I’m currently hooked on repeated re-listenings (is that redundant?) of Al Stewart’s magnum opus ‘Past, Present, & Future’. I drive friends crazy with this habit, but I have to beat an album to death until I’ve worn it out. One of the most haunting pieces is called ‘Last Day of June 1934’. Rather than blathering on about love requited and unrequited, Stewart’s forte was (and is) the telling of historical incidents set to the times. In ‘June 1934’ he speaks of that time, when French vintners carried on as they had for centuries, Cambridge grads celebrated at dance parties, both secure in the belief that they lived in a world ‘finished with war’. This is contrasted with the murder of Ernst Roehm and his followers in the SA (sturmabteilung, Hitler’s private guard), aka ‘The Night of the Long Knives’. The contrast is stark and jarring. We live in a time when we feel nothing can really go that wrong, no matter how many buffoons we must endure. While life went on in June 1934 for most of Europe, the most reviled regime in recent history was sharpening its knives.
And unless we attempt to consign this to the annals of distant history, I would beg to differ. Al wrote this in 1973, thirty-nine years after it happened. That time span is exceeded by the amount of distance between the song’s creation and the present. . . Forty-three years.
There is a poignant tragedy in history…which dominoes will eventually prove to be the back-breaking straw that sets into motion unspeakable horror. That tension is why we must remember the lessons of history, but we must first learn these lessons. We must read about them, and for this, you must take it upon yourself to become acquainted with history. The past is a magic act . . . it is gone but it remains . . .
