The Ragged Edge of Night

by Olivia Hawker

Men are quite capable of destroying the world on their own, as we can plainly see. They don’t need any help from above.”

She can’t release the past as easily as that. Who among us can? What has gone before drags behind. As we move through our lives, our workaday habits, we trail our ghostly wakes.

He is growing up too fast for a boy his age, but that is the way of children raised among suffering. Like seedlings sprouted in a dark corner, they shoot up thin and spindly, grasping and pale. Who can grow strong roots when the very earth is unsafe, when we are starved for light?

And aren’t we all to blame? What has brought us here, if not heedlessness or willful neglect? We have forgotten some crucial lesson our forefathers learned long ago, but ignorance is no excuse; the price must be paid. How did we err, and how did we sin, to allow the Reich so much power? How far back must we go—we, as a people—to undo each small step toward infamy? The first thin roots of this evil twine through history’s soil. But where do they start? We cannot look to 1934, when the chancellor Adolf Hitler declared himself Führer. That was only the culmination of a long black line of discord. The kaiser signed the armistice and we became, suddenly, a republic, reeling and disoriented. Was it then that we turned? Or will we find the first track of this bleak progress in 1918, one generative footprint lying stark and crisp in November snow? Must we look further still—to Wilhelm I wrenching power from the states; to 1814, Vienna, a confederation still reeling from Napoleon’s blow? We look back—the Thirty Years’ War. The Peace of Augsburg, and forty years before, at Martin Luther tapping his tacks into the dark, blank face of an old church door. A third of us dead in 1348, riddled with seeping black boils, and no one to help us, no one to bury us, no one to comfort the dying. Further back still, to Widukind submitting, debasing himself before gold-robed Charlemagne. Baptismal water washes from his hard, Germanic face a war paint made of boar’s blood. It drips onto the black f...

What he cannot do is unspeakable, indescribable. Most of all, it is unforgivable. I can’t turn back time. I can’t tell where we first went wrong—we, this people, this nation to which I belong. And if I could, I would have no way to stop whatever progress has led us here. I am too weak, too human.

I cannot help but know it. Against all sense, I believe. Somewhere, beyond the ragged edge of night, light bleeds into this world.

If we had taken up this habit of kindness long ago, before we fell into darkness, what suffering might we have spared the world and ourselves?

Music is a way of transporting emotion from one breast to another. It is a way of knowing the unknowable, of feeling what we can never allow ourselves to confront in any other way. These agonies and ecstasies—they can break us, use us up, burn us away unless we shield our hearts with music.

“Lord, extend your mercy. Let no one suffer; take those who must die quickly, and comfort those who must go on alone.”

There is no remorse, no care for the consequences. And no thought for what it says about us, as a nation and a people, that we turn our eyes away from our neighbors’ suffering. But of course, the pride and reputation of Germany mean nothing to the Party, or the dogs who lick their boots. They care only for what they may gain. The powerful take ever more power. They will remake the world as they see fit.