These events, unprecedented in the ways they marshaled new technologies and ideologies to mobilize vast armies, galvanize entire populations, and work toward exterminating yet others, has generated an equally unprecedented literature. The monographs and memoirs, prose and poetry, reflections and treatises that have issued from the Thirty-Year War would overwhelm a library of even Borgesian dimensions. Over the next several months, LARB will review some of the most original and provocative books that these anniversaries have given readers.
They will be works of history, of course, but also works of fiction and film, all reviewed with the goal of casting new light on a war not yet as old as we imagine. As a historian of modern France who has written on the questions of occupation, collaboration, and resistance, I was happy to participate: what better occasion to recall and reassess two world wars that, in truth, constituted a single war with a year halftime?
When I arrived for the meeting, however, I was made to recall that historians do not have a monopoly on these events. The 30 or so men and women sitting around the table introduced themselves one by one: uniformed members of the American Legion and American Veterans of Foreign Wars, officers from the Air Force base at nearby Ellington Field, and the director of the Battleship Texas Museum, along with representatives from a variety of civic and political organizations, were all present and accounted for.
By the time I introduced myself, I already knew I was the only professional historian in the room. As I gazed at the weathered and proud faces across and to either side of me, I also realized I was one of the youngest participants at the table. This is almost always a happy situation for someone who, like me, is bearing down on his own 60th anniversary.
This time, though, my all-too-relative youth gave me pause β one that lengthened as the consul general began to speak. With great aplomb and intelligence, he proceeded to choreograph the various events marking the D-Day landings and Allied liberation of France.
