What to Expect When You’re Expecting Catastrophe

And What to Do. A guest essay by Laurie Winer

A guest essay by Laurie Winer.

It's as if the so-called shock and awe of that unholy duo—Donald Trump and Elon Musk—combined with loyalists like Kash Patel, Stephen Miller, Dan Bongino, Ed Martin, and many others, has rendered us, for the moment at least, unable to react.

Magical thinking is far from new. Adolf Hitler came to power amid similar lies and conspiracy theories. We should know where that leads. And, while MAGA may ignore the mountains of books written on fascism, the rest of us are not in the dark about what comes next.

As we brace for further actions from a cabinet catering to a serial fabulist, it is important to note that the president's abstruse nonsense is not random. It has a history. A history that takes us in only one direction, to catastrophe.

Here, then, are things to watch for, all warnings from the well-known story of the Third Reich.

Daily life will take on a surreal quality and, if we do not take some action or join an organized resistance, our discussions will consist of merely repeating the latest horror.

Sebastian Haffner, writing in 1939, noted that “life went on as before, though it had now become ghostly and unreal, and was daily mocked by the events that served as its background…. We were not equal to the situation, even as victims.” Then as now, “many adapt to living with clenched teeth. Unfortunately they form a majority of a visible 'opposition' in Germany. So it is no wonder that this opposition has never developed any goals, plans, or expectations. Most of its members spend their time bemoaning the atrocities. The dreadful things that are happening have become essential to their spiritual well-being. Their only remaining dark pleasure is to luxuriate in the description of gruesome deeds, and it is impossible to have a discussion with them on any other topic.”

People around you will forget that they once were anti-Trump.

Christopher Isherwood wrote of his Berlin landlady in 1933: “Already she is adapting herself, as she will adapt herself to every new regime. This morning I even heard her talking reverently about Der Furher to the porter’s wife. If anyone was to remind her that at the elections last November she voted Communist she would probably deny it hotly and in perfect good faith. She is merely acclimatizing herself in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which changes its coat for the winter.”

The administration will issue absurd denunciations of opponents whose expertise is needed.

Albert Einstein was in Pasadena on the day that Hitler became chancellor, and he never returned to the country of his birth, saying, “As long as I have any choice in the matter, I shall live only in a country where civil liberty, tolerance, and equality of all citizens before the law prevail.” The Nazis attacked him relentlessly in speeches and in news reports. In 1934 at the University of Heidelberg, Nobel Prize winning physicist Johannes Stark, said, “Jewish propaganda has tried to portray [Einstein] as the greatest scientist of all time. However, Einstein’s relativity theories were basically no more than an accumulation of artificial formulas based on arbitrary definitions.” In May 1933, Goebbels issued a brochure entitled “Jews Are Watching You (Juden Sehen Dich An)”, which accused Einstein of disseminating “lying atrocity propaganda against Adolf Hitler”. Under Einstein’s picture was the caption: “Not yet hanged (bis jetzt ungehaengt)”.

There will be parades and possibly mandatory public displays of support for the administration.

In July 2017, Trump went to France as Emmanual Macron’s special guest at an elaborate Bastille Day parade staged to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the American entrance into the First World War. As planes flew overhead and soldiers precision marched down the Champs- Élysées, Trump stood ramrod straight and saluted the French troops for more than a minute, while Macron merely nodded and smiled. Trump has rarely looked as fulfilled; he was clearly in his happy place. He returned from Paris determined to have a military parade of his own, “but better.” His generals did not agree. “I’d rather swallow acid,” Defense Secretary James Mattis, reportedly said. Eventually Trump got his parade, on July 4, 2019, which he called “The Salute to America.” Mattis was by then out, but attendance was mandatory for Trump’s new acting secretary of defense and new acting head of the joint chiefs of staff. The president hyped the event on Twitter, writing: “People are coming from far and wide to join us today and tonight for what is turning out to be one of the biggest celebrations in the history of our Country.”

A few months after Hitler secured power, all the streets in Berlin were sheathed with swastikas. “It was unwise not to display them” wrote Isherwood. A British journalist named Owen Tweedy wrote, “The election [of March 5] has completely altered Germany, both outwardly and inwardly, so much that it is hard to realize we are in the same country we entered a month ago. The Nazis are out-fascismising Fascismo.” Loud speakers blared out speeches by Goring and Goebbels. Like Trump, Hitler also fixated on crowd size. He described his Nuremberg rally as “the greatest mass meeting ever assembled.”

News sources will disappear or be radically altered.

As the White House kicks AP out of its press pool, and Jeff Bezos declares that Washington Post editorials will be in favor of “personal liberties and free markets”, it’s good to remember what Sebastian Haffner wrote about Hitler’s first year: “Many newspapers and magazine disappeared from the kiosks—but what happened to those that continued in circulation was even more disturbing. You could not recognize them anymore. In a way a newspaper is like an old friend; you instinctively know how it will react to certain events, what it will say about them and how it will express its views. If it suddenly says the opposite of what it said yesterday, denies its own past, distorting its features, you cannot avoid feeling that you are in a madhouse. That happened.”

At first The Munich Post, which had closely covered Hitler since the beer hall putsch in November 1923, continued its reporting, running headlines such as “Nazi Party Hands Dripping with Blood,” “Germany Under Hitler: Political Murder and Terror,” and “Outlaws and Murderers in Power.” On March 9, 1933, five weeks after Hitler became Chancellor and eleven days after the Reichstag fire, the SA gutted the newspaper’s offices while the police stood by. Its journalists went into hiding. At least one ended up in Dachau, others simply “disappeared.”

MAGA will continue to believe what the leader says up until the very brink of disaster.

In the summer of 1939, three months after Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, Robert Jamieson, a British English teacher living in Essen, wrote to Lord Londonderry, who had recently acted as a go-between British and Nazi leaders: “[The Germans] really believe that the Czech government had voluntarily sought Hitler’s protection and that they would all starve if they do not get this lebensraum and colonies.

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The debate about whether or not we should bring Hitler or Nazism or fascism into a contemporary political debate is obsolete. Now it is crucial that we take seriously the warnings gathered for us by survivors and writers. When you look at a photo of a Jew about to be arrested or shot and he or she is staring straight into the camera, remember that it is you they are looking at.

NOTES

Defying Hitler, Sebastian Haffner, 1939 (published in 2000).

Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood, 1939

Einstein in Berlin, Thomas Levenson, 2002.

The Man Who Stalked Einstein, Bruce J. Hillman, Briget Ertel-Wagner, Bernd C. Wagner, 2015.

The Guardian, January 24, 2017

Travellers in the Third Reich, Julia Boyd, 2017.

Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti, 1960.

“Against Normalization: The Lessons of the Munich Post”, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ron Rosenbaum, February 5, 2017.

“The Munich Post: Its Undiscovered Effects on Hitler,” Sara Twogood, 2002.

Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry, the Nazis and the Road to War, Ian Kershaw, 2004.

A long-time journalist, Laurie Winer is a founding editor of The Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical (Yale University Press). She now lives in France and is at work on a book called The Hitler Tour.