Episode 98 -- Project 1933, Part VII: September 1 - September 30

Hello, I'm Adrian Dahl.

And I'm Laura Donegan.

Whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrian, today we are back with another installment of the series that we call Project 1933, where you take me through month by month the first year of the Nazis' time in power.

And we are all the way up to September.

How do you feel?

I mean, it's September 2025.

How am I going to feel?

People keep commenting on how relevant this series is.

And like, I really wish that I didn't agree.

I really wish that we could be like, oh, well, what an interesting exercise, but thank goodness it didn't turn out to be super relevant.

It's pretty fucking relevant.

There's things that I see that are diverging, right?

Like today, we are going to talk, as we have a couple times before, about the Nazi seizure of cultural institutions.

And I will note that we are recording the same week that Jimmy Kimmel got pushed off the air and then ushered back onto the air after Backlash.

So, like, we still have something that Germany already sort of doesn't have,

which is a bourgeois that can assert their like purchasing power and

affect policy change that way.

Like, that is something that still exists here that doesn't seem to really be in effect in Germany, at least not through the story that you've been telling me.

Counterpoint though, just yesterday, a general, Ben Hodges, tweeted apparently, July 1935, German generals were called to a surprise assembly in Berlin and informed that their previous oath to the Weimar Constitution was void, that they would be required to swear a personal oath to the Fuhrer.

And one Pete Hegseth, who is currently assembling all the generals in very much a similar way, which got General Ben Hodges to tweet that, replied with, cool story, general.

I agree with you.

There are divergences and there are differences opening up and I think people ought to be paying attention to those.

And certainly if our comparison is making you

more likely to think what is happening inevitable, we very much don't want to generate that impression.

At the same time, we've just come off the podcaster Charlie Kirk getting what can only be described as the horse vessel treatment by people who either are listeners of this podcast or have read the same books we research.

And it's kind of creepy to watch people kind of speedrun or try to speedrun the story we're trying to tell here.

This is something that I don't actually think that we've talked about much together off mic, but I have made this remark to other people and I've overheard you making it to other people, which is that the Trump administration seems to be trying, at least some of them seem to be trying to evoke the Nazis on purpose, right?

And it is

difficult to tell to what degree that is like a sincere and like fulsome ideological commitment.

Like, yes, we think the Nazis had good ideas and to what degree it is meant to provoke a sense of inevitability, a sense of terror in their opposition, right?

Like the

similarity of some of this stuff is really uncanny, right?

In a way that makes it seem like it's maybe kind of on purpose.

And it wouldn't shock me if one day we learned that, you know, Stephen Miller spent a lot of this past year sort of like fluttering his fingers together like Mr.

Burns and trying to make himself seem as Goebbels-like as possible.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, it wouldn't be shocking to find out that he's been audio booking the Ian Kershaw Hitler biographies like, you know, for years now.

Right.

I mean, like, people noted the invocation of the Reichstag moment, where it's like, wait, who do you think you are in this story?

Right?

They were like, this is the Reichstag fire moment.

And we're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Who are you in this metaphor?

Yeah.

Given that both the divergences and the echoes are both obvious and important to parse out, Going into it and then compiling my notes and researching September 1933, my impression was, I think this is going to be a story of divergence.

This is going to be a story about a situation, as you say, with Kimmel, we are not quite in.

Maybe there's something I'm missing, but my sense is that, you know, listeners might be able to listen to the September episode thinking, well, gee, at least we're not there yet.

October will be all about the economy, farmers, the Autobahn, unemployment, and so on.

Although some of that stuff actually happens in September, but I kind of didn't know how to sprinkle it in today.

We always sort of tend to focus on certain things.

And so I thought this one would be about culture.

This is about the cultural politics of Nazism and of anti-Nazism.

And you'll see why I center it on that.

We've seen the Nazis interfere with the cultural sphere quite a lot, but mostly by like firing people and replacing people, kind of part of the Gleischage and part of the synchronization of the civil service, because a a lot of cultural institutions were run by the government.

By September, we get a sense of what Nazi cultural politics really looks like.

What are these people for?

And the results are famous, like infamous.

Like this is where we sort of meet a lot of the image and myth-makers that have shaped our literal image of the Nazis, like what we picture when we close our eyes, when we hear Nazi rally, for instance, until today.

But at the same time, I think it's important to note that when I say sort of the cultural field, a little bit different, what I mean by that than what we might think of in the United States, or at least I hope you'll agree with me that it's a little bit different.

I should mention that I used to teach a class at Stanford called Germany in Five Words, and the first word was culture.

I no longer offer it, but the wager of the class essentially was that each of these keywords were sort of untranslatable, or that in rendering them in English, you were kind of missing a certain part of it.

And culture, or culture, as the Germans put it, is one of these.

I know the word culture in English, and I bandy it about a lot, talking about popular practices, talking about media products, talking about traditions and the ways that ideas get disseminated to a popular audience, right?

Kulture in German means something a little different.

Could you go into that difference for me?

Yeah, so for one thing, it has an antonym, at least in the 19th century, and then that still sort of governs how people think about it in 1933.

It is about a set of practices, but also a specifically binding set of local practices.

That is to say, you know, German culture as a thing that like binds people together, right?

The opposite of that is in the 19th century, the idea of civilization, right?

There are a lot of right-wing thinkers, including the young Thomas Mann, who traffics in this extensively in his Reflections of a Non-Political Man in 1918, where he says, well, you know, there are countries that have a civilization, the French, right?

Everyone looks at French, what we call French culture, and they want to learn it and they want to adapt it, right?

They want to learn the cooking, they want to learn the fashion, et cetera, et cetera.

And then he says there's culture, which you really can't do that with.

It comes out of a particular rootedness in the soil and the people.

And you can sort of try and explain it to people, but you have to explain it.

Like, they're not going to instinctively get it.

It's an instinctive thing rather than a rational thing.

I'm starting to understand why this concept was appealing to the Nazis, right?

There's a sense of rootedness, a sense of place that I think translates very easily to a sense of race and belonging and non-belonging.

At the same time, the Nazis are not alone in this.

This is the point that a lot of our friends and critics that we basically have been tracing for the last

eight months will agree with the Nazis and be like, yeah, like German culture really is somehow rooted in the German nation, which makes it really hard to figure out how to immigrate, for instance, right?

You can imagine how the question of like, is this intelligible to outsiders is pretty key if you're like, well,

I happen to work on cultural things in Germany and now I got to flee.

What's this going to be like, right?

Do I genuinely think I can carry this with me?

Or am I basically going to be like, you had to have been there, guys.

I'm sorry.

It's just believe me that this is not going to land for you.

I don't know how unique this is to Germany, but there is a sense you do encounter from Germans, including those who flee the Nazi regime, that they've like lost a part of themselves that is kind of like untranslatable by having to leave, right?

This is something Hanna Arendt talks about, actually.

In one of my favorite interviews with her, somebody asked her, this is in like the 1970s, this is a famous interview with Hannah Arendt.

Yeah.

It's like, well, do you miss Germany?

Would you go back?

And she goes, well, I have been back.

And no, no, no, no.

But she's like, I miss what I miss is the language.

And she goes on and says, I have thoughts in German that I cannot have in English.

And that is a problem of emigration that I think is maybe particularly potent for the kinds of people that the Nazis were targeting, right?

Like the artists, the intellectuals, the people who are members of these sort of like cosmopolitan urban classes.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah.

I mean, one reason that we've already alluded to in previous episodes of the podcast why this fixation on culture as the unifying instance in Germany was so important was because you couldn't do it through religion, right?

A lot of cultural practices in other european countries but also a lot of north american countries get routed through religious practice in germany as we saw that is uniquely fraud they had literally murdered each other over that stuff so you don't want to go there yeah you can't be like you know as germans we really believe in the literal incarnation of christ in the host you know because then half of the germans are going to be like wait what the fuck stop shooting yeah

Yeah, so basically, but then you're like, well, but we can all agree on Beethoven being fucking rad, right?

