History is the sum total of all the things that could have been avoided.

Adenauer’s aphorism treats “history” less as a triumphant record of progress than as an accumulation of preventable errors—wars, crises, misjudgments, and failures of foresight. The sting of the line is its implied moral: much of what later appears inevitable was, at the time, contingent and avoidable through better judgment, restraint, or institutions. Read this way, the quote is both skeptical and practical: it punctures heroic narratives and redirects attention to responsibility, decision-making, and the costs of avoidable conflict. It also reflects a statesman’s perspective in which politics is often crisis management—trying to prevent the next catastrophe from becoming “history.”