Germany in particular, but it didn't work so well for everyone. The saying "history repeats itself" seemed like an abstract mantra when I was a kid. We beat the Nazis, I watched the wall fall, the iron curtain fell, the cold war was over. We were past all that. We did it. We never had to use those incredible skills of crawling under our elementary school desks and covering our heads in the event of a nuclear attack. Yet history repeats itself.