As I have mentioned, I’m watching the 1980s German miniseries Heimat. It’s about life in a German village from 1919 until the 1980s. Fifteen hours. I had heard about it for years, but have long been unable to find an English subtitled version. Last week, an Italian film buff friend of mine loaned me his copy, dubbed into Italian, but with English subtitles. It’s irritating to watch German rustics of the early 20th century speaking Italian, but you get used to it. The drama is quite involving.

The thing that has made Heimat (it means “homeland” in German, but German speakers say it’s more intimate than that) so intriguing to me over the years has been the way critics say it changed the way people outside of Germany saw Germans. It came out a generation after the end of the war, and landed (outside of Germany) in cultures where our view of Germany was wholly determined by Nazism. Heimat allowed us to see Germans as just people, like any other, and was quite powerful in that way, or so the critics said.

Having watched three hours, covering the years 1919 to 1933, I completely understand that claim. I don’t think my son, who is 20, and who knows history, would be able to see this with the same eyes as his father. He has grown up in a cultural era in which Germans weren’t portrayed as wholly villainous, at least not in the same way they were during my childhood. I’m at the part in Heimat where Nazism is just starting to take real hold in the village. One of the sons of the Simon family, the main characters of the drama, has become some sort of local Nazi official. Eduard is a good-natured simpleton, for the most part; you can sense that he became a Nazi because suddenly, it was the respectable thing to do to serve your community, like joining the National Guard today. (The village mayor, though, clearly embraces Nazism for darker reasons; you think, when you see this, “Of course.”) The genius of Heimat‘s storytelling is that Eduard’s becoming a Nazi functionary is never explained. He just turns up one day wearing an armband and a party uniform, like it’s the most normal thing in the world. That’s how most others treat him. You get it: there wasn’t any real moral struggle for Eduard in this choice. It was just what people did, becoming Nazis — and for him, it finally gives him respectability and a sense of mission, after having spent the postwar years struggling to find a place for himself. Eduard’s mother is quietly against the Nazis, but doesn’t say anything. All too human.

Eduard’s younger brother, Paul, a World War I veteran, returned from the war shattered. In fact, his return to the village is the opening of the series. When Paul arrives back home, he can’t re-integrate into the village’s life. He fakes it for eight years, marrying and having children. One day, something snaps. He starts walking, and doesn’t stop until he gets to Ellis Island, in New York, as a new immigrant. This isn’t directly explained either, at least not yet in the series, but it makes perfect sense. You think about Paul sitting around his family’s kitchen table, with the other villagers, clucking about the brave local boy just back from the front. You think about how faraway Paul was, and how something clearly had cracked deep inside him, from his experiences on the front. But nobody else saw that, because they were so caught up in village life that Paul’s trauma was invisible to them all. It may have been invisible to Paul too, until the destruction by a wild animal of his beloved radio set, a project that he had been working on for years, broke him.

Because we know what’s coming next, historically — the consolidation of absolute power by Hitler — we understand that the thing that broke Paul and caused him to abandon the village and his family is the same force/event that causes his brother, and many of his countrymen, to abandon their roots and give themselves over to radical political religion (National Socialism).

Why do I bring this all up here? Yesterday reader Lawbooks10 commented:

I continue to be amazed by the parallels of this situation to the First World War. I don’t think most people have wrapped their heads around the enormity of what all this means. I’ve been aware for weeks on an intellectual level, but I work in the oil and gas business, and even though I’m still employed right now, I just today started to really process the fact that my career is probably going to be vaporized. I’m likely looking at long-term unemployment. I continue to believe that this event is the 21st century’s First World War – this event is going to destroy all the assumptions that we have about the world, the future, how our lives will go – comfy middle-class lifestyle, college/career/retirement, etc. If my kid was a junior or senior in high school, am I going to send them off to college to take out debt, or pay for it myself, with this uncertainty? Lord no! And this event is going to accelerate all the pre-existing financial problems we had, with the federal debt and entitlement programs like Social Security, etc.

