00:00:09.680And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.0.64
00:00:13.760So Adrienne, today we are returning to our Project 1933, following the Nazis' first year in power, month by month.0.80
00:00:23.500We have done now five of these. This is our sixth.0.64
00:00:27.240We are going to do 10 in total. And that means that we are about halfway through, a little more than halfway through the first year of the Nazis' rise to power. And I wonder what you're thinking as we reflect back on, you know, the seven months before this.
00:00:44.680Yeah, it's an interesting month to reflect on because, you know, we've been trying to draw on various accounts from people who were there and who experienced the Nazis' rise to power from different vantage points.
00:00:58.960But there are some people that we found it easier to check in with others.
00:01:02.240And some of that is just an effect of what they left behind, right?
00:01:05.940Like, did they have time to write in their diary or were they just running around being, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God.
00:01:10.860Did they have to flee later on and maybe their diary didn't survive?
00:01:14.680right? So we've found these people almost by default that can sort of walk us through it.
00:01:20.420And we'll see that they spend August 1933 as kind of a moment of reflection. We've been through half
00:01:27.000a year of this. They've been through half a year of the real thing when it comes to 1933. We've
00:01:31.440obviously been through 2025, which, you know, TBD, how people podcast about that in a couple of
00:01:37.460decades. But it's sort of a moment when things grind to a halt and when people have to reflect
00:02:50.880And then for a while it was the Scaramucci was like a unit of time in which like chaos could emerge and then resolve itself in the Trump White House.
00:03:03.200It was a marker of the acceleration of history a little bit.
00:03:07.480Yeah. And that was an August kind of phenomenon. And like, it was just like part of, I think, why people were able to pay attention to the bizarre speed with which all that happened was that I think a lot of us were on car radios still, right? Like we were driving to the lake to take a swim. Scaramucci again? Then we'd be driving to Wendy's to pick up some food. Scaramucci's on the radio again, like with another weird thing. And then you're driving back from the lake and you hear, oh my God, he got fired.
00:04:23.780Adrian and I, like, I think it does wind up being a pretty authentic conversation, but we do write scripts that are, like, pretty loose for how we are going to structure each episode.
00:04:34.860And then, you know, when it's my episode, I'll write one and send it to Adrian, and when it's his episode, he'll write it and send it to me.
00:04:41.200And the other one can, like, punch in stuff that we want to make sure we get to, et cetera.
00:04:45.500And Adrian just straight up did not send me a script.
00:04:53.280It's an embarrassing reference now, but I am also like the feeling that comes to mind for me when I think about my anticipation for new 1933 episodes is like when I was a kid and there was a new Harry Potter book and you would go to the bookstore at like midnight with the other nerdy children.
00:05:08.260a sentiment that has aged like milk right but like that kind of like giddy it's coming
00:05:15.300and i can't wait to have the pleasure of being consumed by this reading experience is something
00:05:22.080i often feel with adrian's work and i am so deprived now but um i'm gonna have a experience
00:05:30.000like the listeners do yeah hopefully because i really don't know what's coming yeah so be prepared
00:05:35.160to be a little bit mystified at first.
00:05:37.420I'm actually kind of glad you didn't read it.
00:06:04.380Well, I mean, the other thing is we're following white guys in their mid-50s in a time when I think you still sort of wore suits a lot.
00:06:13.340Like, these are people who are not made for hot weather.0.75
00:06:16.220In Dresden, where Victor Klemper is riding, the weather appears to be sweltering.
00:06:20.880And Thomas Mann is at the Côte d'Azur in southern France, where the weather is sort of always wrong.
00:06:26.020Like, he'll go through these long lists of, like, what's happening in Germany or, like, you know, his worries about the future.
00:06:31.540But he starts out every single diary entry complaining about the weather.
00:06:35.480It's either too hot or muggy or there's the mistral winds, which I think are like inland winds that sort of make swimming difficult, which are, I think, actually cold.
00:06:45.340I'm always saying that it sucks to be at the Cote d'Azur.
00:06:48.120You know, it's just, it's really, poor Thomas Mann.
00:06:52.220Even as these guys' world is collapsing, right?
00:06:55.260Thomas Mann at this point is in exile.
00:06:58.760He's like, I can't really go back to Germany.0.55
00:07:01.540And Viktor Klemperer is a guy who is, you know, watching all of his colleagues do the Hitler salute and is worried correctly, I think, that he's like going to get fired for being Jewish at a time when a lot of other, you know, his Jewish colleagues in the universities have already been fired.0.98
00:07:19.200And yet they're still like, oh, my God, it's so fucking hot.0.97
00:07:27.060And that's going to be the theme for this episode.
00:07:28.700And it's hopefully something that our listeners will be noticing about their own experience of 2025 as well, that like life does go on and like the little stuff does go on and schvitzing is still schvitzing, right, even under fascism.
00:07:40.480We're not going to talk about the weather, but we're going to talk about the little stuff, right?
00:07:43.540What Hegel called the lazy existence or idle existence, the stuff that just sort of happens and seems to have nothing to do with significant historical developments in the world, right?
00:07:54.060But of course, we're going to find that the seemingly marginal and quotidian stuff tells its own story about this historic moment.
00:08:02.540This is an episode about the small things, small grievances, petty annoyances, the things that people read, the little conversations in between, the big stuff, summer things, basically.
00:08:15.040And it's about a question that Victor Klemper asks in his diary in mid-August.
00:08:19.740One simply has to get through this time with decency.
00:08:22.340Yeah, there's this, like, persistence of little human preoccupations, like, I don't know, narcissism, comfort, amusement, sociality, self-regard.
