2020 will be remembered in the U.S. for COVID, our reluctant and resentful flirtation with a disease whose cousins were ever present in past generations, much like the air one breathed. 2020 will also be remembered—if it too isn’t toppled and canceled—for a mentality that believes statues must be felled, complex historical figures eliminated, ideas and people we now judge lesser than ourselves expunged.

As was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether” —Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address

In my final year of university, I worked as a tour leader in Europe. Along with two colleagues and twelve students cramped into VW buses, I crisscrossed the continent. We biked the countryside of Holland; kayaked on the Danube; gazed upon Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral; were dazzled by London, Paris, Rome, Florence, Munich, Madrid, Vienna, and Salzburg, each in its turn; and even climbed the highest mountain in Austria.

I doubt any of us will forget one day in particular. We set aside time for a visit to Dachau in the now leafy suburbs of Munich. Bare corridors of hell: Grim, spartan, efficient death chambers, cluttered now only with black and white photos telling the horrible story. No one said a word. There it sits untouched, just as it once was, on the outskirts of a booming, elegant metropolis. Since it has been preserved, one imagines it will never be torn down. A stark reminder of the horrors Germans perpetrated, it is maintained by them for just this reason.

Forty years later my wife and I were on research leave in Göttingen, in lower Saxony. The Berlin Wall now dismantled, and the capital city in various states of magnificent reconstruction, there on the border of the former East Germany is preserved a lone “Checkpoint Charlie,” near the village of Duderstadt. It is a carefully maintained monument to the evils of communism, with almost too much information crammed into its halls in an effort not to forget even one tiny bit.

The past is preserved in Europe. People know they are who they are in light of it. Light and dark intermixed—the soaring cathedral and the descent into infernos of war, pogrom, and holocaust.

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