In his essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin details the power of storytelling and the ways that stories do more than just relate the events in a character’s or society’s lives. Stories span time and history, moving forward. They highlight the “insignificant” who move through history, those who don’t appear in the records of the age, those who exist as the historical moments occur. We are all like that, experiening history and not realizing it. We think of the past as the past and not about how our current moment is already past and will be looked at through a historical lens when we pass.

To detail the movement of history throughout time, Benjamin looks at a passage in Johann Peter Hebel’s “Unexpected Reunion,” a story about the death of a man in a mining accident on the eve of his wedding and his fiancée. Years later, as workers excavate the ground, they find the man, appearing the same way he did when he died, encased in earth and remove him from the ground to have a funeral. His aged fiancée remained faithful to him, and after they bring him up from the abandoned tunnel, she in turn dies as well.

Instead of just writing the number of years between the man’s death and recovery or actually detailing, in winding pages, that span of time, Hebel lists events that readers would recognize, starting with the earthquake in Lisbon in 1755 and ending with Battle of Copenhagen in 1807, covering the span of 52 in a mere handful of sentences. Neither the woman or the man, or those in their community, probably had a hand in any of these historical events, yet they lived through them, during the same period, and experienced the joys, sorrows, and ramifications. Benjamin’s discussion of Hebel makes us remember that we, like the woman and the man, live through history because history never stops. It barrels forward, blowing through barriers to an unforeseen conclusion.

Benjamin’s discussion, as well, makes me think about the ways that Victor Serge approaches the movement of history in Last Times. From the outset, history and memory amidst tragedy takes center stage. The novel begins in Paris by commenting on how time continues to push forward even in teh face of the advancing Nazi Wehrmacht: “Everything doesn’t all collapse at once.” Life remains. People die but people also enter the world through birth. People work. People grow food. People live and love and laugh and cry and suffer.

People on the Rue du Roi-de-Naples, the street that the narrator chooses to describe, exist “in a section of the old city over which the centuries seem to have passed with royal indifference, [that] has not changed and will scarcely change for some time to come.” It will remain. The houses date back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and contained conversation about “the profits promised by the East India Company” while the “paving stones ofter resounded with the tread of insurgent people on their way to attack or defend the Hotel de Ville.”

History happened on the Rue du Roi-de-Naples, but many on the street don’t realize or care. “The struggles celebrated in history books,” the narrator tells us, “have attached memories to these stones, but no such souvenirs are revived in the minds of the present inhabitants, exclusively preoccupied with the miserly present.” The inhabitants on the street live amongst history, dating back centuries, and they live during history, specifically an important historcal moment as the Nazis approached Paris in 1940.

Walking through the streets of Paris, as people seek to escape the impending occupation, Dr. Simon Ardatov contemplates the past, present, and the future. Passing by some stores and looking at the merchandise in their windows, Ardatov begins to think about how these items will appear in museums in the future. He thinks, “Such showcases would doubtless appear in museums toward the year 2500, when the present wars would be studied as curious cyclical cries bringing the sick collectives of the capitalistic era toward their ends or unforeseen rebirths.” Individuals in the future will look at World War II the same way those Ardatov and others looked at the Second Empire of the history of Rue du Roi-de-Naples, as the past, as something to be studied and to illuminate their own present existence.

During the trek from Paris to the South of France, Ardatov sits with the young solider Laurent Justinien walk along the road and talk about their situation. Justinien asks the doctor about “a name for natural death.” Ardatov replies that no word exists because “[i]t’s death, that’s all, which doesn’t exist . . . for only life exists.” Justinien then tells Ardatov about seeing a young girl die and details how he has seen violent death. He then tells Ardatov, “You are old. You are approaching the end. What do you say about that? That [natural death] doesn’t exist?”

Ardatov tells Justinien that he doesn’t often think about death, even though he is over sixty years old, because life exists. He informs his companion, “There are no longer many things I care about, and that’s the beginning of the end, but I am interested in the things that last, that will last after me, after you. Nothing else counts really. We must discipline our thoughts.” At this point in the novel, Justinien only things about the present, not the future, but as the novel progresses, Ardatov’s words impact him, and he begins to think about those wholl come after him, those he will never meet. He ends the novel by fighting for the French Resistance, joining others he met during the escape from Paris and deciding to fight.

Ardatov’s words connect with the opening of Last Times by pointing to the future, the moment on the horizon that he and others cannot yet see. He knows life will continue. He knows history will continue. He knows that what individuals did before him impacted him, and he knows that what he does in this moment will impact the future. This looking to the past, the present, and the future appears throughout Last Times, and the novel always looks backwards and forwards, thinking about the present in relation to years, decades, and centuries.

The last time we see Justinien, he and another refugee Angèle retire to a cave to be together. This is the last we see of them, but we can read this moment as the creation of life, the creation of a future. We need to think about it in relation to Ardatov’s words and to the poet Félicien Mûrier’s thoughts as he passes the Hôtel-Dieu hospital when he thinks about the children being born within the hospital’s walls. Last Times, along with Anna Seghers’ Transit, conatins hope and joy amidst tragedy. The hope of the future and an end to the war permeates each novel, stressing that history will move forward, not deterred from the events of humans

What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below, and make sure to follow me on Twitter at @silaslapham..