[Daniel Kehlmann is the author of the forthcoming novel “Measuring the World.” This article was translated from the German by Ross Benjamin.]

A DIDACTIC play attempts to explain what man must do to make the world better and life more rational; a tragedy shows that life will never be rational and the world will never be good. Long before Bertolt Brecht, German culture was enamored with parables about the triumph of reason. Yet man is a tragic being, irrational and divided within himself, and so it is an enthralling spectacle when a life charted as a didactic play unexpectedly reveals a tragic aspect.

When Günter Grass confessed that he was in the Waffen SS as a young man, the cheap suspicions poured forth: “Oh, he’s publishing a new book,” said the people interviewed on the street. “He’s doing it for the marketing.”

Famous people fall under such permanent suspicion that even their failures are no longer perceived as authentic. Mr. Grass is supposed...

Broad religious movements like frontier revivalism, the Social Gospel or the pluralism of faiths owed to Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu immigrants?

Theological currents like Transcendentalism in the 19th century or neo-Orthodoxy in the 20th?

Theological battles like those over slavery, evolution and church-state ties?

Charismatic preachers like George Whitefield, Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr.?

How about the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956? Signed into law 50 years ago last June by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, it started the Interstate Highway System, one of the largest public works programs in the nation’s history. It transformed the United States’ physical landscape and, it seems, its religious one.

“The nation’s embrace of automobility profoundly affected its spiritual life,” Jenna Weissman Joselit noted three weeks ago in a shrewd reflection on this 50th anniversary. Writing in The Daily Jewish...

In a recent interview, the German author Günter Grass, who was 6 years old when Hitler came to power, added a significant, and overwhelming, detail to the account of his war years. He has always admitted being a Nazi sympathizer. Now he has admitted being drafted by the Waffen SS, the military arm of that criminal corps, in the last winter of World War II. He served in a tank division based in Dresden and claims he never fired a shot. He also states that at the time, he saw nothing wrong with the SS and that he came to understand the Holocaust only after the war.

The uproar on all sides was instantaneous. Grass’s central literary theme has always been Germany’s struggle to come to terms with its past, and he has used his own life — and the realizations forced upon him after the war ended — as a platform for trenchant moral and social criticism. He stands accused now, especially from the right, of deceit and hypocrisy. He might just as well stand accused of embodying, far...

In June 1776, George Washington and a secret committee, assembled to create the first American flag, visited the Philadelphia upholstery business of Betsy Ross. The recently widowed seamstress was eager for any kind of work, but Ross wasn't thrilled with one detail of the original design. The flag featured a six-pointed star, a symbol she objected to because it was the commonly used star in English heraldry. America, she said, should use new imagery: a five-pointed star. To silence the men's protests that these new stars would be unfamiliar and difficult for seamstresses to make, she folded a piece of paper, made a single scissor snip, and revealed a perfect five-pointed star.

Makes for a classic story of American ingenuity, right? Maybe that's why some historians have been on a mission to debunk it. What they've found is that there is no congressional record of any secret flag committee, no official flag resolution until June of the following year, and no mention of Betsy...

[Australian Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop, at the country's "history summit."]

LAST year Roy Eccleston, a journalist at The Australian, returned home after four years ... in the US. There his young son learned the basics about important Americans in first grade: from George Washington to Martin Luther King. His daughter's fourth-grade history book traced the national story from Native Americans through the Revolutionary War and onwards.

Since returning to Australia, Eccleston's children have looked at how their suburb has changed over time. They've done some work on a family tree. But, as Roy lamented earlier this year on the opinion page, "a structured, consistent study of the nation's history" was nowhere to be found. When he expressed his concerns to the local school principal, he was told not to worry. His children wouldn't be alone in their ignorance.

Parents all around Australia are worried that their children...