Tag Archives: #livinginweimar

Living in Weimar 9: Shadow on Your Doorstep

[DISPLAY_ULTIMATE_SOCIAL_ICONS]

Laurie and Debbie say:

In May, we publishing Living in Weimar 8, about the Trump administration’s threat to separate families at the U.S./Mexico border, and the Israeli government’s slaughter in Gaza.

In June, the threat transmuted into fact. As most of the world knows, the United States government separated thousands of children from their parents at the border, and kept no records. The children were put in cages (“those aren’t really cages, they’re just rooms made of chicken-wire fencing”), and guards were forbidden to touch them. The parents were, frequently, turned back. A baby was ripped from a breast-feeding mother.

Let’s be clear: the United States has separated children from their parents before: slave children, Native American children, and (in smaller numbers) immigrant children.  If the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, it has a long way to go.

Public outcry was immediate, loud, and lasting. The administration “walked back” the policy in less than two weeks, replacing it with “family detention,” an almost equally vile practice. Money poured in to organizations on the ground. Hundreds of Spanish-speaking lawyers and support staff are working at the border now, bringing families together while they can.

Meanwhile, the attack on immigrants continues on many other fronts. The Justice Department is hiring lawyers to “catch citizenship cheaters,” whether or not they have committed any crimes or been brought to the attention of law enforcement since they got their citizenship. Green-card (legal immigration before citizenship) holders are under attack if they receive any government benefits. Asylum seekers are being returned to the imminent dangers they were trying to escape. And the U.S. military is discharging immigrants who were promised a path to citizenship.

Immigrants to the U.S., especially if they are from the global south, are under immediate threat, not just of being deported, but also of being targets of hate crimes. Undocumented immigrants, of course, have been under immediate threat for decades if not forever. Many U.S. citizens have first-hand visceral experience of unsafe lives, especially black and brown U.S. citizens. Homeless people never even experience the minimal safety of a locked door between themselves and the world. People like the two of us, who grew up internalizing the Jewish genocide of World War II never quite settle into feeling safe.

The family separation policy, and the news about it, is widening the circle of people who don’t feel safe. As more and more people are directly threatened, and more and more news shows direct threats, people who have historically felt safe in a country stop feeling safe. The U.S. has historically been very safe, especially for middle-class white folks, fear levels rise, and lots of Americans don’t know what to do with these feelings. The Republican Party, of course, thrives on white people feeling unsafe; they’ve been feeding this frenzy forever, and they ramped up on September 11, 2001. That’s one of the factors that helped build Trump’s base.

Note that this is really different from Weimar, because in Weimar, the entire country had just been through an extreme economic depression–the famous wheelbarrows full of money to buy a loaf of bread depression–and was living with big, frequent, armed clashes between Nazis and Communists in the streets. We are living in a (manufactured) economic boom, and armed street violence is rare indeed in middle-class white neighborhoods.

But the anxiety is still real. If you are a reasonably progressive, reasonably safe white person, right now in America, what can you do with your fears? We don’t have answers, but we do have a few suggestions.

1) Acknowledge your fear, to yourselves and the people around you.

2) Never acknowledge your fear without simultaneously acknowledging that it’s a privilege to have gotten this far before experiencing it; many people in your community and in the world have never known what it was like not to live with those fears.

3) Watch yourself. It’s very human to move away from fear and towards safety, and that frequently means making compromises, finding yourself willing to say and do things that go against your sense of right and wrong. Too many people will find themselves sucked into the dark side, because it’s safer there.

4) Do something constructive for a group with more reason to fear than you have. Do this by finding out what that group wants and needs from you, and following their lead. Find the courage to make change where you can. Working towards change matters, even if you can’t see how the change can happen, or don’t believe it’s possible.

5) Repeat 4, until and unless things get better.

Living in Weimar 2: Creative Ferment

[DISPLAY_ULTIMATE_SOCIAL_ICONS]

Laurie and Debbie say:

blm

We’re not the only people thinking about the Weimar Republic while reading the news. Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker just before the Republican National Convention, turned an art review into an analysis of both historical Weimar and contemporary U.S. politics.

Two thoughts, not strictly political but social, come to mind …: First, that the Weimar Republic gets a very bad rap for how it ended and insufficient credit for how much creative ferment and intelligent thought it contained. The notion that it was above all, or unusually, decadent was a creation of its enemies, who defined the creative energies of cosmopolitanism in that way. All republics are fragile; the German one, like the Third French Republic it paralleled, did not commit suicide—it was killed, by many murderers, not least by those who thought they could contain an authoritarian thirsting for power. And, second, that the United States has been the ultimate home of so many cosmopolitan citizens rejected by Europe. People expelled by hate from Europe wanted desperately to get to the American Midwest, to cities like Chicago…. Cosmopolitanism is not a tribal trait; it is a virtue, as much as courage or honesty or compassion. Almost without exception, the periods of human civilization that we admire as we look back have been cosmopolitan in practice; even those, like the Bronze Age, that we imagine as monolithic and traditional turn out to be shaped by trade and exchange and multiple identity.

It is always easy to fall into despair about the world, and ever easier as the news becomes more global, more instantaneous, and more omnipresent.  That’s why it’s so deeply important to take a wider view.

Our times also get insufficient credit for how much creative ferment and intelligent thought we contain. We live in a time that is

  • bringing indigenous movements to protect and sustain the earth (Idle No More is just one example) into prominence and some power
  • going completely over-the-moon about a radical hip-hop musical about the role of brown people in the time of the U.S. founding fathers
  • seeing the principles of the Occupy movement of a few years ago resurface as a powerful and perhaps lasting wing of a major American party
  • moving Black Lives Matter into the forefront of the national conversation
  • creating grassroots movements which force more and more municipalities, counties, and perhaps soon states to ban coal terminals, prohibit fracking, protect and restore clean water

The list is much longer, but you get the idea. All of these victories have costs; all are balanced by defeats, obstacles, and naysayers, but they are happening. And they only happen to the extent that people — here as in Weimar — are engaged, passionate, committed, and thoughtful.

As Gopnik says later in his article, “While the habits of hatred get the better of the right, the habits of self-approval through the fiction of being above it all contaminate the center.”

In our first post of this series, we quoted from Harold Meyerson’s article in The American Prospect. Here’s another piece of his analysis:

… the Nazi regime, [Ernest] Thälmann, [leader of the German Communist Party from the late 1920s until the Nazis arrested him a few months after they took power in 1933] argued, should not vex leftists, as the Communists would quickly overthrow it. “After Hitler, Us!” was the Communists’ slogan throughout 1932 and early 1933…

In a sense, Thälmann, was right. After Hitler’s death in 1945 and the Nazi surrender, the Communists, through the strength of the Soviet army, did come to power in East Germany. By then, of course, close to 60 million people had died in World War II and the Holocaust, and Thälmann himself, at Hitler’s command, was killed in Buchenwald in 1944.

Thälmannism, then, is the inability (be it duplicitous, willful, fanatical, or just plain stupid) to distinguish between, on the one hand, a rival political tendency that has made the compromises inherent to governance and, on the other hand, fascism.

If the habits of hatred get the better of the right, and the habits of self-approval contaminate the center, the habits of thinking in purist terms were a major piece of the downfall of the effervescent progress in Weimar.

That mistake was disastrous then, and must not be made now.

Thanks to Alan Bostick for the pointer to the Gopnik article.