Germans have a particular relationship to fire. The Reichstag fire of 1933 enabled Hitler and the Nazis to scrap the fragile Weimar democracy that had brought them to power. Hitler’s murderous fantasies could now become reality. War, Auschwitz and the German catastrophe followed.
I have known many thoughtful German diplomats over the years, including Michael Steiner, who labored to stop the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and Wolfgang Ischinger, the former German ambassador to the United States. It always seemed to me that their particular passion for freedom, democracy and openness stemmed from the knowledge of how easily these are lost.
Michael Steinberg, a professor of history at Brown University and the former president of the American Academy in Berlin, wrote to me this week:
“The American catastrophe seems to get worse every day, but the events in Portland have particularly alarmed me as a kind of strategic experiment for fascism. The playbook from the German fall of democracy in 1933 seems well in place, including rogue military factions, the destabilization of cities, etc.”
Steinberg continued, “The basic comparison involves […]
Excellent article. Indeed, Trump does seem ti be attempting to follow the rulebook for would be dictators exterminating fragile democracies, from Hitler, to the end of Russia’s brief democracy under Putin. Our democracy is indeed fragile now, destabilized by Trump and the corrupt Republcan party, and the Corona virus. I actually do think that there could be a take over if Biden wins, or that the election could be so interferred with as to be meaningless.