There are questions we cannot answer with certainty, yet they continue to follow us. We can try to explain them through psychology, history, the workings of memory, or what Jung called the collective unconscious. We can choose to dismiss them as coincidences. And then there is another possibility—harder to prove and therefore more unsettling: that certain memories may somehow cross the boundaries of time and reappear in someone who has no idea where they came from.
I do not claim to know which explanation is correct. I can only tell the story of certain things that have happened in my life and leave readers free to decide what they mean.
The Germany I Saw as a Child
When I was a child, I had a geographical atlas, and even today I remember how often my eyes would settle on Germany. Not simply Germany as a country, but especially its eastern territories—the lands that had once been East Prussia, stretching toward Königsberg on the Baltic Sea.
I was drawn in much the same way to another part of Europe: the old Austrian Littoral of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including Trieste and Istria.
At the time, I knew almost nothing about the history of those places. I could not have known that Königsberg would become Kaliningrad, that East Prussia would disappear from the political map of Europe, or that the Austro-Hungarian Empire would vanish in the aftermath of World War I. To me, they were simply territories that seemed to hold my attention more than others.
What is strange is that this curiosity did not remain confined to childhood. It staye
d somewhere inside me, only to reappear many years later in forms I could never have anticipated.
When German Soldiers Died
There is another memory that has stayed with me. When I was a child and watched war movies in which German soldiers were killed, I felt an inexplicable discomfort, almost a sense of grief. I did not yet have the intellectual tools to form a historical judgment about Nazism, war, or Germany's responsibility for what had happened. I simply saw a human being dying, and instinctively I did not want him to die.
At the same time, I felt a spontaneous dislike toward the French, British, Russians, and Americans portrayed in those films. It was an instinctive feeling I could not explain. And precisely because it was so irrational and selective, I have often wondered about it as an adult.
There was also Yugoslavia, toward which I felt an even harder-to-explain hostility. Looking back now, with everything I have learned since childhood, I cannot help wondering whether those feelings were simply shaped by my surroundings, by the images I saw, by the books I later read—or whether they had deeper roots.
Albert von Berrer and Ernst Kölle
Many years later, two men appeared in my writing who belonged precisely to the world toward which I had felt that mysterious childhood attraction: Albert von Berrer and Ernst Kölle.
Albert von Berrer was a German general who fought on the Italian Front during World War I. He died in 1917, only a year before the Central Powers collapsed. He died before witnessing the defeat of the world to which he had devoted his life—and perhaps that is precisely why his story still seems unfinished.
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| Albert Von Berrer |
Kölle was much younger. He was a German soldier who died in 1945, at just twenty-three years old, as Germany was descending into the final catastrophe of World War II.
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| Ernst Kölle |
They belonged to different generations, but they shared something fundamental: both died on the side that history would ultimately regard as defeated.
What still strikes me is that I did not simply want to tell their stories. I wanted to make them speak. I imagined their thoughts, their fears, their relationship with death, and their awareness of a world that was disappearing around them.
At that point, a question became impossible to ignore: Why them?
The Reincarnation of a Memory
I cannot say that I was Albert von Berrer or Ernst Kölle in a previous life. I have no evidence that could prove such a thing. And I do not want to turn a personal intuition into a certainty that I impose on anyone else.
But there is another question I can ask.
Why would someone who, as a child, was inexplicably drawn to eastern Germany, Prussia, and the old Austro-Hungarian world, who felt an unusual distress when German soldiers died in war movies, and who would later develop such a strong fascination with the history of the defeated, eventually find himself writing about two men from precisely that world?
Perhaps it is the collective unconscious Jung described. Perhaps certain images of human history remain embedded in the psyche and, under the right circumstances, find someone through whom they can re-emerge.
Or perhaps the explanation is much simpler. Perhaps I was fascinated by German history from childhood, and as an adult I unconsciously sought out stories that reinforced that fascination.
And then there remains the most difficult possibility of all: that what we call memory may somehow survive individual death in a form we do not yet understand.
I do not claim that this is what happened.
