Episode 93 -- Project 1933, Part VI: August 1 - August 31

Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donnegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the Russian.

So, Adrian, today we are returning to our Project 1933, following the Nazis' first year in power, month by month.

We have done now five of these.

This is our sixth.

We are going to do 10 in total.

And that means we are about halfway through, a little more than halfway through the first year of the Nazis' rise to power.

And I wonder what you're thinking as we reflect back on, you know, the seven months before this.

Yeah, it's an interesting month to reflect on because, you know, we've been trying to draw on various accounts from people who were there and who experienced the Nazis' rise to power from different vantage points.

But there are some people people that we found it easier to check in with others.

And some of that is just an effect of what they left behind, right?

Like, did they have time to write in their diary?

Or were they just running around being like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.

Did they have to flee later on and maybe their diary didn't survive, right?

So we've found these people almost by default that can sort of walk us through it.

And we'll see that they spend August 1933 as kind of a moment of reflection.

We've been through half a year of this.

They've been through half a year of the real thing when it comes to 1933.

We've obviously been through 2025, which, you know, TBD, how people podcast about that in a couple of decades.

But it's sort of a moment when things grind to a halt and when people have to reflect on what they think has just happened and what they think is about to happen.

When we first started texting about this, you were like, oh, what's the theme for this one?

And I wrote, nothing.

My George Costanza voice.

And it is, it's an episode about dead time, right?

Which is maybe overstating it.

As always, we're making selections, but we've talked a lot about institutional collapse.

We've talked a lot about the changing political landscape.

A lot of institutions are on break in Europe in August, and the Nazi state was no different.

And so there is this kind of weird moment of pause.

And it's something that to me seemed

really worth talking about.

And that is, of course, how we're experiencing 2025, right?

There are these moments where just like everything seems to happen at once.

And then you're like, whoa, whoa, like, how weird.

I didn't even notice that it's been seven days without some crazy shit coming down the pike or whatever, right?

I always think back to the first Trump administration and the like 10 days when Scaramucci was a thing.

Remember this?

Was he the press secretary?

Yeah.

And then he got fired very quickly.

And then for a while, it was the Scaramucci was like a unit of time in which like chaos could emerge and then resolve itself in the Trump White House, right?

It was

a marker of the acceleration of history a little bit.

Yeah, and that was an August kind of phenomenon.

And like it was just like part of, I think, why people were able to pay attention to the bizarre speed with which all that happened was that I think a lot of us were on car radios still, right?

Like we were driving to the lake to take a swim.

Scar Mucci again?

Then we'd be driving to Wendy's to pick up some food.

Scaramucci's on the radio again, like with another weird thing.

And then you're driving back from the lake and you hear, oh my God, he got fired.

There's no more Scaramucci.

That seemed like it was such a whirlwind, you know?

Yeah, exactly.

And I think that a little bit of this happens in August of 1933.

So I really want to drill down today on the perception of time.

And I'm looking to sort of mimic how our protagonists, who we'll say about more in a little bit, I do want to replicate how they experience this month in the sense that like, it may seem like this is not about about very much, and then there's going to be a bolt out of the clear blue sky.

And I think that is exactly the feeling that I want to, I want to get at, and I want to sort of replicate for you.

I don't want to pre-determine too much of your reaction.

So, this is an experiment, sort of an experiential

history telling, right?

Well, this is going to be authentic because, once again, you forgot to send me your notes for this episode.

Adrian and I, like, I think it does wind up being a pretty authentic conversation, but we do write scripts that are like pretty loose for how we are going to structure each episode.

And then, you know, when it's my episode, I'll write one and send it to Adrian.

And when it's his episode, he'll write it and send it to me.

And the other one can like punch in stuff that we want to make sure we get to, et cetera.

And Adrian just straight up did not send me a script.

I was so offended.

I was looking for it.

I was like, where is my?

I thought I had.

I'm so sorry.

Yeah.

It's an embarrassing reference now, but I am also like the feeling that comes to mind for me when I think about my anticipation for new 1933 episodes is like when I was a kid and there was a new Harry Potter book and you would go to the bookstore at like midnight with the other nerdy children.

A sentiment that has aged like milk, right?

But like that kind of like giddy, it's coming and I can't wait to have the pleasure.

of being consumed by this reading experience is something I often feel with Adrienne's work.

And I am so deprived now, but I'm going to have a experience like the listeners do.

Yeah, hopefully.

Because I really don't know what's coming.

Yeah, so be prepared to be a little bit mystified at first.

I'm actually kind of glad you didn't read it.

I'd meant to send you the script, but the reason why I hesitated was that it was kind of shapeless for quite some time.

And I was like, well, I don't quite know what this is about.

And then it sort of occurred to me that the shapelessness and the not knowing what it's about was the theme.

of this episode.

So we're starting our story of August of 1933, and basically everyone's just talking about the weather.

Is it too hot?

It's too hot.

Yeah.

It's always too hot.

Well, I mean, the other thing was

we're following white guys in their mid-50s in a time when I think you still sort of wore suits a lot.

Like, these are people who are not made for hot weather.

In Dresden, where Viktor Klemper is writing, the weather appears to be sweltering, and Thomas Mann is at the Côte d'Azur in southern France, where the weather is sort of always wrong.

Like, he'll go through these long lists of like what's happening in Germany or like, you know, his worries about the future, but he starts out every single diary entry complaining about the weather.

It's either too hot or muggy, or there's the Mistral winds, which I think are like inland winds that sort of make swimming difficult, which are, I think, actually cold.

I'm always saying that it sucks to be at the Côte d'Asor.

You know, it just,

it's really poor Tomas Mann.

Even as these guys' world is collapsing, right?

Thomas Mann at this point is in exile.

Yeah.

And he knows he's in exile.

He's like, I can't really go back to Germany.

And Viktor Klemperer is a guy who is watching all of his colleagues do the Hitler salute and is worried correctly, I think, that he's going to get fired for being Jewish at a time when a lot of other, you know, his Jewish colleagues in the universities have already been fired.

And yet...

They're still like, oh my God, it's so fucking hot.

I'm schfitzing.

It's terrible.

And that's going to be the theme for this episode.

And it's hopefully something that our listeners will be noticing about their own experience of 2025 as well, that life does go on and the little stuff does go on.

And Schwitzing is still Schwitzing, right?

Even under fascism.

We're not going to talk about the weather, but we're going to talk about the little stuff, right?

What Hege called the lazy existence or idle existence, the stuff that just sort of happens and seems to have nothing to do with significant historical developments in the world, right?

But of course, we're going to find that the seemingly marginal and quotidian stuff tells its own own story about this historic moment.

This is an episode about the small things, small grievances, petty annoyances, the things that people read, the little conversations in between, the big stuff, summer things, basically.

And it's about a question that Viktor Klemper asks in his diary in mid-August.

One simply has to get through this time with decency.

Yeah, there's this like persistence of little human preoccupations, like, I don't know, narcissism, comfort, amusement,

sociality, self-regard.

Like, a lot of daily life the Nazis haven't totally interjected themselves into yet.

Like, Viktor Klemper sees his colleagues doing the Hitler salute, but he probably still has pretty cordial relationships with a lot of them.

Yeah.

Right.

And then there's a lot of people whose.

I was thinking about this recently, like with the new Trump administration.

There's a lot of people whose daily lives hasn't really changed much.

Right.

Yeah.

And a lot of this world historical political stuff, the

impacts that are being made manifest from the transition from one kind of regime to another,

is sort of at the margins of a lot of people's daily lives.

So it's interesting to see this contrast and the persistence of banal, quotidian human experience against the backdrop of like some pretty horrific history.

That's right.

Let me just read one paragraph that I think kind of gets at this from Klemper.

