Summary: As we remember the 80th anniversary of Hitler’s coming to power in Germany, we need to recall how Hitler’s rise to power was largely facilitated by what German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called "complacency" among moderate Germans. German moderates and traditionalists made a faustian bargain with Hitler, a man they believed could restore order. It was a bargain many of them did not live to regret. Here in America, we progressives find ourselves confronted by a militant, regressive tendency composed of those who would like to see America reaffirm in their fullest form the cultural, social, and economic dispensations of the Nineteenth Century. Such ideas ought to frighten us worse than bombs. History teaches us that we can’t give these people a pass on anything. The ominous parallels are too numerous and too frightening for us to fall into the trap of believing that it can’t happen here. It can.
By: Paul S. Marchand
Cathedral City, January 30, 2013– 80 years ago today Adolf Hitler became the last Chancellor of the Weimer Republic. At the time, Hitler was a rather disreputable politician, an Austrian immigrant to Germany. When he went to see Reichspräsident Paul v. Beneckendorff u.v. Hindenburg, who asked him to try to form a government for Germany, Hitler made no secret of his intention to destroy the Weimar Republic and substitute a warlike, totalitarian government in its place.
In the country of Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller, what German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called “complacent” moderate opinion refused to believe that a phenomenon like Hitler and Naziism was possible. Yet, on that thrice-cursed day of January 30, 1933, everything moderate opinion in Germany said could not happen happened. Within a relatively short time, purges, political score settling, and the precursors to the Holocaust had become the order of the day in what was once considered one of the most civilized nations in Europe.
Most of those who let that guttersnipe Hitler come to power represented an older German value system -military leaders like Gen. Ludwig Beck and Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, nobility such as Prince Philip v. Hessen and his wife, Princess Mafalda of Italy, and such world-renowned theologians as Dietrich Boenhoffer. Hitler’s victims were largely traditionalists -products of the Hohenzollern Second Reich of 1871 through 1918 -who could no longer accept what was happening to their beloved Germany. In many ways, their world outlook -their weltanschauung, as Germans say- was at its best civilized, cultured, European, Christian in the best sense of that oft-maligned word.
When the Great War swept away the Second Reich, it also ushered in a time of radical social change. Postwar political uncertainties and hyperinflation dogged the Weimar Republic that had replaced the Hohenzollern empire: strikes, putsches, 4 trillion marks buying a single dollar. Such events gave rise to a Weimar zeitgeist of drift and decadence -what queer person of more than a “certain age” can forget Liza Minelli and Michael York’s arresting performances in the movie version of Cabaret?
Yet it would be a mistake to see Weimar solely through the prism of Cabaret, or the equally arresting Berlin Alexanderplatz, (as much as it would be a mistake to view modern, reunified Berlin through the prism of Iggy Pop's mid-1980s declaration that he had moved to Berlin because New York wasn't decadent enough). In many ways, the Weimar Republic succeeded in quietly carrying forward many of the more laudable virtues of the Imperial period. However, as happens so often, nostalgia trumped reality in 1920s Germany; the complicated, unglamourous Republic inevitably suffered by comparison with its Imperial predecessor. Not surprisingly, many Germans found themselves looking nostalgically back toward Imperial times when things had seemed simpler.
Hitler initially appealed to Germany’s traditionalists as the man who could halt the drift and decadence of the post-1918 Weimar Republic, in effect repealing its chaotic zeitgeist and returning the Reich to the kind of dispensation it had known under Kaiser Wilhelm II. Of course, Hitler and his Nazis did nothing of the sort. In fact, the National Socialists had only contempt for the Germany they had acquired. They had little regard, and less use, for Germany’s culture, science, and traditions.
Germany’s traditionalists took just a little too long to realize the faustian nature of their bargain with the Austrian immigrant they called the “Bohemian Corporal” behind his back. Germany’s ruling elites believed they could use the Bohemian Corporal to their own ends. In fact, they were had; their culture and upbringing had left them tragically unprepared for the methods of the Nazis, and in the end, Hitler used them as dupes and stooges to seize control of the German nation.
In the years that followed, Hitler led that German nation on a headlong retreat from everything that had for centuries been good, honorable, and praiseworthy in the Reich, into an evil darkness all the worse because, as Winston Churchill wrote in 1938, it was “covered with a veneer of scientific conveniences.”