Not only will the economic fallout be catastrophic, but we lack the social cohesion and individual hardiness to weather it. My grandmother lived on a rural farm in east Texas during the Depression; her family was poor anyways. They didn’t expect to be materially well-off or comfortable. We do. So how we do come to terms with that changing virtually overnight?

I think basically everything is on the table. Here at home, social unrest, rioting, civil war, even the dissolution of the United States. Globally, the collapse of supply lines and trade routes, the largest human migrations in centuries (it will make the 2015 Syrian refugee wave look like a drop in the bucket), chaos in many parts of the world, collapsed states, conflicts over natural resources, etc.

It’s going to be very ugly.

Here’s a portion of a letter I received from a reader last night. He wrote to tell me that he had just lost his job in a Covid-19 layoff:

Now I sit at home trying to read, write, figure out what I do next (looking for work of any quasi-relevancy to my abilities), and not dwell on my bad luck. I graduated into the recession in 2009 (and had to sit out for 6 months to take care of some medical issues, no less), and here a decade later history is repeating itself. I am one of those millennials who fully expects to end his life worse off socio-economically than his parents despite having worked hard, earned a Master’s Degree, never gotten in trouble, etc. For the second time in my life I am brought to financial and professional ruin not because of anything I did, but rather because of the dishonesty and incompetence of others. Will I ever own a house? Will I ever be out of debt? At this point, will I ever be able to afford to have children? Realistically, ehh… I’m not a socialist, but during these once-in-a-lifetime financial meltdowns, of which we have had two in the last decade, I can at least understand the allure. We will all be lucky if we can escape this period without civil unrest, or worse.

Now, you readers know that I am predisposed to decline-and-fall narratives, but I have to tell you, this all resonates very deeply with me, because of all the things I’ve been reading in the past year about the coming of totalitarianism in the 20th century. You know, or should know, that the First World War changed everything. Russia was lost to Bolshevism, and Germany, eventually, to Nazism. Not every nation went to totalitarianism, of course, but none of the major powers who fought that war were left unscathed. There was a radical break with the past in art, literature, and culture. This is all History 101 stuff, but so few people today know anything about that era that it’s worth bringing up here. The war literally shook Western civilization to its foundations, mostly by challenging and demolishing so many beliefs that people previously had taken as certainties. The psychological trauma, especially among the young, was profound. Prior to the war, Europe had lived for a century by the Myth of Progress. It was all shattered by the war (and revived by Communism and Nazism).

Paul Fussell, in his The Great War and Modern Memory, writes:

The day after the British entered the war Henry James wrote a friend:

“The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness… is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.”

We have not plunged into an abyss of blood and darkness (yet, anyway), but we have plunged into an age of destruction via plague. Now we see what all those years of globalism, technological achievement, and liberation of the individual were making for: a world in which everything can be brought low by a virus. It’s not the same thing as the world war, which, as a wholly moral event (in that people can choose not to go to war, but have no choice about plague), is sharply more tragic. Even so, the advanced civilization and economy we have constructed over the past 50 years, and the highly individualistic society, is ill suited to endure this crisis with resilience.

George Packer has a scorching piece in The Atlantic about how this pandemic has revealed that the United States is a failed state. It’s more on the anti-Trump side than I am — in the sense that he places too much blame for our failures on Trump, when I think the blame is legitimately broader — but he’s not wrong about Trump’s failures, and what they signal. Excerpt:

Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.

Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich. The beneficiaries flocked to patronize his resorts and line his reelection pockets. If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end.

This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.

If the pandemic really is a kind of war, it’s the first to be fought on this soil in a century and a half. Invasion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.

