When I first started teaching high school I was struck by how skilled my students were at using Hitler analogies to make a point. It turns out that someone named Goodwin noticed a similar tendency in online discussions and invented a term for it, which he named after himself. Hitler is a pathetic way to make an argument. It's an impulse that leads to things like mustachioed pictures of Obama or Trump and should be avoided by all intelligent, fair-minded people, even in 9th grade.
As I begin my fourth sabbatical, however, I must confess that I have a tendency to succumb to my own personal corollary to Goodwin's Law:
"As I devote more time to reading, the probability of picking up a book on Germany between the wars approaches 1."
This sabbatical it was Richard Evans' The Coming of the Third Reich. As it happens, my daughter was watching "Babylon Berlin," so I also ended up re-watched seasons 1-3 with her, and now we are into the new season 4.
Watching that show about 1920s Berlin after reading Evans helped me make more sense of the complicated plot of the series. And it made what I'd read in Evans about that period come alive.
I found an encyclopedic fan website (historica.fandom.com) that explains the plot, the characters, and the background. I highly recommend this series, and if you do tune in, the website helps to make sense of the complicated characters and plot. Also, TVTropes.org has BB character summaries—don't click on the white redactions; they are spoilers. There are a few real characters mixed into the plot and the fan site doesn't clearly distinguish between them, so it's good to use Wikipedia to separate truth from fiction.
It's satisfying to be watching a TV show and suddenly notice a character you've just read about in a history book. Gustav Stresseman, the Wiemar foreign minister, appears a couple of times, winning the Nobel Peace Prize and surviving an assassination attempt. (The show's protagonist, Gereon Rath, saves him from a fictional plot in 1929—the real attempt happened in 1925.) Evans wrote that Stresseman was the Weimar Republic's "most skilled, most subtle and most realistic politician." He was a monarchist, but he was willing to participate in democratic politics and he was able to build a bridge between the anti-democratic nationalists and the Social Democrats. His death in 1929, coinciding with the crash of the US stock market, made the rise of the Nazis more likely. Those two events are the hinge between seasons 3 and 4.
The film also reinforces the most significant impression I took away from the book, Evans' case for contingency. In the film, we don't know how things will turn out and the good guys are determined, smart, and effective. They face many obstacles, but they have a way of defeating the villains. Evans also tells us that the rise of a viciously racist fascist regime in Germany leading to World War and Holocaust was not the inevitable fruit of German history and culture and the politics of Weimar, which has been a common assumption of most post-war writing about the rise of German antisemitic fascism. In fact, just before the market crash triggered the depression, he writes, Germany's experiment in democracy "seemed to have weathered the storms of the early 1920s" and was entering "calmer waters. It would need a catastrophe of major dimensions if an extremist party like the Nazis was to gain mass support" (230). After the stock prices crashed, German unemployment rose from 4.5% to 24%.
Before 1914 Evans claims, if you had to predict which European country would have created the Holocaust, it would have been France, not Germany. The film does portray lots of antisemitism in the Wiemar period, but it was by no means universal. Jewish characters hold important positions and are respected and admired by the film's protagonists. Nor was the persecution of homosexuals an inevitable product of German culture. The film's depictions reflect the fact that Berlin was the most tolerant city for gay culture in Europe during the 1920s.
I've been repeatedly drawn to this history because of what Germany's failed experiment in republican government tells us about the vulnerabilities of democracy in the face of a version of right-wing populism with certain parallels to the present. The idea that democracy is fragile has become painfully obvious in the 21st century and historians like Jason Stanley and Timothy Snyder have been showing us scary parallels between the Nazis and Trump since at least 2016.
In a parallel that was hard to ignore, Evans begins his chapter on "Culture War," saying that Germans in the 20s "suffered from an excess of political engagement and political commitment . . . no area of society or politics was immune from politicization" (392-395). In recent years, Americans have politicize personal identity, pregnancy, school libraries, and even Thanksgiving dinners. As my new favorite political thinker writes, "the attempt to politicize everything is the destruction of politics" (Crick, 151).
And yet, Evans' point about contingency is well taken. The differences between America today and Germany in 1929 could not be greater. Our democracy is not new and was not imposed on us by hated conquering foreigners. The US Constitution has deeply ingrained roots and its principles are baked into civic culture. We don't have a violent revolutionary leftist movement like the German Communist Party, loyal to a foreign enemy nation and dedicated to overthrowing the system—Antifa notwithstanding. We aren't suffering in the aftermath of defeat in a war that wiped out 2.7 millions countrymen, paying reparations to our subjugators. And even if the Fed fails to avoid a recession, it is unlikely that we will end up with 24% unemployment.
In short, Weimar Germany is not a road map of our future, and Trump is a bad guy in his own unique way. Don't draw a mustache on him.
Source: Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics.
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