The Rise of Hitler and the Current U.S. Election

While this blog is in principle concerned with literary fiction, I am going to stray from that topic for the moment as a result of having recently read a review of a new biography in the Oct. 16, 2016, New York Times weekly Book Review section.

The work, by Volker Ullrich, is entitled "Hitler" and subtitled "Ascent 1889-1939." It focuses on Hitler the individual, a man of remarkably few accomplishments until he emerged out of Germany's post WWI economic and political chaos in a position of leadership, which he quickly consolidated, turning a democracy into a dictatorship.



Hitler's National Socialist German Workers Party (the Nazis) never won a majority in a free election. Rather, he was made chancellor because other politicians thought they could control him, Adam Kirsch, the author of the book review, noted.

"Once in office, Hitler quickly proved them wrong. With dizzying speed, he banned and imprisoned political opponents, had his party rivals murdered, overrode the constitution and made himself the center of a cult of personality to rival Stalin's. These moves did not dent Hitler's popularity. On the contrary, after years of internecine ideological warfare, the German people went wild with enthusiasm for a man who claimed to be above politics," Kirsch said.

"What is truely frighting, and monitory, in Ullrich's book is not that a Hitler could exist, but that so many people seemed to be secrectly waiting for him," the reviewer said.

One of those people may well have been the great German philosopher of phenomenology, Martin Heidegger, who in 1933 was appointed to a university post by the Nazis that required him to enforce the new Nazi laws -- an activity for which he never apologized.

Writing about Heidegger's willingness to serve as an instrument of Nazi power (in a review of "At the Existentialist Café," by Sarah Bakewell), reviewer Edward Mendelson quotes Bakewell as saying "he (Heidegger) seemed to be attracted less by Nazi ideology than by the idea of Hitler dexterously and firmly molding the country into a new form."


Why to I write about this?  Because it brings mind some of the most troubling aspects of the current U.S. presidential election.

Just as Kirsch notes that history suggests many Germans seemed to be secretly waiting for someone like Hitler to come along, and embraced him when he did, many Americans seem to have been secretly waiting for the emergence of someone like Donald Trump. Severe economic anxieties combined with  demographic changes that have already happened or appear likely in the future appear to have at least a substantial minority of the country looking for a new approach, "a new form," if you will. There appears to be a feeling among many that "Washington" (Congress, the Presidency, etc,) has failed and will continue to do so.

Hitler had no use for democracy and one suspects Trump may not either. His suggestion that a defeat at the poles would imply the whole election was rigged or fixed is,indeed, a worrisome threat to American democracy.