Germans are protesting like it’s 1933

RASHMEE ROSHAN LALL March 3, 2024
christian-lue-unsplash-marburg.jpeg
Anti-fascism rally in Marburg, Germany. Image by Christian Lue, Unsplash

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The Big Story:

Germans are protesting the rise of the far right and there are plans for a significant rally in Berlin with a human chain around the Reichstag, seat of parliament. Some say there are grave and frightening echoes of 1933.

The Backstory:

This Week, Those Books:

  • A vivid portrait of a freethinker who grappled with the reality of the Nazis.
  • A novel set in Hitler’s Germany about the boldness of the meek.
  • Insight into how far the extreme right has come in our society.

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  • We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience

    By: Lyndsey Stonebridge

    Publisher: Hogarth/ Penguin

    Year: 2024

TWTB with author Lyndsey Stonebridge (right) at the book launch

A biography of someone’s thought process is rare, particularly someone who thought as deeply, constantly – and kinetically – as Hannah Arendt. Once a Jewish “illegal emigrant” (her own words) from Nazi Germany, she became one of America’s most influential public intellectuals. In this vivid portrait of the philosopher, Lyndsey Stonebridge writes, “She loved the human condition for what it was: terrible, beautiful, perplexing, amazing, and, above all, exquisitely precious”. And again: “Arendt teaches that if you really love the world (and she did) you must have the courage to protect it – to disobey”.

Arendt is famous for the phrase “the banality of evil”, which she controversially discerned in the Nazis involved in the mass murder of Jews but as Stonebridge points out, she “also warned that while the totalitarian regimes of her time would invariably fall, the contexts and thinking that permitted them might well linger into the future”. And so, notes Stonebridge, while “the camps and ghettos have changed their locations, names and appearances, but the misery remains”.

That’s where facing today’s reality – and when necessary, resisting it – comes in. Stonebridge says: “For Arendt we can only be free so long as we have free minds…turning away from dogma, political certainties, theoretical comfort zones, and satisfying ideologies”.

This book, just published, is sadly, very topical. It’s also noteworthy for the audacity of hope. The title is from an Arendt quote, which says it all: “We are free to change the world and to start something new in it”.

  • Alone in Berlin

    By: Hans Fallada

    Publisher: Penguin

    Year: 1947 (German); 2009 (English)

    Hannah Arendt’s prescription is, in a sense, followed to the letter (or more accurately, the postcard) by Otto and Anna Quangel, the working class couple in Hans Fallada’s memorable novel. The couple, whose only son is killed fighting Hitler’s war, secretly distribute postcards around Berlin to awaken fellow citizens to the truth: there can only ever be war and death under the Nazis. It’s a lonely resistance, one destined to end in failure and death but they make a moral choice. The novel – published in German as Every Man Dies Alone – is based on a true story and was made into a film.

    Choice quote:

    “. . .it will have helped us to feel that we have behaved decently till the end. . .we all acted alone, we were all caught alone, and every one of us will have to die alone. But that doesn’t mean that we are alone”.

  • The Politics of Fear: The Shameless Normalization of Far-Right Discourse

    By: Ruth Wodak

    Publisher: Sage Publications

    Year: 2021

    Austrian professor Ruth Wodak offers this working definition of far right populism: It proposes simple explanations for complex, often global developments, pits the alleged “true people” against the “corrupt elite” and draws on stereotypes of “the Other and the Stranger”. With all that’s going on in Germany and Austria, this second edition’s new subtitle, referencing the mainstreaming of far right parties, speaks to the moment.

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