And it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was like, it's like, okay, good, good, good, good.

Let's stick with that.

Let's scan the Christ stuff and just talk about Beethoven a little bit.

If only they had kept it to the Beethoven.

Yeah.

And this is really important, especially for a lot of Jewish Germans, right?

Whether or not they had converted, they knew that there were other German citizens who did not take them as co-equal German citizens.

One way to show that you were part of the group was to over-identify with the culture, right?

So I'm seeing this sense of culture as being simultaneously something that allows ethnic minorities within Germany to assimilate and to have a sense of authentic German-ness.

And also the kind of thing that I'm guessing the Nazis are going to try and define them out of.

That's right.

I mean, the 19th century is rife with brilliant Jewish Germans who excel, who create some of the most famous products of what we think of today as German culture, right?

Karl Marx.

Yeah.

Felix Mendelssohn, right?

Like

Heinrich Heine, right?

Like, so we have all these people, but even at the time, there were people sort of being like, well, they're not using them right.

They don't understand it, right?

Like Richard Wagner will be like, well, Mendelssohn doesn't really get it because like he has learned intellectually what he should be feeling, right?

And it's like, okay, you can just say Jewish.

This is taking forever.

Okay.

So this is an attempt to make the sort of like shared cultural practices and shared cultural world into like an exclusive ethnic prerogative that cannot be authentically participated in by those not sharing and sort of like the blood affinity.

Yeah, it depends on whom you ask, right?

And this is maybe a little bit too cynical, but a lot of people made their money representing German culture abroad.

Like if you were in the classical music field, it was pretty important to you that people in New Zealand like thought that German culture was for everyone because like that's the only way you were going to get to play it and get paid money for it.

For other things, it's a lot more complicated, right?

That's going to run as a theme through today's episode.

This kind of question of is this inclusionary and bridge building or is it really exclusionary?

And basically a stand-in for racial categories.

And you can imagine that someone like Klemper

versus someone like Hitler have radically different answers to that question.

I'm also wondering how this word culture and this debate about what it really means, how did that change after the war?

Because I'm guessing that after World War II, when the Germans are doing this like very conspicuous, I think, to foreigners sort of reckoning with the Holocaust and with the Nazi regime, I'm guessing that this all can kind of turn on its head, right?

What if we are not, you know, uniquely sophisticated or uniquely intelligent or sort of like uniquely elegant thinkers, which is how I think of the German self-conception?

What if we are in fact sort of like uniquely evil?

Is there any of that going on?

Is there any kind of like attempt to purge German culture of what maybe lent itself to the Nazi regime?

That's definitely something that's happening.

There is the question of how could this happen?

And I think September 1933 is really sort of the moment where that sort of starts slipping through in these people's analyses.

They all have, as we mentioned in August, a little bit more time on their hands.

And they're like, well, how the fuck did this just happen, right?

I do love Thomas Mann on vacation, just like complaining about the weather.

If anybody gets a chance to listen to our August episode,

this is a series without a lot of moments of levity, and that is one of them.

Yep, there it is.

But so the question of like, is there something in German culture?

I I mean, we're not quite at, you know, the post-war question, we're just really how could, not how could Hitler come to power, but how could the Holocaust happen?

Like that, that is still in the future.

But still, the idea that the nation of Beethoven and Goethe somehow elected this fucking oaf, right?

Like that's something that these people have to grapple with.

And they have to be kind of a little biased in their answers, right?

Because if there's something uniquely bad about German culture, meanwhile, you're trying to leave the country knowing only that, right?

Like you're kind of degrading the only thing you have possibly to trade on, right?

So you have to be like, no, no, no, no, no, that doesn't mean that at all, right?

And a lot of the émigrés will give talks being like, you know, Wagner is totally innocent of the Nazi appropriation of him.

It's like, well, we...

People are welcome to listen to those episodes.

He wasn't.

But if you were like a famous conductor of Wagner and you're like, fuck, I got to make rent in Paris.

I can't give a lecture about like, oh yeah, that guy was a a fucking fascist.

They're all fascists.

You should not be here.

Listen to Bizet, right?

Like, that's bad.

This reminds me a little of, you know, some contests in American historiography, right?

There are people who want

to tell you that, you know, the United States is only this driving impulse to maintain and reaffirm hierarchies and that that is the truest thing about us, right?

Like chattel slavery is this original sin and that, you know, everything else on top of it is sort of like denial or window dressing.

and then there are those people who want to tell you like no american history in america is the struggle to

achieve the liberal enlightenment promises of the declaration in like a rigorous and meaningful way and it's a struggle for equality and you know the real America is in the civil rights movement or like the abolition movement uh or like the feminist movement and that like anything else is is kind of window dressing on that.

And both of these are kind of dishonest accounts, right?

Because it's just, it's a lot of different people struggling and feeling all these various different kinds of contentions over the meaning of both this place and of its traditions.

Yeah.

And the question, of course, raises itself all the more forcefully in a pre-global age where the question is, well, what does this transplantation look like?

There's a bunch of people transplanting themselves from Germany.

And the question is like, well, does this translate?

So Victor Klemper, our listeners will be familiar with Victor Klempera, but maybe you will reintroduce him to listeners who, for some reason, decided to join in episode seven.

Welcome.

Better late than never.

We're happy to have you.

Victor is a really wonderful source for us.

He was ethnically Jewish, although he had also been baptized as a Christian.

He's a very like beloved source for historians of this era because, in addition to being a like comparative literature professor, he was a compulsive diarist.

and he was kind of like a politically conservative guy, at least at the start, but he had like this really kind of fascinating contempt for the Nazis in particular.

And so he is recording quite meticulously the changes in his world and the changes to political life and what this like affective experience of the Nazi regime is in real time, which makes him very, very useful.

Yeah, and so on September 17th, this guy, Viktor Klemperin, notes the following about himself and his wife, named Hoofa, in his diary.

We too, Hoifa and I, suffer immensely because Germany violates all justice and all culture in such a manner.

And this is right, like the way he's using culture there is really interesting.

And you're like, well, what do you mean by all culture?

And what does it mean to violate culture?

That's right.

And I think he means by that the kind of culture that we've been laying out, the culture as the thing that binds and makes someone German.

Right.

And he's like, you guys are imposing these bizarre categories.

We're like, Heine is out, Mendelssohn's out, right?

Like Wagner's in,

Mahler's out, right?

Like, what is this?

This is so bizarre.

And he makes that remark, though, in the context of his first friends and colleagues kind of coming through Dresden, where he lives, on their way to emigrate.

So these are usually fellow academics who one is going to take a visiting gig in Istanbul, and the other is moving to Haifa.

And Clembera is kind of dismissive of these two people in a way that I thought was kind of interesting.

He sort of scoffs at Haifa as like a new colony.

He's like, why would you transplant yourself from this soil you're rooted in, right?

This cultural soil you're rooted in, to this new colony where you don't belong, right?

It seems to be his idea, which is really fascinating if you think about it.

He seems to agree with the Nazis on the idea that like, well, culture is really about the situatedness in Germany and like you're not going to be able to take it with you.

Right.

Yeah, but he disagrees because he applies that situatedness to Jews, right?

Exactly.

He's like, this is something that is constitutive of who these German Jews are, and they're not going to be able to be themselves in this other place.

Exactly.

And so this is the kind of question that we're going to look into.

Like, how did the Nazis use culture to kind of institute a new sense of belonging and unity

while also excluding a whole bunch of people, right?

That like.

often were some of the greatest practitioners of the very cultural arts that they were supposedly championing, right?

Unlike our fascists of 2025, who just don't give a shit about culture, like the Nazis did.

