So how did we teach ourselves this in school? I must confess that I had all but forgotten. But recently, when I was moving home, my history textbook from the time I was at high school happened to fall into my hands; and you know perhaps we were a little too hasty in setting aside our old schoolbooks, for nothing shows more clearly how rapidly conceptions and viewpoints can change over time. It was there in the old, well-thumbed, dog-eared textbook that I was able to review over such a distance of time the kind of history which had informed our generation. I began to read and immediately I shuddered with horror. The way they had presented the history of the world to such unsophisticated, unquestioning young men! So fallacious, so counterfactual, so premeditated! And instantly it dawned on me—that here history had been artfully prepared, deformed, coloured, falsified, and all with clear, deliberate intention. It was obvious that this book, printed in Austria and destined for Austrian schools, must have rooted in the minds of young men the idea that the spirit of the world and its thousand outpourings had only one objective in mind: the greatness of Austria and its empire. But twelve hours by rail from Vienna—a couple of hours today by plane—in France or Italy, the school textbooks were prepared with the directly opposing scenario: God or the spirit of history laboured solely for the Italian or French motherland. Already, before our eyes had barely opened, we were forced to don different-coloured spectacles, according to the country, to prevent us during our entry into the world from seeing with free and humane eyes, ensuring we viewed everything through the narrow aperture of national interest. From this period came what we today call today national German education, the uniformity of minds commanded by a single central power. History, which ordinarily signified the highest objectivity, was force-fed into us with the sole aim of making us fine patriots, future soldiers, obedient citizens. We had to show ourselves humble before our own state and its institutions, mistrustful of other countries and races, and we had to agree with the carefully inculcated conviction that out country was better than all the other countries, our soldiers were better than their soldiers, our generals were more courageous than their generals; that our people throughout history had always been in the right and whatever might happen we would always be right: my country, right or wrong.
So there it was, the first specious orientation that we received from our schoolbooks. And then another example, which I came upon soon enough reading on from the first page to the last of this old book, but no longer with the accepting, naive eyes of the erstwhile youth. So what facts then were engraved on our callow minds? It was arranged in such a way that the most important dates were printed boldly in the margin like so many milestones along a highway, and these dates we had to learn by heart. What were the notable events that were underscored? The vast majority were battles and wars. We had to know in what year BC the Battle of Salamis had taken place and in what year the Battle of Cannae, how long the first Punic War had lasted and how long the second, and so it went on down the centuries, battle after battle, war after war, right up to Trafalgar, Waterloo and Sedan. As for the dates of the First World War, it was for us to know them in a far more personal and deeply felt manner than mere words on the page.
What then of the other events that had occurred over three millennia, thanks to which mankind had passed from cave-dwelling to modern civilization? The old book told not a word of this, nothing of the emperors and kings, the great statesmen and presidents who had, through quiet, guarded labour, preserved peace at any cost in order to safeguard their people and ensure fruitful progress. Instead only Hannibal, Scipio, Attila, Napoleon were deemed worthy of interest, only those men who had led wars were presented as heroes. Right from adolescence the idea was planted in our malleable minds that the most significant thing in the world was war, that war was not only permissible but desirable, as the greatest of exploits it profited the homeland and therefore the most important duty for any man or country was to gain victory, whatever this took, whatever the price—10,000, 100,000, a million men. Well we have now seen where this has led us and we foresee the sequel in this current state of turbulent unrest, demonstrations and upheaval which so troubles our world today.
History teaches us that world war will, in a plethora of ways and with infinite pairs of those guileless spectacles smashed, hoodwink our unsuspecting youth, and now it is on the threshold of starting the whole process over again. This is why I say again how shocking it is to read with new eyes this old tattered schoolbook. For what does it mean when history is only taught as a history of war? It is deeply pessimistic and depressing. One army triumphs over another, one general over another, a people over another; fortresses are conquered; countries become greater or smaller through the annexations of provinces. Is there anything more soul-destroying than this never-ending calendar announcing all the wars of humankind? It is as if in a history book they want to reel off all the football matches played in the last fifty years, at what point Tom beat Jack, or Jack beat Tom. Through four millennia, men have plundered, warred, robbed, enslaved each other, as if mankind has made no civilized progress at all but rather his senses are forever clouded by bloodlust. Or is it more true to say that the only genuine progress made since the battles of Xerxes up to those of Ludendorff is that they no longer kill with a battleaxe, man pitted against man, but mow each other down in ranks with a machine gun? That they no longer pour burning oil from the ramparts of a besieged citadel, but rather rush in the wonderful invention of the flamethrower in order to burn men alive? That now, though drawing on the same old instincts, they simply have more efficient instruments at their disposal? That instead of the minor struggles of the cannibalistic hordes of yesteryear, there are now millions of men facing each other? That one no longer hears the hoarse cries of the old war chiefs, but rather the insidious voice of today’s propaganda, its commands barking through the radio or the gramophone? I must confess that, like the old schoolbook, I find nothing there that might uplift the spirit of a young person of today, that gives a sense of humanity, but only the dread evidence of our endless falling-back into the old barbarism. I could barely restrain my anger, for I saw so clearly how this generation had been brought up to glorify war. The textbook said it all; here were the seeds of those dangerous and evil instincts that have served to poison our epoch.
