
And it has seemed to hold before - the present moment is not the French state’s first resurgent right-wing flash, and this is not the first popular front to briefly beat it back. Civilization has been “saved” many times (and lost as many minus one), but it was rescued most of all in 1936, Doumergue’s successors no doubt permanently dispensed with, and the fascist spectre exorcised then and for all time - and so Walter Benjamin, exiled from Germany to the French Republic four years before, stayed put. He was one of many republicans who now flowed back across the Rhine, as La Grande Armee beat one final sad retreat. But it would be a long, long time before the storm would break: four years later, the French Republic had been murdered once again, and Benjamin now fled the French State for that last half-savage refuge, far across the sea.
Benjamin crossed the Pyrenees on the 25th of September, 1940. The Spanish Republic, mortally wounded on the Ebro, had bled out along those mountain passes a year before. France, imagining itself the heart and hearth of European republicanism, had watched and done nothing. Now, the gradient reversed, refugees trickled back, seeking temporary shelter with the lesser of two fascists. From there it was to be on to Portugal, a lesser evil still, and then - the New World.
But when Benjamin and his companions arrived in the Spanish border town of Portbou, they were met by the police, or perhaps a special-purpose squad of border guards, but in any case by Franco’s eyes and ears and tongues and throats, his blood and bones and self: earlier that day, the several Francos said, all transit visas had been cancelled. They would be deported in the morning; they would be disposed of some time hence. That night, Benjamin was murdered. It is likely, though not certain, that he died by his own hand, but it was murder just the same.
His brother Georg would be killed in 1942, in the camp at Mauthausen.
II.
In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, written in the shadow of his final flight, Benjamin returns one last time to an old and favorite theme:
“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.
The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
The memory of the Second World War was a storm that blew from the gates of Hell. It, too, was progress - a motive force beyond the normal course of things, bearing us forwards by necessity alone. But that force, for once, was us. The forces of old and evil were never gone - but by will alone the world put them down. The postwar settlement was never stable, as traditional accounting would have it. It secured the common good, but not the commons’ power; it demanded republican virtue from a class whose interests bend towards enlightened bourgeois vice. Nonetheless: among the ruins, material interest did not reign alone.
“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception”, said Hitler’s pet jurist - to rule is to suspend the law at will. “We were only following orders”, said his lieutenants - and perhaps it was even true. “These trials have no legal basis”, others claimed, and they may have had a point. But we hanged them anyway, and had every right to do so - we, too, could make exceptions. With a single stentence here and now, a higher law was written fresh - and then had always been.
Had the century ended otherwise, had we made whole what had been smashed, we might have one day looked back on 1945 as the first wakeward jolt of our emerging planetary demos - the first halting triumph over history, when for one short shining moment we could do as we willed, because and just because it was we who willed it. The postwar era was an exception too; its brief suspension of history's laws the first and only exercise of popular sovereignty on the part of the people, broadly construed.
Nothing about the Beveridge Report makes sense except in light of the fact that the liberals had finally woken up. The Keynesians thought they were going to euthanize the rentier class; American liberalism’s better half saw humanity hanging from a cross of iron, and refused it. The European Union, it seemed, might one day become precisely that: the Roman world, two thousand years divided, might unite. For a moment, we had won.
Nothing about Gorbachev makes sense except in light of the fact that he really did believe. Likewise with Togliatti and Allende, Mitterand and Palme: true believers all, call them what you will. And nothing about May of 1968 makes any sense at all. For a moment, we had everything - and did absolutely jack shit with it. Now there "is no alternative"; now there will be no more exceptions.
Of course this is not “what really happened” either: you could offer other narratives of the 20th century which are every bit as plausible and every bit as true, insofar as they reflect, to a certain degree, recorded fact.
It is the slow self-strangulation of citizen self-rule; it is the final liberal-democratic triumph - the final triumph of anything at all.
It marks the rise of history's last and greatest hegemon; it sees a widening gyre centrifuging out the periphery from the core.
