Reminding Ourselves into Remembering
Ich erinnere mich.
There are phrases that pass through us. And then there are phrases that return in time. Lately, one has been echoing in the quiet spaces between thoughts:
Ich erinnere mich.
I remember.
Or at least, that’s what we say in English. Clean. Efficient. Politely transactional.
But German doesn’t let you off that easily.
I first learned the language at age 19.
Not fluently. Never academically. Just enough to meander the streets of Frankfurt freely and taste the bohemian edginess of Sachsenhausen. Enough to notice that German doesn’t simply describe the world. No, because that would be too easy, wouldn’t it? I once walked where culture dictates all things must be earned to even be expressed. A language like German reveals how the mind organizes it. How meaning is assembled. How thought itself is structured. Ja, genau.
I was struck at the time by the difficulty and effort it took, full glottal, to begin a phrase meant to bring about the joy of nostalgia. Such a shame a harshness had to hijack and force the reflexiveness of such an important phrase as “I remember.” I left Goethe Institut that summer of 1997 perplexed and mumbling it over and over under my breath. And then, like many things we encounter too early in life to fully understand, I let it go. Tschüss.
Or at least, I thought I did.
Decades later, after spending time with the work of Carl Jung while wandering through archetypes, the unconscious, the architecture beneath awareness, the phrase suddenly returned.
Uninvited. Unforced. Unspoken.
Ich erinnere mich.
This time there was no call upon memorization. This time it was about receiving a signal.
Because in German, a language I now have time and perspective to excavate, this phrase doesn’t mean what we think it means. It’s reflexive. And expansive.
Ich erinnere mich. - “I remind myself.”
You see, according to this syntax, memory is not something you possess. It’s something you participate in.
The verb erinnern comes from old Germanic roots meaning “to bring inward,” “to make internal.”
Break it apart and it reveals its own philosophy:
- er- — to bring about, to initiate
- inner — inside, within
- -n — to make it active, alive
To remember, then, is not to simply retrieve a file somewhere in the mind or memory. It is to make something inward again, with life and activation. And participation.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been rewatching the ITV series The World at War, narrated by Laurence Olivier. There’s a weight to the programming that doesn’t age. The pacing. The restraint. The way the opening soundtrack lingers just long enough to let the images do their work, as your breath leaves your body. Remembrance.
Art such as this never needs to persuade you. It simply shows you. And in doing so, it reminds you.
The World at War, even this many years later does not remind us of what war was. But of what war is. And what it always will be.
We like to believe we’ve evolved past it, as humans. That history is something we’ve learned from, neatly archived and footnoted.
But the footage and foment tells a different story. Cities reduced to absence. And ashes. And anguish. Faces carrying something they will never be able to put down. Terror.
The quiet, devastating truth that war does not end when the fighting stops. It merely changes where it lives. And where we languish alongside it.
Watching it now, in a world that once again feels like it’s tilting toward unchecked destruction and unbridled assault, this German phrase returns with a distinct grip.
Ich erinnere mich.
Because remembering, in the truest sense, is not optional. Nor is it enough, it seems.
It is an obligation that shows us we must go inward and remind, not just remember.
As a veteran, this obligation lands differently. It is never notional, nor theoretical. It is not even historical.
It is lived, inherited, and carried. Ever inward.
A duty, in the truest sense of the word.
To remind myself. To go inside. To look within. To make alive.
Or as we deduce and reduce to say, to remember.
But wouldn’t it be easier not to? Because there is a danger in forgetting.
And there is a different, quieter danger in remembering only partially.
In sanitizing.
In abstracting.
In obfuscating.
In allowing the edges to soften just enough that the truth no longer cuts us open.
The German language, in our reunion, does not allow for any convenience.
It insists that remembering is an act. A choice. A turning inward.
You do not simply remember. You remind yourself into remembering.
And perhaps that is what we are being asked to do now. Resist the convenience of forgetting. To bring the truth inward again, however heavy it may be to see and share.
Because if memory requires participation, then so does responsibility.
And if we fail to remind ourselves, then we will inevitably repeat what we no longer feel.
Ich erinnere mich.
I remind myself.
Not just of who I was.
But of what we have been.
And what we must never allow ourselves to become again.
The phrase you used "ever inward I remember." It makes me the reader reflect and think about these times.
My question is how do we avoid the ever escalating effects that humanity is so adept at pressing?
I remember