I write at length about pleasures.

They are the exception, and in general, our life proceeds very unhappily.

Eva is forever ailing and seriously depressed.

I myself am constantly plagued by heart and eye trouble.

And there is the constant pointless tyranny, uncertainty, and dishonorableness of our position in the Third Reich.

My hopes of a swift about face are fading.

The streets crowded with SA, the Nuremberg party rally has been raging.

The press worships Hitler like God and the prophets rolled into one.

On top of that, no change in the continuing pressure of the misery of the house business.

If only Eva could play music, everything would not be half as bad and perhaps quite good, right?

Like it's he, the way he rolls all this stuff into one, right?

It's all equated in his sentence structure, right?

Like

that the Nazis have taken power and everybody around him is worshiping Hitler is of the same importance to him, at least in the way he's structuring this sentence, as the fact that like he's having, he's having a hard time remodeling a house, right?

Yeah.

And then his, is, is it his wife who wants to play music?

Yeah, can't.

And like, she's all pent up and probably doesn't have much to do.

And there is something to this where I've been thinking a lot about how in a moment of like great indignity, right?

There's something about our historical moment as well that imposes a lot of just like like just national humiliation, right?

Like it is humiliating to be an American.

It is humiliating to be like kind of a left liberal American who has lost to these people.

It is humiliating to see, you know, my own intellectual and moral failures in this moment.

And the only place I have dignity, really, is in my private life, right?

Like the daily adherence to routine and principle and comfort and pleasure.

Like that's a place that stands in a lot of contrast, but it's also a place that can provide a kind of shelter.

It's true.

I also think that we know from our own lives how these things can be connected, right?

Like, he doesn't say our health is getting worse because of the Nazis, but like these indignities can

and do impinge on your most creaturely like I know people who can't sleep because of what the government is doing, right?

Like I'm sure that like no one that we're going to be talking about today is sleeping like a baby in 1933 either.

The indignity, it ratchets up ailments.

But also, of course, you experience a kind of global indignity of Nazi rule in 1933, but these people are also discovering discovering it in like the dumbest little things, right?

We're going to talk about the remodel that he's trying to do.

I think he's actually trying to build a new house.

And it's just like

he understands he's not doing it on a level playing field anymore.

And like building a house is probably pretty nerve-wracking business to begin with, but it's much worse if you're like, oh, everything is like basically stacked against me, right?

The thing I would most compare it to is the Jim Crow South, right?

Where just like the effort of being a black person there, the toll it took on a daily basis was just considerable.

And basically, everything else that just is part of living in a society was on top of that.

I know what you mean, right?

There are ways in which an inferior social status that is ascribed to you because of a group identity that you didn't choose or don't find anything wrong with accrues, right?

Like the way silt deposited by a river will like eventually build up into like a levee, right?

Like just this like little indignities

every day where it is just hard to get through your day

because of broad-based hostility or because of like policy.

I'm thinking right now of like

trans people who've had their creaturely need to like go to the bathroom, impinged upon by like actual policy.

And now doing that subjects them to inconvenience, indignity, you know, some kind of like humiliation that is mandated often by the state or like enforced by random strangers in a women's room telling them they don't belong there because those people have deputized themselves for the state's interest.

I imagine a lot of this is seeping into the daily life, the social milieu that people are starting to experience under Nazi Germany, right?

So, on the one hand, like a lot of the fundamentals are the same, right?

Like Victor Klemperer still has his job.

He's still going to work.

He's still trying to build this house.

But on the other hand, there are these like little reminders at the margins of life everywhere of what's going on.

Aaron Powell, I think that's right.

We should also, of course, this being in bed with the right, talk about the gender aspect of these kinds of summer things.

And there's two points I would like to make.

One is methodological, that in some way, turning towards private life, the somatic, et cetera, et cetera, has long been, of course, a intervention of feminist history.

They're not the only ones who invented this, but it's been, it was an important intervention of 1970s, 1980s feminist historians to sort of say the rush to like, what did people who matter do, and the people who matter are the ones who inflict violence on other people, and the things that matter is the violence they inflict on other people, right?

Like your politician passing a law, a general moving this army, right?

But like, we're not going to talk about what happened in the household.

And so social history, labor history, et cetera, et cetera, have been very, very good at kind of reversing that over the last 50 years and saying, like, no, the structures of everyday life are extremely important.

And in fact, the idea that these two things can be distinguished readily is often an absolute misperception of the historical record and says more about the sort of psychology of the historian doing it than it does about the reality on the ground, right?

I do want to point out that this is, in fact, kind of a feminist form of history writing that we're trying to do here.

But there is, of course, also the fact that it's a gender story in that our two most persistent guides through this year have been two men, Victor Klemper, who we've been talking about already, and Thomas Mann, the writer.

But it's been about the collapse of the kinds of professional and institutional structures that tethered these men to, however you want to call it, to civil society or the state, one or the other, right?

What gave them a place and purpose.

And they're both finding themselves in a moment, as you say, in August 1933, where they're sort of having to say, well, what's left of that?

What is left of me?

if the institutions I rely on no longer respond to me.

And this is not about the police or something like that.

That's been gone a long time.

But it's stuff like my publisher, right?

Like things that you and I can very much empathize with.

We'll talk about the annoyance of like a book that you wrote that's not coming out now, right?

Like

am I getting a paycheck, right?

Can I vote in the faculty senate kind of stuff?

You know, like it's, they're obviously dumb and they're little compared to what's going to happen later, but they are about something more.

They're about where you fit into society and whether you fit in at all.

Yeah, there's something about how these institutions, which are collapsing at this point in history, you know, they're becoming Nazified, they're capitulating to the regime, they're changing the way that they operate.

But those institutions are what tie the individual into like broader social and collective life, right?

So when, you know, you're not sure if you can vote in the faculty senate anymore, on the one hand, that's very small.

And on the other hand, it throws into question your role in this larger group that you've been a part of before and are not exactly the same part of anymore.

Yeah, exactly.

And the feeling that they all have that being an out-group is only going to mean more and more and more, right?

That this is demarcating a space that you can then do anything to, right?

This is going to be what's called the prerogative state, right?

Like you're less and less able to draw on institutions that protect you, that treat you a certain way, but instead you become more and more the states to do with as it pleases, right?

I mean, this goes even beyond something like the university.

It's even about the economy.

The way that in a liberal democracy, the way you make money and the way you get to spend it is how society expresses your value as its citizen.

Yeah.

So Klemper has money problems.

He's trying to build this house in the middle of all this craziness.

And it's clear that all his sources of income are drying up.

He's sure he's going to get fired from his 10-year job.

His publisher rejects his new book because it's, quote, purely backward looking and neglects the, quote, national point of view.

Is that code for he's too liberal or is it code for he's Jewish?

I think it's for he's Jewish.

Okay.

I mean, he's writing about France.

So maybe that's bad too.

But like, but he's just like, what the fuck does that mean, you guys?

That book is not of the political zeitgeist that we're now falling in line with.

Yeah, it's the publishing version of the old tweet.

This whole thing smacks of gender.

I yell as I talk.

Right.

Like, it's the way that conservatives invoke gender or DEI to say, I don't like that a black person or a queer person is in this position of power.

I mean, he got along well with his publisher.

It's more like, we think there's a world of hurt coming our way if we publish this and we don't want to, right?

They're not transmitting their own value judgment yet, but they are responding, you know, in advance obedience to the pressures that they're feeling from society and from the state.

And at the same time, Klemper notes in a very funny aside that, quote, there are no bankruptcies anymore.

The National Socialist does not go bankrupt, right?

So he's like, oh, there's always money for these motherfuckers, but I can't figure out how to get this contractor who stiffed me on, I forget what it is, the piping or something like that, like to pay me back.

