What the Artists Know

Dr. Timothy Snyder is an eminent historian, Yale University professor, and author of the much-celebrated 2010 book, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin.

The bloodlands of Dr. Snyder's title roughly correspond to the expanse of Eastern Europe between Berlin in the West and Moscow in the East (though he refines the area further than that) and running from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south.  Since more than 100 of us at the Foreign Service Institute are currently preparing to depart for posts in this region (present-day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Russia), our regional studies instructor (former University of Nebraska professor, Bill Gleason) prevailed upon Dr. Snyder to speak to us about the theses of his work, and it was our tremendous good fortune that he agreed.

Though Dr. Snyder is clearly a unique thinker and a gifted speaker, he is first and foremost a historian (or, if you prefer an historian).  This means, of course, that his ideas exist within the contexts and traditions of academic historiography.  His innovations are improvements upon and responses to the way that historians have thought in the past.   Thus, most of us in his audience who are not historians will have relatively little to say about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of his several revolutionary postulations.

But one particular moment during his address stood out to me, mostly due to the fact that it was so much like so many other moments I've experienced in my life while listening to scholars of whatever caliber.  It was this:

During a discussion of "collaboration," i.e., work (sometimes banal, often heinous) performed by non-Nazi or non-Soviet populations on behalf of either the Nazis or the Soviets (and forgive me, historians, if this definition takes too many liberties with "collaboration" as a term of art), Dr. Snyder reported that scholars have too often focused on ideologically-motivated collaboration, and too little on economically-, or socially-motivated collaboration.  He averred that quite likely the vast, vast majority of collaboration was indeed motivated by very simple social and/or economic exigencies; i.e., that everyday Latvians, Lithuanians, Belorussians, etc., acquiesced to the ghastly demands of Nazi or Soviet soldiers simply because that seemed at the time like the only way to survive.

Well this seems uncontroversial.  And indeed, as I understand it, it's not so much that academic historians have denied that this is the case, but rather that they've tended to write it off as unworthy of much concerted study (or as too difficult to study because so often undocumented, or what have you).  Dr. Snyder, though, appeared to me to be suggesting that in as much as each "common" or "unexceptional" life constitutes a kind of universe unto itself, a comprehensive and utterly inimitable mode of being in the world, those common lives are proper subjects of inquiry every bit as much as the unexceptional lives--the farmer offering eggs to a Nazi patrol tells us as much about the nature of war, deprivation and betrayal, as does the spy trading in secrets about troop movements or supply routes.

And it was at this point that I thought of a book I recently re-read.  Written by a young gentleman named Jonathan Safran-Foer, it's titled Everything is Illuminated, and among its many subjects is a Ukrainian grandfather haunted by memories of a night in 1943 when a German solider gave him a choice: identify your best friend as a Jew or witness the murder of your wife and infant son. 

I thought as well of South African Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, in which a local authority in a far-flung corner of an unnamed, vaguely post-apocalyptic empire is forced either to repress the residents of the settlement for which he's responsible or face personal ruin.

I thought of Chilean novelist (and recent Nobel laureate as well), Mario Vargas Llosa, writing about (among so many other things) the machinations in which so many Dominicans were caught under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in the 1940s and 50s. 

And so on. There are of course poems, films, paintings, songs, and any number of other artistic forms as well which treat of this topic.  It's an all but biblical theme.  The question is, why has it been missing (to a greater or lesser extent) from the discipline of history?  Why has it taken a Timothy Snyder to bring into the academy what the artists have been talking about for millenia?  And why does it always take a Timothy Snyder?  Because it always does.  Any curious, perceptive lay person paying attention over the years will have noticed that academia is forever atwitter over ideas that have been abroad for decades.  The pompous, oblivious professor agog over his discovery that water is wet, the wheel round, etc., etc., is all but a trope in popular culture.  Why?

I don't have an answer, really.  I have inklings, suspicions, some of which, probably inappropriately, border on grudges.  In asking the question, though, I'm actually less interested in the intricacies and interrelations of various academic pathologies (we all know about them, and we all know that they are legion), and more interested in exactly what it is that artists are doing so presciently and boldly and sensitively.  I should probably better ask what it is, after all, that our artists know, what they're able to intuit and reveal.  If historians catalog and compile, and then deduce; if scientists hypothesize and then test, and then report (and I realize, many would suggest that those are big ifs); then what are we artists doing?  Do we even know?  And if we did know, would our knowledge render us unable to go on doing it?