But in all European states we have been taught the same version of history. And today we see the result. It is forever being shouted down our ears, hammered into our hearts, that victory is the supreme honour, that one man stands for the whole people, and that we remain indifferent to the method by which victory is achieved. Indifferent too, concerning the price paid for this victory—10,000, 100,000, a million men. Instead of moral opinion changing after the war and such acts being viewed as entirely criminal, we witness today with horror that they return to infect the youth in the majority of European countries with an even more terrifying intensity and aura of unbridled extremism. In these countries today people are forced to hear the voices of dictators vaunting the heroic life, declaring that any love of peace is weakness and that there is nothing of greater importance for a man than to die for his fatherland on the field of battle. The law codifies this: whatever is for the good of the people is permitted, and ideologies are invented to excuse those actions. Today in Europe we have a systematic deification of lying in the explicit form of propaganda, more powerful than anything known in 3,000 years of history. We bear witness to an exaltation of war as the highest achievement of the soul, one that even the Spartans or barbaric hordes could not dare to match. We are experiencing a falsehood of history that goes right to the heart of our national soul. With our blood seething in our veins, we can only tremble at the thought that, due to this kind of skewed education, the innocent and credulous new generation of young people might be heading for an even more appalling bloodbath than the last.
What can be done about this? Remove history from the school syllabus altogether? No, of course not, for of all human experiences, intellectual development is surely th
e most essential. So then should we suppress all mention of war in our school textbooks? No, for this would be a falsification of facts and the history of tomorrow must always show the greatest objectivity. But we should demand that what is written harbours a new-found sensitivity, where the spiritual life of humankind is not shown as something stagnating but as progressive, advancing towards the humane and the universal, emphasizing everything that has contributed to this great work of civilization.
This new history we demand must be written with a view to the existing level of culture and the progress to come, rather than that of yesterday, which concentrated uniquely on nationalism and war. For let us remember how our history was born, from Tacitus and Xenophon to the chroniclers of the Middle Ages and on to the modern age. In that distant epoch the world was not yet a uniform bloc; each dwelt in the narrow framework of their little country; one thinks here of Greece, difficult to locate even on a large map. Men’s horizons rarely reached beyond the limits of their own country’s borders and they remained ignorant of what was happening elsewhere. But we today live in a world of synchronization, of simultaneous happenings, we know at each second what is going on everywhere, even in the remotest corner of the globe, and we learn about it through speech, through sound and through image. If men lived then as if in the folds of a mountain, their sight limited by the peaks on either side, we today see as if from a summit all worldly happenings in the same moment, in their exact dimensions and proportions. And because we have this commanding view across the surface of the earth, we must now usher in new standards. It’s no longer a case of which country must be placed ahead of another at their expense, but how to accomplish universal movement, progress, civilization. The history of tomorrow must be a history of all humanity and the conflicts between individual countries must be seen as redundant alongside the common good of the community. History must then be transformed from the current woeful state to a completely new position; from now on we must say no when yesterday they said yes, and yes when yesterday they said no. In order to have a starting point for its own evaluation, it must clearly contrast the old ideal of victory with the new one of unity and the old glorification of war with a new contempt for it.
Can this be achieved without force? I believe it can. Simply by reversing the signs we can serve truth and morality, for we can recount the history of wars without changing a single fact. Let me give an example. Of all the great representations of war, the most impressive to me seems that of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. No historian has recounted with more cogent and expressive power the three campaigns of Napoleon against Russia. You live every page. You see the generals and the diplomats bent over their papers and maps, the armies marching, the officers, the soldiers at particular moments of the battle. You are driven along, shaken up, you feel a thousand times more powerfully the momentousness of the event than any war glorifier could muster. But how did Tolstoy retain this sense of movement, of momentousness, this sense of grandeur that he inwardly regards as immoral, and not inspire others to act likewise?
From the opening page he writes: “On the 24th of June the armies of Western Europe breached the Russian frontier and war broke out. That is to say, an event occurred which was at odds with human nature. Millions of men began to commit the most depraved acts—trickery, treason, larceny, plunder, arson and murder—so many that they would have filled every courtroom on earth for centuries. But at that time the men committing these crimes saw nothing criminal about them.”