Like it's dumb stuff like this, where he's like, oh, but you and your dumb brown buddies cannot possibly lose money anymore.

But for me, there's a totally different set of rules.

Like he would obviously acknowledge that that's like, even in his Maslow's hierarchy of, oh, this sucks, it's basically very, very small potatoes.

But this stuff adds up, right?

It adds up to a feeling that like, I do not belong in ways that I think this state will use as an occasion to visit further violence and exclusion.

I will stand up for Victor Klemperer and say that it is comforting to me to see somebody be kind of petty and narcissistic amidst the rise of a authoritarian regime.

I'm like, oh, other people have done this before.

Exactly.

That's what I'm doing.

No, exactly.

This did make me feel much better about like the way my diary has been looking, which is like,

you're like, it's so hot.

Yeah.

God, this fascism is awful and such small portions.

Like the fascism is awful, but more importantly, what about me and my narcissistic gratifications, which I am not getting enough of?

Exactly.

This is Vitto Klempera.

On Tuesday, August 15th, a bus trip.

So that's the kind of old man he is.

He's like, ooh, bus trip.

He makes fun of it.

The fashionable thing for the petit bourgeois, for the elderly, for those who have difficulty walking.

As we left the station at two, the mystery tour by tram was also just setting off, even more emphatically for the little people because cheaper, one Mark 50 against three or four marks in the bus.

At the front of the car, with a conductor's band, then nine or ten full carriages.

There were three buses, each with some 30 passengers, a couple on little folding chairs, and a manager and a master of ceremonies, who made short, humorous speeches, helped when people were getting out, etc., etc fortunately our third bus was open and when on the return journey it rained a couple of times our master of ceremony reisman he had introduced himself had constantly to wind the top up and down for coffee we were at the table with two elderly ladies of quote better society superior gossips completely aran fragments of their conversation indignation that some jewish doctor such a fine man such a good family has been deprived of his livelihood.

After coffee, there was cabaret in the large room.

The three managers performed all sorts of things.

Only the solemn first poem, Michel Be German, against foreigners.

But not a shred of politics, no anti-Semitism, the most harmless comedy, animal voices, dialects, etc.

God.

It's like boring, boring, boring.

It's interesting, right?

Like he's having the most boring, normal ass.

He's on a bus tour

and he's just overhearing these gossipy old ladies talking about the consequences of the Nazi regime.

And then it's like, back to the entertainment.

Yeah.

I think it's so interesting also that they are complaining, right?

Like no one clocks that Klemper is Jewish.

There's no anti-Semitism in the comedy, which like makes sense because like, obviously this is hacky stuff.

They didn't update their crap just because the Nazis came to power.

They're disagreeing with what the Nazis are doing on a very personal individual level.

Question is, like, do they do anything about it?

And I, and Klemper, I think.

in that summer spirit that we've been tracing is sort of more like, oh, thank God for this.

They go back to another bus tour.

Like four days later, they become like addicted to these bus tours because it's just like, it's a nice reprieve.

But of course, you and I reading this are just like, are the society ladies going to do anything about this?

Or are we just going to be like, oh, our poor doctor, you know?

Yeah, there's a way in which the passivity, the comfort, the assumption that it's not their fault for their problem, it's like very recognizable.

Right.

And it's also monstrous in its way.

It is a symptom of the whole problem.

It's like, why don't you read about, I feel like the New York Times has done a couple of these profiles.

It's like he voted for Trump.

He didn't realize that his wife would be deported.

You know, it's the stupid complacency.

Yeah.

Which is not exactly malice, but winds up having a lot of the similar effects.

Well, or like the people saying I didn't do the Hitler salute, like the idea that I was against it.

Like, I mean, it sounds like these ladies are against it.

And like, good for them.

But like, what's the next sentence after that?

Right.

Like, is there.

How did they vote?

You know, like,

maybe not even.

Like, I mean, the Nazis had gotten 44% of the vote.

I think in the last like not free and fair election, they're going to do a lot better in November.

But of course, maybe these ladies just didn't vote.

In some way, it's easy to be like, I'm against it and to leave it at that.

Like this state is already victimizing people at alarming rates and is stripping citizens of their citizenship.

And you never know what people's capabilities are until there's pressure.

And I think a lot of people were finding themselves against it, but like not capable of doing very much about that fact.

That's Victor Klimperer.

Let's turn now to our other major diarist and guide through this year, Thomas Mann, who has exiled himself to France.

Yeah, exactly.

So he's not set foot in Germany since leaving it in, I believe, early February.

And I think we already talked about it, that like he has known that this was going to be for good or had a sense that it was going to be for good since at least June.

But this is also the month where he has to make that explicit and official.

So he's nervous.

He's finishing a novel.

It's the second volume of his massive Joseph Tetralogy, so based on the Bible.

And the first volume of it is due out in October with his longtime publisher, Samuel Fischer, in Berlin.

And you might see the problem with that.

Yeah, uh-oh.

How are they going to publish a Thomas Mann who has now been sort of publicly like disgraced, right?

Because he has refused to embrace the Nazi regime.

Exactly.

Like, he's like, well, what if we publish this and they burn it, right?

He hasn't yet gotten book burned, I think, but his brother has.

But he's like, well, you know, it's dumb stuff.

But like, should I even publish it there?

Like, do I get my advance back?

Do they, do they pay for the ones they burn?

How does this work?

And we should mention his publisher, Zamu Fischer, is Jewish.

And Fischer was apparently, we can talk about this a little bit more, but

Fischer was like, oh, this is all going to blow over.

They wouldn't dare.

And his son is begging Man to sort of stay with the publisher.

And Man is like, you guys made me i we i love you guys but i keep getting offers from german language publishers that are springing up in like amsterdam and paris and honestly that feels like a better way to reach readers are you guys sure you aren't kidding yourselves here wait wait wait wait do you mean to tell me that already in august 1933 there are these expac communities trying to like rebuild a like German cultural world in exile.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

That's so fast.

Well, some of it, I think, might have been before 33, right?

I mean, like, there are right American publishing houses, small ones, being run out of Paris right now, probably.

But yeah, no, a lot of things had to move very, very quickly.

Are there American publishing houses in Paris?

Do they need an intern?

Can I go?

Can I work for them?

Are there American publishing houses in America?

Yeah, they're not hiring either.

But like, yeah, no, it happens very quickly.

For instance, the publisher that Thomas Mann is considering is the Quirido Falag, which was founded in July of 1933 and was a joint venture between Emmanuel Quirido, I don't know how exactly you say that, and a subsidiary of his publishing house.

And I'm going to butcher the Dutch here.

Apologies in advance to our Dutch listeners.

Quirido's Autsche Verai, is that right?

I'm not sure.

But anyway, this guy had an existing, very well-established publishing house in Amsterdam on the Kaisersgracht, in fact.

and he basically entered into a joint venture with this guy fritz landshoff who was dismissed from the kietenheue a publishing house in germany during this first wave of purges and synchronizations so one of the things i'm guessing that we're seeing happening is that entrepreneurial types outside of Germany are seeing these purges happening and going, oh, that's talent I can poach.

Like how the fanciest American academics are getting offers from, you know, universities abroad now because everybody's looking for the exits.

There's like something maybe similar happening where people are like, okay, this is a like decently sized market in of German speakers that I can capitalize on because all of these like big talents are going to have to leave.

So there's some of that.

At the same time, I'm guessing Kerry Do did this out of conviction because it's a nightmare in terms of a business model, right?

There were not enough German speakers that had fled to the Netherlands to make this a Dutch company.

This was basically a mail order operation, right?

Which I think in the 1930s was

avoiding the main country in which these things would be read.

It's kind of a nightmare trying to sort of navigate this stuff.

