Reading The Signs Of The Times
And: Otto v. Habsburg's Funeral; Young Men & Religion; European Civil War; Resilience
So, like I told you yesterday, I’m at the point of writing the last chapter of the Weimar America book, and I’m thinking about the question: “What do we do?” Meaning, how can we avoid the coming of a new form of totalitarianism, given that all the pieces are in place for the rise of a Caesar figure?
First, if you are skeptical of my thesis, I get it. It’s a frightening one. I only ask your patience to read the case I’ve put together, when it comes out. Normalcy bias — a cognitive disposition that makes people wish to minimize threats — is a real thing.
As I’ve written here before, until I read the novel The Oppermanns, I didn’t fully internalize the sense of why Jews didn’t leave Germany in time, even though the signs were all there. It’s a novel whose German Jewish author wrote about events of late 1932-early 1933, just before and right after Hitler came to power, in real time. It’s as if he was doing journalism, but through fictions. It’s about a wealthy, high-bourgeois Jewish family in Berlin, most of whom couldn’t bring themselves to recognize what was happening, despite all the evidence. They had so much invested in Germany — emotionally, but also financially — that they believed the Bad Thing couldn’t happen to them.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the years reading about decline and fall, and have become a bit fixated on the issue of how and why people ignore evidence that something bad is coming, in time to fix it. One of the big books for me in this is Edward Watts’s book The Final Pagan Generation, a history of fourth century Rome as seen through the eyes of the generation of Roman elites born near the beginning of that fateful century.
If you recall our discussion of the book in this space a long time ago, Watts demonstrates that these men and women, having been heirs to a religious system that had existed for many, many centuries, and living within a social circle in which it was totally normalized, simply could not grasp the growing discontent among the masses, and the growth of the Christian sect. The temples were still open, after all, and the pagan holidays were still celebrated. They really did think that Christianity was going to be a passing thing. Normalcy bias.
Another good book on this point is Joseph Roth’s great 1932 decline-and-fall novel, The Radetzsky March. Roth was a Viennese Jew who lived and wrote during the final years of the Habsburg empire, and the aftermath. The book is elegiac; Roth, like many Jews of the Empire, had a real fondness for the Habsburgs, who, for all their problems, had run a relatively tolerant empire. It begins early in Kaiser Franz Joseph’s reign, and ends in World War I, telling the story of the Empire’s slow decay through the lives of three generations of a single family, the von Trottas. You see how devotion to the glory of Empire and its ideals can blind one to its inner decay.
The first generation is a simple Slovenian soldier who, in a moment of insight, saves the young Kaiser from assassination. The Kaiser ennobles him, and uses the new Baron von Trotta as part of imperial myth-making. The man hates the falsification of his story, but is powerless to do anything about it. Baron von Trotta’s son grows up to believe wholeheartedly in the imperial myth, and to serve in the military. But we observe the inner decay of the myth, which loses its hold on the people. Its rigid forms and belief in itself cannot adapt to changing times.
The loss of understanding between generations — the militantly pro-Habsburg second generation, and the increasingly dissolute third, who follows his father into the military, according to family tradition, but who doesn’t really feel the kind of devotion and confidence in it to support it against challenges from real-world conditions in modernity — including the rise of nationalism (assertive ethnic identity) and socialism.
If you know anything about World War I military history, you’ll know that the Austro-Hungarian armies performed poorly, and had to be bailed out time and time again by the better-trained and equipped Imperial German Army. The Radetzsky March, written by a Jew who missed the Empire, but who was an incisive observer of why it fell, lets you inhabit the mindset that explains its inability to survive the test of history.
And, on a tiny but highly personal scale, I observed within my own family system the instinctive unwillingness of people within it to abandon myths that they used to make sense of the world. Their own rigidity led to personal disaster for me, and the dissolution of the system, which could not cope with changing realities. People within the family system refused to look at the Bad Thing squarely, and make the necessary changes to keep it alive. My point is, I’ve seen this same pattern play out up close and personal. It is a constant in human relations, not because we are bad people, but because we are fallible, time-bound humans. The devastating final lines of Philip Larkin’s poem “Myxamatosis,” addressed to a poisoned rabbit who is dying, and doesn’t understand what’s happening to him, is about us today. They are devastating for their understatement:
You may have thought things would come right again
If you could only keep quite still and wait.
The 1862 Turgenev novel Fathers And Sons is also about this, on a much smaller scale. It’s about the inability of a landowning Russian father to understand the political radicalism of his son. It foreshadows the revolutionary upheaval that was to come in the early 20th century. I was thinking yesterday about the Russian-American historian Yuri Slezkine’s writing about how, in the late Imperial period, a lot of well-to-do Russians, even high-ranking officers in the Tsar’s military, couldn’t bring themselves to stand up to their radical, university-educated children, in large part because they themselves sensed that the old system was decaying. It’s not that they sympathized with their children, but that they simply did not have the confidence to defend the system by which they had benefited.
I think — and I demonstrate in the book — that we are in a similar place today, in the United States. I won’t rehearse the entire argument here, but I think focusing on the German experience this time (versus the Russian/Communist experience, as I did in Live Not By Lies), is more relevant to us. The Germans, being Western, are a lot more like us. Plus, though he became a dictator, Hitler rose first through democratic persuasion, and was always aware, even when he was the absolute autocrat of Germany, that he had to keep persuading the German people — that is, that he couldn’t rely entirely on force.