Thus Tolstoy begins his incomparable description of the Russian campaign, and perhaps you may understand more clearly now what I was saying earlier about reversing the signs. During this whole account Tolstoy comments relentlessly on how the absurdity of the event is revealed in every detail. How the brilliant campaign plans both of Napoleon and Kutuzov were never properly executed, how chance steers wars a hundred times more than calculation, how the inferior officers had decorations heaped on them while the more capable were forgotten. Page after page he shows that half of what we hear about wars is a tissue of lies, only a partial explanation of the facts, and we should not attribute any merit to the generals and diplomats, because their acts always take place within the framework of an event which is in itself an absurdity and their accomplishments depend more on luck than on any creative inspiration. We must, then, Tolstoy warns, save our admiration for something more worthy of it than these most foolish exploits, which should only arouse our mistrust.
I think that the history of tomorrow, if it is to fulfil its pedagogic mission, must be written in such a way that wars will not be removed from the schoolbooks but they should no longer be seen as the greatest and most positive exploits of a people. But that is not sufficient. If we view the military actions which break out interminably down the centuries as the dark side of history, there should necessarily be a bright one. I believe that for the three millennia we can embrace with our thought, there has been considerably more going on than just hatred and reciprocal murder between peoples, something else which has encouraged man to leave his cave and learn not only how to kill animals and his own kind, but also to master the elements, gradually to extend himself across the land and on the water, infinitely multiply the strength of his arms through the machine; leading him to invent printing, or allowing him to see things once thought invisible with the aid of the microscope, to study the stars, to calculate their movement in space, to leash the lightning bolt, to speak, to think, to see beyond the continents and the oceans. This conquest of civilization, this intellectual dominance of the world, is it not more important than all those conquests of cities and countries? Is it not the one thing that reassures us that we are slowly succeeding—terribly slowly, admittedly—that humanity is not remaining static, but is advancing towards an invisible objective? And this history of our progress, of our relentless ascension to an ever more noble state of humanity, is it not a thousand times more consoling, more inspiring, for the young and for us all than the bloody roll call of battles and massacres? For does it not tell, instead of the triumph of a single people, a single nation, of our communal triumph, the only one really worth anything?
But it’s true; of this communal progress of humanity we have learnt little in our patriotic books. They do not ask that we direct our ambition, our pride towards becoming cosmopolitans, a fraternity, with brotherly feelings; no, these history books tell us to love only our own country—Austria, France or England—and to mistrust other peoples. That is why they insist on nations pitting themselves one against the other, unthinkingly rejecting anything they might have in common. In Europe our history of yesterday, and sadly that of today, follows this same well-trod path of isolationism. It moves in a centripetal sense, where everything that happens and has happened in the world does so through the eyes of the individual state. In the current predominance of nationalism we think from the point of view of the state, whose aim is to force us to think only of the state. Unconsciously, and I fear even consciously, history itself is placed in the service of the state with equal servitude to that of its citizens.
Now it is my conviction that whosoever sees in this hypertrophy of the state and nationalism the misfortune of our generation and the future one, will contribute to seeing the world released from this hypnosis; and this history of tomorrow, can it not glorify one nation or another but all humanity? We have to change this way of thinking if we wish to see the world raise itself a few steps higher, as when in a landscape the detail becomes lost to the gain of the wider panorama. Such a transformation seems to me not only desirable but also rich in insights. I still remember the revelation I experienced many years ago, from a book which completely overturned the conception of history in our young souls. It was a work by Prince Kropotkin called Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. They had been telling us in a thousand books until then that the primordial law of the jungle was the “struggle for existence”, and that the forests, the grasslands, the swamps and the sea, the ether and the caves were solely a location for savage s
truggle and pitiless butchery; one beast hunted down another with the same fury, almost in the same refined way in which men struggled against each other; everywhere the stronger threw themselves on the weak, mutual destruction was the only instinct which appeared to interest the animal kingdom. Now this book by Kropotkin showed, by drawing on a wealth of examples, that precisely in the animal world, which we consider bestial and devoid of reason, mutual assistance in fact existed, not only in one species but between species, that the animal shared man’s altruistic instinct and, like him, found it acting in opposition to his egoism. Now, if already by instinct the animals, without even being conscious of it, could act in this way, then surely we who are endowed with a consciousness, the mysterious voice of God breathing through us, can we not overcome our bad instincts? And have we not already been doing that across millennia? Instead of the wars and battles that history cites so frequently, has this not been our true strength, that in the past we were cajoled into wars without jubilation and with a bad conscience, and that in spite of all official idealization as practised today, in Germany above all, we always felt mistrustful at heart towards this war heroism? Are we not a thousand times prouder of what our culture has achieved, the progress of our civilization, and should we now present a version of history that suits us better than one which makes us recount forgotten victories, a version that places at the centre of our lives an enriching and encouraging sentiment? We are continually progressing; each decade, each year brings us more inventions, new discoveries, we gain more power over the elements, and even if from time to time we may stumble and fall back for a bloody hour into the old barbarism, we do not turn full circle, we go on unswervingly towards that invisible target.