I would contest that.

I think our fascists give quite a bit of a shit about culture.

Like he took over the Kennedy Center, so it can't perform anything.

They ban books.

They

get outraged when, you know, Cracker Barrel changes its logo.

The green MM isn't sexy enough anymore.

They actually love culture.

It's just that the kind of culture that they're paying attention to is really degraded, like a lot of our civic life.

They're playing it out on this mode of consumption and sort of commercial imagery rather than in like sort of the fine arts.

Yeah, I mean, I guess this is maybe where I'm just at heart a German intellectual in the mode of Klimperer because I would not consider a yellow M ⁇ M or, you know, a Cracker Barrel logo part of anyone's culture.

I'm like, that's, that's nice.

This is me being the American.

I'm like chomping a hot dog and like saluting for the national anthem.

I'm like, no, the Cracker Barrel logo is crucial to my people.

The cracker stays in the barrel.

No, but there is a sense in which like both of these movements are deeply, deeply invested in imagery and in control of imagery.

And that is something where they seem to think at times that like the image or the spectacle that they're creating.

By doing that, it will like affect the material conditions or the intellectual change, right?

In that sense, they have a really deep investment in the uses of spectacle.

Like they almost kind of put the cart before the horse a little bit.

Aaron Powell, it's true.

I guess the difference I would point to is that like Trump is very clearly trying to ruin the Kennedy Center.

The Nazis took the arts institutions that they were taking over and frankly also ruining quite seriously, right?

Like these were opera buffs.

These were like one of them is a failed painter, right?

Like these are people who think they're all about the arts.

Like some of their first public works projects are art museums and stuff like that, right?

Like times have moved on in some way, but like it's, it's very noticeable.

Maybe the difference we're teasing out here is that, you know, what Trump is presiding over both with Doge and with these like mass disinvestments from things like the National Humanities Foundation is that there's a libertarian style disinvestment and like flight from the institutions and gutting out of the institutions, whereas the Nazis didn't want those institutions like gutted out and their resources removed from them.

They wanted, in fact, to be in control and to have the gravitas and the status that came with sort of like cultural elitism as well.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah.

And I mean, in the end, it often amounted to a degradation, but they didn't think of it that way, right?

Like that's important.

It was not a deliberate kind of gleeful degradation as you had with something like the judicial system, where they were like, oh, yeah, no, the judge decided and the judge is independent, ha ha ha, right?

Like they really did believe in Bayreuth.

They did believe, I think, in art museums, et cetera, et cetera.

And part of that is just they emerged from the same cultural background as someone like like Viktor Klimper and Thomas Mann, except that they, you know, are just a lot dumber.

So let's get into one of the big cultural events of the Nazis'

first year in power, which is also going to lead us to one of our little pet assholes for this month.

Yeah, you're going to meet the whole range of new assholes here.

So what happens on September 1st?

So September 1st, the Nazi Party holds its rally in Nuremberg, which becomes sort of this annual thing.

And Goebbels decides that this needs to be commemorated in images.

And he turns to a young actress and director named Leni Riefenstahl to film the entire rally.

Leni, Leni, Leni.

Is this the first film she makes for the Nazis?

This is the first film she'll make for the Nazis.

The Nazis had, I found out, a kind of court director already.

I don't know what he felt about all this.

They're like, get the fuck out.

Which is both interesting.

I mean, like,

film was not as established in art in Germany in 1933.

So like...

like later on with the radio, Goebbels is kind of moving into new media here.

He's kind of like unusual in this, but the Nazis had been filming filming themselves for quite some time.

But it's very clear that Goebbels wants Riefenstahl rather than their usual dude because he wants the images to have an aesthetic impact.

He's like, this isn't a documentary.

Like, this isn't about filming a Hitler speech.

Hitler is not in the eventual film that you'll deliver that much.

And certainly its sequels, the two other sequels that she'll make to this movie,

will have everything but basically Hitler in it.

But there's a kind of aesthetic ambition.

Like

is an ambitious filmmaker in a way that, you know, if you had just a news crew here, like they've taken over the news, right?

They could just be like, send a news crew here.

They had that.

That's not what they want.

They want something that to them is a work of art, right?

I don't know if there was also news footage of this event being shot.

Klempera in his diary interestingly notes having seen footage from this Nazi Party rally.

He notes, Contemporary history on film.

This time the Nuremberg rally of the Nazi Party.

What stage direction of the crowds and what hysteria?

Hitler consecrates new standards by touching them with the blood flag of 1923.

Gunfire every time the flag cloths touch.

The blood flag being an artifact from the Nazis' failed coup.

That's right.

1923, yeah.

Exactly.

And then he, in brackets, he puts, Eva says, Catholic hysteria.

So Eva can always like, Eva is a mistress of the well-timed, like, these fucking guys.

So it's unclear, right?

He notes this down on September 19th.

Riefenstahl's movie is a documentary movie, right?

Like she sat in the editing suite with that for a while, I believe.

It's possible that there was a, that what Klemper saw is actually a Wachenschau.

It's just actually a newsreel.

I don't think so, because I think that

I mean to remember that the Nazis really wanted only Riefenstahl to document this, also to just like not have another camera sort of like capture the other cameras.

And so maybe she like handed over some of the footage or whatever.

But like part of what he's noticing is like he's like, they're not just, they're not just saying what happened.

There is, there's an image making going on here.

He, as a philologist, as a reader of literature, as a scholar of literature himself, recognizes, oh, this is what's happening.

They're making myths already.

And so Riefenstahl becomes pretty central to this spectacle creating project of the Nazis already, already in like, you know, we're here in the back half of 1933.

So tell us a little about her, because I know Lenny Riefenstahl, you know, Nazi filmmaker, but that's about all I know.

Subject of a new documentary, apparently, which I have not seen, to be honest.

Yeah, she was born in 1902.

Oh, that's younger than I thought she was.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, she lived forever.

She died in the 21st century.

I know.

I remember when she died.

Rest in peace.

But, I mean, this is something that maybe we haven't talked about because we haven't talked about the big Nazi biographies of 1933 that much.

I don't really want to do like, you know, here's what Goebbels was like.

No, you're Nazi.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But the Nazis are, by and large, a pretty young bunch.

The takeover, the Nazification of Germany is also a generational struggle.

It's often people in their 50s, 60s getting pushed aside for people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s.

Right.

Just to give you an idea,

do you have an idea of how old Hitler would have been in 1933?

You know, come to think of it, I don't.

I think of Hitler as being born and having died at the age of 55, just like perpetually 55.

Yeah, I mean, he did die, I think, in his mid-50s.

I don't remember it was 55, but he would have been like 43, 44 at the time.

Oh, okay.

That's, he's a young guy then.

I mean, 1930s, 40s is obviously not our 40s, I hope.

And I mean, just that face does no one any favors.

But, you know, Goebbels was 36.

Oh, wow.

Quite a young guy.

Himmler turned 33 in 1933.

And it's doubly true for the sort of like coattail writers in aesthetics, right?

The people who didn't sort of like beat up on communists for five years, six years, but the people who create the Nazi look.

Albert Speer, Hitler's favorite architect and also a guy who lives for fucking ever, was, I think, turned 28 in 1933.

These are, these are young people, right?

So they also live long lives after the war, which has got to be an interesting place in the Germany of, you know, the 1980s and 90s to still have Alber Speer and Lenny Riefenstahl kicking around.

Yeah, though they blazed right through it.

It was fine.

You're like, don't worry, they die peacefully and in their beds.

Yeah, yeah.

They do get away with it.

Thank you.

Yeah.

But Riefenstahl had had a career already.

She was born in Berlin and she sort of became involved in the expressive dance movement.

So like.

Wait, seriously?

Yeah, like most of history's greatest monsters.

Lenny Riefenstahl, like modern dancer.

Okay.