I mean, I'm sure they were trying to figure out how to make it work, but it was largely also, it was a labor of love.

It was something that they felt they needed to do.

I think the publishing house survived, but a lot of the ventures sort of came to naught.

Klaus Mann, for instance, in September 1933, Klaus Mann would start a magazine, in fact, with Chirido, Die Samlung, which was supposed to just collect exiled German writing.

And that folded within like two years.

It's just, it's hard to make this stuff work.

But, you know, there is just, as you say, a lot of talent going around.

And so part of it is busy work.

Part of it is charity.

Some of it is, hey, we can actually make some money doing this.

Okay, but granted, a literary magazine launching and then immediately folding is not something that only happens under conditions of authoritarianism.

That happened all throughout the heyday of American democracy, too.

Yeah, now that I'm saying that, actually, two years for a literary magazine seems pretty good.

Another example of an institution that travels outside of Germany is the famous Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, also known as the Frankfurt School, right?

And this is a really interesting one.

This gives you a sense.

So Kerry Do was founded by people who just were like, oh, shit, sometime in March or April 1933.

Not the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, because Max Hochheimer, the director of the Institute, together with Fritz Pollock and young Theodore Adono, had started doing these surveys of Germans to sort of figure out how authoritarian were these people.

And legend has it that basically took one look at the results, was like, oh, we're moving.

We're out.

So what they did, they had an endowment and they moved parts of that endowment abroad, to the Netherlands, in fact, and incorporated as some kind of nonprofit in Switzerland.

So they were pretty much set up by 1933.

And I mean, they got closed down immediately.

They got closed down in March.

All their assets were frozen and seized by the Gestapo, I think, in July.

So they didn't have much time, but they didn't need much time.

They were fully set up to kind of move their infrastructure first to the Netherlands, then eventually to New York and on to LA.

It's really a transplantation of anyone who's worth anything in German life and letters, like outside of Germany.

Like that does create needs and does create a need for infrastructures.

This is a question of to what extent do I still participate in the publishing sphere of this country that I've left behind?

Like Publishing with Fisher says, Look, I am making a bet that people in Germany will want to read this still.

I'm trusting you to be brave and pick up a book from a guy that the Nazis can't stop shouting about and read it.

And one that is all about the Old Testament, which probably is also not a total coincidence in 1933.

But at the same time, he gets the reports from his kids, he gets the reports from people back home, and he's like, I don't think they have it in them.

Like, I think they're all caving.

Like, that's somehow worse.

If suddenly there's like thousands of copies of my book just like piling up and poor Zamu Fischer goes bankrupt over having guilt-tripped me into publishing with him one last time.

The timing couldn't be worse because he was asked in July to fill out a questionnaire from the Reich Organization of German Writers.

It asked of all writers residing within Germany or outside of it certain questions and then had a loyalty pledge on the back of it.

Right.

And he knew that he wasn't going to fill it out or sign it.

And he knew there was going to be blowback in Germany once that became became public.

But he's like, well, how bad is it going to be?

And how can I make it less bad?

Right.

He was like, do I just say nothing?

Or do I, because other people were like, hey, Thomas, you should probably say something, right?

Just like write an open letter about why you didn't sign this freaking thing.

And he's like, oh, but have a book coming out.

Like,

that's how you get burnt.

That's how you get burnt.

Now it would be like courting maximum controversy to try and draw attention to his book.

It's like, maybe I can shoot off an inflammatory tweet and see if I can go viral.

I will say controversy does not always yield book sales.

No.

Of course, like this isn't just about, oh, my public and like my country, blah, blah, blah, my public stature.

He's still trying to get all his shit out of his house in Munich and trying to figure out how to do that, right?

That's right.

There was also like a weird thing you hear about with these émigrés during the Nazi era is just like how hard it was to get their stuff out of Germany, often because like Nazi customs officials would like demand bribes, but also because like it was just a logistical nightmare.

Yeah.

It's very clear he has to pay some kind of fine for abandoning Germany or whatever.

And he's like, it really depends.

Like I have brought some money abroad.

I'm happy to pay a certain amount.

But he goes from like one entry to the next being like, oh God, this is going to be fucking ruinous.

I can't pay this to like, oh, now it's like tiny bits and like inflation will eat the rest.

That's fine.

Right.

I mean, he understands that, obviously, like if this book, depending on how his refusal to sign this thing and the new book, depending on how those are received the nazis can very easily just be like oh uh now it's a billion dollars or whatever right like not not unlike certain us universities you know yeah it's another thing is that when people are trying to persecute you for your political beliefs it's actually kind of advantageous to have as few assets as possible and that's true because there's less for them to uh come after ask me how i know when you are broke it's true that you in fact don't have anything to lose yeah but when you are successful that draws more attention and it also makes people wonder about how much money you're making.

That's right.

It's the Bobby McGee rule.

And, you know, so there's just like a lot of nervousness to that summer.

And a lot of his entries could feel like Clemper is very small bore compared to the early stuff, which is like, I get reports from this and there's this.

And, you know, and here it's more like, my back hurts.

I can't swim.

Why is it all so hot?

My piano, where's my piano?

I'm in a thing with my publisher who will not see reason, right?

It's a little bit like when a rock band makes a song about like the contract they shouldn't have signed.

And you're like, honestly, I think this is more interesting to you guys than to us.

But on the other hand, Mann is, of course, partly, I think, attuned to his own nervousness and...

these kind of small creaturely fixations, partly because he's a huge narcissist, sure, sure, but also because he has written before about sort of nervousness as an index of historical change.

In 1929, Mann had published a novella called Mario and the Magician, which is the story of a bourgeois German family stay at an Italian beach resort and a stay in a story that are clearly overshadowed by Italian fascism.

It's not only about that, but it's definitely trying to tell a story about like how fascism percolates into everyday life and sort of makes people agitated and nervous.

The first sentence of this story is, The atmosphere in Tora di Venera remains unpleasant in the memory.

From the first moment the air of the plays made us uneasy, we felt irritable on edge.

I guess we have both been out of the country since Trump returned to power, and the vibe is different.

You know, it's kind of difficult to

articulate what it is about returning to the U.S., but it's like, oh, great, now I'm nervous to go through customs.

Or like, oh, great, now I

have to reimmerse myself upon my return in

this water I didn't really know I was swimming in before.

There is a way that people have both like conscious and direct fear of like the state and its actors, right?

But then there's also just an ambient discomfort with the world that

can sort of seep its way into your consciousness when you're living under an authoritarian regime.

Aaron Ross Powell, that seems exactly right.

And the funny thing is that the Nazis, of course, sort of spread that even beyond the borders.

The émigrés partly have to decide where to settle down.

So Mann has a lead on a house in Switzerland and he's thinking he might want to move there.

But of course, the Nazis are already making noise about maybe annexing Austria.

And so he's like, a lot of these people are like, well, I have left behind the Nazis.

Will the Nazis come to me now?

Right.

And just to give you a sense of just how clairvoyant this was in some ways, Mann says in the diary, previously I I sat for a long time on the small terrace and reflected on the conversations of the afternoon.

Hensel shares Schwarzschild's opinion that if the Germans are given time to continue their immense armaments for another one and a half to two years, a victorious German war against the West, perhaps with Russian support, is not inconceivable.

As a chemist, former cement manufacturer, he claims to be able to say that Germany's chemical superiority and its lead in poison gas production make this possibility more than conceivable.

So it's not like, oh, I got out.

It's saying, like, they're coming.

Like, this isn't going to stop there.

So everybody seems to be anticipating a war.

Yeah.

They're like, the Nazis aren't going to stay put, right?

And like early in 1933, we talked about how some people were expecting slash maybe hoping that like the Allies would invade because the Nazis are now very clearly violating the terms of the World War I armistice.