I simply leave the question open.
The Memory of the Vanquished and the World of 1945
This personal story, however, leads me to a much larger question.
The world we live in is still, to a significant degree, organized around the international order that emerged from World War II. More than eighty years have passed, yet a substantial part of the global system we know was born from the ruins of 1945.
That order had victors and vanquished. The United States emerged as the leading Western power, the Soviet Union became the other great superpower, Europe was devastated by war, and Germany was divided and radically transformed.
But no historical order lasts forever.
Today we are witnessing a transformation that cannot be explained simply by the rise of the BRICS. The war in Ukraine, the conflicts and crises in the Middle East, the strategic competition between the United States and China, and the growing autonomy of other major actors are gradually reshaping the international balance of power.
I do not necessarily believe that the victors of 1945 will become the defeated of tomorrow. The transformation may be much slower and much more subtle than that. We may simply witness a gradual decline in their relative weight, until countries we now regard as superpowers or great powers find themselves operating in a system where several different centers of power exist.
In other words, not necessarily defeat, but the end of a dominant position.
Rome Shows Us That Empires Change Before They End
It has happened before.
When we think about the Roman Empire, we tend to look for a precise date: 476, when Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus. But that date marks only the end of the Western Roman Empire.
The Roman Empire continued to exist in the East for almost another thousand years. The people we now call Byzantines considered themselves Romans and called themselves Rhomaioi. The term "Byzantine Empire" belongs to later historiography and, if used without qualification, can make us forget the continuity that the empire's own inhabitants recognized.
From this perspective, the final end of the Roman Empire came in 1453, with the fall of Constantinople.
But even then, history was not simply a succession of victories and defeats. Rome did not disappear overnight. First it stopped expanding. Then it had to defend its frontiers. It began losing territory, transforming itself, shifting its political center, and surviving in forms that its inhabitants still recognized as Roman.
This is something we often forget when we look at today's great powers: an order may already have entered the stage of relative decline long before historians are willing to declare it finished.
The World That Is Coming
Something similar may be happening today.
We do not know what the next international order will look like, and it would be naïve to pretend that we already know who its winners will be. But we can see that the world created after 1945 no longer appears as immutable as it once did.
The United States will probably remain an extraordinarily important power. But being a great power does not necessarily mean being the sole center of the system. China, India, Russia, regional powers, and other economic and strategic actors are contributing to the emergence of a more complex world—one that is increasingly difficult for any single country to control.
Perhaps the coming transformation will not consist of one empire simply replacing another.
Perhaps it will be the end of an age in which empires were capable of determining the fate of the world on their own.
And that possibility makes the history of those who lost even more interesting.
Perhaps the Dead Do Not Return. Perhaps the Questions Do.
When I think about Albert von Berrer, Ernst Kölle, and the child who, many years ago, stared at a map without knowing why his eyes kept returning to that particular part of Europe, I cannot determine whether there is truly a thread connecting them.
It could simply be a construction of my own mind.
It could be the collective unconscious.
It could be the result of a historical memory that slowly accumulated inside me.
Or, for those who believe in reincarnation, it could be something else entirely: a memory that does not belong exclusively to this lifetime.
I do not need to choose the answer for the reader.
I am more interested in leaving the question open.
Because perhaps reincarnation does not necessarily mean returning to Earth with a precise memory of who we once were. If it exists, perhaps it can manifest in far more elusive ways: through inexplicable attractions, places that seem strangely familiar, historical periods that seem to call to us for no apparent reason, or people who died decades ago yet suddenly compel us to tell their stories.
And perhaps history itself has a form of reincarnation.
Empires fall. Nations change. Borders are erased. Powers lose their relative weight. New actors take the place of old ones.
What once appeared to be permanently finished can return, even though it never returns in exactly the same form.
That is why I still wonder why, as a child, I kept looking at that particular part of Europe.
Perhaps it was nothing more than a map.
Or perhaps that map was showing me something I would not understand until many decades later.
I do not know which of the two is true.
But perhaps that uncertainty is precisely what makes the question worth asking.
