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Bold Realizations!: The possible impossibility of Vergangenheitsbewältigung

We have a German culture and history class three times a week. Today we spoke very briefly about German toward the end of the war and in the twenty year or so period thereafter. And I realized that I will never be able to fully process what happened in this country’s recent past, or Eastern Europe’s, or America’s, for that matter, and there is no historical research project I can do or book I can read that would let me understand how people lived. I mean the manner in which they lived, yes, but also how they lived in the face of what history offered them. And how they kept living after.

I’m not sure if that’s what we were supposed to take away from the class. But I think it was a lesson worth learning, in its way.