00:08:37.040Like, a lot of daily life the Nazis haven't totally interjected themselves into yet.0.66
00:08:42.020Like, Viktor Klemper sees his colleagues doing the Hitler salute, but he probably still has pretty cordial relationships with a lot of them.0.61
00:08:48.720Right. And then there's a lot of people who's, I was thinking about this recently, like with the new Trump administration, there's a lot of people whose daily lives hasn't really changed much. Right.
00:08:59.860And a lot of this world historical political stuff, the impacts that are being made manifest from the transition from one kind of regime to another is sort of at the margins of a lot of people's daily lives.
00:09:17.680So it's interesting to see this contrast and the persistence of banal quotidian human experience against the backdrop of like some pretty horrific history.
00:09:29.380That's right. Let me just read one paragraph that I think kind of gets at this from Klemperer.
00:09:33.820I write at length about pleasures. They are the exception, and in general our life proceeds very
00:09:38.460unhappily. Eva is forever ailing and seriously depressed. I myself am constantly plagued by
00:09:43.440heart and eye trouble, and there is the constant pointless tyranny, uncertainty, and dishonorableness
00:09:48.360of our position in the Third Reich. My hopes of a swift about-face are fading, the streets crowded
00:09:53.660with SA, the Nuremberg Party rally has been raging, the press worships Hitler like God and
00:09:58.500the prophets rolled into one. On top of that, no change in the continuing pressure of the misery0.71
00:10:38.240And like, she's all pent up and probably doesn't have much to do.
00:10:41.880And there is something to this where I've been thinking a lot about how in a moment of like great indignity, right?
00:10:49.020There's something about our historical moment as well that imposes a lot of just like, like just national humiliation, right?
00:10:55.520Like it is humiliating to be an American.
00:10:58.020It is humiliating to be like kind of a left liberal American who has lost to these people.
00:11:02.560It is humiliating to see, you know, my own intellectual and moral failures in this moment.
00:11:09.460And the only place I have dignity, really, is in my private life, right?
00:11:13.940Like the daily adherence to routine and principle and comfort and pleasure.
00:11:20.000Like that's a place that stands in a lot of contrast, but it's also a place that can provide a kind of shelter.
00:11:25.020It's true. I also think that we know from our own lives how these things can be connected, right?
00:11:30.860Like, he doesn't say our health is getting worse because of the Nazis, but, like, these indignities can and do impinge on your most creaturely, like, I know people who can't sleep because of what the government is doing, right?
00:11:44.600Like, I'm sure that, like, no one that we're going to be talking about today is sleeping like a baby in 1933 either.
00:11:50.480The indignity, it ratchets up ailments.0.56
00:11:52.540But also, of course, you experience a kind of global indignity of Nazi rule in 1933, but these people are also discovering it in like the dumbest little things, right? We're going to talk about the remodel that he's trying to do. I think he's actually trying to build a new house. And it's just like he understands he's not doing it on a level playing field anymore. And like building a house is probably pretty nerve wracking business to begin with. But it's much worse if you're like, oh, everything is like basically stacked against me, right?0.80
00:12:20.620The thing I would most compare it to is the Jim Crow South, right, where just like the effort of being a black person there, the toll it took on a daily basis was just considerable.
00:12:31.740And basically everything else that just is part of living in a society was on top of that.
00:12:35.600I know what you mean, right? There are ways in which an inferior social status that is ascribed to you because of, you know, a group identity that you didn't choose or don't find anything wrong with accrues, right?
00:12:50.620Like the way silt deposited by a river will like eventually build up into like a levee, right?
00:12:56.860Like just this like little indignities every day where it is just hard to get through your day because of broad-based hostility or because of like policy.0.57
00:13:10.320I'm thinking right now of like trans people who've had their creaturely need to like go to the bathroom impinged upon by like actual policy.
00:13:19.740And now doing that subjects them to inconvenience, indignity, you know, some kind of like humiliation that is mandated often by the state or like enforced by random strangers in a women's room telling them they don't belong there because those people have deputized themselves for the state's interest.
00:13:37.980I imagine a lot of this is seeping into the daily life, the social milieu that people are starting to experience under Nazi Germany, right?
00:13:47.580So on the one hand, like a lot of the fundamentals are the same, right?
00:13:50.540Like Victor Klemperer still has his job.
00:14:04.420We should also, of course, this being in bed with the right, talk about the gender aspect of these kind of summer things.
00:14:10.380And there's two points I would like to make.
00:14:12.220One is methodological, that in some way turning towards private life, the somatic, et cetera, et cetera, has long been, of course, a intervention of feminist history.
00:14:22.080They're not the only ones who invented this, but it was an important intervention of 1970s, 1980s feminist historians to sort of say the rush to like, what did people who matter do?
00:14:32.100And the people who matter are the ones who inflict violence on other people.
00:14:35.840And the things that matter is the violence they inflict on other people, right?
00:14:39.140Like your politician passing a law, a general moving this army, right?
00:14:43.880But we don't kind of talk about what happened in the household.
00:14:46.720And so social history, labor history, et cetera, et cetera, have been very, very good at kind of reversing that over the last 50 years and saying like, no, the structures of everyday life are extremely important.
00:14:57.240And in fact, the idea that these two things can be distinguished readily is often an absolute misperception of the historical record and says more about the sort of psychology of the historian doing it than it does about the reality on the ground, right?
00:15:12.460I do want to point out that this is, in fact, a kind of a feminist form of history writing that we're trying to do here.