Yeah, her parents didn't like that, sent her to a boarding school in the Haz Mountains, which is this very rural, very picturesque part of Germany.

We need to do at some point like a episode on those like elite girls' boarding schools in the Alps, which is a whole

dark, weird, sort of psychosexually charged gender world.

Girls in uniform.

Well, you're about to watch Sysperia, which is set at a girls' ballet school in Freiburg, Germany.

I know.

I'm going to watch Sysperia tonight for a coming episode.

It's going to be great.

Yeah.

I also just read Sweet Days of Discipline, the like psychosexual obsession novel set at a Swiss boarding school.

I mean, I kind of feel like this would be a U joint that I would amble through.

The murder lesbians are my beat.

That's it.

I don't burden Adrian with them.

Yeah.

I'd be like, there was just so much fingering and this, what's going on?

But yeah, so she only, I think, attended for like a year.

So she's not really, we can't blame German boarding schools for Lani Riefenstahl.

She sneaks out to see these performances at, I think, what was at the time sort of Germany's premier open-air theater.

Is this a Wagner kind of a

deal, open-air theater?

Are they into that because they're into Wagner?

So Wagner is behind it, partly.

The idea of a Gesamkunstwerk of a total work of art is clearly behind it.

But in the first third of the 20th century, you just get a lot of these kind of back-to-nature kind of experiments where the idea is like our art has become too artificial, it's become too metropolitan.

We need people nakedly, you know, frolicking by a brook more yodeling oh no some of this can be quite avant-garde right okay oh yeah oh yeah yeah there was a right-wing avant-garde right like there are people who are just like oh my god it's like dimes square i'm sorry

i'm just like but their art is so bad and they're so reflexive and and just repetitive but like the idea that like civilization was destroying modern humanity was something that left wingers right-wingers could almost agree on where you kind of could watch someone's stuff and not realize that they were a huge right-winger right okay like they were you could meet a communist who was like women should be allowed to sleep with whoever and kids should run around naked and people should just work whatever they feel like right

and you'd be like oh great are you a communist like not so much right like so it's a place where like you know you can have these kind of painters these kind of dancers these film directors etc etc meet and some some of them were super left-wing, some of them were super right-wing.

And then some, like, we just don't know, right?

Like, to give you one example, Mornau, the great film director, has this whole movie about like a South Sea atoll and like the natives there and like how they get corrupted by civilization, et cetera, et cetera.

And like all his movies are kind of

these kind of like noble savage kind of proto-fascist treatises.

Fritz Lang is like a weirdly sort of anti-urbanist guy, but obviously like once these people arrive in Hollywood, they're like, oh, yeah, no, I'm not a Nazi.

And they weren't, but like they kind of spoke the Nazis' language, right?

Like, so there is this kind of weird, this weird overlap going on.

I don't know.

I think like when you're looking at somebody's art, like from experience, I think when you're looking at somebody's art or you're reading somebody's writing and you're like, this is giving me a right-wing vibe.

I tend to try and encourage people to listen to that impulse, right?

It's not coming from nowhere.

But so, this is what I was getting at earlier when I said that, like, the Nazis are just a lot more enmeshed in the cultural politics of their day, also as fans.

Like, I think Fritz Lang tells the story, which might be apocryphal, that basically Goebbels invites him and is like, hey, would you mind filming one of our rallies?

And Lang is like, I'm Audi.

And he basically gets a ticket that day.

So, like, there is this thing where, like, the Nazis are in many ways sort of like a Theodore Ardorno or Thomas Mann and Joseph Goebbels might on some arts be like, oh, yeah, that is very interesting.

We all like this, right?

Yeah, you know, come to think of it, like Donald Trump has strong opinions about culture, but he's kind of just a hater, right?

You'll go on and be like, Jimmy Kimmel's not even funny.

Or like, you know, this guy, he's not as handsome as he used to be in the 80s, you know, like he's a, he's only kind of a heckler.

He's not a fangirl.

Yeah, Goebbels is a fangirl, right?

Like, you know, he's a, he has his PhD in German literature.

So there's that.

They give those out to anybody these days.

I know.

Again, history is great as monsters.

Goebbels does.

German literature PhDs.

Yeah.

But yeah, so there is this tendency.

Goebbels, like he obviously seizes the means of kind of cultural production because he sees that like film, radio, et cetera, et cetera, can really be good vehicles for propaganda.

But he's also, I think, kind of a star fucker.

He's just like, oh, this way I get to like like pay people money to like make movies for me right and like he will continue making movies like

way later than it makes any sense like there's a bizarre kind of like let's all pull through kind of movie called kohlberg about a east prussian town that gets besieged by the french he deputizes like 10 000 wehrmacht soldiers to film this thing in like late 1944.

It's like, I don't know, Joseph Grebels, if you value your life, is that the thing you want to spend 10,000 German troops on?

But like, no, he really thinks in images.

Some of that is very canny and very forward-looking, but some of it is also, this is a guy who believes in this stuff, in the power of images and the power of culture in a way that, you know, I think you're right, that Donald Trump really doesn't.

Well, I don't know.

That sounds almost a little compulsive, also, right?

Like, if you are under bombardment from the Allies and you're going in to get the shot, that speaks to me to something a little pathological.

Like actually, when you're describing that, I'm thinking of Trump when he got shot, raising his fist up in the air because he knew immediately that he wanted the photo.

He's not thinking, oh my God, I just confronted mortality.

My life is so fragile.

I am frightened.

He's thinking, how do I get this to look good on TV?

Like there's something about that impulse

that's not

normal.

Yeah, but at the same time, notice which quote-unquote art he was referring back to.

And no no offense to our listeners, you can write me all the mean comments you'd like, but like he's thinking of wrestling.

He's thinking of what will be the WWE shot of Vince McMahon, basically, right?

And he's thinking of social media, not of a film.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

But you're right, there is that.

But anyway, so is this how they encounter Riefenstahl, the Nazi regimes?

Are they like, are they fans of her work?

Because she's just a dancer at this point.

Yeah, so dance is a funny art in the 1930s.

And here I want to be very careful because there's been a lot of great work and historical work done on art in the Weimar Republic, some by my very good friend Kate Elswit.

And I don't want to get that wrong, but my impression is that like Germany is super important in the dance world.

A lot of dance is very expressionistic or absurdist or sort of trying to push towards ecstasy.

Valeska Geert, I think, did a dance that was supposed to represent basically an orgasm.

And the Nazis had some problems with this, but not the ones that you might think, right?

They were fine with ecstasy and orgasms and tightly controlled bodies like at peak performance was obviously something they kind of liked.

Right.

The sort of like rigorous masochistic self-control of the physique of like a ballerina, right?

Yeah.

There's a there's something fascistic in that aesthetic.

Yeah.

And in the work and exertion required just to have that kind of body and a body capable of doing those things.

Exactly.

So what the Nazis really hated were Jews doing any of this stuff.

That was an immediate year out.

But they were also sort of against expressionism and celebrations of ugliness or absurdity, what they would call degenerate art.

And they were also, this is interesting in light of our earlier discussion, they were against an international style of dance.

They were like, oh, everyone's doing the same thing.

Like German dance needs to come out of our tradition and our particular national genius, right?

So is it that they just don't want to be importing influence or is it they don't want to be exporting influence either?

I think neither.

They basically think like it shouldn't be fully exportable.

They had a kind of particular hatred for things that they thought of not so much as imports into Germany, but as like something anyone could do.

Very unfairly, they thought of jazz this way.

They were very, very dismissive of jazz influences.

Well, it's an American black art form, yeah.

Right.

So obviously that didn't endear it to them, but it almost, I think, was more the fact that it was so adaptable and that like it just was everywhere.

You could listen to it in Paris, in New York, uh, in Rome, and in Berlin.

