Past imperfect

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. So said philosopher Santayana, whose first name was, startlingly, George (so prosaic, so son-of-the-rural-soil, so Beatle-ish!). So if you tripped over the area rug in the lobby today and promptly forgot all about it by the evening, it is very likely, as per this byte of philosophising, that you will trip over the area rug in the lobby tomorrow. And if you still don’t remember what happened the day after, you will do it again the day after that. Ad infinitum.

So how is the whole thing relevant here and now? I was watching something on TV recently and heard a group of young people in Germany being asked about Hitler, the Nazi regime and the Holocaust. “We do not know since we were never any part of it,” they said, hefting another round of beer as they spoke. But there is - or used to be – a real defensiveness in that country’s people when they discuss these issues. Very few people could talk about the not-too-long-ago past with candour and a straightforward, unselfconscious, guilt-free, dispassionate attitude.

Some months ago I was talking about this with writer Vikram Seth, whose latest book, Two Lives, is the story about a woman who lived through the Holocaust and was married to Seth’s great-uncle, an Indian. They lived in England and the time that shocked the world was never mentioned. But when Seth went to Jerusalem as part of his research into history, he was stunned at the strength of his own reactions, he said. As he scrolled through the archives looking for information that could help him write the story of his great-uncle and aunt, he was startled out of his thoughts by a German accented voice behind him, asking if he needed help. It was only a young student, perhaps 17 years old, offering his translation skills to the writer. Seth turned, feeling a violence that for him, he relates, was not just rare, but completely unexpected. It was a drastic knee-jerk (literally) reaction to the past, perhaps, one that made his leg spasm and bounce as it had never done before. It was not the boy, it was not the words, it was merely the sound – the lilt, the accent, the pronunciation - that had him display that brief whiplash of hatred, of a need to hurt and maim and destroy. Would he actually have done something physical, or even said something that could be as harmful? Probably not, not once the cloud of memories and the images they invoked had flown into modern-day reality. Which takes how long, after all? A few seconds?

Or does it? What is a hate crime against Indians living in Europe or the UK? Is that not the legacy of the past, revisited? What are skinheads all about? The past, once again, reborn into a new echelon of hatred? Dot-busting? Klan lynching? Man, as a social animal, should have evolved beyond such pettiness and negativity. Will he, as a species, ever do so? Who knows.

Which proves all over again that Santayana - George, as his family and friends may have called him – was right. People have forgotten their histories, and the past of their own people. So they will relive it…and so will the rest of the world.