On the Individual in History

1.
We are living in historic times.  This is a curse.

Twice before, I have lived in historic times.  In both instances, the experience was unpleasant.  In the late sixties, society collapsed into warring factions.  The divide was mostly generational.  In the Minneapolis suburb where I lived, this cultural chaos resulted in schoolteachers refusing to teach.  For a solid year, I went to school but the teachers didn’t teach – I presume they were holed-up in the faculty lounge nursing hangovers or recovering from LSD binges and, undoubtedly, smoking like chimneys.  The Vietnam war had reached its crisis with the Tet offensive and people were setting off bombs at public buildings and the Democratic National Convention exploded into street-fighting in Chicago.  Although I don’t think the outcome was ever seriously in doubt, nonetheless, I remember that history mostly as boredom – normal routines were suspended and this meant that nothing could be done and that necessary curriculum was neglected and ordinary routines disrupted; teachers didn’t teach although the more active students learned different and more complex card games and more aggressive ways to wager and bluff.  The sense of boredom arose from waiting helplessly for the crisis to come to an end.

In the mid-eighties, Local P-9, the meat packer’s union struck the Hormel Foods plant in Austin.  This was also a historic event and one in which I was at its epicenter.  The strike inaugurated a wave of labor unrest that fundamentally transformed the economy and work force.  What I recall about that event was a flood of rumor and speculation, almost all of it ultimately found to be untrue, and the willful refusal of half of the participants in the strike, the workers, to observe what was obvious – they had neither the means nor the will to defeat management and the outcome of the strike seemed somehow a foregone conclusion.  (However, I wonder if my memories of that aspect of the strike suffer from “hindsight bias.”) Chiefly, I recall that it was dangerous to express opinions on the subject and, so, the principal event in the history of our town really wasn’t ever discussed because the topic couldn’t be broached without danger.  Thus, what I recall about the Great Strike was mainly silence – even when there was fighting at the gates to the Plant, the local press and news media didn’t carry the story for fear of upsetting advertisers.  We had to read about what had happened in our town a couple years later in a book assembled by Minneapolis reporters who had been assigned to cover the story.  Only, then, did a clear picture, albeit fictional as is all good journalism, emerge from the fog.  (In the case of the Great Strike, the fog was literal: one famous event was the loss of a helicopter containing a camera crew and news personnel who crashed into an utilities tower in the pre-dawn fog while hurrying to Austin from Minneapolis to cover the fighting at the Plant gates – all of the news happened before 7:00 am when the plant’s operations began.)

The covid-19 pandemic has shut down major economies, killed over 75,000 Americans, and resulted in economic dislocations that are greater than those wrought by the Great Depression.  This crisis is ongoing as I write.  Two familiar impressions as to the experience of “historical events” have returned to me.  First, the situation is intensely boring, the news all sounding in one key and timbre, even the sense of panic attenuating into something deeply dull and tedious.  Everyone is waiting for something that can not occur – that is a return to normalcy.  Second, the landscape is very hazy – no one knows how this will end (or, even, if it can exactly end).  Nothing at all is clear except that prognostications are eagerly made, and no less eagerly, consumed and, then, generally turn out to be false.

2.
In his excellent book on Hollywood narrative technique, Reinventing Hollywood, David Bordwell notes that studio pictures in the forties used “flashbacks” to tighten their narratives.  Bordwell identifies a sort of fallacy called “hindsight bias” – this is simply that everything looks pre-determined and the outcome of events seems necessary when viewed in retrospect.  Many Hollywood plots involved extreme, even absurd, coincidences necessary to knit together characters and story-lines.  These coincidences can be made to seem less arbitrary, less capricious, if plot cause and effect is viewed in hindsight.

Hindsight bias takes a series of accidents and fuses them into a plot.  This is how history is written.

But, as we all instinctively know, historians write in retrospect, that is, looking backward while life is lived prospectively, peering into an uncertain future.

Thomas Heise’s film Heimat is a Space in Time is a long documentary (almost four hours) tracing German history through family memoirs.  In one extended take, Heise reads letters documenting the courtship of his grandmother and grandfather.  The couple met in Vienna and commenced their relationship in that city.  While Heise reads the letters written by his protagonists, his camera records the view out of the rear-window of a Viennese bus.  It is raining and the window is smeared.  We can see where the bus has been, that is, how it has reached the present position on its route, but not where it is going.  Even our view of the past is occluded by the rain droplets speckling the bus’ back window and running down the glass. (It is like viewing past events through a veil of tears.)  A disembodied voice announces stops about a half-block before they are reached – we can hear the stop announced but don’t see the intersection until the bus has passed through it.  This device, the extended take viewed through the bus’ back window, is a metaphor for history.  We are moving forward but nothing is visible to us except the path that we have taken to this moment – and, even, that terrain is unclear because of the falling rain spattering the glass through which we see.  There is nothing inevitable about the young people becoming a couple just as there was nothing inevitable about the Holocaust.  Heise dramatizes this in a wrenching and lengthy episode in his film: a young man and woman named Udo and Rosi engage in a torrid, complicated love affair that lasts almost seven years and results in many passionate letters; then, suddenly, Rosi meets another man and sleeps with him – this is Wolfgang, the filmmaker’s father who enters a history that seems configured to deliver one result, Rosi and Udo’s marriage, but that takes a sudden, even, inexplicable turn into another narrative entirely. 

Applied to our own experience, “hindsight bias” defines history as the series of events that led to me.  I am the pinnacle of creation.  All historical processes have somehow led to my consciousness.  Since I ineluctably exist – indeed, may be the only thing that really exists – history’s accidents and coincidences are all propitious in that they lead to the glory of creation, that is me. 

3.
A writer whom I respect noted that the covid virus doesn’t attack young people.  This writer declared that whatever happened to older people, the young would surely survive: they would be humanity’s lifeboat. 

But it’s not a lifeboat unless I am on it.


4.
Heise’s film about German history leads to the melancholy conclusion that everyone is either a victim of history, a victimizer, or a witness, more or less, indifferent to the plight of the victims.  In fact, since most people view themselves as acting under compulsion, that is, “obeying orders”, there are really only victims and witnesses.  I would suspect that almost all concentration camp guards and administrators viewed themselves as complicit with the system, but not active agents in its enterprise – that is, they saw themselves as witnesses to the suffering of others but not the causes of that suffering.  The cause of that suffering was abstractly “orders”, that is, orders from superiors and, more theoretically, the “order of things.”

In one scene, Heise reads from a DDR (East German) state security file amassed by the government about his family.  The narrative compiled in the Stasi file tells us that the Heise’s have friends with automobiles who often come and go, but that the family itself doesn’t own a car and uses taxi-cabs.  At the family home, a red flag is flown, supposedly in “solidarity” with workers.  Mrs. Heise dresses elegantly and looks younger than her age.  Sometimes, the family entertains people with “Southern complexions” – that is, possibly Turks or Arabs.  The file, then, scrupulously documents the identities of the snitches providing this information  – there are about nine sources, most of them neighbors said to reside “within 300 meters” of the Heise home in East Berlin.  Accordingly, this rather slender and inconsequential account of the doings of the Family Heise is the result of a dozen or so interviews with nine different informants, all willing to spy on the Heise’s works and days.  It is sozusagen etwas komisch.  (“It is, so to speak, a bit comical.”)

May 7, 2020