What Berlin Teaches Us About Resisting Tyranny: Wendy Lesser’s Cautionary Mirror for Our Times

“Hitler had to abolish democracy to take over Berlin.” — Wendy Lesser

 

“Ich bin ein Berliner” (I Am a Berliner), JFK famously said in West Berlin on June 26, 1963, in the face of Soviet imperial tyranny. Today, Wendy Lesser is offering the same defiance in her new book Berlin Before and After. Only Lesser offers a cautionary mirror for our times of not just post-Soviet Putin but also wannabe-tyrants like Trump.

 

Lesser’s loving portrait of Berlin is of a free city. She reminds us that even in Germany’s darkest hour, Berlin never actually went Nazi. The city voted left up to and including 1933, so Hitler had to abolish democracy to take it over. Nor, Lesser argues, was Nazism a reaction to Weimar Berlin’s Cabaret-style nightlife, any more than Trump is a reaction to wokeness. Economic forces, not cultural ones, she insists, enable dictators.

 

Today’s Berlin, as a city that memorializes its own crimes, offers America an urban lesson in acknowledging historical guilt. That’s what makes Berlin such a defiant beacon of freedom in our authoritarian age. There are more urbane cities than Berlin, but none quite as dedicated to freedom. Go there and/or read Berlin Before and After. Today we should all be Berliners.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       Our Own 1929 — or 1932? The book began as a love letter to the Berlin Lesser adopted in 2003 — the everywhere writer of Berkeley, New York, and Berlin, against Lampedusa the ultimate somewhere, who never left Sicily and carried Shakespeare through the coffee houses of Palermo. But as she wrote, America’s condition worsened: “We were not only in our own 1929, but perhaps in 1930, ’31, or even ’32 — verging on our own descent into frightening dictatorship.” Hence the subtitle’s cautionary mirror — though history, she insists, never exactly repeats itself, and the American analogies came unforced, surfacing every thirty or forty pages without hammering. Being an everywhere, she says, doesn’t make you write better — Lampedusa proves that — “but it improves your life,” and it gave her the subjects her native California never could.

•       Berlin Never Went Nazi. The episode’s revelation: the city of Weimar flamboyance never gave the Nazis a majority — Berlin voted left up to and including 1933, and “Hitler had to abolish democracy to take over Berlin.” From which follows her sharpest argument: Nazism was not a backlash against Berlin’s sexual and artistic freedoms, “just as I do not see the election of Trump as a reaction to so-called wokeness or trans rights. Cultural manifestations do not cause such government changes. Economic forces do” — wealth gaps, regional deprivation, the east feeling second-class, then and now (the AfD’s heartland). The direct equivalences are rhetorical: America’s poisoned-blood language on immigrants comes “straight from the Goebbels playbook,” and the rights that flowered in twenties Germany were “instantly squished” in the thirties. As for today: the AfD polls high before Berlin’s September city elections, but the firewall holds — and the party is formally flagged by German intelligence as constitutionally dangerous. Andrew’s question stands: any vaccines for this thing?

•       1929: The Year Everything Premiered. Why that year: Grosz, Sander, and Otto Dix at their peak; Brecht and Piscator both premiering; All Quiet on the Western Front, the underrated Grand Hotel, and Berlin Alexanderplatz in the bookshops — plus Thomas Mann’s Mario and the Magician, the novella that predicted fascism; Billy Wilder still a weekly-paper journalist shooting his first film; and Christopher Isherwood arriving on the first visit that became Goodbye to Berlin and, via Broadway, Cabaret. “Only in retrospect do we