They were like, oh, this, it's, it's a little bit like that Theresa May line about the citizens of nowhere, right?

This idea, like, this is art from nowhere.

Dance has to be from somewhere, right?

Also, a line of thought that tends to lend itself to anti-Semitism.

Yeah, exactly.

And like, when people today say, oh, internationalist, like, that's, that's what they mean, right?

Anyway, Rievenstahl is basically a pretty successful dancer, sort of a B-level.

She's not one of the big ones, but she then busts her knee and professional dance is sort of out, and she turns to acting on screen.

She makes her debut in Vieget Zurchaft und Schoenheid, so Paths to Power and Beauty, which is this film about gymnastics and calisthenics and

PE.

So it's a translation of her like athleticism as a dancer, right?

Now she's using that as an actress on screen in this film that's celebrating the discipline of perfected bodies.

Yeah, basically, she's straight up just a dancer in in it.

She doesn't, it's silent, 1925, right?

The guy who made it, Wilhelm Prague,

was sort of one of the pioneers of kind of what we might today think of as an essay film, right?

These are not documentaries that sort of like fly on the wall, Maisel's brothers kind of thing.

It's staged, it's very frankly staged, and it's about visual compositions.

It can be sometimes like a little abstract.

It's often about kind of the body transcending what we would think we would normally be capable of, right?

And Prague was an interesting case too, because he was, I believe, half half Jewish, but was basically allowed to stay on for quite some time in the Third Reich, since his movies, while not Nazi movies by any stretch, really harmonized with these Nazi fascinations.

Even though, again, like, I think he comes at it from a totally different point of view.

He just wants to celebrate like the natural body.

And the Nazis are like, yes, say more about that.

You know, there was just immense interest in kind of like the body as a like Dagmar Herzog has done really, really fascinating work on the idea that the Nazis were somehow prorient or anti-sex, at best the half-truth, right?

They had those elements, but really they come out of a world in which celebrating beautiful naked bodies was understood as a kind of a bohemian kind of liberatory practice that they totally agreed with.

They were totally fine with that.

This is why Germans love nudism so much still.

This comes out of the early 1900s, and the Nazis were fully on board with that.

Right.

This is a song I play about the United States right all the time, right?

This is not an anti-sex philosophy.

This is a group of people with strong normative ideas about sex, but they actually are like quite enthusiastic about the sex that they enjoy.

Exactly.

Anyway, so she starts in this documentary, and from that, she gets slotted into another kind of right-wing filmic obsession, which is the mountain film.

So this is going back to her, you know, open-air theater when she stuck out of boarding school days.

Exactly.

And this is funny.

Whereas a lot of the like, let's get into nature and get naked kind of stuff really could cut across the entire political spectrum, the mountain film had clear far-right kind of leanings.

It was one of those Weimar cultural products that you watch today and you're like, oh yeah, like everyone in this is a fucking Nazi.

So when you say the mountain film, could you tell me a little bit about like the genre conventions?

Like what are we talking about here?

So this would be something, and I mean, like, stop me if you get a sense of why this might be something the Nazis like.

This is about, you know, taciturn men and beautiful women who have to survive in the difficult terrain of the high Alps or in the Himalayas or whatever.

It's all about self-sacrifice, it's all about overcoming nature, it's all about struggle and death, and physical tests, overcoming the weakened, niggling kind of strictures of civilization, and how really the only way to test your true metal is by getting above 3,000 meters and just like let your lungs get shredded and like get into an avalanche or whatever, right?

Yeah, that sounds like Nazi stuff.

Yeah.

And this is where sort of she cuts her teeth.

So she co-starred with a guy named Luis Trenke who did a bunch of these and he was like friends with Mussolini and Hitler.

So like not subtle where his sympathies lay, who made a ton of these mountain films in the 1920s and 30s.

Her first mountain film was The Holy Mountain of 1926, directed by this guy named Arnold Fank.

She mostly starred as a dancer there.

She was this kind of nature child dancer who dances in this beguiling way for a mountain climber.

And she has a pretty successful career as an actress, but lots of mountain films, including The White Hell of Pits Palu, which I must admit I've never seen, the other ones I have, and The Blue Light.

What she did on those mountain sets was learn how to get a good shot.

She's very fascinated with the craft of filmmaking, learns how to use cameras and shoot a scene, learns blocking in a way, frankly, that I think if she'd done this stuff in Hollywood, she wouldn't have.

A lot of these mountain films are in fact shot in nature.

This is something that Weimar cinema did more than Hollywood, or a lot of German expressionist film had been very, very deliberate and, hey, we're putting theater on screen.

Let's just build it in a set.

Yeah.

Right.

Let's build it in a soundstage.

So she's shooting with natural light.

Yeah.

And she's got these aspirations to capture like transcendent transcendent beauty of the body and sort of like natural authenticity

and these, you know, like heights of the spirit, right?

Like, now we should probably say that not in the like, you have to hand it to Lenny Riefenstahl kind of way, but she is sort of generally agreed upon by historians of film to be really like a pathbreaker in the form, right?

So what is it that Lenny Riefenstahl is really good at?

Well, she's very

good at using the actual material in front of her.

Like she stages relentlessly, even in nature.

She's not a documentary filmmaker in that way, but that was common in documentary filmmaking at the time.

If you think of something like the man from Iran or Nanuk of the North, it's very clear a lot of that was staged too.

You just, the cameras were gigantic.

You'd have to be like, I'm sorry, would you mind riding the slid one more time?

But she also was really, really good at both capturing action and kind of giving that action almost abstract quality.

There's a very famous scene in her Olympia film from 1936 where she starts shooting people jumping off a diving board into a pool.

And initially it's a pretty standard shot.

And eventually the water goes away and then the board goes away.

And by the end, you see only bodies hurling themselves out of nowhere into nowhere.

And it becomes this image of just like the leap, the death leap kind of thing.

She eventually, it's actually hard to pick out exactly where.

She runs the tape backwards and like it's not even quite clear whether she just tilted the camera at a bizarre angle or she's running the clip in reverse.

But it becomes this kind of like meditation on the idea of leaping.

There's something about the body in motion that she does that sort of is in between a realistic depiction of what happened and doing something interesting with what happened, right?

This is obviously after she's joined up with the Nazis, but there's some of that already in the mountain films.

The Blue Light is the very first movie she shoots, and and among its fans, allegedly, according to Briefenstahl, who narrates her life relentlessly and nothing can ever be confirmed or disconfirmed, which is super convenient if you're a Nazi fuckhead,

Hitler loved it.

Hitler just loved the blue light and apparently told her, once we come to power, you have to make my films, right?

And so we get to Victory of Faith, which is the first in her trilogy of party rally films.

The most famous one, obviously, is Triumph of the Will.

And it's not quite the Olympia film.

It's not quite Triumph of the Will, but it is much more artistically ambitious.

It's a work of propaganda than a reportage of any kind.

It's full of staging.

It manipulates images.

It sort of abstracts from the individual body towards a greater whole.

And you can imagine why someone like Goebbels wanted that and why someone like Hitler would want that.

But it is sort of like the moment we kind of get the pictorial language that we would later associate with fascism, right?

I have the suspicion that when we say, oh, that looks just like a Nazi Party rally, what we're really saying is, hey, that looks like a clip from Leni Riefenstahl, right?

Like, I bet you they were very different to stand through.

I guess I should have asked my relatives who were at some.

But like, you know, they somehow never talked about it.

Weird.

But yeah, so my impression is like it would have been very different to be part of this.

What she captured was kind of an almost impossible image of this totality and reflecting that back, even at people who may have been there.

I bet you that these things were kind of messy, right?

Like hundreds of thousands of people constantly marching, like sound amplification technology was terrible.

It seems very likely that like what we get on screen is the real thing, is the thing that people were supposed to be impressed by.

The actual image itself was paramount.