00:15:19.600But there is, of course, also the fact that it's a gender story in that our two most persistent guides through this year have been two men, Victor Klemperer, who we've been talking about already, and Thomas Mann, the writer.
00:15:30.960But it's been about the collapse of the kinds of professional and institutional structures that tethered these men to, how do we want to call it, to civil society or the state, one or the other, right?
00:15:45.820And they're both finding themselves in a moment, as you say, in August 1933, where they're sort of having to say, well, what's left of that?
00:15:52.540What is left of me if the institutions I rely on no longer respond to me?
00:15:59.160And this is not about the police or something like that. That's been gone a long time. But it's stuff like my publisher, right? Like things that you and I can very much empathize with. We'll talk about the annoyance of like a book that you wrote that's not coming out now, right? Like, am I getting a paycheck, right? Can I vote in the Faculty Senate kind of stuff? You know, like it's obviously dumb and they're little compared to what's going to happen later. But they are about something more. They're about where you fit into society and whether you fit in at all.
00:16:27.220Yeah, there's something about how these institutions, which are collapsing at this point in history, you know, they're becoming Nazified, they're capitulating to the regime, they're changing the way that they operate. But those institutions are what tie the individual into like broader social and collective life, right?0.52
00:16:45.340So when, you know, you're not sure if you can vote in the faculty Senate anymore, on the one hand, that's very small.
00:16:53.540And on the other hand, it throws into question your role in this larger group that you've been a part of before and are not exactly the same part of anymore.
00:17:04.100Yeah, exactly. And the feeling that they all have that being an out group is only going to mean more and more and more, right?
00:17:09.720That this is demarcating a space that you can then do anything to, right?
00:17:15.000This is going to be what's called the prerogative state, right?
00:17:17.420Like you're less and less able to draw on institutions that protect you, that treat you a certain way, but instead you become more and more the states to do with as it pleases, right?
00:17:28.760I mean, this goes even beyond something like the university.
00:17:31.700It's even about the economy, the way that in a liberal democracy, the way you make money and the way you get to spend it is how society expresses your value as its citizen.
00:18:23.920Like, it's the way that conservatives invoke gender or DEI to say, I don't like that a black person or a queer person is in this position of power.0.81
00:18:33.840I mean, he got along well with his publisher.0.99
00:18:35.380It's more like, we think there's a world of hurt coming our way if we publish this and we don't want to, right?
00:18:39.800They're not transmitting their own value judgment yet, but they are responding, you know, in advance obedience to the pressures that they're feeling from society and from the state.
00:18:49.480And at the same time, Klemper notes in a very funny aside that, quote, there are no bankruptcies anymore. The National Socialist does not go bankrupt, right? So he's like, oh, there's always money for these motherfuckers, but I can't figure out how to get this contractor who stiffed me on, I forget what it is, the piping or something like that, like to pay me back.
00:19:09.220Like, it's dumb stuff like this, where he's like, oh, but you and your dumb brown buddies cannot possibly lose money anymore.1.00
00:19:16.760But for me, there's a totally different set of rules.1.00
00:19:19.380Like, he would obviously acknowledge that's like, even in his Maslow's hierarchy of, oh, this sucks, it's basically very, very small potatoes.
00:19:27.700But this stuff adds up, right? It adds up to a feeling that, like, I do not belong in ways that I think this state will use as an occasion to visit further violence and exclusion.
00:19:40.200I will stand up for Victor Klemperer and say that it is comforting to me to see somebody be kind of petty and narcissistic amidst the rise of a authoritarian regime.
00:19:51.200I'm like, oh, other people have done this before.
00:25:46.040Do you mean to tell me that already in August 1933, there are these expat communities trying to like rebuild a German cultural world in exile?
00:26:00.040Well, some of it, I think, might have been before 33, right? I mean, like there are, right, American publishing houses, small ones being run out of Paris right now, probably. But yeah, no, a lot of things had to move very, very quickly.
00:26:10.880Are there American publishing houses in Paris? Do they need an intern? Can I go? Can I work for them?
00:26:18.540Are there American publishing houses in America?
00:26:24.580But like, yeah, no, it happens very quickly. For instance, the publisher that Thomas Mann is considering is the Kierido Verlag, which was founded in July of 1933. It was a joint venture between Emanuel Kierido, I don't know how exactly you say that, and a subsidiary of his publishing house. And I'm going to butcher the Dutch here. Apologies in advance to our Dutch listeners. Kierido's Outgeverai, is that right? I'm not sure.
00:26:51.760But anyway, this guy had an existing, very well-established publishing house in Amsterdam on the Kaisersgracht, in fact, and he basically entered into a joint venture with this guy, Fritz Lanzhoff, who was dismissed from the Kiepenheuer publishing house in Germany during this first wave of purges and synchronizations.
00:27:13.060So one of the things I'm guessing that we're seeing happening is that entrepreneurial types outside of Germany are seeing these purges happening and going, oh, that's talent I can poach.
00:27:25.660Like how the fanciest American academics are getting offers from, you know, universities abroad now because everybody's looking for the exits.
00:27:34.140There's, like, something maybe similar happening where people are like, okay, this is a, like, decently sized market of German speakers that I can capitalize on because all of these, like, big talents are going to have to leave.
00:27:48.160At the same time, I'm guessing Kerido did this out of conviction because it's a nightmare in terms of a business model, right?
00:27:54.560There were not enough German speakers that had fled to the Netherlands to make this a Dutch company.
00:28:00.800This was basically a mail order operation, right?
00:28:03.880Which I think in the 1930s was avoiding the main country in which these things would be read.
00:28:09.420It's kind of a nightmare trying to navigate this stuff.
