When I asked, “What is Germany ?” to the twenty-three students and teachers that are serving as my travel companions, I received three general responses: 1) “Somewhere where we’re not”; 2) “Somewhere we may or may not reach”; and 3) “Somewhere with a bed.” Sitting in the baggage claim area of Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport and sleep deprived from a seven-hour red-eye flight, we had been informed that our flight to Berlin had been cancelled, and the cloud of uncertainty that this information brought some shade to the sunny optimism that, over the course of our pre-trip meetings, I’d noticed our group to have.
Admittedly, there are worse places to be stuck than Paris, but after so much planning and anticipation, we were anxious to begin our studying in Germany. And even more than that, there are few things more unsettling than uncertainty. When something is planned, it can be prepared for; when a surprise occurs, even if it’s a pleasant one, it must be processed on the spot, and this can range from intimidating to terrifying depending on the extent of the shock. And uncertainty is nothing if not the promise of multiple surprises. And so, while we were attempting to relaxedly go with the flow, gradually anxiety began to creep up on us all.
As uncomfortable as it made us feel, for a historical trip on which we (hopefully!) would be embarking, there is a certain amount of appropriateness to the circumstances. When we study history in the classroom and from textbooks, it is tempting to begin to think of it as a series of pre-destined events, that, with effort, can somehow be foreseen. And this is dangerous, because then we can begin to ask ourselves: “Why didn’t the Jews leave Germany before World War II, knowing what would come? Why did the people of the Weimar Republic elect a guy who would do the things that Hitler did? Why didn’t people leave East Berlin while they had the chance?” But, of course, they couldn’t see the tragedies of the future, and assuming they could prevents us from having any sort of empathy with our ancestors. And when empathy fails, we stop seeing previous generations as human, and then history means nothing at all.
One day, not knowing how and when we would get to Berlin will be a memory, a story that, in its future telling, will seem just as foreseeable. But as we sit here, we don’t know the future, only that there will be one. And maybe we need this uncertainty to remind us of the uncertainties of the past.