UBC: The Unmasterable Past

Maier, Charles S. The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.

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When I say that The Unmasterable Past is a thought-provoking book, I mean it quite literally: it provoked a great many thoughts. It's been a long time since I engaged in active, critical reading, marking passages and making marginal notes and arguments, but this book demanded it. Even the endnotes made me think.

The Unmasterable Past was published in 1988, the year before the Berlin Wall came down, and it was strange reading it and remembering, Oh yeah, this is what the Cold War felt like. Not the anxiety about nuclear war, but that feeling that the countries behind the Iron Curtain weren't just foreign countries, they were like another planet. I was not quite fourteen when the Wall came down, so the mentality evoked isn't a sophisticated or rational one (i.e., it's memory, not history), but it's all still there in my head.

Which is appropriate, since one of the things The Unmasterable Past is about is precisely the intersection between memory and history.

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Animals--some fuzzier than others

found via Sharyn November, video of a baby porcupine learning to climb, with a stool standing in for a tree

found via matociquala, more than one octopus