Uwe Wittstock’s February 1933: The Winter of Literature, published in Germany in 2018 and in English translation earlier this year, is a kind of Advent calendar of terror. Wittstock chronicles the events of each day, for a little over a month (he starts at the end of January and continues his narrative for about a week and a half after Adolf Hitler’s election on March 5), in the arts community of what became, very quickly, the Third Reich. He wants you to feel how fast it happened. And he wants you to know that it could happen to you.
It’s an elegant book—concision, the knife blade, always feels elegant, but Wittstock also makes specific unexpected choices. Most of the chapters are short, to make you feel how fast things moved, but there are multiple longer chapters about maneuvering within the Division for the Art of Poetry of the Prussian Academy of the Arts. It takes skill to do this: to show how questions like, Did we notify everyone of this meeting according to the bylaws of our organization?, become moments of defining moral choice. The Academy’s story always feels tense and vital. And it continues all the way into the final chapter, in which we learn what happened to most of these people—a chapter full of sideswipes, bitter ironies, deaths and successes that seem like they happen at random. (At one point I found myself thinking, Never ask a man his salary, a woman her age, or a West German how he earned the Order of Merit, First Class for service to the arts.) A lot of the names in this book were unfamiliar to me, even though I’m an extremely casual fan of Weimar lit; I assumed most of the unknowns had been killed, but in fact you’ll get a lot of tiny stories about the postwar feeling of being left behind. The people who could capture the imagination of 1932 often struggled to depict the world of 1946.
Each chapter focuses on artists’ lives, but has short endnotes about other aspects of life. The notes about the flu, and people’s folk-scientific ideas about masking to prevent flu, are a rare misstep: They feel like they’re supposed to be portentous, telling us something about the role of the pandemic in our own politics, but the parallel is weak and it just seems like a quirk of history. By contrast, there’s no mistaking the relevance to both past and present of the notes tracking the day-by-day Nazi takeover of police and government agencies. Wittstock records rising political violence, and there’s a day when the way he records it shifts—a tiny shift in emphasis that’s chilling.
Almost everyone in this history has some acknowledged contact with politics from the beginning. They also mostly had ties to artistic institutions in other countries; they could get work outside Germany. Many of them were able to escape. I re-read Maus shortly before I read this book, and there, the Nazi takeover feels slower, more like quicksand: encroachments, things you can strategize your way through for a while. Things getting worse but livable, and then worse but survivable, and then worse than that. Maus is a story about ordinary people, not prominent people who would be early targets, and it’s not a story about people who got contracts to perform in Paris as a matter of course. Although Wittstock says in the introduction, “Many of them refused to acknowledge the danger, underestimated it, reacted too slowly, in short: they made mistakes,” a surprising (to me) number of them fled the country as soon as they could—in some especially terrifying cases, leaving their children behind. Others who stayed knew that they were in serious danger, although there are levels of knowing: It’s easy to think you have more influence on events than you really do.
Wittstock is not subtle in unfolding his purpose here. The introduction invites us to picture more realistically what it feels like to live in a society tipping over into dictatorship: “If the claim that Hitler’s crimes are unimaginable has any meaning, then it must hold true first and foremost for his contemporaries. They could not imagine or at best could only suspect what he and his people were capable of. Presumably it is in the very nature of a breach of civilization to be difficult to imagine.” He gets blunter: “Perhaps it is not a bad time to remind ourselves what can happen to a democracy after a catastrophic error in political decision-making.”
It’s a risky strategy. In encouraging a comparison to the politics of our own time, with its open threats to law, elections, and minority groups, Wittstock sometimes made me notice which things aren’t happening here. There was a murderous torchlight parade in Charlottenburger Chaussee Charlottesville where fascists chanted, “Jews will not replace us!”, but also, I do not think a single real Jewish writer or artist lost a job or contract because of that violence, nor did Jewish Virginians flee the country. The rise of Nazi political power damages artistic freedom swiftly and ubiquitously, as theaters across Germany cancel shows due to threats, protests, and disruptions. Those accounts may make you, now today, adamant in your defense of Drag Queen Story Hour as a kind of fabulous canary in the coal mine. But imagine cineplexes in New York and LA refusing to show that subversive, anti-white attack on American patriotism, Killers of the Flower Moon, as Scorsese pleads with his FBI technical advisor to help him get his visa renewed so he can escape to Canada. That’s closer to what happens to figures like Thomas Mann, whose children have to beg him—in code, because their phone lines are probably tapped—to stay in Switzerland instead of coming home to terror.
Wittstock sets expectations in one way, and I guess I’m now trying to set them the opposite way: to let the parallel emerge from the contrast. If you expect February 1933 to feel entirely alien, you may instead find yourself thinking about things like the NYPD attacking demonstrators (and bystanders) in the summer of 2020. Or wondering where we might be, had a few people made different decisions on a single day in January, when the man who’s arguably the frontrunner for the presidency provoked his followers to attempt to overthrow the United States government. You may find yourself wondering, Why do I think about that only now and then? Why am I not thinking about that all the time?
Photo of a tiki torch (at the Brite Winter Festival in Cleveland 2010) by “Tim,” found via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.