“The worst is over,” Thomas Mann wrote to Herman Hesse on December 22, 1932. “The madness seems to have passed its peak, and if we live long enough we shall witness happier days.”
Mann was referring to the Nazi political threat and was of course soon proven sorely mistaken. And yet he actually had good reason for feeling the way he did. Despite the Nazi Party’s impressive results in the July 1932 Reichstag elections, it had “only enjoyed limited success in its primary objective of breaking into the Social Democratic and Centre Party vote,” the historian Richard J. Evans writes. Hitler’s subsequent refusal to enter into a coalition government at which he was not the head was ruffling feathers in the ranks of the Nazi leadership, leading to the resignation of the well-connected Gregor von Strasser on December 8. As of early January 1933, the Nazi Party was effectively in decline.
Thomas Mann, like most German writers, was caught completely unaware by the Nazi seizure of power not two months later. Following an intensive lecture tour that had brought him to Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris, Mann and his wife, Katia, had gone to Arosa in the Swiss Alps for a trip that was part recuperation, part winter vacation. They were soon joined there by their youngest daughter, Elisabeth. News of the Reichstag Fire on February 27 changed everything. On March 12, Mann received a phone call from his two oldest children, Erika and Klaus, telling him not under any circumstances to return to Germany.
Mann and his wife soon left Arosa for Lugano in the southernmost part of Switzerland, where they rapidly discovered many other German writers similarly run aground, including Bruno Frank, Ludwig Fulda, Emil Ludwig, and the dashing Erich Maria Remarque, who had kept one foot out of Germany’s door since the worldwide success of his 1929 novel All Quiet on the Western Front, a frequent target of Nazi propaganda. There was a constant coming and going of frantic Germans who either couldn’t return home because they were Jewish or because they were political enemies of the Nazis or (usually) both. The German consul was bombarded with requests for visas or passports, the hotel lobbies were full of rumor and hearsay, and letters and telegrams kept the devastating news coming.
Thomas Mann was aghast at the complacency of the German population. “What is all this?” he asked in a diary entry on April 2. “Fear? Forced acts of submission? Or a wave of feeling that has overwhelmed everyone inside the country and is stronger than the forces of humanity or reason?” These were indeed good questions, even if they (understandably enough for the moment, perhaps) didn’t address the more vexing question of why hardly any writers or intellectuals in Germany had imagined the Nazi takeover possible. There had been countless warnings and appeals, of course, including many from Mann himself, but few had imagined it would seriously come to this. The anarchist Erich Mühsam, whom the Nazis would arrest on February 28, 1933, wrote in December that “they will never come to power.” Lion Feuchtwanger, the Jewish German playwright and novelist, built a house in Berlin in 1931.
Knowing all that we know about the Nazi rise to power today, it seems impossible that so many brilliant minds could have been so unimaginative and so unprepared. But we are arrogant to feel this way, and a little absurd, too – how many of us have said “it could never happen here” about our own countries in the time since the conflagration was put out? The historian Christopher Clark, in his study of the outbreak of the First World War, The Sleepwalkers (2014), discusses the Austrian lawyer Georg Jellinek’s work System of Subjective Public Laws (1892), in which Jellinek writes about what he calls “the normative power of the factual.” Here is Clark’s commentary:
By this he meant the tendency among human beings to assign normative authority to actually existing states of affairs. Human beings do this, he argued, because their perceptions of states of affairs are shaped by the forces exerted by those states of affairs. Trapped in this hermeneutic circularity, humans tend to gravitate quickly from the observation of what exists to the presumption that an existing state of affairs is normal and thus must embody a certain ethical necessity. When upheavals or disruptions occur, they quickly adapt to the new circumstances, assigning them the same normative quality they had perceived in the prior order of things.
Clark argues that something very similar occurs when we contemplate catastrophic historical events, which seem in hindsight to have an air of inevitability about them. “Contingency, choice and agency are squeezed out of the field of vision,” he writes. It’s a problem of perspective: we cannot help but view historical events through the lens of what followed. Clark’s particular example is the First World War, though I think the fall of the Weimar Republic is another.