And then they give up on that hope.

And now the anticipation has changed to one of like a war of Nazi aggression.

Exactly.

And I mean, this is before the Nazis have even officially dropped out of the League of Nations, right?

These people do see it very, very clearly.

And part of that's because they have to start thinking long term.

They're starting to think about, well, if I buy a house, if I rent a house, if I get my kids in school here, right?

You may remember, you know, Judith Kowl's family, for instance, has settled down in Switzerland by now.

And of course, it becomes a question, like, well, do we now have the kids go to Swiss schools?

Or are we going to try to go somewhere else?

And they'll eventually wind up in London, right?

So these are some everyday questions that some listeners listeners of ours will be familiar with, but those everyday questions sort of become overlaid with how far can these people get?

Where are we safe?

Switzerland feels safe, but Switzerland is right next door.

France feels safe, but

we all know what happens.

Is the UK necessarily safer?

They don't know that, right?

These kinds of horrifying and, as it turns out, accurate, fears for the future overlay with this very sort of quotidian business of like, well, where's a good place where we can sort of hunker down for a few years, however long this takes.

Another thing that happens is that as people settle down, people send more letters, I think.

It's easier to know where people are staying and to get things to them.

And so people are checking in with each other.

So for instance, in mid-August, Mann notes in his diary that he needs to get together with Leon Feuchtwanger, the famous novelist,

who seems to have gotten most of his money out of Germany really successfully.

He's like, I want to know how he did that.

I need some pointers.

How'd you get out?

How'd you get your money?

How are you getting money now?

But of course, something that we'll see again and again with the émigrés in later years, past 1933, is that no one's quite in the same boat and no one's quite created equal, right?

So Mann, of course, will eventually wind up in California.

He'll wind up in Pacific Palisades.

And just two miles down the road from him will be Leon Freistwanger.

Feustwanger living in a gorgeous building that almost burnt down during the fires last year, but was spared, which is nice, the Villa Aurura.

And then across what's today the 101 freeway has a bunch of people living in these like shitty rentals in West Hollywood.

And part of it, it was a question of like, did you have a U.S.

publisher, right?

Thomas Mann shows up and like, I'm a Nobel Prize winner here.

Like, I'm translated.

I'm in the Book of the Month Club, you know.

And some people who were a big deal in Germany are not actually internationally known.

Exactly.

So they become a little fish in the very big pond of the United States.

I mean, Mann's brother Heinrich, for instance, important left-wing writer, the president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, so the Prussian Academy of Sciences, so you know, establishment guy.

But by now, his books have been burnt, his articles are being prescribed up and down the land, and he isn't really set up for the international stuff nearly as well as his little brother.

There will be others.

Franz Werfel is a funny example who's married to Gustav Mahler's widow, Alma Mahler.

He writes this kind of, honestly, a little bit treakly novel about a Catholic saint in France.

It has something to do with Lord.

It doesn't matter here.

But it gets optioned by like MGM, I think.

And so he comes to California and he's like, rolling in it.

Like people are like, I went to Verfel's house.

It's real nice.

I ran to Charlie Chaplin there, right?

He's just like living the life, right?

And then they get Tein Richmann, who's like, has to basically beg his little brother for like alimony to like make rent, or Bertol Brecht, who like shows up to this job in a studio that he got because someone wants to make sure that Bertolt Brecht doesn't starve.

And they're like, could you write us a, you know, a romance picture?

And he's like, no.

Like, I'm very fucking brecht.

Like, I will not be writing your fucking romance picture.

But so it really depends.

And these fissures are already opening up.

So another letter that Mann gets after talking to Feustwanger is one from Jakob Wassermann, who was another one of these people that is in kind of a weird position.

I'm guessing that's not a name you've ever heard.

It's also a name that some of our German listeners will not have heard of, Jakob Wassermann.

Very, very successful in the interwar years in Germany.

Best-selling novelist, probably sold better than Mann, but didn't really succeed outside of Germany that much.

Today, the books are hard to find.

I think New York Review Books put out one or two.

He went through a really messy divorce, which really drained his finances.

So he is someone who really experiences having to leave Nazi Germany.

He's Jewish, having to leave Nazi Germany as just a huge reversal of fortune.

I think his books are being burned.

They're certainly not on shelves anymore.

And this was someone who really made money not from like prize money and like lecture tours, but like books, just selling books, right?

And he can't do that anymore.

Literally couldn't be me.

Would love love it if it could be.

You know, like you can't do that anymore in Germany in 1933.

You can't do that anymore anywhere in 2025.

It is true.

It is true.

Unless you're Dan Brown or Gia Tolentino.

Or like, yeah, basically just those two people.

Yeah.

Although I think Gia actually writes for TV now.

Oh.

So not even Gia, not even the Tolentinos of the world.

Oh, man.

This is depressing.

Maybe Ton Hesikots.

Yeah, hopefully.

If he can't make it work, no one can.

But just to give you an idea of how this all sounds, in mid-August, Man gets a letter from Vassaman.

It's about the fact that he's like, I got this questionnaire too.

What are you doing?

Are you going to write something?

Are we doing an open letter?

Did you fill it out?

Did you sign the stupid thing?

Don't put this in writing.

This is the other thing I want to read.

Like, I'm so glad that they did for the historical record.

Yeah.

But at the time, I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.

This is a conversation you have on the phone or in person.

Like, you do not put like, how are we going to not cooperate with the authoritarian regime like in writing in a letter to your buddy that like can be subpoenaed?

No, not just subpoenaed.

I think this is also where Mann first says like I got a letter from Munich.

It was very friendly.

I am pretty sure this letter was opened before it got to me.

Right.

Like so he's he's starting to like, I mean, I'm sure they only do it when they see the name Thomas Mann for now, but like you can't rely on the privacy of mail, for instance, anymore.

But so he notes that Wassaman says like, I'm just in dire straits here.

Really sucks.

He doesn't say that Wassaman asks for money, but it seems implied.

And this is where we get, I feel like I sometimes give you a Thomas Mann picture that is a little hagiographic and too nice.

I cannot emphasize that also Thomas Mann was very significantly kind of an asshole.

That's very important for you to know.

Really, because the image I'm getting from this biography, which I do not think is the one that emerges from the books, but from the biography, he kind of seems like a daughtering old man in this part of his life.

Like the biography that you're painting for me, that is, it's like he has to be cajoled by his gay children into not going back to Germany.

He's like a little worried about money in a way that seems like, I don't know, maybe disproportionate to his actual needs.

You know, he just seems like, it's like dad.

It's like the foibles of dad.

Yeah, but he is, he can be a little bit monstrous.

And I think there's every chance.

I don't know if we have the letter from Wassaman, but there's every chance that Vassaman's like, I'm really having a rough time.

Any chance you can help me?

And Tomas Mann is like, sucks to be you, man.

Or just

like, that's what he's like, very bourgeois.

He's like, you don't ask other people for money.

He's the son of a Lübeck importer-exporter, right?

He's like, no, you keep your own accounts, man.

He will never let his brother forget that he has to help him out later on.

Although he's nicer with his kids about that stuff.

So he says, Wassaman writes me, talks about what to do about this questionnaire from Reissoband, and says, like, how terrible he's doing.

However, he's staying at the Boro Lach when he's in Zurich next time.

Do you know the Boro Lac?

I'm guessing fancy.

Well, let's look it up right now.

It's still there because in Switzerland nothing got destroyed.

Let's have a look.

If you wanted to stay there tonight, $1,102.

Wait, Jesus, this place looks amazing.

I do want to stay there tonight.

I mean, it's Olak means on the lake.

It's literally very close to the lake.

Look at these ballrooms.

Room service.

I don't know.