In our own time, we have seen the honor of our own nation sullied by a similar retreat into a kind of atavistic darkness, made worse for being facilitated by scientific and technical conveniences vastly more advanced than those of Winston’s day.
If the Weimar time in Germany saw a conflict between those who believed the Republic was worth saving, and those who sought to repeal the Weimar dispensation and return Germany to the ways and thinking of the Empire, we in America have had our own “culture wars,” in which two opposing views have been meeting in deadly contention. On one side are those of us who believe that America is a better place because of the achievements of the Democratic administrations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. Opposing us is a militant, regressive tendency composed of those who would like to see America reaffirm in their fullest form the cultural, social, and economic dispensations of the Nineteenth Century. The ominous parallelism between their views and those of Hitler and his party ought, as George Orwell once opined, to frighten us worse than bombs.
A few examples make the case:
• Like the Nazis, who proclaimed that there was no such thing as pure science, only superior “German” science and false “Jewish” science, America’s militant far-rightists have waged all-out war on science education in our public schools. When I was a child, evolution was taught as a matter of course in the public schools. No longer. Now phony constructs such as “intelligent design” are being taught as stalking horses for the ultimate imposition of a Genesis-based creation narrative in the schools.
• America’s far-rightists continue to wage war on women, in the same way that Hitler sought to bind German womanhood in chains inscribed “kinder, küche, kirsche.” Anna Quindlen has rightly observed that the debate over reproductive choice has much less to do with women making choices about making babies than it does with women just making choices at all. In the end, the issue isn’t about abortion, it’s about whether women are entitled to first-class citizenship in the commonwealth. When bloviating blowhards like Rush Limbaugh can attempt to slut shame Georgetown University student Sandra Fluke for speaking in favor of access to contraception, we know that an effort is being made to undo generations of progress by and for women.
• America’s far-rightists have also been waging the same kind of war against queerfolk that Hitler’s Nazis did. Indeed, they’ve gone so far as a suggest an identity between the Nazis and us. If there is one great link between America in the latter half of the 20th Century and the first decades of the 21st and the Weimar Republic it has been that in both societies queerfolk were and have been able to live relatively actualized lives as out people. When the Nazis took over, they stopped that straightway, driving Germany’s queerfolk right back into the closet; in our own country, an increasingly strident tendency would deprive us of the civil rights gains we have fought so hard, and lost so many, to achieve for ourselves and for the queer youth who will follow us. When ultramontane Roman Catholic bishops thunder against marriage equality from their pulpits, and Republican Congresswomen like batcrap crazy Michelle Bachmann loudly defend anti-LGBT bullying in schools, the echoes are clear.
Germany’s traditionalists -and Germany at large- failed to see the danger of Hitler and his ideology until it was too late. By the time they turned to active opposition, they had been rendered ineffectual. “This is the country of Goethe, of Beethoven, of Schiller,” they used to say, justifying their inaction. “It can’t happen here.” Of course, it did, and the names of the camps echo down through history like a doleful litany: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Flossenburg, Treblinka, Sachsenhausen, Theresienstadt, Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen, Majdanek, and on and on, reproaching the complacent self-delusion of the Germans who let Hitler happen.
There are men and women in our country today who would happily repeat the horrors of the Third Reich, men and women who stand perilously close to the levers of power, who preach a doctrine antithetical to everything we hold dear, who want to lead us in headlong retreat from the ideals of our American Revolution. If Americans of goodwill on both sides of the aisle do not act to preserve our way of life -by not giving the far right and its supporters supporters a pass on anything- we shall soon find ourselves as powerless to act as those “good Germans” who found themselves saddled with a dictator.
As Americans of goodwill, we especially dare not fall into the traditional “moderate” trap -the “good German” trap- of believing that because this is the country of Washington, of Lincoln, of FDR and Jack Kennedy, it can’t happen here.
Yes, it can.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, where he served two terms as a member of the City Council. Among other things, he serves on the steering committee of the Desert Stonewall Democrats, and he believes that just possibly, Dietrich Boenhoffer may have been a saint, and was certainly a martyr and Passion-Bearer. The views expressed herein are his own. They are not intended as, and should not be construed as legal advice. This post is an updated revision and extension of a post originally written in the summer of 2005.
