Two recent bestsellers, The Nightingale and All the Light We Cannot See, personify World War II from the viewpoint of a few European characters caught up in its horror.

The Nightingale’s main characters are women, two French sisters. One joins the resistance movement against the Nazis, and the other endures the German occupation with her daughter in her family home.

All the Light We Cannot See is set in the same time period but includes the German as well as the French viewpoint. One character is a blind French girl, upended by the occupation that takes her from Paris to a French village by the ocean and her subtle part in the resistance. A second viewpoint comes from a teenaged German soldier, traumatized by the violence he witnesses and struggling to find a way to overcome the sins he is called to commit.

Both novels highlight the awful suffering of ordinary people: starvation, rape, killing of civilians, and other brutalities. Even more tragic than the conflict itself is the understanding that it need not have happened.

The war was the culmination of centuries of conflict between European nations for mastery over the other. Each conflict produced a loser. National leaders preyed on the desire to overcome humiliation, increasingly demonizing other nations, until Hitler rose on a wave of Nazism fed by anger and economic hardship.

Unfortunately, such dynamics never die. They lurk in the background, like the evil that finally bursts out in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. How do we guard against the hatred and excessive anger that produces such horrors?