00:28:12.600I mean, I'm sure they were trying to figure out how to make it work, but it was largely also, it was a labor of love.
00:28:18.540It was something that they felt they needed to do.
00:28:21.040I think the publishing house survived, but a lot of the ventures sort of came to naught.
00:28:24.840And Klaus Mann, for instance, in September 1933, Klaus Mann would start a magazine, in fact, with Querido, Die Sammlung, which was supposed to just sort of collect exiled German writing.
00:28:37.080And that folded within like two years.
00:28:39.460It's just it's hard to make this stuff work.
00:28:41.460But, you know, there is just, as you say, a lot of talent going around.
00:28:48.880Some of it is, hey, we can actually make some money doing this.
00:28:51.800OK, but granted, a literary magazine launching and then immediately folding is not something that only happens under conditions of authoritarianism.
00:28:59.600That happened all throughout, you know, the heyday of American democracy, too.
00:29:04.640Yeah, now that I'm saying that, actually, two years for a literary magazine seems pretty good.
00:29:10.820Another example of an institution that travels outside of Germany is the famous Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, also known as the Frankfurt School.
00:29:20.180Right. And this is a really interesting one. This gives you a sense. So Querido was founded by people who just were like, oh, shit, sometime in March or April 1933, not the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, because Max Horkheimer, the director of the institute, together with Fritz Pollock and a young Theodore Adorno had started doing these surveys of Germans to sort of figure out how authoritarian were these people.
00:29:44.760And legend has it that basically took one look at the results.0.69
00:29:51.180So what they did, they had an endowment and they moved parts of that endowment abroad to the Netherlands, in fact, and incorporated as some kind of nonprofit in Switzerland.
00:30:00.280So they were pretty much set up by 1933.
00:30:03.540And I mean, they got closed down immediately.
00:33:24.140But he understands that, obviously, like if this book, depending on how his his refusal to sign this thing and the new book, depending on how those are received, the Nazis can very easily just be like, oh, now it's a billion dollars or whatever.
00:33:36.260Right. Like not unlike certain U.S. universities, you know.
00:33:40.200Yeah, it's another thing is that when people are trying to persecute you for your political beliefs, it's actually kind of advantageous to have as few assets as possible.
00:34:27.280I'm in a thing with my publisher who will not see reason, right?
00:34:30.960It's a little bit like when a rock band makes a song about like the contract they shouldn't have signed.
00:34:34.400And you're like, honestly, I think this is more interesting to you guys than to us.
00:34:39.200But on the other hand, Mann is, of course, partly, I think, attuned to his own nervousness and these kind of small creaturely fixations, partly because he's a huge narcissist.
00:34:53.800But also because he has written before about sort of nervousness as an index of historical change.
00:35:00.560In 1929, Mann had published a novella called Mario and the Magician, which is the story of a bourgeois German family stay at an Italian beach resort and a stay in a story that are clearly overshadowed by Italian fascism.
00:35:15.220It's not only about that, but it's definitely trying to tell a story about like how fascism percolates into everyday life and sort of makes people agitated and nervous.
00:35:25.720The first sentence of this story is, the atmosphere in Torre di Venere remains unpleasant in the memory.
00:35:33.000From the first moment the air of the place made us uneasy, we felt irritable on edge.
00:35:38.680I guess we have both been out of the country since Trump returned to power.
00:35:45.820You know, it's kind of, it's difficult to articulate what it is about returning to the U.S.
00:35:52.780But it's like, oh, great, now I'm nervous to go through customs.
00:35:55.160Or like, oh, great, now I have to reimburse myself upon my return in this water I didn't really know I was swimming in before.
00:36:05.940There is a way that people have both like conscious and direct fear of like the state and its actors, right?
00:36:14.060But then there's also just an ambient discomfort with the world that can sort of seep its way into your consciousness when you're living under an authoritarian regime.
00:36:53.920And just to give you a sense of just how clairvoyant this was in some ways.
00:36:58.300Mann says in the diary, previously, I sat for a long time on the small terrace and reflected on the conversations of the afternoon.
00:37:04.040Hensel shares Schwarzschild's opinion that if the Germans are given time to continue their immense armaments for another one and a half to two years,
00:37:11.060A victorious German war against the West, perhaps with Russian support, is not inconceivable.
00:37:16.660As a chemist, former cement manufacturer, he claims to be able to say that Germany's0.90
00:37:21.080chemical superiority and its lead in poison gas production make this possibility more0.95
00:37:36.940The Nazis aren't going to stay put, right?
00:37:38.480And, like, early in 1933, we talked about how some people were expecting slash maybe hoping that, like, the Allies would invade because the Nazis are now very clearly violating the terms of the World War I armistice.0.70
00:37:57.920And, I mean, this is before the Nazis have even officially dropped out of the League of Nations, right?
00:38:01.940These people do see it very, very clearly.
00:38:04.120And part of that is because they have to start thinking long term.
00:38:06.700They're starting to think about, well, if I buy a house, if I rent a house, if I get my kids in school here, right?
00:38:13.460You may remember, you know, Judith Cal's family, for instance, has settled down in Switzerland by now.
00:38:17.960And like, of course, it becomes a question like, well, do we now have the kids go to Swiss schools or are we going to try to go somewhere else?
00:38:25.300And they'll eventually wind up in London, right?
00:38:27.400So these are some everyday questions that some listeners of ours will be familiar with.
00:38:31.420But those everyday questions sort of become overlaid with how far can these people get?
00:40:21.020I'm in the Book of the Month Club, you know.
00:40:23.240And some people who were a big deal in Germany
00:40:26.520are not actually internationally known, right?
