The Weight of the Past

I recently had the opportunity to see Tom Stoppard’s thinly fictionalized family history, Leopoldstadt, the story of the rise and fall of a wealthy, cultured, cosmopolitan Viennese family of Jewish descent from 1899 to 1955.

The Czech-born playwright, now 85, traces the extended family’s history through a series of harrowing events, including the loss of a son at Verdun, cancer, deaths at Auschwitz and Dachau and in the Blitz, and ultimately a postwar suicide.

We witness a Christmas celebration in 1900 (with a Jewish star placed temporarily atop a Christmas tree), a Passover seder in 1905, a circumcision in 1924, the extended family confronted by Nazis on Kristallnacht in 1938 and the three survivors in 1955, surrounded by ghosts.

Most Popular Stories

Most Popular

Born Tomáš Sträussler to a nonobservant Jewish family, Stoppard only began to come to grips with his Jewish ancestry in the 1990s. This play, almost certainly his last, is a gut-wrenching, extraordinarily depressing multigenerational account of ambition and aspiration, which lays bare the delusion that it was possible to overcome antisemitism through religious conversion, intermarriage, cultural assimilation and professional and entrepreneurial success.

In the end, nothing—not money, not cultural or educational accomplishment, not baptism, not intermarriage—could protect that family from the horrors of the Holocaust.

The play is about ethnic identity—about what it means to be Jewish both to oneself and to others—and civilization’s fragility, and also about denial, not the river in Egypt, but the conscious refusal to recognize or acknowledge certain distasteful or painful realities that seem glaringly obvious in retrospect. Denial, Stoppard argues, is inevitably futile. Our “identity—whether it’s embraced, rejected or buried”—is inescapable. Says one character to a child who survived thanks to adoption, “You live as if without history, as if you throw no shadow behind you.”

Of course, identities are escapable even as our ethnicity need not define us. Many of the most prominent recent British playwrights of Jewish descent “Anglicized their names and strategically left any trace of their secret identities out of their dramas.” Harold Pinter was not an exception.

Of course, Stoppard’s drama is also a timely object lesson, a tract for our time, about the dangerous illusion that if we ignore the forces of evil, the threats will eventually pass.

Among the play’s most powerful themes is the impossibility of shedding or escaping the burden of the past. We must ultimately come to terms with a painful history, no matter how difficult or seemingly distant that past is.

The need to come to terms with a still-felt past is also the theme of a new book on Native American history by Peter Cozzens, a former U.S. Army captain and three-decade-long foreign service officer in the U.S. State Department. The third installment in his history of the dispossession of Indian lands in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, A Brutal Reckoning: Andrew Jackson, the Creek Indians and the Epic War for the American South tells the ugly, emotionally crushing story of the Creek War of 1813 and 1814, which helped open western Georgia, all of Alabama and parts of Mississippi and Tennessee to white settlement.

Though overshadowed in textbooks by the War of 1812, the Creek War, culminating in the deaths of at least 850 Creeks and their allies at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, where American forces lost just 26, was instrumental in allowing slavery to expand into the Old Southwest.

In line with the most recent scholarship on Indigenous history, the book is as much a story of the complexities of Native cultures and societies as it is a work of military history or the emergence of Jackson as a pivotal figure in American politics. That’s not surprising. Cozzens is the author of an impressive study of the Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his younger brother, the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa, who developed and disseminated a Pan-Indian doctrine of religious and cultural revitalization that sought to unify the disparate peoples of the Old Northwest to resist U.S. expansionism.

As Cozzens demonstrates, the Creek War’s causes and outcome hinged on divisions within the Creek nation and the intricate interplay of diverse parities including the Cherokee and Chickasaw nations as well as of Britain, France and Spain.

If, on the one hand, this book is an account of the horrendous human costs of American progress, it is also a story of Indigenous agency and cultural richness that we have a moral duty to recall.

The book also raises a question that anyone with a mind must ask: Could the story have ended differently? Was it possible for the Creeks and the United States to coexist? Before we dismiss this question out of hand as a historical impossibility, we need to recall, as one commentator quite rightly puts it, “Many of the survivors migrated into the Florida frontier and joined their cultural relatives commonly called the Seminoles. Osceola [the Seminole leader] was a refugee of the Creek War. This fomented the most expensive (national treasure and men) Indian war in national history as the various groups in the territory united and fought off-and-on until the 1850’s.”

A key theme in Leopoldstadt and A Brutal Reckoning has to do with how to grapple with the weight of the past. Is this a burden to be shrugged off or actively engaged? Both the play and the history book tell us that however much we might try, we can’t escape the past. We must ultimately come to terms with our history, no matter how difficult that may be.

Stoppard’s play is a heartfelt meditation on his own relationship to a people he only dimly recollected. As an adoptee, he was seemingly freed from the past, only to find himself in later life struggling to make sense of how that history had shaped his identity.

Janet Metcalfe, an eminent neuropsychologist and cognitive scientist, recently told me that there isn’t much evidence to support the idea that confronting a horrific past in its full ugliness will somehow release us from trauma. It is just as likely to fuel anger, resentment and a quest for vengeance and retribution.

Sanity requires forgetting. A certain level of amnesia is essential if we are to function.

Nevertheless, it’s my job, as a historian, to record and reconstruct the past in all its intricate complexity. I do this not because history is therapeutic and will lead to some kind of catharsis, but, rather, to challenge dangerous myths and misconceptions, show how forces, ideas and processes rooted in the past continue to haunt and shape the present and, in the process, broaden our identity even as we partially release ourselves from history’s oppressive grip.

I view history as a form of collective psychotherapy akin to psychoanalysis: as a way to recognize unconscious truths about ourselves, see how our shared past has shaped current modes of thinking and feeling and grapple with the kinds of aggressive, hostile and maladaptive behavior and ideas, rooted in the past, that are utterly self-destructive for individuals and societies.

History, in other words, can serve as a spur to self-awareness and self-reflection. Among the play’s lessons, in the words of the critic Helen Snow: “we are responsible even for the things we do not know.”

Or as the writer on Catholicism Edward Short puts it, “we can awaken from the nightmare of history only by reclaiming the dignity of its heartache.”

My mentor, the great historian of slavery and antislavery David Brion Davis, reminded his students that we are all the descendants of slaves and slave owners, that while each of us has a capacity for compassion, creativity and transcendence, we also have the potential to commit acts of horrendous evil.

It is a gross error, in his view, to divide humanity between the children of light and the children of darkness. Whether through acts of commission or as mere bystanders, each of us, under the right conditions, can help perpetrate wrongdoing.

History offers many lessons. It reveals the exoticism of the present and the infinite variety of human cultures and behavior in the past. It exposes the roots of collective evil and inequality and the dynamics of social, economic and cultural transformation. It also reminds us that the richness of human experience and life’s joys and tragedies have been felt by every generation.

But perhaps history’s most important lesson involves contingency. In the end, nothing in history is inevitable. It is the product of choices, behavior and perceptions that might have led to a very different future. Our choices and our actions ultimately define our identity.

This was, of course, the point that Abraham Lincoln made in a December 1862 message to Congress:

The burden of history is ultimately the burden of choice.

Whether or not you believe in divine judgment, history “will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil” (Ecclesiastes 12:14).

History will judge us just as we judge those who preceded us. Historians and future generations will appraise, weigh and assess our acts and choices and render their verdict.

Since we can’t escape the memory of time, it is essential to act in ways that we won’t come to regret.