Could be worse.

Could be worse.

Well, that's exactly Tomasman's point.

He's like, I can't help but notice you at this fancy hotel.

Where I'm like, I don't know, Tomas Mann.

Like, the man's clearly down.

Why are you kicking?

But he does have a bitchy side.

And he's just like, he's like, if you're asking me for money, I want to approve of the way that you're spending the money you still have.

Right.

It's like the way people respond to welfare recipients.

They're like, hey, you should be suffering a little.

He's like, you should at least be staying at a Marriott.

Boom.

Roasted.

So he's writing in his diary as like, you can't be that hard up, can you?

Yeah, exactly.

He is a little bit of a dick.

I like him.

He's a little bit of a bitch.

Yeah.

But just to give you a sense of, you know, these little irritations that everyone has sort of come with real costs.

Like Ifa and Viktor Klempera's health woes would eventually go away, but Wassaman's story has a much darker ending.

He wasn't as lucky.

He died on January 1st, 1934, at age 60 only.

And it's a stroke.

It's not a suicide.

It's a stroke.

But very clearly brought on by the stress of his new situation, the situation that he complained to Thomas Mann about.

In fact, I believe there's some reason to suspect that he had the stroke right after getting off the phone with his publisher.

So this is these little hurts, these little painful shifts in people's lives have massive consequences.

They end lives already.

This is something that you find a lot more when they all have to live cheek by jowl in Pacific Palisades and Southern California.

They're starting to detect that they're all in the same boat, but they're not all in the same boat.

You know what I'm saying?

Like differences open up.

And I mean, like writers, we always compare ourselves to each other.

Writers and artists operate in these invisible or very impenetrable economies of prestige, which do translate to real money, whether or not you can afford to live comfortably, et cetera, et cetera.

And now the economy of prestige is kind of like running on empty because there is no like, oh, who's going to get invited to give this lecture at the university?

Well, spoiler alert, none of y'all are going to be invited to any German university for 12 years.

And they think it might even be longer than that in some moments of sort of dark candor.

One thing that's happening that hadn't occurred to me that is happening, that these guys who are competing professionally

now find themselves kind of thrown out of that economy, right?

Who is going to land a job in LA is a very different question than like who's going to get this professorship that came up?

Who's going to get this fellowship?

Who's going to get this award?

Like what they were used to valuing themselves over and competing among each other for are things that are just like no longer available.

Like, I think there's a a reason why Man commits this to his diary and doesn't sort of write to other people, like, Fasterman, ask me for money, right?

Like, he's not being that much of a jerk.

But this is kind of what art world people, I think, do.

And like, they can't snap entirely out of it.

He's like, like, it's also kind of a funny story for a guy who's like, you got to help me out, man.

I'm staying at the Beau Rollack and it's fucking expensive.

Does this pettiness persist?

That's the thing.

It's like, they do seem to know, actually, that they are living through a moment of history that they should take seriously, right?

Yeah.

That doesn't seem to be lost on them.

No.

And yet, they're still so petty and such like little like backbiting queens.

It's

on the one hand, like, I think you can say clearly it's like a moral failure to make your own conduct align with the gravity of your historical moment.

And on the other hand, it's kind of like reassuringly human.

While we're on the subject of expensive Swiss hotels, another group of people that we've already followed who are living in a fancy Swiss hotel for a moment in the summer of 1933 are the Kells, so a Judith Kells family.

The family has reunited in Zurich and they're living in an extremely fancy hotel and find out they can't afford it.

And so they move into a much more remote holiday destination hotel, which was cheaper, apparently.

The book, which again is a novelization, how Hitler stole the Pink Rabbit is not a memoir, but it does appear to,

for all intents and purposes, dovetails with Judith Kaz's actual timeline.

So the individual episodes may be enhanced or embellished, but the general outlines of it are true.

And she describes this as being pretty idyllic, right?

Like their money trouble made them go to a lakeside in the Swiss Alps.

Could be worse.

Must be nice.

Must be nice.

But one of the episodes she describes in When Hitler Stole the Pink Rabbit that I think is kind of interesting is that, of course, the kids ran into Germans from Nazi Germany there.

And it's the first time she starts speaking of the Germans, which I mean, this book is written decades later, but like it's interesting, right?

Like this is the moment when they're, oh, we're not like them, right?

Like they'd sort of left Germany very, very quickly.

Of course, they're speaking German with these kids,

but in some way they're like excited when there's someone finally not speaking Swiss German, which is quite different.

And then these kids' parents are like, you can't play with these kids, you know, telling their kids you can't play with these kids because they're Jews, right?

And so it's like the first time that she sort of experiences that, like, yeah, that she is now something else entirely.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: The meaning of what German is has changed under the Nazis, right?

These are kids who at the beginning of their lives wouldn't have occurred to them to not think of themselves as German, right?

The Jewish and German are continuous categories.

And that ceases to be true after Hitler rises to power.

Yeah, and I do think it's really remarkable how quickly that goes.

Klemper starts using the word Aryan, and initially it's like scare quotes and kind of a wink, and then eventually there's just no more wink.

It's just like, yeah, it's just a word we have to use now, right?

Like the overall vibe is, I'm not endorsing this, but like, this is just the reality in which we live now.

These are the operant categories, right?

The politics has made something imaginary into something that has real social balance and importance.

Exactly.

And that does determine who you should play with in a Swiss ski hotel, basically.

So it's important to note that as they're sort sort of pouring over the data of what has happened so far, right, like there's all this small stuff that crops up for them.

And I just thought I'd mention a few things that I think we can sort of riff on a little bit.

One of the things Mann finds out is that

while a lot of his books are starting to disappear and while his brother's books are really starting to disappear,

His first big novel, Buddenbrooks, gets added to, I think, his granddaughter's

school library.

He doesn't seem to think of it it as an act of resistance so much as he's like, oh, that's detached from me as a person, right?

They're like, that's a German classic already, because he wrote that in 1903, I want to say.

So he's like, this is a work that is detached from me and will survive independent of my biography, which is something that does indeed happen during the Nazi years.

There are a couple of poems of Heinrich Heine's that were so well known, especially when set to music, that the Nazis would just remove the author's name, Heine was famously Jewish, and would just call it traditional.

So, like, so Ma, instead of getting that, he's like, well, at least you're teaching my work.

They're like, this is an old poem.

Who knows who wrote it?

Yeah.

Who's to say?

That's kind of funny.

Yeah.

So they're starting to give thought to like,

if my work isn't going to survive as being authored by me, how is it going to survive, right?

Which is something something that will embroil two of our émigrés in a really hilarious feud that we can talk about one day, which is one that takes place in Brentwood, California.

Yeah, it's shocking to me how much of the transport of like the German intellectual class just wound up like in LA.

Oh, yeah.

Because you would think that they would at least go to New York, right?

So how do they all wind up in Los Angeles?

Well, it's cheaper, ironically.

A lot of it is that they all land on the East Coast first.

It's the obvious place.

A lot of them go to Princeton.

You know, the foundations are stronger.

A lot of these people are living essentially on the government dole at this point.

Or they try to slot into big research projects.

And well, let's be clear, like the West Coast was still a bit of a backwater at the time.

But they couldn't afford it.

They couldn't figure out how to make ends meet.

And then it was like, well, move to LA.

You'll get your own house.

And maybe there's some Hollywood stuff you could do or whatever.

And that's what they do.

The urban cost of living strikes again.

Everything comes back to housing.

Yes.

Well, certainly in California, yeah.

And there's an even weirder kind of twist to it, which is that LA's big sort of land expansion is sort of happening while these immigrants are arriving.

And there's good reason to suspect that the reason why a lot of these people ended up so close to each other spatially and were able to...

able to hang out so much and get into weird fights was because of maybe the most evil group in the world, California realtors.

