As If 1918 Never Happened

You will pardon me if I am going to use a personal incident—and a series of disparate but interconnected episodes gathered from my life over the years—to tell this story. A very simple story indeed. A story like many others that are unfolding in almost every country even as I am writing here in the heart of Italy's Orobie Alps. As many of you know, almost every country has been forged out of wars, litigation over borders, land claims, ongoing ethnic conflicts, never-ending hatred, and an ultimate wish to overthrow "the other."

It seems to me that reconciliation may not be possible among human beings, and the funny thing is that we still don't know why. In the year 1500, only twenty percent of the countries that exist today were geographically defined as we know them now; those twenty percent are precisely the ones that have gone on to rule the remainder, and to determine their geographical and anthropological "affairs." It has happened in my "bigger nation," Europe, and in my "smaller nation," Italia. It has happened in Asia, Africa, and Australia, and it has happened in the Americas. It will happen in Antarctica, too, because most of the nations involved in the Antarctic Treaty—precisely that same twenty percent—can't help but "conquer and exploit" the resources at hand. The Last Frontier.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Europe had the frightening record of being the largest, most efficient and thorough slaughterhouse of men and women. Starting in 1914 and ending in 1945, one huge civil war occurred in Europe. For history's sake, the war has been given two names—the First World War and the Second—and the adjective world because all of the major countries fought on our territory and millions died on our grounds. These wars have created a sort of strange brotherhood, especially considering that Americans came here to rescue Europe from the Hitler regime—as if Europe, the homeland of most Americans, reappeared in their consciousness only during these three decades.

Whether this was a reunion between America and Europe is debatable. In fact, many places in Europe had never had a reunion of their split personalities. Germany, for example, was cut in half like a chocolate cake. Beautiful Berlin, located at her heart, became embedded in barbed wire, and thousands of soldiers guarded the invisible line that separated the West?/?Us from the East?/?Them. To me, growing up in the sixties and seventies, the 1973 Pink Floyd masterpiece "Us and Them" captured this situation:

Us and ThemAnd after all we're only ordinary menMe, and youGod only knows it's not what we would choose to doForward he cried from the rearand the front rank diedAnd the General sat, as the lines on the mapmoved from side to side.

Because of the generation I was born into, I have found from a very early age that all conversations are ultimately about the Second World War (1939–1945) and?/?or the Holocaust, in which the Nazi regime murdered six million Jews in concentration camps. (Others, too, were killed by the Nazis, such as the hundreds of thousands of nomadic peoples slaughtered in those camps.) But prior to that war came the Turkish government's genocide of 1. 5 million Armenians, the mention of which can still rattle international relations, as we saw during the recent debate between the u.s. Congress and the Turkish government. People of my generation would have thought that 1918, the year marking the end of the First World War, was old news, forgotten, belonging to "granddad days." And therefore it was something our collective memories needed to erase, not least because it had never been resolved.

Let me jump ahead and tell you about a stupid little episode in my life as a man, as an Italian, as a writer touring his own country to promote his new novel. My book was titled La Valle di Ognidove (The Valley of Everywhere) because I wanted my character to travel in space and...