00:05:21.460They're interesting documents, but they're not as, like, informative as Klemper.
00:05:25.400like, here's the problems we're dealing with. And those guys are just like, I heard Hitler on the0.86
00:05:30.940radio and I wanted to throw up. And it's like, it's like their revulsion. As you say, their
00:05:35.680dignity harm is so visceral. Yeah. Klemper is great because he's so attentive in his diaries
00:05:40.800to the ongoing like political events, right. As well as the affective. But I, it strikes me that
00:05:46.840like one of the harms, maybe not the most immediate harm of an authoritarian regime is just like the0.99
00:05:53.060submission to being ruled over by idiots and by people who are very kind of open about their1.00
00:06:00.080contempt for you. Yeah. And I think there's already a secret theme emerging that I didn't1.00
00:06:04.940think about, which is contempt. We're going to end on contempt and on hatred today, which is great.
00:06:09.820Classic in bed with the right territory. Ending on contempt, folks. That's the in bed with the
00:06:13.920right promise. Yeah. So that's what we put on our T-shirts. Start with contempt. So, but one source
00:06:20.560for Klemperer's insecurity about, like, what am I even supposed to do on November 12th was about
00:06:25.180the fact that the Nazis had changed a lot of the legal structures and constitutional structures of
00:06:29.440the late Weimar Republic, but the election law was essentially unchanged, except that, like,
00:06:33.520no one believed that. So, right, like, they were running, essentially, a Weimar-style
00:06:39.280electoral campaign with the election law was essentially that of the last elections of the
00:06:44.580Weimar Republic. But it was like, well, I feel like there's another shoe about to drop, right?
00:06:50.560Right. And then that turned out to be true, of course. But everyone's like, I don't know. Like, clearly they're going to monkey with it. But like, in what way am I getting shot? Or is it just that they're like, can I like grab my right hand and make me make a check mark somewhere else? Like, what is this going to look like? Right. We know they're cheating, but how? Right.
00:07:06.540Right. The like constitutional skeleton of the Weimar regime is still there. There's still like these weird forms that are being fulfilled, but the like sort of popular sovereignty has been removed. Right. So there's like form without function or form without spirit.
00:07:22.780That's right. Partly because Parliament's gone, right? The Reichstag has dissolved itself. It is supposed to be a dictatorship. It's supposed to be a temporary one. So like, technically, these structures are all still somehow in place. But everyone's like, well, okay, right now feels like a moment when what technically exactly means really matters. And I'd like to know before I walk in there, as he says, make a martyr of myself. Like, is this do anything? Or like, would you guys be like, oh, shit, we lost, right? Or is it just like, I put a mark on my back for no fucking reason whatsoever.
00:07:52.780So one of the things Klemperer is worried about and presumably other Germans are worried about is like, look, if I don't vote the way the Nazis want me to vote, I might be risking violence.0.97
00:08:03.060Yeah. And there is some of that, right? So something about this election, and maybe political scientists who are listening can confirm or disconfirm this, is that I think it functions differently from the way Republicans in the MAGA world today seem to envision what American democracy will look like.
00:08:22.360in this respect, they're probably not looking to Germany in 1933, though they are probably
00:08:25.740looking to it in other ways, Gleichschaltung, for instance. But they're looking to competitive
00:08:31.180authoritarian regimes, these kind of hybrid regimes, Hungary under Viktor Orban or Putin
00:08:37.340in Russia, right? Yeah, Putin in Russia, like Modi's India to a certain extent. Orban in Hungary
00:08:43.960is the one that they really seem to envy, even though it's just like kind of a, it's not applicable
00:08:49.000here that Hungary is a tiny country entirely dependent on Germany for its economy.
00:08:54.900Orban is a pretty good example here with these kind of competitive authoritarian states.
00:08:59.300You can see that the rulers, they put their thumb on the scale when it comes to elections,
00:09:03.380but they are worried. Like every once in a while, someone rises in Turkey and Erdogan seems
00:09:08.140genuinely worried about that guy. Orban seems genuinely worried about this new figure rising,
00:09:13.700I think, in Hungarian politics, right?
00:09:42.040Of the conservatives, a lot of them are still there, but just kind of grumbling quietly.
00:09:46.900Their moment will come in 1934, I would say, when a lot of them end up on the business end of a SA revolver.
00:09:53.480But today, I think some of this has to do with how our thinking about authoritarianism has evolved.