The thing that people were doing was just to produce the image, right?

And so this is sort of the beginning of the Riefenstahl career that Susan Sontag, friend of the pod, will later thematize in the 1970s in a wonderful essay that we've already talked about on this pod in a very early episode called Fascinating Fascism.

Do you remember this essay?

Do you remember what it's on?

Yeah, it's on Riefenstahl's oeuvre and also on sort of other appropriations of fascist aesthetics, right?

She talks about like the use of

Nazi uniforms and like BDSM as well.

Yeah.

So she is reacting to an art show.

Riefenstahl, after the war, didn't make movies anymore for obvious reasons.

She became a photographer.

And she had this show in New York of photographs of the Sudanese tribe called the Nuba.

And there was this kind of facile thing where it's like, oh, here's a woman who was like famously associated with white supremacism, you know, making these pictures of black people, right?

And Susan Santa's here is like, I hate to tell you, Laney is up to her old tricks.

This stuff is just as fascist as the other shit.

She says, quote, what is distinctive about the fascist vision of the old idea of the noble savage is its contempt for all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic.

And if you think back to Riefenstahl's approach to dance, you think about her approach to mountain film, it's exactly this.

Santak sort of gets the ultimate read on Riefenstahl by saying, like, this is this woman's great theme in life.

It is that to turn off your brain, to leap into the unknown, to test your mettle, and to become part of something bigger, whether that's the ocean or

the Nazi party or the mountain or whatever, like is basically that is the main through line of this woman's ur.

She's had one idea exactly in her life and this is it, right?

And it's a fascist idea, Santak thinks, and I think she's right.

So that's Lenny.

But maybe we should check in now with our old friend Thomas Mann, who is still in exile in France, right?

Yeah.

So if the Nazis sort of start stretching their hands out after institutions of power and image making and start thinking about like, what are we actually for aesthetically?

What do we want the Third Reich to look like?

One way you can think about what Riefenstahl, Hitler, and Goebbels are up to, right?

They're trying to figure out like, what is our branding going to look like?

And it's a very powerful branding.

We still think of Leni Riefenstahl's films when we think of a Nazi Party rally.

What you get among the anti-Nazi intellectuals, both within Germany and outside of it, is kind of a first accounting of the question that we were starting with, which is what in German culture made this possible?

And what can we salvage?

Right.

At the end of September, Mann will commit to a lease on a house in Kristna, Switzerland.

And basically, that is the moment when it's obvious that he's not just sort of like sitting stuff out.

until things blow over, but like, no, he is now an exile officially.

Yeah, he's like renouncing Germany.

He's not planning to go back again.

Exactly.

He's quiet about that at first, but he is, to anyone who can read the signs, it's obvious.

So the question of like, well, what am I taking with me is really, really key for them.

So on September 8th, Mann gets mail.

Love it.

I love getting mail.

Oh, yeah.

Well,

this is very much like mail you and I get from time to time in the sense that it's coming from a Nazi.

Strangely enough, he notes in his diary, he's been sent a Franconian Nazi newspaper, and he apparently spends the entire evening perusing the paper with what seems like genuine curiosity.

I have to say, when I get Nazi mail,

I do not read it with care or curiosity.

I usually just kind of read enough of it to understand that it's Nazi mail.

And then I, you know, make a note of having received it and throw it away.

Yeah, do not mail us Nazis.

Yeah, if you're thinking about it, don't.

Also, please don't know my address.

Yeah, just fax us.

But like, this is interesting to me that he reads it so carefully, right?

There's a degree of like fascination.

Is it the fascination of like looking at a car wreck on the side of the road?

Or is there, you know, something maybe

a little more, I guess, sophisticated in Mann's approach to reading this Nazi material?

So I think he has a couple of things going on.

On the one hand, he's still trying to understand what exactly happened.

He's also trying to understand who these people are.

And at the same time, what you don't get with Mann and some of the other émigrés as well is to be like, these people are nothing like me.

He does seem to think that he has a shared cultural foundation with them.

In later years, he'll write a pretty famous essay called Brother Hitler.

Like, he's like, I recognize this guy.

This isn't an alien that dropped in.

Like, I understand where this guy comes from.

And he will always, in his American speeches, in his speeches to other Germans, which will be distributed through the BBC, he would, in Pacific Palisades, record basically these speeches, which would be pressed on record in his house, sent I think to London by airmail and then played by the BBC to basically tell Germans like, you have made a deal with the devil, kill him now or you will be destroyed and you will deserve it, right?

I mean like really, really amazing stuff.

But a position that he takes again and again is, I know you and I know him because I recognize myself in you and in him.

So it's not quite that he's like, I have nothing to say to these people.

You know, this is a man who himself was kind of a folkish right-winger who seemed to think that like German culture, like, oh, you just can't explain it to an outsider and like, you know, had sort of slightly anti-Semitic sides as well.

In addition to a Jewish wife.

Yeah, you know, weird.

Yeah.

And that's part of it, that he's like, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.

Like, he's not like, Jesus Christ, get a load of these assholes.

He's like, yeah, I can see who this appeals to.

That's not me, but like, I need to understand who these people are.

I don't know.

Like, have you ever had the impulse watching Donald Trump to like identify his woundedness or his like defensiveness or his denial as like a warped or exaggerated version of something you've done?

I'm like, oh yeah, like the impulse to tell a transparent but self-exonerating lie.

Like that's something I have felt.

I haven't done it on television, but like I

can

understand

a little more of Donald Trump's psyche than I think it like exactly flatters me to be able to understand.

I think that's right.

For me, I think it's his, the lying, the flop sweat-drenched bullshitting.

I'm like, I have never found anyone more recognizable in my entire life, right?

Like

just like the way he like gets a question and like you can see the panic behind the pancake makeup and you're like, oh, he's thinking furiously.

Oh, fuck, I've never heard of any of this.

He's like, yeah,

and you're like, and then like his satisfaction at having given this like

D minus answer.

And he's like, nailed it again, Donald.

I'm like, yeah, this.

Many people are saying you're going to be talking about it more and more.

And then they're like, okay.

And he's like, nailed it.

But like, what I mean to say is that there's like kind of a horrified and fascinated recognition.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

And there's also a sense with Donald Trump that like, I don't feel like I've known anybody.

quite as well as I know Donald Trump because his psyche is on such a relentless display and has been now for a decade, right?

Yeah.

Like I know Donald Trump Trump like roughly as well as I know my actual spouse.

Yeah.

But that also means that there's like no capacity to surprise anymore.

Like everything he does, I'm like, oh, fucking course he did that.

You know, even if it hadn't occurred to me in retrospect, I'm never like, wow, how out of character.

I'm like, yes,

I can reverse engineer exactly his line of thinking, exactly his motivations, exactly the justification he's going to deploy.

Like it's never out of pattern, right?

Yeah, exactly the psycho-demon staffer who like he talked to right before saying that into cameras.

Yes, exactly.

And I wonder if Thomas Mann is at that point with Hitler yet, or if it's still a little bit of a like a curio for him.

I think it's the latter.

So he's not quite there yet.

Partly because, of course, Hitler had withheld himself pretty cannily during the years of his rise.

He was not present in people's lives other than as this picture for much of the late 1920s.

And some of that is just a media environment too, right?

Like the chance of seeing one of these speeches if you weren't seeking them out was something that didn't really happen to people.

In reading through this Franconian Nazi newspaper, he comes across a speech of Hitler's that's reproduced in full, and he observes, amazing, this man, a representative of the lower middle class, a walking primary school education that has started philosophizing, is truly a curious figure.

And I think, yes, there's a kind of elitism here.

He's like, this guy walked straight from an elementary school education into wanting to explain the world, but also like a truly curious figure.

This is about a man who has just about ruined Thomas Mann's life, right?

Who he knows will destroy this country that he loves.