They tended to sort people, right?

There's a lot of evidence to suggest that

redlining really shaped American cities, it was real estate brokers who sort of made sure that the right people ended up in the right neighborhoods.

And so they often packed the Jews together.

And so these people would end up in, yeah, in a very nice California bungalow, but it would be a bungalow in an area where people wouldn't be upset if Teodoro Ardorno moved in next door.

I can also just see somebody not necessarily seeing themselves as nefarious, but being like, oh, you know, the bookish guys from Germany tend to like it over here, or a bunch of them have already settled successfully there.

I sold those houses.

Maybe I'll try and sell this new house over there, too.

And then he winds up sticking you next to the guy who's the wrong kind of communist who you knew from back home and already hated.

Yeah, I think there's a story where Max Horkheimer is offered a house in Pacific Palisades, and they're like, oh, there are already some German families not too far away.

Someone just moved in around the corner.

And Horken is like, Oh, yeah, who's that?

And he's like, Oh, a Mr.

Mann.

And so, yeah,

Germans divorced from context, encountering all of these smiling Californians who are completely oblivious.

That strikes me as very, very plausible.

Yeah, so there is a story that may not be true.

Alex Ross, who's been on the pod, has not been able to confirm that this really happened.

But there is a story that Leon Feustwanger's wife, Martha, ran into Arnold Schoenberg at the Brentwood Market, which I believe is still there.

It's somewhere like where Larry David films Kirby Enthusiasm.

And basically, they get into a whole thing about Thomas Mann's latest novel, which ends with Schoenberg shouting, I don't have syphilis at the top of his lungs at the Brentwood Market.

Whether or not this is apocryphal, what had happened is that Mann had written a story, had written a novel called Dr.

Faustus about a German composer who becomes a stand-in for Nazi Germany.

And his analysis of what had happened in Nazi Germany, as that, I have to admit, is not particularly convincing.

He's much better on the Nazis in his essays and his speeches at the time than he is in that novel.

Still a great novel.

The problem is that this fictitious composer, Adrian Levakuhn, winds up inventing 12-tone music, which is, of course, what Arnold Schoenberg famously invented.

And so everyone's like, oh, that's Schoenberg.

And the guy asyphilised.

And so that's why Schoenberg got like super upset.

But the whole point of this is not only do they end up with these like weird provincial little things, but if you think about it, like why the fuck would Arnold Schoenberg, famous composer, care that like Mann based this character kind of on him in some ways, right?

Also, Mann didn't know enough about 12-show music to get that part right, so he had Theodore Adorno write those parts of the novel for him.

So Schoenberg also hated Adorno.

Adorno loved Schoenberg.

It was a, it's a whole mess.

I mean, you have to have Alex Ross talk you through it at some point.

The Mean Girls has nothing on this.

But more importantly, I looked into this altercation a couple of years ago at the behest actually of Arnold Schoenberg's grandson.

I kept wondering, like, why was this guy so agitated?

Like, I mean, yeah, it's kind of a party foul, but like, Thomas Mann was the master of party fouls.

He wrote a novella where two twins based on his wife and her twin brother commit incest.

And I'm like, I really don't know how you top that.

That would make Christmas really awkward.

Giving a random composer syphilis feels kind of small compared to.

But the reason I think is that Schoenberg really thought that Mann was rewriting history and that people may not remember who Arnold Schoenberg was.

They're starting to become very worried about like how and why and under what modalities will any of this work through which I've defined myself survive.

They had sort of one idea of what the futurity, not of themselves, but of their work looked like.

And now someone like Schoenberg cannot be sure anymore.

He's like, well, my students are going to go be everywhere and be like the composing teachers of tomorrow.

They're going to tell everyone how great Arnold Schoenberg was.

And he's like, they're all out of jobs or they flipped and they're making horrible Nazi music and will never admit that they knew me, right?

Like the only thing that is left of me one day may be this book that Thomas Mann wrote containing a bunch of lies about a guy who's modeled on me.

I mean, it makes sense that when you've lost your whole world and your position and your status, these little things that are the remnants of the life you once managed to build for yourself take on this outsized importance, right?

I do not think that I would manage to have to flee my country and watch my career be destroyed and find myself in humbled circumstances in a foreign country without at minimum yelling in a farmer's market.

Like, I'm going to be ugly crying in whatever poor country winds up having to take me.

Yeah.

New Zealand or Uruguay or something.

I know.

You'll be the saddest person in Uruguay.

Just on a beach, just bawling.

Yeah.

I mean?

Yeah.

So another entry that I think gives you a sense of of what this downtime month of August really feels like and is like is another entry from Mann, from August, is August 24th.

A new political book by Spengler.

So Oswald Spengler, who we did an episode on, has been published in Germany in which he declares his unreserved support for national socialism.

Every line he wrote was intended to harm the Republic.

I knew that already.

It's like, yeah, girl, that's not news.

The wry-ness,

like, of course you went Nazi.

Yeah.

Because I already didn't like you.

I think he's thinking about, like,

as a member of what was once the conservative revolution, but who had turned, you know, much more liberal.

I think it's also like, he's like, well, yeah.

It's like when people are like, can you believe Barry Weiss published Chris Ruffo's letter about how the U.S.

university should be synchronized?

It's like, well, yeah.

I could absolutely believe that.

Yeah, that was the road she was on since 2018.

Yeah.

Well, since she tried to get get that Palestinian professor fired.

She tried to get a Palestinian professor fired when she was like not yet old enough to vote or drink or something.

You know, like this is actually who these people have always been.

Yeah.

And the fact that some people are surprised by it, right?

I think that's the wry-ness.

Like, look, if you're surprised by Oswald Spengler making a fascist heel turn,

you know, I have a bridge to sell you.

Like, you're, you're just like not that good at analyzing people or reading their work.

So I think that's, that's the other thing that he's sort of not experiencing this really as like a betrayal.

And then on the 25th, like, right, like the next day after sort of ragging on Spengler, he says in the morning, the news via a letter from K, so Katja's mother, that the Poschinger house in Munich has been seized and is being guarded by SA men.

What's a Poschinger house?

That's his house in Poschinger in Munich.

Katja told me this while I was lying in bed and I changed color, right?

It's the small stuff I've been saying.

We're kind of marking dead time here until such a moment when like something crazy strikes out of a clear blue sky.

And here, this is happening basically while he's noting down these things about Spengler, about Wassaman, and about the house in Munich, which is that the Nazis release this announcement and basically rescind German citizenship for about 30 writers and thinkers,

including Mann's brother Heinrich.

and Feuchtwangen.

Veustwanger is also on it.

I thought we would maybe talk about that a little bit more.

This is something that to me is such an echo of 33 and 2025, where the way our new fascists play with citizenship and people's passports.

You may think about like the threat to strip Zoran Mamdani of his citizenship.

You may think of the way they question citizenship for

Donald Trump came to political prominence by undermining the citizenship on a racial basis of Barack Obama.

That's right.

And we should say that, like, of course, you know, from the very beginning of the Trump administration, it's been very hard to get a new passport for trans people.

People are really worried about leaving the country and coming back with one.

There's the passport issue, but there's also, you know, that man has been struggling with the passport issue for a while because his is okay, but I think his kids' passports are expiring.

So they were worried, like, will we not be able to prove our nationality?

Well, now in August, it's getting one worse, which is why we may no longer have a nationality.

As of the 23rd of August, Heinrich doesn't have citizenship anymore.

He's just stateless.

So you live your life, you have a summer, you go swimming by the pool, you complain about people trying to hit you up for money, and then boom, just like that.

Your brother is stateless.

Your brother is stateless.

And I mean, he must, given what he was about to not sign, have been like, well, that can't be long for this.