00:09:58.520I think after World War II, political scientists, I think, used to look at authoritarian regimes as transitional, like they would eventually democratize.
00:10:07.620And this competitively authoritarian paradigm, I think, came about to start describing places that were way more democratic once upon a time and then backslide, right? That seems closer to what the Weimar Republic is experiencing here, but like no comparison, right?
00:10:22.720But the reason I'm bringing all this up is because political scientists tell us that like part of why competitively authoritarian regimes are worth studying is that even though unfair, an election can be this double-edged sword, right?
00:10:35.080Like, it can create this illusion of popular support, but it also provides an opposition with tools to kind of activate and reach masses.
00:10:46.060And it, importantly, provides elites who are maybe not fully aligned with the regime with a sort of junction point in which they can switch allegiances, right?
00:10:57.800And I think that is helpful to understand what the Nazis are trying to avoid here.
00:11:01.340The reason why these elections are so incredibly unfree and so incredibly unfair is that they are worried about both those things.
00:11:20.120And secondly, it's very important to them that like these elites that they've just sort of bonded to their cause don't get an opportunity to kind of like deviate or nuance or create some daylight or shift the trajectory of the regime in any way, right?
00:11:37.360So if elections present all these opportunities for the regime's consolidation of power to be threatened or eroded or undone, how do the Nazis arrange the election to guard against that possibility?0.64
00:11:52.240Yeah, so they in some way use it as an opportunity.0.85
00:11:55.160They turn the election into a referenda, into backward-looking reflections of a pre-established relationship, right, rather than a genuine decision point that would, you know, shape the country's future.
00:12:06.640They also made participation in the election into a repressive mechanism.
00:15:29.580Well, he was about as successful as the blimp.
00:15:32.080Both the blimp and the man really stuck the landing, if you know what I mean.
00:15:36.520But like Catholic priests who, after the Reichskonkordat that we discussed, I think in episode five or six, are now allowed to basically voice political opinions, advise their flock to vote yes on this.0.68
00:15:49.680Gotta love the Catholic priests voting for the war insurance plebiscite.0.65
00:15:54.960It's like, we will definitely go to war.0.93
00:15:57.280All of you will be sent directly to God.1.00
00:16:46.880So he finds out that one of his friends is going to vote yes and says, quote, I completely lost my temper, thumped the table with my fist and repeatedly bellowed at him.
00:16:54.380Whether he considered these rulers to his policy, he was assenting to be criminals or not.
00:17:11.240So he's basically saying, look, independent of your feelings about this issue, showing up to vote for it, obviously, will serve to identify the Nazi party and its course with this country.0.63
00:17:22.900Can you imagine where that will lead, right?0.60
00:17:25.120And history showed us exactly where that led.
00:18:14.620And they were voting badges to single out people who hadn't voted.
00:18:17.640So you get the I voted, but then like people would get sort of like accosted if they didn't wear one of those badges.
00:18:23.180You know, thinking about badges and Nazis, you're like, oh, this is this is where it starts.
00:18:28.160Right. In the event, Klemperer voted no on the withdrawal and against the Nazis.
00:18:33.320And Eva submitted an empty ballot in protest.
00:18:36.300What the Klemperers would not have known because of how the Nazis counted these things, Eva's ballot was almost certainly counted as a yes vote.0.99
00:19:30.660And so I think it becomes this kind of enforcement mechanism.0.98
00:19:33.440One interesting thing that this made me realize, which I never sort of thought about, notice that Klemperer, not Eva, is Jewish, meaning Jewish Germans were required to vote in this fucking thing.0.99
00:19:44.900Right. It's not that kind of Trump style. Oh, we're going to get rid of all the voters who are not aligned with our ethno-national racial project. No, they were still voting. They were supposed to vote. Yes.0.98
00:19:55.260They're making everybody get on board. Yeah. And Jewish Germans later have their citizenship taken away. But that's not true yet. Yeah, exactly. And so but like, I mean, there's already right. I mean, they can't be in civil service. They can't participate in parts of the economy.
00:20:08.020But they are compelled to give a thumbs up to their own. Right. Like repression. Yeah.
00:20:12.720I mean, like for Americans who I feel like are steeped to sort of Jim Crow understanding of how a racialized state functions, like that's so strange, right?
00:20:21.280Like the South was always about like not letting people vote.