But as he would often when speaking about Hitler in the coming years, Mann's tone is ultimately pitying.

He says, quote, the thoughts he strung together on this topic helplessly, repetitively, with constant lapses and in a pitiful style, are those of a helpless, striving grade student.

This answers a question that I have had about Hitler, which is that does he sound stupid in German?

Because Donald Trump sounds like embarrassingly stupid in English to an English speaker.

But I think the image of Hitler in translation is often of fearsome confidence and competence, right?

Is that how it is in the original?

No, I mean, I.

It's hard with all this historic distance to know how he worked.

And we should say that everyone, I mean, listen to FDR fireside chats, right?

Like rhetorical styles have obviously evolved once cameras and microphones started capturing them.

At the same time, I can say he does not sound fully in control of himself.

He's not rhetorically brilliant in any way.

There is a kind of thudding obviousness to what he's doing and saying.

It kind of feels like, I don't know, like a guy who would give a speech in front of you know, a bunch of veterans or whatever, right?

Like it feels like you don't feel like you're in the hands of a master manipulator.

I've always found that image of him very hard to match with what I've actually heard.

In the speeches, Mann is right about the repetitiveness and the lapses.

Some of that, again, is like he has to shout at the top of his lungs.

He doesn't read off a paper or a prompter, right?

Like, so there is an element here of

helplessness, I think, that Mann is queuing into.

And then there's also the gestures that to us, just, I mean, that's the thing, gestures evolve and our gestures are so strongly identified with the televisual medium.

Hitler was among the first politicians to use that medium effectively.

He did a lot of, like, listeners can't see the gesture that I am making into my Zoom camera.

But like Hitler, when he's not making the Nazi salute, he does a lot of like fast reaching into the air and then grabbing back.

And it's like, like, you know, Obama did the like.

thumb and forefinger like pinch like let me be clear you know and hitler goes the like yeah like it's like

it's almost like a cheerleader move.

Yeah, he's pointing a lot.

Yeah, he also does this kind of at least in the beginning, I think he does this interesting thing where he sort of screws his hand up, which I think American politicians avoid because it looks fae and a little swish, to be honest, right?

Like he also sometimes, like when he's like really coming from the heart, he'll again, listeners can't see this, but I hope I can describe it as I do it.

He'll put his fists sort of in front of his chest and then kind of push them outwards.

Yeah, like the back of his hands together.

Yeah.

I don't want to like direct our listeners to Lenny Riefenstahl.

Like we talked about, should we include links?

And like, is that ethical?

And I sort of err on the side of like, you know, especially because this is an audio medium, it's just easier to understand if you can see it.

And the Nazis are such an aggressively visual regime, but his body language is quite strange.

And he always, he always looks incredibly tense.

He's never like at ease.

Yeah, which he could be.

We have backstage footage of him with dogs, for instance, where he could be.

This is a performance of hysteria.

One lucky thing is that obviously like every smart person in Germany hated this guy and wrote down their thoughts.

So we do have a lot of a record of this.

There's a historian, Claudia Schmuildas, who's done these kind of studies of how people looked, what they saw when they looked at Hitler.

And she's a friend, so I hope she'd agree with me if I say that one very common comparison that people made was a toddler throwing a tantrum.

This kind of screwed up tenseness and this inability to relax.

It really has the feeling of you just told them that they can't watch TV.

As the parent of a toddler, this comparison, I imagine, is quite evocative to you.

Yeah, but I mean, like, this is something that people kind of pointed to at the time.

They were like, this feels like a tantrum.

They're like, this reminds me of my kid.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it feels involuntary, right?

That's the thing.

At the the same time, it was Cannali staged.

He did take acting lessons with a screen actor, I believe, in the 20s.

Like a lot of this stuff is probably second nature at this point in 1933, meaning what looks like this guy doesn't have full control over himself, which is what Charlie Chaplin will parody so beautifully in The Great Dictator.

Unlike what Chaplin seems to think it is,

is actually a pretty carefully choreographed performance of unhingedness unhingedness and of desublimation in some way, as opposed to someone genuinely fucking going off.

It's not meant to

convey sort of the

disconnect from reality, but in fact, like an overwhelm of authenticity that can no longer be contained, right?

He just feels so passionately that his passion, his beliefs are bursting forth out of his body.

Yeah, and I think it's supposed to kind of mimic something that's happening in some listeners, right?

He's staging the kind of abreactive process that he wants to affect in his listeners, but he kind of becomes their stand-in, like the matador and like a bullfight or whatever, who like stands in for the people in the audience.

It's very mysterious.

It's interesting to think about Chaplin in this regard, who obviously like becomes fascinated with Hitler because they look a lot alike.

but whose parody entirely relies on the idea that this guy doesn't have any control of himself.

And yet I think Chaplin and Hitler were closer than they thought in the sense that they were both really good screen actors who knew how to direct themselves, basically.

Be like, no, that's not my good angle, right?

And if anyone wants to read more about that, I once wrote a long article about Chaplin's Hitler performances.

It's an academic article, which I'll link to in the show notes.

I didn't know you did that.

Oh, yeah.

That's so cool.

Yeah, please put that in the show notes.

I want to read that.

You may not know that about me, but I sometimes write academic stuff too.

But yeah, I mean, more generally, I think monasteries in France gives us a sense about the victims of 1933, that amidst all the terror, these people who are, after all, some of the greatest thinkers in this country retain kind of an abiding curiosity about their new situation and about these people who brought it about.

They really are trying to sort of figure out what is happening and what made this possible, right?

We've already mentioned that Victor Klemperer, who is currently sort of trying to shop around his new book on 18th century France, will abandon that book and he will instead write a book that comes out in 1947 called LTI, the Language of the Third Reich, right?

Where he's really just sort of like tracing like, how does this work?

September is sort of the month when panic confusion that kind of characterized the first few months becomes something else.

The émigrés have very little hope of changing situations on the ground in Germany, but they could hold on to their training, to the tradition that they had been raised in, and now train it on Germany's new rulers, right?

And that matters because I think a lot of the interpretations that someone like Mann offers, where he's like, this guy is a petit bourgeois, but also he's a primary school

student who also wants to be a philosopher, right?

Like they're starting to put in place the pieces of interpretation that would come to dominate our thinking about the Nazis once they're gone, right?

After 1945, it's people who lived through 1933.

Mann, Adorno, Klemper, Arendt, right?

It's going to be people who lived through 1933 who are going to shape what we understand Nazism to have been.

Its origins, its psychic qualities, etc., etc.

So I do think that's really, really important that we're already kind of seeing the beginning of a post-war analysis of this phenomenon among these people who are right now just like for the first time catching their breath after fleeing.

The next date I wanted to point to is actually something that Mann anticipates in his diary entry that I quoted, which is something that happens on September 22nd.

Like we get exile culture starting to form form outside of Germany and we get Nazi cultural politics and Nazi culture sort of forming inside of Germany.

Mann writes of Hitler in that same speech, the same thing that we actually kind of remarked on on that speech of Hitler's right after he gets appointed chancellor.

Remember that I was like, I didn't know it was going to be that much about like the press and like the movies being bad and like literature.

I'm like, I thought it was going to be like taxes and like the farmers, coal miners or whatever.

No, like Hitler like is fixated on cultural issues.

Mann writes, there's no doubt that unlike people like Goering and Ruhm, Hitler is not concerned with the war, but with German culture.

Now, we might be like, Thomas, I think he might also be preoccupied with the war.

But at the same time, like, I think he's just reacting to that one speech.

He's basically saying, like, I thought it was going to be like, about like, oh, we're going to undo Versailles and we're going to like invade France.

But instead, he's like, movies are bad.

And he's like, oh, okay.

Word?

Right.

And I think that's part of his recognition of Hitler as a kind of a kindred spirit, a perverse kind of kindred spirit.

