Anyone who has seriously attempted it knows the impossibility of representing past events authentically, as they were lived and felt by the people involved. …. People then just didn’t think the way we do.

“Es schwimmt eine Leiche im Landwehrkanal” — “A corpse swims in the Landwehr Canal” — went a music-hall song in the 20s, referring not specifically to Rosa [Luxemburg] but to the post-World War I poor who committed suicide out of desperation.