00:20:25.340Here it's about like, oh, yeah, you should vote.
00:20:27.120We're just going to stand next to you with a bully club while you do it, right?
00:20:31.480Anyway, so the Nazis did keep statistics on these, and they're a little tricky.
00:20:37.160But the differences between regions are telling, and I do want to briefly delve into that.
00:20:42.160So here are the percentages of invalid ballots.
00:20:45.240That's to say ballots marked no, but not including empty ballots or empty envelopes, right?
00:20:51.760We don't know the numbers of this because they were counted as yeses.
00:20:55.260But basically, this is how Klemperer voted, right?
00:21:26.600What's being revealed by these numbers?
00:21:28.200Is it a difference between like urban and rural areas?
00:21:31.380What do they have in common in the places where proportionally more people are voting no?
00:21:36.100So one thing that really jumps out is the urban-rural divide.
00:21:39.980East Prussia is by far the most rural part of the Third Reich.
00:21:43.180It is also the one where, remember, the Nazis had really done a lot of work to goose kind of employment schemes.
00:21:49.280So it was probably a much more thoroughly integrated society.
00:21:52.380Like people like the Nazis were just everywhere.
00:21:55.060Some of this might mean that the farmers really tacked to the right, which we've seen across 1933.
00:22:00.540Some of this might also be that it's easier to surveil people in rural areas, right?
00:22:05.340Like, oh, the village teacher hasn't voted yet.
00:22:07.660Let's make the village teacher vote, right?0.99
00:22:09.460Whereas if you have 16% of people in Hamburg being like, fuck this, like they probably knew each other.0.99
00:22:14.260They probably went in as a group and were like, look, if they want to beat us up, they can.1.00
00:22:17.120But like, we're going to vote no on this shit.0.99
00:22:19.040So there's a little bit of anonymity that people can use.0.99
00:22:21.380But it's also the Nazis still did poorly where there were large, homogeneous groups opposed to them, above all ethnic minorities.
00:22:29.700For instance, the Danes in northern Schleswig-Holstein and large working class neighborhoods, above all in urban areas, right?
00:22:36.360So people probably realize that, but it's worth saying that, like, it's not that Hitler somehow persuaded people. The fact that 70% of voters in Hamburg are just like, fuck you, right, at considerable risk, like, suggests that, like, you know, that there is enduring leeriness over the Nazi project.0.91
00:22:52.420So whatever is going to happen to bring these people over eventually to the war effort and to the rearmament effort and to the fascization of German society is still in the future to some extent, right?0.98
00:23:03.240Clearly, the Nazis still understand there being an independent, popular will that's distinct from the will of the state and which has something of a capacity to constrain the will of the state, right?
00:23:14.300Yeah, or these people at least think they have that, right? It's almost this dead man walking. It's a zombie, right? It's kind of, they're asserting something that has no more import on what sovereignty looks like, but they're asserting it anyway, just because they don't consider what is happening in the country legitimate, right?
00:23:31.800If you look at the same results for the same areas for the plebiscite, it's simpler, right?
00:24:24.000Yeah, I was what, like, 96.6% turnout in Dresden.
00:24:31.420I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's high.
00:24:33.680Yeah, Weimar election turnouts were really robust by modern standards, but these numbers are fishy as hell.
00:24:39.920The July 1932 election, super important, super contested, had a turnout of 84.1%.
00:24:45.280The ones in November 1932 had one of 80.6%.
00:24:49.120So it makes more sense to me that there would be a high turnout for a election where popular will could influence the outcome, where there are actual stakes and where like maybe it's going to be close.
00:25:02.600This election doesn't seem like, you know, aside from the threat of violence, it doesn't seem like there's that much of a motivation to come out.
00:25:09.160Yeah. Essentially, the turnout really becomes sort of a propaganda coup for the Nazis.0.76
00:25:13.640In East Prussia, the no vote on the plebiscite about the League of Nations and rearmament talks stood at 1%.0.67
00:25:20.640You don't get that kind of number unless either SA or your neighbors are watching what you're doing.
00:25:38.820But, so like, it's essentially a celebration of sort of the repressive capabilities of the Nazi state, but also of a civil society, is my guess.
00:25:48.460Like the neighbors surveilling neighbors, turning each other in, pressuring each other.
00:25:53.060And it's also a test run for the media.
