Editor’s note: This commentary is by Jack Mayer, who is a Middlebury pediatrician and writer. As a speaker for the Vermont Humanities Council he gives presentations about Germany’s Weimar democracy and the rise of the Third Reich, the history that inspired his new historical fiction, “Before the Court of Heaven.” His previous book, “Life in a Jar: The Irenea Sendler Project,” is about the Warsaw ghetto.
[I] listen with anxiety as President Trump promises to “make America great again.” As a child of Holocaust survivors, this makes me nervous.
The Spanish writer George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” He enjoins us to recognize echoes of painful history and prevent its recurrence. Though history is cyclical, we can never anticipate how recurrence will manifest. It’s never identical.
It is our unfortunate nature to project evil onto others, as if we are not capable of it ourselves. We do so at our peril. Following World War I, the Third Reich rose to power as a malignancy within Germany’s Weimar democracy. Germany, the nation that brought us Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, also brought us Hitler and the Nazis. Weimar Germany was a constitutional democracy with the rule of law and free elections. In 1933, a plurality of Germans voted for the Nazi party and Hitler became chancellor through legal parliamentary processes.
German journalist and New York Times columnist Jochen Bittner noted four conditions that cleared the path for the fall of the Weimar democracy and the rise of the Third Reich – loss of trust in institutions, social humiliation, political blunder and economic distress. I would suggest, though not identical, these conditions exist again today.
No one of us can reverse this disturbing reverberation, but each one of us can do something, no matter how small, to promote decency, tolerance and respect for all people.
In a time of economic, cultural and political polarization, Hitler promised to “make Germany great again.” His appeal was based on fear, populism, xenophobia, nationalism, bigotry and scapegoating. He promised that an authoritarian, law and order regime would save Germany from decline at the hands of “the other.”
Hitler’s campaign utilized inaccurate historical analysis and outright lies. He demonized the press and developed a propaganda campaign of savage efficacy. Cheap radios, widely distributed, not unlike social media and Twitter, and skillfully exploited by Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, spread Nazi disinformation – “fake news.” Few could envision the horrific outcome.
But it wasn’t all Hitler. He was necessary, but not sufficient for the rise of Nazism. A plurality of Germans voted for Hitler and the Nazis. As a result of civil passivity and willful blindness, the German people, ordinary people no different than you and me, gave Hitler the reins of a dictatorship that would commit extraordinary crimes.
I’m a physician, a scientist. I believe in evidence and I do not subscribe to facile conspiracy theories. But after researching and writing a novel about Germany’s Weimar democracy and how it became the Nazi dictatorship, I hear echoes of this disturbing history. Sadly, my novel is a cautionary tale.
We hear an echo of Weimar today in our political discourse. No one of us can reverse this disturbing reverberation, but each one of us can do something, no matter how small, to promote decency, tolerance and respect for all people. We must understand this history as an immunization against recurrence.
Two thousand years ago, a Hebrew sage said, “It is not for us to finish the task, neither are we free to desist from it.”
