There are two types of movies I watch when I’m anxious. The first, Victorian dramas centered around a feisty female lead reluctantly finding true love. Or Edwardian, I’m not picky. For me it is a mini step above reality tv, as it at least has literary roots. Ah, the simpler times of old school female oppression, where nothing mattered so much as trapping the right man.

Victorian lady drama is me sucking my thumb. When I get serious about shutting my anxiety down, I go for the big guns. I go for the tanks and artillery, the Jerries and Yanks of the Second World War.

Other people must be watching these films, as Netflix’s eerily accurate genres confirm. Period pieces with a strong female lead. Critically acclaimed historical war dramas. The consuming romance of my lady drama is an obvious escape, but WWII? One of the universally worst times in both my historical roots, the East and the West? Why do I feel better after watching these gutting films?

Because I can gain perspective on my doughy modern life and come to terms with the fact that my soft heart is a gift. I can attach my distress onto the extreme distress of cinematic war and leave it there once the credits roll. But I think I’m the outlier. I think most people feel terrible after these movies.

So I understand why I watch them, but I wanted to understand why we watch them. Like many things in my obsessive life, it all comes down to story.

By retelling the war in all its blood and vividness, we flatten it into folklore, into stories. We tell and tell again. It makes us feel something. And so the past lives once more, albeit falsely, in a gruesome and beautiful lie.

History on its own is a pile of disparate facts. It takes a skilled storyteller to shape it into something meaningful, something that moves us to change. People learn history, but they believe in stories. Stories help us make sense of things and feel connected to each other. Without stories, everything that happens just happens. Not for any reason or string of logic. Without stories life is literally meaningless, as there are no patterns to speak of, no lessons to be learned for a better tomorrow.

And so we watch the stories. We watch the facts spun into a thousand different narratives: love overcoming country borders, the heavy guilt of dumb luck, the loss of entire bloodlines based on a scientific rationalization of hate. We are desperate to remember, to go forth. For the greatest homage we can pay to all the lost souls is to never forget why they fought and why we can’t ever afford to destroy each other like that again.