00:27:24.900And then you use the fact that you're basically driving people to the ballot box to sort of say, like, yes, there's a great enthusiasm, right?
00:27:33.000My read on this is that Goebbels and Hitler were still smarting from the actual results of the last sort of semi-free and fair election that they had in March of 1933, where they fell well below 50%, right?
00:27:45.140So this is also like kind of self-soothing.0.53
00:27:47.720They're like, we're going to have the election that we wanted to have all along, where everyone says, you guys are awesome, you know?
00:27:53.800And Klemperer experiences the election as, as you say, a dignity harm, but he really hates.
00:27:59.800He finds the election campaign even worse because it involves his students, right?
00:28:03.460He's like, my students can barely, he has like very few at this point, but the few he has, he's like this, they're just constantly taken up with election propaganda.
00:29:44.460It's also this incredible visual, just like presence in everyone's life.
00:29:49.140And that's, I think, how the Nazis conceives of this.
00:29:50.960Really, Election Day is almost an afterthought to the campaign leading up to it.0.53
00:29:55.580So part of it is like the exercise of the propaganda itself is both a demonstration of the new regime's power and a way to enact that power and conscript all these people through threats of violence, through, you know, pressure,
00:30:13.280through presumably some degree of genuine enthusiasm
00:30:27.420Elections are, as we sort of suggested at the beginning,
00:30:30.520moments where various elites and groups
00:30:34.080get to sort of chime in and say their peace, right?
00:30:36.820Whether it's a union, some intellectuals,
00:30:39.500it's institutions, et cetera, et cetera.
00:30:41.260When Hitler's propaganda says one people, one Führer, one yes, the whole point is like there is no more institutional intercessionary kind of structure between me and the people.
00:30:51.720Klemperer reports Hitler's speech after the election quote-unquote victory, right, and he says, content, I know no intellectuals, bourgeois, proletarians, only the people, right?
00:31:01.020You know, the whole idea is like any kind of pluralism is division, is dissent, is disharmony.0.55
00:32:07.180Who is saying an untruth for cynical reasons consciously in an effort to deceive and who is saying an untruth because they have been indoctrinated or because they no longer have a grasp on reality is like a question.
00:33:45.380There's a lot of smoke and mirrors, lots of sound and fury.
00:33:48.560But like in the end, like with any good ritual, the end is preordained.
00:33:54.160Well, they've kept all of the sort of symbolic, like quasi-spiritual function of an election, but disposed of like the actual material outcome, right?
00:34:05.320Like, you can't use an election to change who is in power anymore, but you can use an election to mark yourself as a participant in the state to sort of try and express the spirit of the people.
00:34:20.780You know, the sort of patriotic purchase an election has is here made kind of independent of its actual democratic functioning.
00:34:46.140But of course, you're doing your civic duty, but you also have the incredible privilege of getting to shape the world around you.
00:34:55.640And as you say, like, this is the duty without any of the risk to those in power that might come with that.
00:35:03.640I mean, I will say, like, there's a—it's not that they're not trying to rig the election, right?
00:35:09.160It's like this gerrymandering effort is functionally like about making elections non-competitive, in which case it doesn't matter if large numbers of opposition voters turn out because the outcome has been preordained by MAPS, right?
00:35:29.400So there is an effort to like retain the form of elections, but to mute their function.
00:35:35.640That's also something that does happen here.
00:35:37.700At the same time, I do think if there are listeners who study competitive authoritarianism, they would probably push back and say, even a rigged election can with its result, even if the party in power is obviously going to return to power, can really signal something, right?
00:35:53.480If an authoritarian suddenly really craters in the polls, but because he's gerrymandered everything, is returned to power, people can look at those results and say like, well, gee, I wasn't going to risk my height running against this guy, but he seems weak.
00:36:09.360It is a moment when an elite might say like, this guy seems epically unpopular.
00:36:13.820If he has to fake it to get to like 55%, like we might switch allegiances.
00:36:17.480I think that's what political scientists would point out, that, like, there is a risk in elections that are still semi-free and semi-fair.
00:36:25.380Well, in like for many years in places like Wisconsin and North Carolina, the state houses were gerrymandered so badly that, you know, Republicans would win even though Democrats won like a majority of votes.
00:36:41.020Democratic senators represent something like two-thirds of the vote or the number of votes cast in Senate races, but they cannot get more than, say, 51 seats in the absolute best year, you know?