It is the age of our revolt against all the binding ties which have haunted us of old; it is an all-encompassing all-devouring Coca-Cola coup of human culture, all in all.
All tales we might tell true, if it suited us to do so. But none of them are really True; they may structure our histories today, but in the end all they'll really be is content. If they appear in works written three centuries hence, it will be in reference to *us*: mentioned, described, perhaps even recounted - but little believed, and most likely never used.
Future generations will narrate our past in their own ways, fit for their own purposes: if some also speak of the post-war era as a brief bright spot in the course of our long defeat, it will not be because that's what it really was - what it really was was complex beyond the wildest hope of human comprehension, as all our eras are. It will be because we have saved it for them, because we have preserved enough of the past to show to them the same succession of facts that we perceived, and the light in which we saw it; enough of ourselves that some can yet retain the eyes with which to see.
This is not what the 20th century really was - but it's what that time should have meant to ours. It's an image of that era which was and must remain a grave concern of ours; a memory which must be seized and seized and seized again. That was when, out of nowhere and all at once, the sky had opened to us; our course was briefly free. That was the dreamtime, when giants walked the Earth.
III.
There are no more giants anymore; the realm of necessity has made its counter-play. We all know, in its broadest contours, what it is we have to do: excess carbon must come down; the bombs must never fly. But there’s no one left to do it; no one who can make sure. The United States is no longer an agent; NATO never was. Both now sleepwalk towards some final conflict, though they can’t decide with whom.
Europe, too, cannot decide - exit again into exile, a shattered periphery on the fringe of human affairs, or dissolve into Empire, an appendage of the American superstate? The French have held their popular front together, if barely so - but they can hold themselves to little else. Every banlieue gives the lie to the indivisible Republic and the rights of man. Germany, having regained its sovereignty at last, seems intent on handing it back to the Americans as quickly as it can. And Britain, of course, killed itself back in 1979.
There are no more sovereigns; there will be no providential Great Men. There cannot be, because there are no movements left to bear their memory, from which such men are made. The left is dead, or rendered liberal; all the liberals have hollowed out their hearts and gouged each other’s eyes. And the right, of course, is nothing at all, pure negation, as they have always been. The messianic flames - all of them - have been put out. Everyone, everywhere, will one day have to plead - we were only following orders.
Of course they might not plead at all; they might deny that anything was owed. That, too, is back in fashion - the new New Right (a farce to fit the tragedy of old) meets our late great neoliberal nihilism (which is, in fact, quite new) with an even more infantile response. “Don’t you talk back to me” thunders down from the heights; “You can’t tell me what to do” seethes back from below.
And the war, The War, the defining moment of the modern era, the murder of a hundred million people in the biggest tantrum of them all, now teetering on the threshold of living memory, has been reduced in some sectors to the object of another revanchist pissing match. When mourning’s all that’s left, it’s all that’s left to matter, and matters a great deal - those who seem to miss the mourning mood cannot be trusted far.
With the mainstream, evasion is the standard theme: say all the right things, but quietly, and with as little feeling as you can, then cap it off with your favorite Old World grievance. This last part, they mean. The grandchildren of Polish nationalists and East Prussian exiles, joined hand in respectable hand to bring a little much needed nuance to the most straightforward show of human evil the world has ever seen. Responsible, repentant Germans, reorienting their memories towards the, shall we say, *pressing threat*, to the east. (They know that talk of "greater enemies" will still, from them, not fly.) They will not deny that Caesar was ambitious - but Octavian, surely, is an honourable man.
But the new-right revisionists, whatever their other flaws might be, know just what sort of things they are. Their stories are not just not quite altogether true - they are lies. I will offer no examples, or at least offer them no names: we owe them no attention, and I would give them even less. Names would be of little value, in any case: it only ever goes one way with human stains like these.
“The Soviets did war crimes too.”
True, but the Holoc-
“They helped start the war too, just look at Poland”
Ok, it’s more complicated than that, but I suppose in a certain light-
“The Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS were just defending their people against Bolshevik subversion.”
Go fuck yourself.
This is a moment; the danger is you.