To stand in Mann’s study today, with editions of Goethe and Schiller on the shelves, is to feel pride in the country that took him in and shame for the country that drove him out—not two Americas but one. In this room, the erstwhile “Greatest Living Man of Letters” fell prey to the clammy fear of the hunted. Was the year 1933 about to repeat itself? Would he be detained, interrogated, even imprisoned? In 1952, Mann took a final walk through his house and made his exit. He died in Zurich, in 1955—no longer an émigré German but an American in exile.
Alex Ross (The New Yorker)
Tag: fascism
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WPA Federal Art Project in New York City, ca. 1936/37. The play was based on a novel about fascism happening here.
Source: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/92516051/.
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Is insidious destruction of our democracy by a bureaucratic samurai with the soothing voice of a boys’ school headmaster even more dangerous than a self-destructive buffoon ripping up our values in plain sight?
Maureen Dowd, “Who’s the Real American Psycho?,” New York Times, November 10, 2018. -
The caption reads, “I’ve decided to accept God, but he has to become Italian.” The German here for “accept,” “gelten lassen,” could also be translated as “allow.”
Source: Simpicissimus, May 3, 1926, http://www.simplicissimus.info.
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“How do the early days of the Trump administration look like the Third Reich? Historian Richard Evans weighs in.” Interview by Isaac Chotiner, Slate, Feb. 10, 2017.
The question might still seem hyperbolic to many, but sober, historically informed analysis along such lines can be informative for understanding both present and past.
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There is an infectious simplicity about this film, which rings true politically in these times, even if the history it tells was more complicated.
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“I would suggest that a major source of our unease — beyond Trump’s personal unfitness for the presidency — is not that Trump is going to attempt to construct some fascist-style dictatorship, but rather that the trends that are manifested in his triumph represent a threat to our democracy that has arrived from an unexpected direction. That is what has left me, in any case, bewildered and unprepared.”
“But Hitler was a fixated ideologue with a strong party organization, while Trump is an opportunistic narcissist driven above all by the need for adulation. Hitler was the ‘little corporal,’ the man of the people, who feigned austerity, while Trump is a billionaire who flaunts his wealth and luxurious life-style. Ultimately, Trump seems far more a hybrid of Berlusconi and Putin, potentially merging kleptocracy and autocracy, than the reincarnation of an ideologically driven, war-mongering, and genocidal dictator.”
Christopher R. Browning, “Dangers I didn’t see coming: ‘tyranny of the minority’ and an irrelevant press,” Vox, January 18, 2017.
I recommend reading Browning’s whole piece. See also the earlier comments by the sociologist and political scientist Theda Skopol, “A guide to rebuilding the Democratic Party, from the ground up,” Vox, January 5, 2017, which is about much more than the Democratic Party. She understands something that conservatives of various stripes have long acted on, but which Democrats have ignored to everyone’s detriment.
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It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television and the casino greeter’s come-on, since that is as much our symbolic scene as nostalgic re-creations of Roman splendors once were Italy’s.
Adam Gopnik, “Being Honest about Trump,” The New Yorker, July 14, 2016.