00:40:29.500So they become a little fish in the very big pond of the United States.
00:40:35.500I mean, Mann's brother Heinrich, for instance, important left-wing writer, the president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, so the Prussian Academy of Sciences, so, you know, establishment guy.
00:40:47.240But by now, his books have been burnt.
00:40:49.780His articles are being prescribed up and down the land.
00:40:52.920And he isn't really set up for the international stuff nearly as well as his little brother.
00:41:24.080I ran to Charlie Chaplin there, right?
00:41:25.680Like, he's just, like, living the life, right?
00:41:28.620And then they get Heinrich Mann, who's, like, has to basically beg his little brother for, like, alimony to, like, make rent.
00:41:36.240Or Berthold Brecht, who, like, shows up to this job in a studio that he got because someone wants to make sure that Berthold Brecht doesn't starve.
00:41:43.280And they're like, could you write us a, you know, a romance picture?
00:42:38.720Having to leave Nazi Germany as just a huge reversal of fortune.
00:42:43.220I think his books are being burned. They're certainly not on shelves anymore. And this was someone who really made money, not from like prize money and like lecture tours, but like books, just selling books. Right. And he can't do that anymore.
00:42:58.420Literally couldn't be me. Would love it if it could be. You know, like you can't do that anymore in Germany in 1933. You can't do that anymore anywhere in 2025.
00:43:10.040It is true. It is true. Unless you're Dan Brown or Gia Tolentino.
00:43:14.760Or like, yeah, basically just those two people.
00:43:46.340This is the other thing I want to, like, read.
00:43:47.940Like, I'm so glad that they did for the historical record.
00:43:50.600But at the time, I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.
00:43:52.600This is a conversation you have on the phone or in person.
00:43:55.840Like, you do not put, like, how are we going to not cooperate with the authoritarian regime, like, in writing in a letter to your buddy that, like, can be subpoenaed?
00:44:05.920No, not just subpoena. I think this is also where Mann first says, like, I got a letter from Munich. It was very friendly. I am pretty sure this letter was open before it got to me. Right. So he's starting to like, I mean, I'm sure they only do it when they see the name Thomas Mann for now. But like, you can't rely on the privacy of mail, for instance, anymore. But so he notes that Wasserman says, like, I'm just in dire straits here. Really sucks. He doesn't say that Wasserman asks for money, but it seems implied.
00:44:34.940And this is where we get, I feel like I sometimes give you a Thomas Mann picture that is a little hagiographic and too nice.0.99
00:44:41.280I can't emphasize that also Thomas Mann was very significantly kind of an asshole.0.98
00:44:45.420That's very important for you to know.0.96
00:44:46.860Really, because the image I'm getting from this biography, which I do not think is the one that emerges from the books, but from the biography, he kind of seems like a doddering old man in this part of his life.
00:44:57.740Like the biography that you're painting for me, that is, it's like he has to be cajoled by his gay children into not going back to Germany.0.59
00:45:05.100He's like a little worried about money in a way that seems like, I don't know, maybe disproportionate to his actual needs.
00:45:12.220You know, he just seems like it's a dad.
00:49:20.380Like, what they were used to valuing themselves over and competing among each other for are things that are just, like, no longer available.
00:49:29.100Like, I think there's a reason why Mann commits this to his diary and doesn't sort of write to other people.
00:49:33.720Like, Pastor Mann asked me for money, right?0.99
00:49:35.320Like, he's not being that much of a jerk.0.99
00:49:37.460But this is kind of what art world people, I think, do.0.99
00:49:41.280And, like, they can't snap entirely out of it.
00:49:43.960He's like, like, it's also kind of a funny story for a guy who's like, you got to help me out, man.
00:49:49.060I'm staying at the Borough of Luck and it's funny and expensive.
00:50:05.400And yet, they're still so petty and such, like, little, like, backbiting queens.
00:50:12.020It's on the one hand, like I think you can say clearly it's like a moral failure to make your own conduct align with the gravity of your historical moment.
00:50:23.440And on the other hand, it's kind of like reassuringly human.
00:50:26.380While we're on the subject of expensive Swiss hotels, another group of people that we've already followed who are living in a fancy Swiss hotel for a moment in the summer of 1933 are the Kells.
00:50:39.980The family has reunited in Zurich, and they're living in an extremely fancy hotel and find out they can't afford it.
00:50:47.920And so they move into a much more remote holiday destination hotel, which was cheaper, apparently.
00:50:56.780The book, which again is a novelization, How Hitler Strolled the Pink Rabbit is not a memoir, but it does appear to, for all intents and purposes, dovetails with Juditka's actual timeline.
00:51:07.960So, you know, the individual episodes may be enhanced or embellished, but the general outlines of it are true.
00:51:16.420And she describes this as being pretty idyllic, right?
00:51:19.040Like their money trouble made them go to a lakeside in the Swiss Alps.
00:51:28.160But one of the episodes she describes in When Hitler Stole the Pink Rabbit that I think is kind of interesting is that, of course, the kids ran into Germans from Nazi Germany.