00:37:00.120No, I think it's only within authoritarian states that this does actually matter.
00:37:03.780I mean, Moira, are you saying that the citizens of Wyoming don't deserve exactly the same number of senators as, you know, the entire city of San Francisco?
00:37:12.040Because we have the same population, you know.
00:37:13.820We're actually a little bigger than Wyoming.
00:37:15.660I mean, I don't—our one listener in Wyoming, I don't want her coming for us.0.98
00:37:19.860She should get back on her horse and ride into the sunset.0.99
00:39:37.000So, he's sort of compatible, right?0.79
00:39:39.760And then the other thing that I think is worth pointing out,
00:39:42.000the other reason I think he's thinking about leaving Switzerland
00:39:44.280is that people sort of keep coming up to him with vaguely pro-Nazi positions.
00:39:49.740So, he says that in the Neuzio, which is still Switzerland's most well-known,
00:39:55.540regarded liberal newspaper although i wrote an entire book about how they no longer really deserve
00:39:59.920the label of liberal if you'd read german but he says that there's an editorial by a german
00:40:04.740correspondent about the quote-unquote election that the swiss should be ashamed of right so like
00:40:09.000they're like oh look at all this unity over there in germany with the kind of subtext of like hey
00:40:13.800shouldn't we maybe do this too or isn't there something to this the same way that like now
00:40:19.000european newspaper writers like seem to need to look at trump and be like but you gotta hand it
00:40:24.520to him on this, or like, well, he's getting rid of wokeness, right, and all this stuff.
00:40:27.660It's like, this is exactly happening in especially the German-speaking world.
00:40:32.000Yeah, there's something about like the European gaze on America where it's like rubbernecking,0.80
00:40:37.860you know, they both sort of gawk at the vulgarity of the American right and also try to kind
00:40:44.900of launder it into a more polite form because it reflects so many of their own impulses.
00:40:49.580Like, America serves a very particular function in the European imagination as a way for them to, like, both indulge and disavow their own worst impulses.
00:41:23.980There are these elements in other countries
00:41:25.480and they're kind of looking at Germany
00:41:26.980and they're kind of liking what they see.
00:41:29.660And what's really interesting is that like
00:41:31.700Mann sort of keeps getting the stuff to have passed.
00:41:34.500Like he's now for the first time really settling down.
00:41:36.820He's reading German language newspapers
00:41:38.620outside of Germany for the first time.
00:41:41.040He's reading the NZZ, the Neuzurische Zeitung,
00:41:43.860which comes out of Zurich, pretty much daily.0.99
00:41:46.340And he's like, oh shit, these people are ready to, it's like some of these people are ready to capitulate, right?0.93
00:41:51.500Two of his professor friends who sort of like put him on a lecture tour, give him this book, Das Geistige Reich, The Spiritual Realm, quote, which I read at length last night.0.99
00:41:59.980He's a Swiss man with average thoughts and quite professorially glorifies national socialism without sense, insider feeling for its reality, the hideousness of its intellectual and moral level, the lies, the intellectual dishonor.
00:42:12.700So he's like, look, if I got to read that, I might as well be at home in Munich, right?0.97
00:42:16.540Like, I don't need to move to the fucking mountains for this.0.87
00:42:20.420If everybody around you is starting to capitulate to Nazi ideology anyway, the utility of having emigrated and exiled yourself is probably starting to seem, you know, kind of limited, right?0.98
00:42:37.580And I think that's the sense that a lot of them are getting, that, like, there's a lot of sort of anti-boycott kind of discourse, both in the United States and in Europe, right?
00:42:46.260This idea that, like, we have to normalize.
00:42:49.040We have to come to terms with Germany, and Germany at this point is identical with the Nazi state, right?1.00
00:42:54.980And all the emigres are like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.1.00
00:43:00.400Sure, they may have voted for this shit 92% allegedly, but I need you to not pay attention to that.0.99
00:43:06.640I don't need you to not credit that, right?0.99
00:43:09.200Yeah, the Thomas Mann we've also seen, and to a lesser extent in Klemper, but really in Thomas Mann, like the idealized other Germany, right?
00:43:17.300The better Germany, trying to preserve it.
00:43:19.880It reminds me a little bit of American liberals going like, this is not who we are.
00:43:23.480It's like, well, this is also who we are.
