David Segal, a feature writer for the New York Times, interviewed German-born novelist Daniel Kehlmann, who “sees chilling parallels between what happened [under Hitler] and what has unfolded since Trump’s second inauguration.”
The “Republican president = Hitler” smear has been a tired and offensive liberal trope since the Reagan Administration, unworthy of appearing in a once-prestigious newspaper. The Times headline writer wasn’t subtle:
In a Nazi-Era Filmmaker’s Compromises, a Novelist Finds Reasons to Fear
Daniel Kehlmann wrote ‘The Director’ only to realize how loudly the moral quandaries faced by G.W. Pabst would resonate today.
The spark of inspiration for “The Director,” Daniel Kehlmann’s new historical novel about a filmmaker toiling for the Nazi regime, came during the first Trump administration. Kehlmann noticed Americans taking special care about what they said and to whom they said it. The self-censorship faintly echoed stories he’d heard from his father, who was a Jewish teenager in Vienna when the Third Reich came to power.
The word “Austria,” for example, was banned by the regime. Suddenly, everyone lived in Ostmark.
Was Segal paying attention when people were getting fired from jobs for posting mildly critical comments on the Black Lives Matter riots, or for questioning state government authoritarian edicts that shuttered businesses and schools? That was an actual time when people had to take special care not to offend the vengeful activist left.
Kehlmann, a boyish 50-year-old born in Munich, has long been fascinated by the ways that citizens accommodated Hitler’s dictatorship. He centers his novel on the largely forgotten G.W. Pabst, an Austrian film director who gained fame in the era of silent movies and flamed out in Hollywood in the 1930s.
Pabst got stuck in Austria when the Nazis shut the border and eventually worked for the German film industry under minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels.
Once again, a Times writer carefully curated events to make a Trump-Nazi parallel sound plausible, at least to gullible liberal ears.
To understand how the left-leaning Pabst ended up as one of the Nazis’ marquee directors, Kehlmann read deeply about Germany’s slide into autocracy. Now he sees chilling parallels between what happened then and what has unfolded since Trump’s second inauguration. Eroding the rule of law, persecuting “enemies,” elevating incompetents and extremists to top jobs -- it all comes from the same playbook
….
In “The Director,” he unpacks what is “total” about totalitarianism. Nazism warps every interaction and every opinion, and social status is no longer determined by talent. Gifted people on the wrong side of the ideological divide are persecuted. Hacks are elevated and praised.
Sounds like rule under liberal leadership. Segal must have missed the last few years of online censorship, both self-censorship and the real kind, when the good people showed their fealty by condemning “white privilege” and passing around woke reading lists online (often headed by the now-discredited, “everything is racist” pseudo-scholar Ibram X. Kendi) for the unenlightened masses to read.
We met the day after Germany’s parliamentary elections, in which the hard-right Alternative for Germany party had over-performed, winning 20 percent of the vote.
Kehlmann greeted the news with equanimity. The AfD would not join the ruling coalition, he predicted -- correctly, it turned out -- because there remains in his home country a powerful social stigma against extremist politicians, something he finds alarmingly absent in the U.S.
For someone afraid that people were taking special care of what they said, the novelist seemed disturbed by the fact that someone at a fancy dinner he attended actually “proudly identified himself as a major Trump donor.”
At a dinner at the Metropolitan Museum of Art not long ago, he sat next to a man who proudly identified himself as a major Trump donor. By Kehlmann’s lights, the Republican Party is now demonstrably more dangerous than the AfD. Deep-pocketed members of the party are mixing in the highest echelons, he said, even though they support an administration posing an existential threat to democracy. “Everybody says that society here is too polarized and too fractured,” he said. “But maybe on the level of the really wealthy, it’s really not fractured and polarized enough.”
At the end, Kehlmann cited his own paranoia to prove himself right that American had become a dangerously intolerant place under Trump.
“Immediately I’m thinking, can it be bad for me to say something like this to The New York Times? Which, I think, proves my point.”