He's like, this guy also eats, drinks, and shits German culture.

This guy, like, he's bad at it.

He sucks.

He's a bad artist.

But in terms of his faith in this stuff, he's actually like me, right?

He thinks, like, he has my disease.

Like, we're both German art freaks.

This is a problem, right?

And to some extent, this is borne out.

So in September, the planning ramps up for the Haus der Kunz.

This is a massive art gallery in Munich, one of the first monumental buildings specifically commissioned by the new regime.

We'll talk about this in October, but the regime was largely kind of just reaping the dividends of Weimar projects.

Like Hitler would be like at an Audubon opening, be like, I will forever be associated with the Audubon.

Well, if an Audubon gets built in 1933, the planning stages are 10 years behind, right?

Like, so he's just kind of taking credit the same way that like Republicans will take credit for like stuff from the Inflation Reduction Act right now.

Right.

But like the Haus der Kunz in Munich is a Nazi project and they're starting to fast track that and be like, no, this is ours and it's an art gallery.

And then a law announced on September 22nd establishes the Reichskultur Kamme, which is this massive centralized and fully Nazified organization for all of the arts, right?

Dance, decorative arts, painting, theater, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Right?

Kamer, is that just like center?

Chamber.

Chamber.

It's like a chamber of commerce, but for arts.

For the arts.

Yeah, or for culture, kurtua, right?

The president was Goebbels himself, because

you know, if you want it done right.

And it's his big bid to really pump some money into the arts.

And I think there are two things that are important about Reichskurchua comma.

One is we have to be clear that this was a kind of art subvention system really of a par with what we would get in Western democracy.

Really quite, they're spending quite a bit of money.

And the second thing we have to emphasize is that the art that comes out of it is uniformly god-awful, right?

For the next 12 years, the RKK mostly makes obvious just how hollow and how inert and how pedestrian the Nazis' ideas of art were.

Because under its auspices, a bunch of mediocrities and has-bins can sort of stew endlessly about the kind of art they detested while producing very little of lasting value of their own.

I thought I might introduce you to one such figure, and no one has to remember this guy at all.

In fact, if you forget about him the moment you move on to your next podcast, I will be pleased.

You should all feel proud of yourselves.

A mediocrity.

A mediocrity.

Do not remember this man.

Franz Friedrich Blunk is this mediocre writer well past his prime by the time 1933 rolls around.

He joins the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1933, which means he's taking the spot of someone who got thrown out for being Jewish and or left-wing, right?

A month later, he takes on the vice presidency of that organization, again, replacing someone who had resisted the Nazis, right?

This is where Mann's brother Heinrich has just been kicked out.

I don't know who the vice president was, but he took over for him.

So, right, like he's rising through the ranks because a bunch of people who know their shit in the arts are like, yeah, I'm Audi, guys.

This is bullshit.

In October, he will join 87 other writers in publicly pledging fealty to Adolf Hitler.

Before long, he runs the literature section of the RKK.

And in the following years, Blunk's career has all the hallmarks of a Nazi artist.

And I use artist in a pretty loose sense here, biography.

He's extraordinarily productive, writing 97 books during the Third Reich.

Wow.

Exactly zero of which appear to be worth reading.

Yeah, this is a thing, the like extremely prolific, but absolutely talentless and like ultimately very repetitive writer.

Like I think we touch on this with Phyllis a lot too, like on our Schlafly episodes.

It's just somebody who produces reams and reams and reams of the same dumbass thing over and over again.

Yeah, the Nazis created a platform for it called the Reichskuchukomme.

We created a platform for it called Substack.

I got to get off that fucking thing.

Anyway, yeah, and throughout it all, he fully accommodated himself to what Klemper calls LTI, right?

The language of the Third Reich.

For instance, one of the things that the Nazis had these people do was go abroad and be like, you've been lied to.

The same thing that Orbans Hungary does now, you know.

Like Shenyun, like actually China was beautiful before Christmas.

That's right.

Or I guess Putin-affiliated artists who are like, I was able to walk around just fine.

It's like, yeah, you're a Ukrainian 12-year-old because like, I don't think we were saying that like Anani Trebko is having problems.

I think we're like a little offended for the Ukrainians you're maiming right now.

So for instance, he does this lecture in London.

And there are Nazi organizations abroad.

There are German immigrant communities that welcome this stuff, including in the United States, right?

The German American Bund.

But there's also like homegrown fascists that are Nazi sympathetic in places like the UK and the US.

Yeah, I don't know where these guys would have spoken.

I think because it's culture, it would have been more like their cultural institutes or whatever.

And there he says, true poetic activity is freer in the Third Reich than it has ever been before.

Oh my God.

Yeah, right.

True poetic activity.

Whatever.

Yeah, because they've unleashed the spirit of authenticity that's just been, you know, so suppressed by the cosmopolitans and the modernity and the internationalists, right?

This is just like the sense of like an authentic spirit.

And they always talk in these like vague, almost like new agey woo-woo terms.

Yeah.

You know, our fascists do this too a lot.

Like Jordan Peterson talks this way.

Yes.

Like Curtis Yarvin talks this way.

And it's like, define your terms because you're never specifying what you're talking about.

Exactly.

And I think the way everyone on the conservative right and among their reactionary centrist enablers agrees that our universities have somehow fallen short of some standard that they never bother to articulate and can't describe.

It's a similar kind of thing.

Like you get this kind of cultural pessimist idea, but really what it is, is resentment mongering, right?

Like what he's saying is like, Alfred Dublin, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Leon Feuchtwanger had more readers on the technicality that wrote better books.

And I'm butthurt about this and I like need to make it their fucking problem, right?

Which is the same way that all these fucking failures in the Trump administration, like that's how they look at the universities.

It's like, no, it's not you woke professor that's the reason that you got to be in that class.

It's that you

are a garbage human with garbage thoughts and a substack.

Yeah, there's a like a needful aspiration for the recognition of the hated and exiled other.

You see this a lot in our conservatives too.

And it's like, well, if you hate us so much, why don't you leave us alone?

Yeah.

Why do you need my approval on top of everything else?

Why do you need me to debate you and be owned?

You know, like, it reminds me of like post-separation abuse a little bit.

Like, well, you said she's a lying bitch and you threw her out of your house, but why are you now showing up at her job?

You know, like

there's an affinity there that is sort of like malignant.

Yeah.

And I do think that like Mann is getting at something like that with his striving first grade student remark.

He's like, these people want something from me.

Like

they say they're done with me.

Germany is done with me.

And then they also like, they're not happy.

The recognition they're getting, they don't want from people they don't want it from, right?

They are bigger believers in the world they're trying to destroy than one might assume from the way they talk about it and the way they're going about dismantling it.

But yeah, so that is September 1933, a moment when German culture finds itself at a crossroads and everyone's trying to figure out what the fuck German culture is.

And there's fights over it and the Nazis are producing a whole lot of bad stuff.

You know, right now we're in a moment in America where like it's not really possible to have meaningful like political struggle, let alone like class struggle, right?

So it's all getting sublimated into the arts and into even like consumption and the weird signifiers attached to like what you buy and consume.

And it's just a very fraught battleground in part because the other avenues for this kind of expression have been foreclosed, but also because I think it is meaningful in its own right.

That's the thing that I wanted to drive home, that like in some way the image of this era, both among its critics and those who feel like they want to bring it back or whatever, is already here, right?

Like the analysis of fascism has drawn on these people that we're reading and their analyses of this year.

And similarly, our understanding of what Nazi Germany looked like, when we were, oh, this isn't really Nazi Germany.

Like when we are trying to compare these two pictures, we are looking at pictures that probably in 1930, in March of 1933 would not have been true, but now in September 1933, we get them.

In Bedworth, the Right is made possible by hundreds of listeners who support us via patreon.com.

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

Our title music is by Katie Lau.