00:43:25.500You have an effort and a desire to preserve this different American ideal, and that desire might be noble, but it also involves a certain disavowal of reality.
00:43:35.600I mean, that is, I don't know if this is apocryphal, but I think around the conspirators of July 20th, 1944, the generals' coup where they tried to assassinate Hitler, the phrase, the world must know we were not all like him.
00:43:49.540Oh, I don't really buy that from German generals in 1944.
00:43:53.960But these people get there in, you know, in 1933.
00:43:56.800They're like, yeah, they're torn between two things, right?
00:43:58.900They're trying to say, on the one hand, there's something about Germany that allowed for this to happen, right?0.68
00:44:04.000There's something that's wrong here, but it is also important that it's not fated, that the Germans aren't necessarily like this.0.75
00:44:11.960There are still decision points here, right?
00:44:15.560Thomas Mann's brother, Heinrich, will write, also in November,
00:44:19.720the saddest thing about the contemporary history of Germany is that it could have turned out entirely differently.
00:44:27.040This is not where Germany was going to end up anyway.
00:44:29.740Like there were choices being made here and people are morally responsible for them, right?1.00
00:44:34.700It's not, Germans are always bad, right?0.58
00:44:37.080It's important for them to recover this kind of Germany because they think otherwise, like you're just, you're giving in to the Nazi identification of their own state with the German people, which is indeed what ends up happening, right?
00:44:49.700The question of collective guilt raises itself because of that.
00:44:53.400Speaking of Heinrich, well, Mann is sort of contemplating maybe going back, like what's the difference?
00:44:58.840He winds up not considering it for very long.
00:45:01.920Part of it is that his brother, who, remember, has already had his books burnt.
00:45:05.920He was the president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and he was thrown out of that.
00:45:11.760He's living in Paris, I believe, at this point.
00:45:14.120And he sort of gets in on the other big trend of late 1933 among German immigrant intellectuals,
00:45:19.580which is like, you make the final break.
00:45:22.180You light the torch, you walk up to the building, and you're like, all right, here goes nothing.
00:45:28.800So he writes a book called The Hass.0.91
00:45:32.120It's first published in French as La En, so Hatred, with Gallimard.0.60
00:45:37.900And then it comes out in German almost immediately, a couple of days later, with Querido.
00:45:43.100So the new publishing house that exiles have built up together with a Dutch publisher in Amsterdam.
00:45:49.140And he basically wants this out there very quickly.
00:45:51.080It's an interventionist book, and it's brutal.
00:45:53.840It's basically like ensuring that if they ever catch him, like that's it.
00:45:58.320So that's the other thing that people do, which is really, really kind of interesting.
00:46:01.980And it's an interesting reflection on hatred.
00:46:23.680So he's saying, like, there is this kind of hatred that I didn't know my neighbors were capable of, of Jews, of LGBT people, of socialists, of intellectuals, etc., etc. And then there is this hatred that I feel about them. He says, like, you know, in a democracy, there is, in the end, a kind of commonality that you sense, even with people who you feel or disagree with.
00:46:46.800And he's like, I think I have to let go of that.
00:46:49.860Like, I think they have let go of it, and I think I have to as well, right?
00:47:09.000I'm sure they're not doing it, and I don't think I can do it either, right?
00:47:11.940And he sort of traces the end of the Weimar Republic in a way that I think is really kind of interesting for 2025 United States to the inability of elites to really counter the dehumanization that came along with Nazi hatred, right?
00:47:27.980It's always like you always were trying to understand this within the ambit of Republican exchanges of opinion and ideas, when in fact what it was, was just in Kuwait screaming at you, right?
00:47:41.760Like your mistake was mistaking for an opinion what was a threat, what was an assault, right?0.59
00:47:48.660Yeah, I think this might go back to our point that we made at the top of the show about dignity harm, right?
00:47:53.420Like, living under authoritarianism compels a kind of moral degradation even among opponents of authoritarianism, right?
00:48:03.240Like, I think we dealt with this in the U.S. a lot in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination, right?
00:48:09.120You don't want to be a person who can feel relief at violence.
00:48:15.020But living under an authoritarian regime, even one that's not as successfully consolidated as the Nazis were by this point in 1933, can create the conditions that make you feel that way.
00:48:27.300I think that's something that people resist for reasons that I empathize with, but which also might not be a full reckoning with the reality of their time.