So automatic is the association of the Weimar Republic with the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 that it hardly seems possible to separate the two. And yet reading Nazi Germany back into the Weimar Republic is to override or ignore the experience of many of the people living in Germany at the time for whom the future was anything but predetermined, and who were entirely unprepared for what was to come. As the writer Ludwig Marcuse (no relation to Herbert) put it in his autobiography: “Even the most pessimistic could see the future only in terms of what was already familiar.”
For a sense of what it was like to live through the fear, chaos, and uncertainty of the early months of 1933, there is no book more likely to get under your skin than Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel The Oppermanns, which was somehow both written and published in that same fateful year. (McNally Editions reissued a gorgeous paperback of the novel with a characteristically smart introduction by Joshua Cohen in 2022). The novel is centered around the fates of the Oppermann brothers, descendants of a prominent Jewish family whose furniture company goes back several generations. Early in the novel, Gustav Oppermann, the brother now in charge of running the company, is celebrating his fiftieth birthday. It is November, 1932:
Here, in Gustav Oppermann’s charming rooms, people were not inclined to concede that a thing as ridiculous as the Nationalist movement had a chance. Gustav Oppermann’s books, ranged along the walls, the library and study formed an agreeable combination of good taste and comfort; the likeness of Immanuel Oppermann, shrewd, kindly, lifelike, observed the company; one’s foundations were firm, one was equipped with comprehensive knowledge, enjoyed the fine things bygone centuries had developed, had a substantial bank balance. It seemed ridiculous to imagine that the tame, domesticated beats—the common man—threatened to revert to his wolfish nature.
Despite being well aware of the violence and militance of the Nazis, the Oppermanns on the whole feel themselves secure. “It was a stormy time, they too had had their share of the deluge, but they could stand that, they remained firmly on their feet,” the narrator tells us.
One of the most unsettling questions raised by The Oppermanns is this: how can you tell when it’s too late? Unlike the way it’s regularly portrayed in movies and on TV, a dictatorship doesn’t just march into town from out of the nowhere. As the histories of the Weimar Republic teach us, and as The Oppermans shows us, the process of a democracy’s breakdown is messy, slow, and fraught with ambiguities. Worst of all, most people are unaware of it when it is happening.
Few would disagree that we inhabit our own uniquely stormy time, though how exactly we got here and where we’re going remains a matter of contention. Perhaps we’re a little like Ulrich in Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, who at one point wonders to himself, “So much was astir in the world… But two years or five years earlier there had also been much excitement, every day had had its sensations, and yet it was hard, not to say impossible, to remember what it was that had actually happened.” Whether we can keep it all straight in our minds or not, the global upheavals—the Covid-19 pandemic, artificial intelligence, the destruction of Gaza, the threat of climate change, the second Trump administration, to name only a few—keep coming, fogging the air around us with a sense of finality, of time running out. As the political scientist Jonathan White points out in his recent book In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea, this expectation of a coming end poses its own particular kind of threat. How is democracy going to survive if we assign the anticipation of its collapse a normative power?
Toward the end of Feuchtwanger’s The Oppermanns, members of the family are reunited for the first time since Gustav’s fiftieth birthday. This time they are not sitting in the comfortable house in Berlin’s Charlottenburg neighborhood but — where else?—in Lugano, Switzerland, where they are gathered in exile. Reflecting on the events that have flung them into this particular corner of the continent, there is general agreement around the table that “the world must be continually told that in present-day Germany every instinct hostile to culture was considered a virtue and that the moral code of the caveman was vested with the dignity of a State religion.”
They must continually be told, we might add, because so much is astir in the world; because a little repetition is necessary if one is to resist the “normative power of the factual”; because the awful truth is that democracy dies not in darkness but in broad daylight, before our very eyes.