All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

“You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.”

As a kid I took for granted that the history taught in school was the one and only truth. But as I get older, I began to see that history is a story continually shaped and reshaped by people with power. In my research for All the Light, I learned that as early as 1932, Joseph Goebbels, the soon-to-be Minister for Propaganda for Hitler’s Reich, was grasping the immense potential of radio for controlling narratives. Generally speaking, wireless sets were too expensive for most people in the depressed Germany in which Hitler came to power, so his new government worked with manufacturers to mass-produce substantially cheaper radios called People’s Receivers. By 1938, Goebbels announced that he’d added 5.5 million new listeners in the five years since the National Socialists had come to power, and that he’d soon reach his goal of placing a radio in every German home. (See 1938 NYT article here: nyti.ms/2ndwzMV) I hope that as readers read these sections, they might consider ways technologies are being used now, in the 21st century. How can the tools of digital media be used to misrepresent, distort, and amplify the truth?