Disquiet On The Weimar America Front
And: Zoomer Civil War; Epstein Mystery; Bad Bunny Is Actually Bad; AI, My Best Friend
Greetings from the Zauberberg, which is what I call my top-floor apartment while I’m convalescing from this stupid Epstein-Barr virus (mono) relapse. (Thomas Mann readers will get my snooty reference.) Because all I do these days is write, sleep, and flop, I I watched on Netflix the 2022 film version of All Quiet On The Western Front late last night, considering it research for my Weimar book project. It was one of the most intense movies I’ve ever seen. When it was over, all I could do was pray for all those poor boys, on all sides, who died in that war. It’s really hard to avoid the conclusion that the Great War was the suicide of the West, and we’re just living through the tsunami waves from the initial tectonic rupture.
The film differs somewhat from the Remarque novel. For example, the novel’s scene that I found most powerful — Paul Bäumer, the protagonist, going home on leave, and experiencing the shock of the patriotic folks back home having no idea how bad things are at the front — doesn’t make it into the film. Plus, it adds a political-historical subplot, in which the Social Democratic politician Matthias Erzberger negotiates a surrender with the French high command, over the protest of a fictional warmongering German general. We see in that general’s final speech, before he orders a futile attack in the last hours before the armistice takes hold, the seeds of the “stabbed in the back” myth that allowed the German generals to avoid responsibility for the war in the eyes of the German people, and that later proved so useful to Hitler as he was building his movement. And Paul’s death is more dramatic in the film than the novel, but its essential futility remains true to the Remarque work.
I know it’s just a film not real life, but it is extremely detailed, and faithfully reproduces the things I’ve been reading from historians about what it was like for infantry on the front lines. It was good to watch this material visually reproduced; the horror of it all lands harder. Watching it really does help one understand where Hitler came from, in the sense that it is very, very difficult to imagine how any nation overcomes that kind of mass trauma.
Two million German soldiers died in the war, and about 700,000 civilians, from malnutrition and disease. The French lost about 1.3m soldiers, but many fewer civilians, even though the war was fought on French territory.) In any case, conditions at the front were the same for all combatants. In 2018, I visited a French farm family in Picardy, whose land was part of the front back then. The Battle of the Somme was fought there. One million men in total died in that single battle.
I took this photo in the forest behind the family’s fields:
The scars are still there. The father of the family told me that when his grandfather returned to their village from the fighting, there was nothing left, only rubble. He didn’t even know where his family home had stood. Imagine what that does to a people. The French more or less recovered; the Germans did not, because they bore the burden of losing the war (and thus the sense that all that death and suffering was meaningless), plus the crushing weight of Allied reparations, which contributed to the hyperinflation that impoverished millions.
It’s important to making my thesis that I recognize the contemporary US population has suffered nothing remotely like the agonies that the Germans carried with them into Weimar. If you read two great histories: Modris Eksteins’ Rites Of Spring, and Paul Fussell’s The Great War And Modern Memory, you will better understand the catastrophic effect that war had on the culture and psychology of the peoples who fought in it. You see in the All Quiet film the patriotic, chummy ebullience with which the young German recruits head off to the fighting, and how it evaporates under war conditions that resemble the worst of Dante’s Inferno. Reading Stefan Zweig’s memoir The World Of Yesterday, written in his exile from Nazi Germany, you get a strong idea of how ordered the European mind and soul was prior to the Great War … and what followed.
That’s my focus in this book project: how we Americans of today find ourselves in a psychosocial condition that resembles Germany of the 1920s, even though we have not suffered what they did in the Great War and its aftermath. To be specific, like the Germans of the 1920s, we collectively live in a state of precarity, fear, and anxiety about the future. Most of the old, structured assumptions and traditions by which we lived are gone. Trust in institutions has all but evaporated. Mass loneliness and atomization is a widespread phenomenon. We have reached the point where many, perhaps most, people don’t know who or what to trust, and prefer Narrative to Truth.
All of that came to 1920s Germany as a result of the war and its aftermath. We have reached similar conditions without that vivid, visceral trauma. How? I think the acceleration of life over the past half-century has a lot to do with it, and so does the advent of the Internet. Of course there are actual historical events that contributed — 9/11, the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2008 financial crash, Covid — but mostly, I think, it was gradual. But here we are, in a comparable state of instability.
Some people, when they hear I’m working on a book about the Weimarization of America, assume that my thesis is that America is headed towards Nazism. That’s not it. I don’t know where America is headed. I only know that the conditions are ripening for the emergence of some form of authoritarianism. It could be of the Left or the Right, or some new thing we haven’t yet imagined (e.g., the de facto corporate fascism of Communist China, producing material abundance while maintaining strict social control). I think the advent of AI, and its integration into daily life, will present future authoritarians with an incredibly powerful tool for managing the masses.
When I was working on The Benedict Option, a historian told me that I should be careful not to give too much weight to the power of ideas to change culture — this, in response to my view that the triumph of nominalism in the High Middle Ages opened the door to the slow decline of Christianity. He said that the widespread famines, wars, and plague of the 14th century likely had more to do with shattering the medieval order than intellectual struggles. Similarly, I think, with World War I and the shattering of European order, including what remained of Christianity after the 19th century.
The key to understanding the Weimarization of America is understanding how we have managed to produce Weimar psychosocial conditions without war and economic collapse. It’s going to be a challenge like convincing readers in Live Not By Lies that when wokeness was in power, we were (and in many places still are) living under a soft form of totalitarianism, but a totalitarianism that does not resemble what Orwell and the Soviet experience told us totalitarianism was. But it is still essentially totalitarian! The point is, if you stare too closely for precise parallels, you’ll miss important patterns that disclose the essential nature of the thing, and its similarlity to what preceded it.
The history books about Weimar focus mostly on politics and economics, but the complete breakdown of sexual mores in Weimar Germany, which signaled deeper disorder within society — well, we have them now in contemporary America. That kind of thing. Wait till you read the next item, below the paywall.
