The Ragged Edge of Night

by Olivia Hawker

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...