This is true. What Packer can’t see, of course, is the decadence of the liberals. Last year he wrote a powerful piece about the identity politics drama in his kid’s New York City public school. The piece was interesting in part for what it revealed about Packer himself: that he’s a good, decent white urban liberal who can’t bring himself to name what is right in front of his nose. He’s like Paul’s family in Heimat, who can’t see the trauma and brokenness borne by their young kinsman, back from the war. The insanity and dysfunction of the public schools in NYC, which, in Packer’s account, are clearly being ruined by left-wing ideology, are a thing that Packer perceives, but can’t name, because to do so would require recognizing that something fundamental in his picture of the world is false.

We conservatives can roll our eyes at the Packers of the world, but we would be wise not to. The faults he finds in Trump, and in the GOP, really are there, to a great extent — and they’re hidden from our own eyes, because to recognize them would mean accepting that the model of the world that we have been carrying around in our head for so long is not valid, or at least not as valid as we thought it was.

I find that I don’t have much patience for anybody, left or right, who doubles down on the narrative that says what’s wrong with America today is the fault of the other side exclusively. Some things are true: that China is primarily to blame for this global crisis, and that the Trump administration has made some particular mistakes that made our response worse. But countries all over the West are struggling hard in similar ways. Spain is in much worse shape than the US, and it is governed by Socialists. In fact, one reason Spain is in so much trouble is the Socialists insisted on going through with the International Women’s Day march, despite warnings that it was too dangerous, in a pandemic time, to bring all those people together. It’s just not true that the failures of governments and societies to deal with this virus effectively are a problem of left-wingers, or right-wingers. It’s a failure of the system, and not just the bureaucracy, but a way of life.

Alan Jacobs has a powerful short blog entry about why so many of us cannot think clearly through this crisis. It has to do with our habits of reasoning in terms of in-groups and out-groups. In this passage, he focuses on the failure of so many of us in the Christian Church to think clearly and respond well, as Christians:

Allow me to emphasize once more a recurrent theme on this here blog: We are looking here at the consequences of decades of neglect by American churches, and what they have neglected is Christian formation. The whole point of discipleship — which is, nota bene, a word derived from discipline — is to take what Kant called the “crooked timber of humanity” and make it, if not straight, then straighter. To form it in the image of Jesus Christ. And yes, with humans this is impossible, but with a gracious God all things are possible. And it’s a good thing that with a gracious God it is possible, because He demands it of those who would follow Jesus. Bonhoeffer says, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” He doesn’t bid us demand our rights. Indeed he forbids us to. “Love is patient and kind,” his apostle tells us; “love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Christians haven’t always met that description, but there was a time when we knew that it existed, which made it harder to avoid.

We are unlikely to act well until we think well; we are unlikely to think well until our will has undergone the proper discipline; and that discipline begins with proper instruction.

Read it all. 

I’m interested in politics, I’m interested in culture, and I’m interested in economics. But what I really care about is the life of the church. In this crisis, we are seeing essential truths clarified, and buried rot brought to the surface — in politics, in culture, in economics, and yes, in the life of the church. If this crisis is our First World War, in the sense of being a traumatizing civilizational event that radically upends settled ways of living and thinking, then we are all in for a hell of a ride. Politics, culture, economics, religion — none of these things exists separately from the others. Even if you are not a religious person, there are still somethings, or some thing, in your life that you hold to be sacred, and that conditions the way you view politics, culture, and economics. World War I was not supposed to happen, according to the Myth of Progress … but it did, and it recast the entire century.

Think of that nice young middle-class Millennial reader, who now, for the second time in his adult life, is facing his prospects having been reduced to nothing. What does this tell him about his heimat, his familiar world, the “village” that formed him, but that now seems unlivable? Think of Paul Simon, the protagonist of the first part of Heimat, staggering home from the war, to a family and a village full of elders who don’t understand what has happened to their world, and maybe he doesn’t quite understand either.

But he will. They all will. They will see things they can’t have imagined in 1919. We too will probably see things that were hidden from our view in January 2020.