Immersing myself in Weimar history has been a real education for me, emotionally. That is to say, it has forced me to imagine myself in those days, in 1920s Germany. The terrifying thing is to recognize that I too would likely have gone along with what was happening with the Nazis — if not actively, then passively. Once you get into the details of what ordinary Germans had to live with under Weimar — the chronic instability, economic and otherwise — you can better grasp why the terrible myth Hitler sold to the people was, at last, persuasive. As Robert Nisbet wrote, people can only bear chaos for so long.
If the system of American liberal democracy, which includes free-market capitalism, is put to a severe test today, I am not at all confident that it can survive. Yes, we have a far longer history of democracy than the Weimar-era Germans had, and much stronger institutions. But we are still very decadent — not just decadent in the usual sense we associate with Weimar (Berlin as sex carnival), but in the Radetzsky March sense of having lost the inner dynamism and devotion to our national myths.
What I didn’t fully understand until I began my research is how important the chasm of understanding between generations would be. As in early 1930s Germany, so too with us: the revolutionary class is educated, middle-class young people who had been raised in chaos, and who saw no future for themselves under the Weimar system. I have been haunted during this writing process by what the Zoomer conservative I met in Washington last fall told me, when I asked him what the Groypers of his generation want: “They don’t want anything. They want to burn it all down.”
Mine is a book about pre-Nazi Germany, but whatever I fear may be coming to America may not be a right-wing regime. It could be a left-wing one (it is not fully appreciated by Americans today how much of a threat militant Communism was to Weimar democracy). Or it might not be an ideological regime in the left-right sense, but could be some form of techno-totalitarianism, in which we submit to rule by AI-empowered technocrats.
I don’t know. I don’t think anybody really knows. But I do know that the precarity of our current situation is real, and that only fools would ignore or downplay it. No, I don’t think that Nick Fuentes is a coming Führer — he’s far too trivial a figure — but I remind you that as late as 1928, the Nazis were marginal to German life. It was the Great Depression, and the paralysis of the centrist governing parties in the face of the crisis, that gave Hitler his opportunity — and, for that matter, boosted the Communist Party of Germany. But Fascism was far more appealing to most Germans than Communist. In either case, the Germans were done with democracy, which had proven itself unable to protect them from mass poverty and social instability.
So, as I approach this final chapter, the “What Is To Be Done?” one, I will be writing about ways we might avoid Weimar’s fate, but also how we should prepare ourselves for resistance if democracy fails. I’ll be thinking of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Evangelical) and Franz Jägerstätter (Catholic), two brave Christians who saw what was happening, and did not submit. They paid for it with their lives, but in the end, the evil that was Nazism went down in defeat.
I intensely hope and devoutly pray that we can somehow avoid Weimar’s fate. But if we can’t, then I hope to inspire us all, including myself, to face what comes as Bonhoeffers and Jägerstätters — and Sophie Scholls, and St. Maximilian Kolbes. Death is not the worst thing, not for us Christians. We believe that at some point, before the End of Time and Christ’s Second Coming, that the church will undergo a severe test under the reign of the Antichrist. Many Christians will fail the test; others will pass it, but will pay with their lives. Is that time upon us now? I don’t know. There’s a great line from the Talmud, cited in The Oppermanns, which will appear in this final chapter: “It is upon us to begin the work. It is not upon us to complete it.”
It is upon us to learn to read the signs of the times and to begin the work of preparing our souls, our families, and our communities for the severe test that we hope is not coming, but which might well be, and soon. That’s what I want to do with this book. Come to think of it, that’s what I’ve tried to do with every book I’ve written since The Benedict Option. I don’t always get it right — remember peak oil? — but I think I have a pretty good record overall.
A personal note: my life has been a sad one in many ways, since the breakdown of my marriage starting in 2012. The sadness intensified after my wife filed for divorce in 2022. But one major consolation has been my work — my writing. It has allowed me to feel useful. I thank God for this blessing, and for the blessing of people who have made it possible — including you subscribers, who may not always agree with me, but who believe that my work is important enough to support with your money.
Otto von Habsburg’s Funeral
Here is a beautiful imperial tradition. Watch the “knocking scene” at the beginning of the funeral of Otto von Habsburg, who died in 2011. He was a great European, and the son of the Blessed Karl, final Kaiser of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Otto was the Austrian crown prince when his father abdicated, ending the long monarchy; had the monarchy survived, he would have been Kaiser. He led a life of exemplary service. What’s fascinating about this is the ceremony as the funeral cortege approaches the doors of the Capuchin church in the heart of Vienna. All the Habsburg greats are interred in the crypt (which you can visit if you go to Vienna — I highly recommend it).
What you see here is the leader of the cortege rapping at the closed door. The Capuchins are on the other side. The leader (I don’t know what you call him) announces all the royal titles of the dead man. The monk answers, “We don’t know him.”
Then a second time. The monk on the other side of the door asks, “Who seeks entry?” the leader announces all the secular honors Otto von Habsburg accumulated in his lifetime.
Again the monk: “We don’t know him.”
A third rapping. The monk: “Who seeks entry?”
The leader: “Otto, a mortal, sinful man.”
The big doors swing open at last. Watch — it’s very moving:
And here, in the funeral ceremony, the family and their guests sing the imperial national anthem, the Kaiserhymne:
