History feels closer when it’s written in your own language. This is something that I’ve come to appreciate more and more over the years that I’ve lived in Germany. There’s a unique intellectual and emotional closeness we feel to stories, ideas, and histories that are originally expressed in our language – the one that we understand without translation.

The last point is critical, because translation is never a purely linguistic exercise. Anyone who has read a book in translation recognises that merely changing the language does not remove the ‘foreignness’ from the text. Writers addressing their native audience rely not just on a shared language, but on a shared cultural context. Even an excellent translation will still contain cultural references that are unfamiliar, clever turns of phrase in the original language that need to be rewritten or omitted, and subtext that would be immediately understood by the original audience but not necessarily by outsiders.

Translation is an art in itself, and a skilled translator will try to preserve and explain as much of that cultural context as possible. It might require deviating from the literal interpretation of the text, adding footnotes, or seeking other creative ways to convey the original tone and meaning. A lot of effort is needed to bring the foreign reader up to the same level of understanding as the locals.

This is no simple undertaking, especially for a linguistically complex and culturally rich source text. My favourite example of this comes from the post-war German author Günter Grass – a notoriously challenging read even for native German speakers. Translating Grass is difficult not just because of the linguistic complexity and extensive wordplay, but also because the cultural context in which he set his most famous books – in pre-1945 Danzig (Gdańsk) – no longer exists. Many of his characters speak in a local dialect that has since died out.

Before his death in 2015, Grass famously hosted translation workshops in Gdańsk to bring together dozens of his translators and quite literally walk them through the context. The workshop for the 50th anniversary re-translation of Die Blechtrommel (‘The Tin Drum’), for example, involved eight days touring locations in Gdańsk, going line-by-line together through key passages, and intensive back-and-forth on cultural and linguistic questions between the author and ten of his translators.

The effort was immense, but the cultural payoff for the foreign reader is enormous: an immersive glimpse into a time and place that no longer exists, but was nonetheless consequential in shaping the course of history (as the time and place where Germany began its invasion of Poland and started WWII). Foreign readers will still be confronted with references they don’t understand as well as an educated German (or Pole) would, but the translator has brought them that much closer.

Unfortunately, translations are never perfect. There will always be a depth of linguistic and cultural understanding – of closeness – that can only be achieved in the original.

Ever since I got properly good at German – and by that, I mean good enough not just to understand literal meaning, but to pick up on nuances in tone, register, and subtext, as well as most historical and cultural references – the language has opened up a new cultural lens for me. I’ve achieved insight into worlds of German history and literature, like Grass’s pre-war Danzig, that were previously only accessible to me through the translator’s eyes, and not through my own. Reaching a ‘literary’ level of German was an exciting time for me, followed by an explosion of interest in German literature, which then further strengthened my ear for nuance and my cultural literacy.

But there was a side effect that came with German linguistic and cultural fluency that I didn’t expect when I first arrived here. Namely, that the darkest elements of German and central European history – the Nazi period, WWII, the Holocaust, the expulsions – suddenly felt much more tangible, more vivid, and much closer than before.

I’d always had a morbid interest in the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, but rather in passing. The horror that I felt learning the details in school, and then in books and film, was probably not that much greater than it would be for any other human being with a conscience and a vivid imagination. So when I came to Germany, I was interested in the history, but not overly so. It was simply the horrible backstory of the country I’d chosen to study in, something to feel bad about and condemn, but not a history that I felt personally affected by or attached to more than any other foreign gentile.

What first stirred something more in me was visiting the Jewish Museum after I had been living in Berlin for several months. Of course, the stories told in that museum will move someone in any language. The exhibits gave detail and substance to the lessons I’d had on the Holocaust in school, and personalised it with testimony from survivors. But what shook me on a deeper level was peering into the display cases and seeing the original anti-semitic propaganda, deportation orders, execution records — and for the first time, being able to read them myself.

How many times had I already seen, in books, documentaries, or in school, photos of signs from Nazi Germany declaring villages ‘Jew-free’, racial slurs splashed across the front of Jewish-owned businesses, or photocopies of deportation forms? Why was it hitting me so much harder now? This wasn’t even my first time seeing such documents in person in Germany; I’d come to Berlin three years earlier as a tourist and visited several history museums. But I didn’t speak any German back then. It turns out that simply being told what a deportation order says, and being able to read the text yourself, are different emotional experiences entirely.

Translation is like a filter that stands between you and the history; you can still see it, but the foreignness of the language means that it’s one step removed from your cultural world. The effect of having that filter lifted is like seeing colour footage of the First World War, or viewing the colourised version of a famous black-and-white photo for the very first time. It feels more immediate, contemporary, and relatable. It feels more real.

I thought a lot about that experience in the museum, but the bigger shock was yet to come. It was an evening sometime after my first year in Germany, and I had my TV tuned to a historical documentary on German television, which I was only half-watching while completing some chores. The show was about Hitler’s family and childhood, and involved a lot of interviews with elderly dialect-speaking Austrians that I couldn’t understand. But then it suddenly transitioned to footage of Hitler speaking at one of the Nuremberg rallies — and that, for the first time, I could understand.

The Nuremberg footage is possibly the most internationally recognisable footage from Nazi Germany, and is something of a symbol for fascism more generally. Every schoolchild in the Western world and beyond has seen at least clips of it. Hitler, at the podium, in a sea of swastikas, screaming in scary-sounding German to a cheering crowd: an iconic moment. I had probably seen it with subtitles before at least once in my life, but I had never given much thought to the actual words he was saying. Something angry, something hateful, something about the Deutsches Volk and the glorious Reich. The footage was burned into my memory, but as a symbol only.

This time was different. It was the same footage that I had seen a dozen times before — but the unintelligible screaming I remembered had been replaced with words that I could understand. I had never realised that Hitler spoke with such a distinctive Bavarian accent, and the ‘folksy’ effect that it gave to his voice was so unexpected that it could have made me laugh if the context hadn’t been so serious. Even though I had always known at least the gist of what he was saying, actually hearing him speak for the first time was jarring; my skin prickled with goosebumps.

The fledging German-speaker in me squirmed in discomfort as I watched, because I had never heard someone speak that way in German before. The vocabulary, the style, the nationalist tone — it all felt verboten in a visceral way. I hadn’t even realised how much I had subconsciously internalised the post-war boundaries of ‘acceptable’ German speech until I heard them being violated. Just watching it felt uncomfortable.

Since then, I’ve developed an entirely new relationship with German and European history. It feels more important and personal to me. Intellectually, I can’t get enough of it. Being able to peek into such a dark and complex past through an untranslated lens is incredibly stimulating. I feel driven to understand it in a way I never did before.

Growing up in Canada, I had always struggled to wrap my head around the horrors of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. It was a big, horrible thing that I knew had happened, but it all felt so far removed from my peaceful experience of the world that it seemed impossible to understand or explain. All I could do was mentally rope it off as an abstract ‘evil’, and try not to get too close.

But this was intellectually unsatisfying; and also, I’ve now come to believe, intellectually irresponsible. ‘Evil’ is a cop-out. It’s a lazy way to avoid examining how, and why. It means not having to wonder what drove the perpetrators (or their enablers in the general population – the Mitläufer) to act as they did, and not having to think too deeply or honestly about what you would have done in their place. It makes it easy to picture yourself always on the side of the ‘good’, because you know that you’re not ‘evil’. If World War II and the Holocaust were planned and carried out by ‘evil’ people, then ordinary people (‘like you and I’) are absolved of guilt, except to the extent that they were manipulated, indoctrinated or intimidated by the evil ones.

What I’ve come to appreciate about post-war Germany’s spirit of Vergangenheitsbewältigung – i.e., Germany’s cultural reckoning with its Nazi past – is that it tends not to fall into this intellectual trap, at least not in the completely post-war generations. This is admirable, but also not surprising. The war and its immediate aftermath are still within living memory; the Holocaust was written in their language. The history still feels close, relevant, and personal. It’s not an abstract evil here, but an all-too tangible collection of people and events… one that frequently includes one’s own relatives.

Here is one more story: Less than a month after I moved to Berlin to study public policy, a fellow international student was telling me how strange it felt to live in Germany. He joked that he ought to start an art project by buying a calendar and marking off the days when he didn’t read or hear something about the war. ‘It’d just be a blank calendar,’ he said. When you live in Berlin – and above all, when you speak German – it’s inescapable.