00:51:37.800there. And it's the first time she starts speaking of the Germans, which I mean, this book is written
00:51:42.980decades later, but like, it's interesting, right? Like, this is the moment when they're, oh, we're
00:51:47.040not like them, right? Like they'd sort of left Germany very, very quickly. Of course, they're0.80
00:51:52.400speaking German with these kids, but in some way they're like excited when there's someone finally
00:51:56.580not speaking Swiss German, which is quite different. And then these kids' parents are like, you can't
00:52:00.980play with these kids, you know, telling their kids you can't play with these kids because they're
00:52:04.400Jews, right? And so it's like the first time that she sort of experiences that like, yeah,
00:52:09.000that she is now something else entirely. The meaning of what German is has changed under
00:52:14.660the Nazis, right? These are kids who at the beginning of their lives wouldn't have occurred
00:52:18.340to them to not think of themselves as German, right? The Jewish and German are continuous
00:52:23.100categories. And that ceases to be true after Hitler rises to power. Yeah. And I do think it's
00:52:28.060really remarkable how quickly that goes. Klemper starts using the word Aryan. And initially it's
00:52:32.820Like, scare quotes and kind of a wink, and then eventually there's just no more wink.
00:52:36.700It's just like, yeah, it's just a word we have to use now, right?
00:52:39.340Like, the overall vibe is I'm not endorsing this, but, like, this is just the reality in which we live now.
00:52:43.620These are the operant categories, right?
00:52:45.460The politics has made something imaginary into something that has real social valence and importance.
00:52:51.820Exactly. And that does determine who you should play with in a Swiss ski hotel, basically.
00:52:56.840So it's important to note that as they're sort of pouring over the data of what has happened so far, right, like there's all this small stuff that crops up for them.
00:53:06.020And I just thought I'd mention a few things that I think we can sort of riff on a little bit.
00:53:10.580One of the things Mann finds out is that while a lot of his books are starting to disappear and while his brother's books are really starting to disappear, his first big novel, Budenbrooks, gets added to, I think, his granddaughter's school library.
00:53:28.800He doesn't seem to think of it as an act of resistance so much as he's like, oh, that's detached from me as a person, right?
00:53:35.160They're like, that's a German classic already because he wrote that in 1903, I want to say.
00:53:40.100So he's like, this is a work that is detached from me and will survive independent of, like, my biography, which is something that does indeed happen during the Nazi years.
00:53:51.120There are a couple of poems of Heinrich Heine's that were so well-known, especially when set to music, that the Nazis would just remove the author's name, Heine was famously Jewish, and would just call it traditional.
00:54:04.640so like so man instead of getting there he's like well at least you're teaching my work
00:54:10.180they're like this is an old poem who knows who wrote yeah who's to say
00:54:16.240that's kind of funny yeah so they're starting to give thought to like if my work isn't going to
00:54:24.860survive as being authored by me how is it going to survive right which is something that will
00:56:00.980There's a lot of evidence to suggest that like before,
00:56:03.460well before sort of redlining really shaped American cities,
00:56:06.580it was real estate brokers who sort of made sure
00:56:10.660that like the right people ended up in the right neighborhoods.0.55
00:56:14.040And so they often packed the Jews together.0.72
00:56:17.040And so these people would end up in a very nice California bungalow, but it would be a bungalow in an area where people wouldn't be upset if Teodor Adorno moved in next door.0.68
00:56:27.040I can also just see somebody not necessarily seeing themselves as nefarious, but being like, oh, you know, the bookish guys from Germany tend to like it over here or a bunch of them have already settled successfully there.
00:56:39.500I sold those houses. Maybe I'll try and sell this new house over there, too.
00:56:43.160And then he winds up sticking you next to the guy who's the wrong kind of communist who you knew from back home and already hated.
00:56:49.860Yeah, I think there's a story where Max Horkheimer's offered a house in Pacific Palisades.
00:56:54.620And they're like, oh, there are already some German families not too far away.
00:56:57.880Someone just moved in around the corner.
00:57:14.380So there is a story that may not be true.
00:57:17.300Alex Ross, who's been on the pod, has not been able to confirm that this really happened.
00:57:21.180But there is a story that Leon Feustwanger's wife, Martha, ran into Arnold Schoenberg at the Brentwood Market, which I believe is still there.
00:57:29.560It's somewhere like where Larry David films Kirby Enthusiasm.
00:57:34.060And basically, they get into a whole thing about Thomas Mann's latest novel,
00:58:23.360And so that's why Schoenberg got, like, super upset.
00:58:25.660But the whole point of this is not only do they end up with these, like, weird provincial little things,
00:58:30.860But if you think about, like, why the fuck would Arnold Schoenberg, famous composer, care that, like, Mann based this character kind of on him in some ways, right?
00:58:39.800Also, Mann didn't know enough about 12-channel music to get that part right.0.79
00:58:43.100So he had Theodore Adorno write those parts of the novel for him.
00:59:16.140And I'm like, I really don't know how you top that.
00:59:18.500That would make Christmas really awkward.
00:59:20.040Giving a random composer syphilis feels kind of small compared to him.
00:59:24.520But the reason I think is that Schoenberg really thought that Mann was rewriting history
00:59:29.380and that people may not remember who Arnold Schoenberg was.
00:59:32.060They're starting to become very worried about like how and why and under what modalities
00:59:37.520will any of this work through which I've defined myself survive.
00:59:41.200They had sort of one idea of what the futurity, not of themselves, but of their work looked like.
00:59:45.960And now someone like Schoenberg cannot be sure anymore.
00:59:48.720He's like, well, my students are going to go be everywhere and be like the composing teachers of tomorrow.
00:59:52.700They're going to tell everyone how great Arnold Schoenberg was.0.59
00:59:55.060They're all out of jobs or they flipped and they're making horrible Nazi music and will never admit that they knew me, right?
01:00:01.580Like the only thing that is left of me one day may be this book that Thomas Mann wrote containing a bunch of lies about a guy who's modeled on me.
01:00:08.780I mean, it makes sense that when you've lost your whole world and your position and your status, these little things that are the remnants of the life you once managed to build for yourself take on this outsized importance, right?