What's really interesting to me is these 33 people that get stripped of German citizenship in this very first announcement in the Deutsche Reichsanseiga.

So it's published for all to see.

It's the first of like hundreds of these.

They kept stripping people, I think, until April of 1945, when the Nazi state controlled like effectively like Greater Berlin.

They were still stripping people who they probably had like no more actual control over of their citizenship.

Like this gesture of exorcism, of being cast out from the kind of people's community becomes like an absolute obsession of them.

It's not a a ton of people, like in pure numbers.

There are later laws that, of course, strip Jews, for instance, of citizenship.

But that's not naming individuals.

Exactly.

These are gestures where they are naming specific people they don't like and saying, you, you are no longer German, Rosie O'Donnell, or whatever it is.

Yeah.

Man notes in his diary, the first list of politicians and authors who are being declared stripped of their German citizenship being published in Germany.

Einstein is at the top, but Heinrich is on it too.

To think that it's people like these who decide whether or not you get to be German.

Yeah.

That's a good line, right?

Like, it's of all the people who get to decide this, and these are, Thomas probably more so than Heinrich, but they're German nationalists in a way, right?

Cultural nationalists.

Yeah, this is something I've noticed: is that there's a lot of like ongoing contention over what the word German means, which I think the Nazis win that battle.

It's not clear to me that it's even been like wrested from them since, but like there's a opposition to the Nazis that is grounded in like German pride, right?

That takes these sort of like nationalist impulses that the Nazis had manipulated very badly and like recasts them as this sort of like patriotic anti-fascist resistance.

Exactly.

Like how some people now are like, actually, the left needs to wrap themselves in the flag, you know, because we have this other American history.

You see this in things like the 1619 project, right?

Like we can actually rewrite or rethink American history as a like right to struggle against injustice rather than this persistence of hierarchies, like maybe like a big dispute within like left-wing American historiography.

But like, you do see this impulse emerging now, too, is what I'm trying to say.

Like, there are people who are offended about right-wing ownership of the concept of who gets to be an American, not merely for the power that that implies, but for what it says about the concept of being American, which can be otherwise defined.

Yeah, that's right.

In the case of Germany, it's also, why would you listen to any of the people coming from this country if this country is like this?

Right.

There is a famous scene later in Mann's life where he's asked, asked, I think in the New York Times, in fact, like, do you miss German culture?

And he says, I don't, because German culture, I'm going to butcher the quote a little bit, but German culture is wherever I am, right?

First of, it's a healthy dose of self-confidence there, but he's making a bigger point.

He's saying, look,

all the things that you valued that country for are no longer in that country.

So, you know, I'm not sure what there is to miss.

Like, the guy who discovered general relativity lives in Princeton now.

So I'm not sure why you need to go to Germany, right?

Yeah, one thing Germany did with these big purges of its intellectuals, which were quite deliberate, was a kind of national suicide, right?

Like there's a way in which the Nazis set about destroying everything about Germany that somebody like Thomas Mann would have valued.

And I should say being stateless in 1933 sucks.

It's really tricky and risky.

And in fact, it will cost people their lives, that they have a really tough time crossing borders.

And the U.S.

doesn't play an altogether wonderful role in that process either.

At the same time, it's also important to note that the Nazis do have an international arm, and that's maybe the thing we can close our August with.

Apparently, when this Deutsche Reisanzeiger comes out with this list of 33 people, the German club in London, the Deutsche Klupp, puts up the pictures of these 33 men with a heading over it, if you meet one of these men, kill him.

And this is in London, right?

The reach of the Nazis is quite significant because people outside of Germany, and especially, frankly, Germans outside Germany, do take this stuff very seriously and participate in the same kind of debates and excitations over these cultural figures, right?

Zaman sort of notices it and is like, well, there's this list.

And he kind of just is like, well, whatever, a bunch of assholes.

I can't believe these guys get to decide that.

my brother is no longer German.

But at the same time, like in London, you have people being like, if you meet these people, they're anti-German and you should hurt them.

And on August 31st, Mann notes that the writer Theodor Lessing, who had fled Germany right away, basically, had been killed by National Socialists in the Czech Republic, in Marienbad, so in the northern Czech Republic.

These things that are happening in Germany, they have a way of trickling out, right?

He notes on September 3rd in his diary, Prague, Paris, Amsterdam may be safer than Marienbad or Basel,

but I don't think that anyone who wrote for the Weltbün, this is Waszetzki's paper, should feel secure for their lives.

I'm afraid of ending up like Lessing, but not necessarily because it's such a terrible ending, but because it really fits for someone like Lessing, but it doesn't fit me.

He's such a dick.

I'm wondering, I couldn't quite tell.

Like, is he just like trying to rag on this guy who just got shot?

Or is he trying to say, look, I'm just an establishment guy, right?

What's the line from Michael Clayton?

I'm not the guy you kill.

I'm the guy who writes about Richard Wagner and Goethe, right?

Like, Lessing was a bit of a rabble-rouser.

He'd been a big sort of, you know, muck-raking journalist.

Like, he'd been a fiery essayist.

Like, and here's Mann, who's like halfway into the Weimar Republic.

He's like, hey, guys, I don't think the Weimar Republic is all that bad.

Like, that's the level of his radicalism.

He's like,

if they shoot me, it's going to be so weird, right?

As you say, I mean, boring dad.

Yeah, it's like, if you can't handle Thomas Mann,

like, how much has the Overton window shrunk?

Maybe we'll leave it at that in terms of our data, but I did want to, in our closing, reflect on, yeah, what this means for us and for the right now.

There have been months where I've really struggled to contain everything into one solid story.

And here I feel like it is just a very simple story, which is that life goes on.

But in some way, that simple story hides...

way more than the months where like, you know, Anton Schmaus is jumping out a window, running across a forest in his underwear and tries to like flag down a transit cop or whatever.

It's not like these high drama moments.

There's a lot of banality in which the force of history is nevertheless marching forward.

The people who oppose this are never going to fully see eye to eye.

Opposition to a regime will always open up as many differences as it creates solidarity.

And my sense after reading all this is that's okay, right?

It's all right to backbite in the resistance.

It's okay to be shitty to each other in the resistance.

I mean, the thing about the Nazi resistance is that they lost.

Maybe we should hope for a more successful American version that might be better served with a degree of solidarity.

I mean, this is also not the resistance that like does anything inside of Germany.

These are the people who've had to leave and who have given up.

I mean, Mann is told, I forgot to mention that in early August by a policeman who is friends with him to like not go back.

He's like, I don't know if they'd keep you, but they're going to arrest you for sure.

And he's like, I'm too old and too fancy for that.

Like, I need my back.

I'm simply too famous to endure such a dignity.

Yeah.

They're starting to settle into the long term.

The fishers are sort of starting to open up.

At the same time, they sort of come up with some of their most interesting and most moving, really, observations about how the person on the political really gets squished together in a moment of international crisis.

I hope that all of our listeners are enjoying their summers, that wherever they are, it's not too hot like it was for Thomas Mann on the Côte d'Esor,

and that the flashes of, you know, invading consciousness of rising authoritarianism are muted enough to not spoil your days out.

Thank you for coming on a summary and summer themed episode of Project 1933 here on Embed with the Right.

And thank you, Maura, as always, for letting me walk you through this.

And we'll be back in September with a more active month, but I think also a more confusing month.

I don't want to preview too much, but this next one is going to be, I'm finding it hard to distill a theme, let's put it that way.

Classic Embed with the Right.

Like, we're not really sure what this is about, but here's an hour and a half.

That's right.

Nothing, Jerry.

Show what nothing.

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Our episodes are produced and edited by Mark Yoshizumi and Katie Lau.

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