The Enduring Impact of History on Our Lives

This personal essay is part of a series exploring the question: What is history? Further reflections can be found in the related series.

I was born just 22 years after World War II concluded. Growing up in East Berlin’s center, my childhood was spent playing amid the city’s war-torn ruins.

I was in my early twenties when the Berlin Wall came down.

A recent publisher’s note about one of my stories mistakenly described my father as Russian and my mother as Polish. The truth, however, is more complex.

My father was born in Ufa, then the capital of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. His parents were ethnic Germans who had emigrated to the Soviet Union to escape fascism and returned to Germany after the war.

My mother’s origins trace back to a small town in what was once German East Prussia. After the war, when the territory became part of Poland, her mother took my then three-year-old mother and her siblings westward into what remained German territory, traveling by foot, train, and horse-drawn cart.

At that time, my mother’s father was a prisoner of war in Norway, while her mother was forcibly relocated by the Red Army to Siberia for labor. She returned to Germany shortly before Christmas 1946 and reunited with her family.

What we call “history” is deeply embedded in my family’s narrative. Every event that shaped us—whether joyous or terrifying—was preceded by hopes and dreams, shared with countless others. Yet, those hopes rarely unfolded as envisioned. Sometimes this was beneficial, sometimes detrimental.

My paternal grandparents had aspired to build a just and peaceful society within the Soviet Union, grounded in solidarity. Instead, they narrowly escaped Stalinist purges and kept their shattered illusions private until late in life.

On my mother’s side, her parents once believed in the Thousand-Year Reich, only to reconstruct their lives from its rubble twelve years later.

In the socialist schools where I was educated, history was taught as a saga of class struggle culminating in a future communist utopia, possibly centuries away, where Marx’s ideal of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” would prevail. This vision collapsed with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Eastern Bloc’s dissolution in 1989.

Other aspirations were also swept away, including those of a brave few who initiated the so-called Peaceful Revolution in East Germany, seeking democratic reforms within socialism. Their hopes were dashed by the majority who favored rapid reunification with West Germany as a shortcut to prosperity.

Following German reunification in 1990, many East German workers faced unemployment in the ensuing years. Those recently freed from socialist constraints found themselves thrust into a capitalist society whose rules were unfamiliar, leading to a new form of disorientation.

I picture my maternal grandmother—once a League of German Girls member during the Nazi era—in her thirties, just returned from Siberia. Malnourished, confused, and infested with lice, she sat on the floor of Berlin’s Ostbahnhof underpass like a beggar. Two days later, quarantined, she struggled to recall her children’s names.

I see my mother as a three-year-old, clutching a blue earthenware jug with white dots while fleeing East Prussia. Her grandmother gave her the jug to keep her occupied on the arduous journey.

I remember my paternal grandmother in the early 1990s, her mind fading. She repeatedly said with closed eyes, “Ten people are shot every minute. Now.” Then, exactly one minute later, without checking a watch, she repeated: “Now.”

In 1992, my mother wrote a letter protesting her dismissal from Humboldt University. She had committed no wrongdoing; the new administration was simply conducting a restructuring euphemistically called “evaluation.”

I envision my grandparents’ summer home deteriorating. Like roughly 650,000 East German houses occupied for four decades, it was returned to former West German owners after reunification. These owners left it empty, selling it at escalating prices to others who also neglected it. Over time, it became a neglected asset, inhabited only by pine martens beneath its crumbling thatched roof.

While my mother worked temporarily in a “job creation scheme” and my father moved between projects after the Academy of Sciences dissolved, I wandered New York, overwhelmed by skyscrapers. Yet, on the streets, under bridges, and in subway cars, I saw those left behind by capitalism—one man wrapped entirely in plastic bags making the subway his home.

History is inescapable; it occupies a place within our lives and nowhere else. There is no “zero hour” where history resets. The past weighs heavily on the present, and the future springs from what already exists. Even rapid upheavals leave different scars on each generation—old, middle-aged, and young alike.

History books list battles by name; laws are recorded in print; new borders appear on maps. Yet no map reveals where historical events become personal realities, places unique to each individual’s life. It is there that history divides memory into before and after. The powerful drive for change born from dissatisfaction and hope is sometimes crushed, sometimes misguided, sometimes exploited, occasionally leading to fleeting happiness but often falling short.

“In olden times, when wishing still did some good”—this phrase begins many traditional German fairy tales.