Last spring, we traveled to Wurzburg, Germany to celebrate our son-in-law’s return to his home base after nearly a year of piloting a helicopter in Iraq. It was a sobering experience for us, who take security for granted, to be in the company of someone whose daily routine was haunted by danger. I’ve never seen anyone take more delight in the simple pleasures of life or dote on his family more than that young man.

Among the harrowing adventures he described was taking off from Baghdad at midnight on New Year’s Eve in a blazing chaos of fireworks, rifle and artillery fire, unable to differentiate between them. We rejoiced that for the time being he was safe and sound.

But it wasn’t surprising that the theme of war seemed to follow us around. We found it in the Residenz in Wurzburg, the finest of the baroque castles built in Bavaria in the 17th and 18th century. After ascending a grand stairway beneath Tiepolo’s sprawling fresco of the four corners of the world, we faced a photo exhibit that showed the great palace reduced to a pile rubble with only its skeletal walls intact.

An Allied bombing attack had destroyed it, along with 80 percent of Wurzburg, only a few weeks before the end of World War II. In just 20 minutes, the priceless heritage of centuries had been obliterated. A detailed model depicted a roofless, windowless ghost town. And yet, restoration has been so skillful and complete, you’d never guess that Wurzburg and the Residenz had suffered anything more than usual ravages of time.

Monuments to futility

Nearly every church and architectural monument we visited in Germany had similar exhibits, stark testimonies to the futility and waste of war. Ironically, our side had unleashed a devastating retaliation against the Germans, and then funded the rebuilding of what we’d destroyed. The exhibits emphasized American attacks and American bombs and we wondered how much schoolchildren are taught about Germany’s responsibilities for the war. Some Germans, I’ve read, are cultivating the notion that they were the victims. One thing we may never understand is why such a gifted and industrious people so willingly, enthusiastically and disastrously following the devil into his pit.

We found a touch of humor to the war theme when we drove the scenic “Romantic Road” to Rothenburg, the best-preserved medieval city in Europe. Besieged and captured during the Thirty Years War, Rothenburg was spared when one of its burghers, on an enemy dare, drank three quarts of wine in a single gulp.

In Augsburg, we visited St. Afra and St. Ulrich, two churches built side by side, the one Catholic, the other Lutheran. Designed to commemorate the peace which recognized both denominations in 1555, they also remind the visitor of the affinities of religion and war.

In Munich, we sought out the Frauenkirche, the city’s iconic church with its twin towers and onion domes. It too had been almost completely destroyed in 1945 bombings, along with many other of the city’s historic buildings. The Olympiapark evoked the 1972 Games, when Palestinian terrorists took a group of Israeli athletes hostage and subsequently murdered them.

We moved on to Vienna. On the train, I read an account of the siege of 1683, when 25,000 tents of the Turkish army surrounded the city.

“Repulsed three hundred years ago, the Turks are now returning to Europe not with weapons but as a work force,” wrote Claudio Magris in his book “Danube.” Europeans with low birth rates depend on cheap Muslim labor, but the two cultures have remained separate, if not hostile. “Our future will depend in part on our ability to prevent the priming of this time-bomb of hatred, and the possibility that new battles of Vienna will transform brothers into foreigners and enemies.’

War in art

We plunged deeper into the past at Vienna’s Ephesos Museum where a marble frieze commemorates Lucius Verus’ victory over the Parthians in 165 AD. It’s a stunning work of art, rendered more eloquent by having been destroyed and restored in fragments. A disembodied hand smashes a skull. A muscled arm jabs a spear into a shard of a throat. The upper half of a man sits down, bewildered, as life drains from his face. Pieces of another soldier crawl on all fours from beneath a toppled horse. It’s a Homeric statement in marble of the brutal reality of war.

In a nearby series of rooms, we saw hundreds of suits of armor, beautiful in their own way, ingeniously fashioned costumes dedicated to the murderous arts. What craftsmanship had gone into those articulated elbows and knees, those finely ornamented shields and greaves. Helmets with beak-like visors gave some the look of lizards or predatory birds. It wasn’t hard to imagine that malevolent spirits still inhabited those intimidating statues of polished steel.

We wandered from those sinister presences to a collection of antique musical instruments. Here were rooms filled with pianos that once belonged to Beethoven, Schubert, Haydn, with elegant harpsichords, citterns, bassoons, trombones. It seemed like another kind of arsenal, one filled with alternatives to swords and spears, a shrine to culture, harmony, peace.

Elsewhere in Vienna, we stumbled upon a modest Jewish museum which housed a collection of items salvaged from Kristallnacht, the Nazi attack on Jews that foreshadowed concentration camps and gas chambers. We expected a major Holocaust memorial, but the featured exhibit was a photo history of the Jewish Mafia in America.

There was something wonderful about this expression of ruthless honesty. The usual instinct is to celebrate ourselves as uniquely good and to brand our enemies as incarnations of evil. In this exhibit, the Jews had held the mirror up to themselves and acknowledged the mingling of virtue and wickedness that is the hallmark of humanity. Isn’t this the answer to fanaticism, racism and hatred? Or are we condemned to invent intolerable differences between ourselves and others and to sort them out on the battlefield?

The whys of war

Scholars puzzle over the causes of wars and never come up with satisfactory answers to the question: Why? Perhaps some biological imperative demands that we murder some percentage of one another. At any rate, the milestones of histories and guide books are wars.

“Wars are always, in Lincoln’s perfectly chosen words, astounding,” writes Adam Gopnik in a recent “New Yorker” essay on the First World War. Gopnik quotes a couplet Kipling wrote after his son was killed in that war: “If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

After Vienna, we visited Prague. Near St. Vitus’ cathedral, we passed two tiny boys in strollers. They couldn’t have been more than 3 years old, but already they were playing war — firing at one another with miniature baguettes. They knew the lingo: Pow! Bang! Their daily bread, turned into guns.

George Gurley, a resident of rural Baldwin, writes a regular column for the Journal-World.