#peter fritzsche

[renest]

Der Blick. / 31.01.2021

[renest]

Der Hase im Herbst. / 10.11.2019

[renest]

Der Hase. / 12.04.2019

[arcticdementor]

Voters elected Hitler because they liked his fascist promise. Trump's reelection repeats that history

Voters elected Hitler because they liked his fascist promise. In 2024, the same appears to be true for Trump.

The end of the presidential campaign was characterized by broad charges that President-elect Donald Trump is a fascist. Vice President Kamala Harris and her surrogates invited voters to view the former president as a reckless, self-interested dictator in the making. Trump’s own former chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly, characterized him as an authoritarian “in the far right area” and said he “falls into the general definition of fascist.” The assumption was that voters would be turned off by seeing Trump for what he is — authoritarian, pitiless, hateful — and would recognize him as a kind of Hitler. Hitler, the most identifiable villain in modern history, and America’s arch-enemy in World War II. But the charges didn’t stick. “Fascist” and “authoritarian” proved themselves to be abstract, unfamiliar, and even esoteric labels that did not particularly matter to voters concerned with inflation or immigration. And there was another, less savory, reason that the charges did not really hurt Trump: To suggest that Trump was a fascist was, actually, to identify many of the attributes that made him appealing.

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Hitler, in other words, won as much support as he did precisely because he was uncompromising, incendiary, and willing to battle Germany’s enemies — not despite those qualities. There was nothing coy about Hitler or the Nazis.

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Then, as now, it turned out that fascism was an attraction. The fascist is a monster to some, yet a siren to others.

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The voters who assembled behind Trump like that Trump is Trump — just as the decades-past swing voters who went Nazi liked that Hitler was Hitler. As far as Trump and his fervent supporters are concerned, the 2024 election — the first in which, it is important to note, Trump won the popular vote — has given a mandate to the very qualities Harris and her allies tried to depict as dangerous to the soul of the country. Perhaps those qualities, instead, reflect the current soul of the country. Trump’s deferential Republicans have won a Senate majority, and are poised to pull off the same feat with the House. The Democratic opposition will find itself more paralyzed in face of the scale of events. In the new era, they might well themselves take up MAGA talking points, as trends suggest more people will flock to MAGA than peel off. This combination of growing consensus and targeted coercion is part of fascism. We know how this can play out — now, we simply have to wait to see how bad it gets.

[spectaculardistractions]

Many Germans proved highly receptive to this promise, and this fact, as public officials complained bitterly, greatly complicated their efforts to regulate the sphere of lay medicine. The frequent recourse to suggestive methods by lay practitioners attests to the desire of many ordinary Germans for a more direct, personal relation to their doctor. While appropriating scientific procedures, lay healers—many of whom, police records suggest, were veterans of the Great War and had probably gained their first exposure to hypnosis while being treated for shellshock—also based their knowledge claims on their own narratives of overcoming illness through suggestive methods. Such assertions of expertise rested on firsthand experience of the simultaneously transgressive and emancipatory potential of hypnosis. The faith in the possibilities of molding human subjects that Peter Fritzsche has identified as a hallmark of the interwar period was shared not least by those subjects themselves.

Andreas Killen, Homo Cinematicus

[spectaculardistractions]

RPA communiqués appealed to the notion of a new, specifically “völkisches[racial] conscience,” the growing strength of which, they claimed, could be measured in terms of rising numbers of sterilizations and declining numbers of abortions. Yet the specter of racial crisis remained ever present, a fact largely blamed on the continuing influence of the churches. The uncompromising Gross cast the issue in the starkest possible terms, as a battle between the forces of enlightenment and those of “darkness,” referring in one context to the need to combat the “obscurationist tactics” (Verdunklungsmanöver) used by the “shadowy figures” (Dunkelmänner). Building this new conscience entailed banishing all traces of “exaggerated humanity” or “false pity” just as it did rejecting any concession to liberal, reactionary, or confessional worldviews. Such statements lend support to Robert Proctor’s argument concerning the Nazis’ intention to recast relations between those responsible for formulating race hygiene doctrine and the German public. While Peter Fritzsche has argued that “the most basic continuity between Weimar and Nazi policy lies in the assumption that human material could and should be molded,” Edward Ross Dickinson stresses the radical nature of the break that occurred in 1933. Among other things, this meant the closing down of that space that, during the Weimar period, allowed heterogeneous views to coexist, including those associated with figures like Hirschfeld. Enlightenment was no longer conceived of as something arrived at on one’s own but as something imposed from above by the state. Perhaps this development may best be characterized as the expression of a form of “enlightened totalitarianism”: a regime carrying to its most radical conclusion that distinctively modern conception of human and social engineering that Detlev Peukert refers to as Machbarkeitswahn (“dream [or, more literally, mania] of perfectibility”).

Andreas Killen, Homo Cinematicus

[spectaculardistractions]

A related program emerged from the mental hygiene movement. In the war’s aftermath, specialists in psychiatry, biology, and anthropology undertook large-scale research projects intended to gather data about the health of the German population. The ambition of figures like Emil Kraepelin to make psychiatric science handmaiden to social policy illustrates what Michel Foucault has described as the ascendance of psychiatric power in the modern era. In Germany, the fields of psychiatry and mental hygiene had close ties to racial hygiene, whose triumph under the Nazis is identified by Peter Fritzsche as marking a shift from conventional forms of policing focused on “law and order” to a demographic and biomedical approach dominated by a new class of “ethnocrats.” But as Edward Ross Dickinson has argued, the bio-political obsessions and strategies of the interwar era encompassed many different tendencies, only some of which could be identified with National Socialism. Within the broad terrain staked out by the human sciences, eugenicists of many political persuasions coexisted, and prior to 1933 the field of mental hygiene included both Jewish sexologists and proto-Nazi race hygienists.

Andreas Killen, Homo Cinematicus

[spectaculardistractions]

Against such readings, this study stresses the open-endedness and multiple trajectories that marked the alliance between cinema and human science in the postwar era, which were only foreclosed with the Nazis’ ascent to power. Weimar film, I argue, was neither a medium of cynical enlightenment nor one of hypnosis; nor was its public a merely suggestible throng. In tracing the emergence of a new nexus between science, cinema, and social policy in Germany between 1895 and 1945, this study highlights the ambiguous faith in “the molding of peoples” identified by Peter Fritzsche as a hallmark of this era. Films of this period allow us to witness the emergence of this faith as well as its vicissitudes, dark possibilities, unintended effects, and limits.

Andreas Killen, Homo Cinematicus