00:48:38.180Yeah, exactly. The point that he makes in this essay called Unhatred or Unhate is that even the Nazis had to get themselves to this point, right? He says, in truth, there are within the party which vanquished Germany two classes of people.
00:48:53.480They are the animals, and they are the apostates from civilization, who had to force themselves to return to barbarism once more.0.56
00:49:00.360But he adds, it is to be expected that the second kind of hatred will go further than the first, because the first doesn't have to prove to itself its own bestial nature.
00:49:09.600He's making a comparison to a man like Goebbels, right?
00:49:13.500This guy fancied himself an intellectual, he lets go of all this for this kind of overly emotional, racially dominated fellow feeling with people who have nothing in common with him, right?
00:49:24.580He says, demanding the heads of Jews, intellectuals, and Marxists year after year, every day, wasn't that hard for a man like Göring, who is close to an animal anyway, an animal with some mysticism.0.66
00:49:35.580The great Hitler, too, likely didn't encounter any resistance from any conscience when he undertook to become the high priest of hatred, right?0.63
00:49:42.700But he's like, Goebbels has to force himself.0.87
00:49:45.360And that's what makes him so dangerous.
00:50:18.840And I think that's so key because, like, people at the end of 1933 will often sort of reach for almost biblical or kind of religious language.
00:50:28.460And, like, these are fire and brimstone kind of sermons, right?
00:50:31.840You remember Judith Kerr, the little girl we've been following a little bit?
00:50:35.560So she's settled down a little bit, and her father, Alfred Kerr, ends up writing an article about someone we've already mentioned briefly, the dramatist Gerhard Hauptmann, who had decided to basically join the Nazi cause.
00:50:48.960This is another one of these sort of kiss-off texts.
00:50:51.560It's called Gerhard Hauptmann's Shame, but it's basically he's just cursing his name.
00:50:55.500At the end, he says, so Hauptmann has sort of reached out to the Nazis and sort of tried to be part of their celebrations around Horst Wesse.
00:51:01.920And this is how Alfred Kerr ends his little Philippic here.
00:51:50.000He's just like, you do not argue with these people.
00:51:52.880You do not find a better argument to snap them out of this.
00:51:55.540You have to be like, explain this to the grandchild you can imagine, right, having one day.
00:52:01.260You know, as a grandchild of someone alive in 1933 and going along with it all, I can tell you, like, he was onto something.
00:52:09.040Their descendants' love for them was always tinged with the fact that, like, we knew that they had done this, that they had participated in this.
00:52:15.780And yeah, if that is not the future you envision for yourself, get busy.
00:52:21.140I do think about this all the time with Trump supporters and collaborators of how their descendants will either confront with great shame or try to obscure them from their family histories, right?
00:52:37.140Like you see this happening with people who are descended from slave owners.
00:52:40.160You see it happening with people who are descended from Nazis.
00:53:08.780Right? It ends with us. It's really quite striking.
00:53:11.720And I think at the same time, I mean, as someone who studies sort of how people avoid these kind of reckonings, and I mean, you do too, the sad thing is like the moral failure in calling out earlier accommodations, transgressions, of course, enables the next wave because like people know that there is no reckoning coming, right?
00:53:31.560The fact that slave owners got to be integrated into post-war American society and that the people who were spitting at integrated lunch counters and got to go back to their subdivision, you know, without a care in the world.
00:53:43.980Like the fact that like the people who talked the United States into murdering, you know, hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East.0.54
00:53:51.280got to die in their beds. Yeah, no, I think punishment, social rejection,
00:53:57.140like mass pilloring of those responsible for great injustice and violence, these are actually
00:54:03.720noble causes, right? We live in an era where a lot of people are, I think, fairly or understandably
00:54:10.120wary of punishment. But punishment has a purgative function. It is socially expressive. It delineates
00:54:18.980what we will accept and what we will not.
00:55:46.660Because in the end, we will have people in our lives who participated in this.
00:55:51.380And the question was like, what do our forebears have to teach us about when to extend a generous hand and when to say like, no, this is it.
00:55:58.820You made your decisions and now you inhabit the world that those decisions have created for you.
00:56:04.900So I think it'll be fun to delve into that.
00:56:06.660But for now, I'm still really excited about our December episode, which I will likely be recording from Munich if our production schedule works out.
00:56:14.580We should probably also ask people to rate and review us on iTunes and sign up for our Patreon.