01:00:22.840I do not think that I would manage to have to flee my country and watch my career be destroyed and find myself in humbled circumstances in a foreign country without, at minimum, yelling in a farmer's market.
01:00:40.020Like, I'm going to be ugly crying in whatever poor country winds up having to take me.
01:00:58.080So another entry that I think gives you a sense of what this downtime month of August really feels like and is like is another entry from August, is August 24th.
01:01:10.100So Oswald Spengler, who we did an episode on, has been published in Germany in which he declares his unreserved support for national socialism.
01:01:18.040Every line he wrote was intended to harm the republic.
01:01:33.560I think he's thinking about, like, as a member of what was once the conservative revolution, but who had turned, you know, much more liberal.
01:01:41.100I think it's also like, he's like, well, yeah.
01:01:44.280It's like when people are like, can you believe Bari Weiss published Chris Rufo's letter about how the U.S. university should be synchronized?
01:01:51.400It's like, well, yeah, I can absolutely believe that.
01:01:54.820Yeah, that was the road she was on since 2018.
01:01:58.580Yeah, well, since she tried to get that Palestinian professor fired.0.78
01:02:01.260She tried to get a Palestinian professor fired when she was like not yet old enough to vote or drink or something, you know, like this is actually who these people have always been.0.89
01:02:09.740Yeah, and the fact that some people are surprised by it, right?1.00
01:02:13.800Like, look, if you were surprised by Oswald Spengler making a fascist heel turn, you know, I have a bridge to sell you.0.99
01:02:20.500Like, you're just like not that good at analyzing people or reading their work.
01:02:23.640So I think that's the other thing that he's sort of not experiencing this really as like a betrayal.
01:02:28.800And then on the 25th, like, right, like the next day after sort of ragging on Spengler, he says in the morning, the news via letter from Kay, so Katja's mother, that the Puschinger house in Munich has been seized and is being guarded by SA men.
01:02:51.380I've been saying we're kind of marking dead time here until such a moment when like something crazy strikes out of a clear blue sky.
01:03:00.540And here, this is happening basically while he's noting down these things about Spengler, about Wassermann, and about the house in Munich, which is that the Nazis released this announcement and basically rescind German citizenship for about 30 writers and thinkers, including Mann's brother Heinrich and Feuchtwanger.
01:03:27.000I thought we would maybe talk about that a little bit more, that like this is something that to me is such an echo of 33 and 2025, where the way our new fascists play with citizenship and people's passports.
01:03:42.880You may think about like the threats to strip Zoran Mamdani of his citizenship. You may think of the way they question citizenship for Barack Obama.
01:04:01.960And we should say that, like, of course, you know, from the very beginning of the Trump administration, it's been very hard to get a new passport for trans people.
01:04:09.700People are really worried about leaving the country and coming back with one.
01:04:13.420There's the passport issue, but there's also, you know that Aman has been struggling with the passport issue for a while because his is OK, but I think his kids' passports are expiring.
01:04:21.320So they were worried, like, will we not be able to prove our nationality?
01:04:24.740Well, now in August, it's getting one worse, which is, well, we may no longer have a nationality.
01:04:28.780As of the 23rd of August, Heinlein doesn't have citizenship anymore.
01:04:44.400And I mean, he must have, given what he was about to not sign, have been like, well, that can't be long for this.
01:04:50.280What's really interesting to me is these 33 people that get stripped of German citizenship in this very first announcement in the Deutsche Reichsanzeige, so it's published for all to see, it's the first of, like, hundreds of these.
01:05:02.400They kept stripping people, I think, until April of 1945, when the Nazi state controlled, like, effectively, like, Greater Berlin.
01:05:10.440They were still stripping people who they probably had, like, no more actual control over of their citizenship.
01:05:16.220Like, this gesture of exorcism, of being cast out from the kind of people's community, becomes like an absolute obsession of them.
01:05:25.280It's not a ton of people, like, in pure numbers.0.61
01:05:29.320There are later laws that, of course, strip Jews, for instance, of citizenship.
01:05:35.780Like, these are gestures where they are naming specific people they don't like and saying, you, you are no longer German, Rosie O'Donnell, or whatever it is.
01:05:43.900Yeah. Mann notes in his diary the first list of politicians and authors who are being declared stripped of their German citizenship being published in Germany. Einstein is at the top, but Heinrich is on it too. To think that it's people like these who decide whether or not you get to be German.
01:06:02.220That's a good line, right? Like it's of all the people who get to decide this. And these are Thomas probably more so than Heinrich, but they're German nationalists in a way, right? Cultural nationalists.
01:06:11.400Yeah, this is something I've noticed, is that there's a lot of, like, ongoing contention over what the word German means, which I think the Nazis win that battle. It's not clear to me that it's even been, like, wrested from them since. But, like, there's a opposition to the Nazis that is grounded in, like, German pride, right? That takes these sort of, like, nationalist impulses that the Nazis had manipulated very badly and, like, recast them as a sort of, like, patriotic, anti-fascist resistance.
01:06:39.940Like how some people now are like, actually, the left needs to wrap themselves in the flag, you know, because we have other American history.
01:06:46.180You see this in things like the 1619 Project, right?
01:06:48.340Like we can actually rewrite or rethink American history as a right to struggle against injustice rather than this persistence of hierarchy.
01:06:57.120It's like maybe like a big dispute within like left wing American historiography.
01:07:00.840But like you do see this impulse emerging now, too, is what I'm trying to say.
01:07:04.520Like, there are people who are offended about right-wing ownership of the concept of who gets to be an American, not merely for the power that that implies, but for what it says about the concept of being American, which can be otherwise defined.
01:07:19.380In the case of Germany, it's also, why would you listen to any of the people coming from this country if this country is like this, right?0.96
01:07:26.440There is a famous scene later in Mann's life where he's asked, I think in the New York Times, in fact, like, do you miss German culture?0.95
01:07:51.500So, you know, I'm not sure what there is to miss.
01:07:54.860Like, the guy who discovered general relativity lives in Princeton now,
01:07:58.880so I'm not sure why you need to go to Germany, right?0.83
01:08:01.640Yeah, one thing Germany did with these big purges of its intellectuals, which were quite deliberate, was a kind of national suicide, right?
01:08:08.600Like there's a way in which the Nazis set about destroying everything about Germany that somebody like Thomas Mann would have valued.0.90
01:08:16.800And I should say, being stateless in 1933 sucks. It's really tricky and risky. In fact, it will cost people their lives, that they have a really tough time crossing borders. And the U.S. doesn't play an altogether wonderful role in that process either.
01:08:31.940At the same time, it's also important to note that the Nazis do have an international arm, and that's maybe the thing we can close our August with.0.98
01:08:42.180Apparently, when this Deutsche Reichsanzeiger comes out with this list of 33 people, the German club in London, the Deutsche Klub, puts up the pictures of these 33 men with a heading over it, if you meet one of these men, kill them.0.84
01:08:56.580This is in London, right? The reach of the Nazis is quite significant because people outside of Germany and especially, frankly, Germans outside Germany do take this stuff very seriously and participate in the same kind of debates and excitations over these cultural figures, right?
01:09:16.120And so Mann sort of notices it and is like, well, there's this list.0.99
01:09:18.880And he kind of just is like, well, whatever, a bunch of assholes.0.99
01:09:21.560I can't believe these guys get to decide that my brother is no longer German.1.00
01:09:25.420But at the same time, like in London, you have people being like, if you meet these people, they're anti-German and you should hurt them.
01:09:30.760And on August 31st, Mann notes that the writer Theodor Lessing, who had fled Germany right away, basically, had been killed by national socialists in the Czech Republic, in Marienbad.
01:09:44.980So in the Northern Czech Republic, these things that are happening in Germany, they have a way of trickling out, right?
01:09:51.740He notes on September 3rd in his diary, Prague, Paris, Amsterdam may be safer than Marienbad or Basel.
01:09:59.940But I don't think that anyone who wrote for the Weltbühne, this is Ossetsky's paper, should feel secure for their lives.
01:10:07.080I'm afraid of ending up like Lessing, but not necessarily because it's such a terrible ending, but because it really fits for someone like Lessing.
01:10:40.480And here's Mann, who's like halfway into the Weimar Republic is like, hey, guys, I don't think the Weimar Republic is all that bad.
01:10:46.880Right. Like that's the level of his radicalism.
01:10:49.040He's like, if they shoot me, it's going to be so weird.
01:10:51.880Right. As you say, I'm your boring dad.0.91
01:10:55.120Like, yeah, it's like if you can't handle Thomas Mann.
01:10:57.840Yeah. Like how much has the Overton window shrunk?
01:11:02.600Maybe we'll leave it at that in terms of our data.
01:11:04.640But I did want to, in our closing, reflect on what this means for us and for the right now.
01:11:10.480There have been months where I've really struggled to contain everything into one solid story, and here I feel like it is just a very simple story, which is that life goes on.
01:11:20.040But in some way, that simple story hides way more than the months where, like, you know, Anton Schmaus is jumping out a window, running across a forest in his underwear, and tries to, like, flag down a transit cop or whatever.
01:11:33.300It's not like these high drama moments. It's a lot of banality in which the force of history is nevertheless marching forward.
01:11:41.280The people who oppose this are never going to fully see eye to eye. Opposition to a regime will always open up as many differences as it creates solidarity.
01:11:50.560And my sense after reading all this is that's okay, right?
01:11:55.500It's all right to backbite in the resistance.0.92
01:11:59.260It's okay to be shitty to each other in the resistance.0.95
01:12:03.600I mean, the thing about the Nazi resistance is that they lost.0.99
01:12:06.720Maybe we should hope for a more successful American version
01:12:10.940that might be better served with a degree of solidarity.
01:12:14.460I mean, this is also not the resistance that does anything inside of Germany.
01:12:17.900These are the people who've had to leave and who have given up.
01:12:20.860I mean, Mann is told, I forgot to mention that, in early August by a policeman who is friends with him to, like, not go back.
01:12:28.100He's like, I don't know if they'd keep you, but they're going to arrest you for sure.
01:12:32.320And he's like, I'm too old and too fancy for that.
01:12:39.820They're starting to settle into the long term.
01:12:42.140The fissures are sort of starting to open up.
01:12:44.160At the same time, they have come up with some of their most interesting and most moving, really, observations about how the person on the political really gets squished together in a moment of international crisis.
01:12:56.940I hope that all of our listeners are enjoying their summers, that wherever they are, it's not too hot like it was for Thomas Mann on the Cote d'Azur, and that the flashes of, you know, invading consciousness of rising authoritarianism are muted enough to not spoil your days out.
01:13:19.020Thank you for coming on a summery and summer-themed episode of Project 1933 here on Embedded with the Right.
01:13:26.000And thank you, Moira, as always, for letting me walk you through this.
01:13:30.300And we'll be back in September with a more active month, but I think also a more confusing month.
01:13:35.880I don't want to preview too much, but this next one is going to be, I'm finding it hard to distill a theme, let's put it that way.