I grew up in East Germany, in the former German Democratic Republic, and I am still here today.

In the fall of 1989, we liberated ourselves from dictatorial conditions through a peaceful revolution. That was a beginning. Freedom “from something,” however, must lead to freedom “for something.” We discussed how we wanted to develop our country. The possibilities seemed endless.

Then the Wall fell. People oriented themselves towards the West. It promised prosperity, which had a stronger allure than taking our own uncertain path.

So, I became a citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany. But for decades, I felt like a stranger. For East Germans, everything—really, everything—had changed with the accession to the Federal Republic of Germany. For West Germans, the only thing that changed was their postal code.

Then, in 2015, on the news thousands of refugees appeared walking on highways in Austria and Hungary, seeking a new home. Germany took them in—over a million people. When Angela Merkel said, “We can do it,” I felt a sense of belonging for the first time. My country—I finally saw it that way—felt like a welcoming society that took responsibility for its actions in the world.

But soon, the welcome turned into backlash against migrants. German politics shifted from focusing on migrants’ reasons for fleeing to dwelling on reducing the number of refugees reaching the country. Today, refugees are pushed back, beaten, and robbed at the Polish-Belarusian and Croatian-Bosnian borders—the outer borders of the European Union. Pushbacks are illegal and criminal, but they are condoned by the European Commission.

Most vocal in this backlash is the AfD, or Alternative for Germany party. In July 2023, a politician from the AfD declared to the audience during a television report from the party congress: “Dear friends, what we need are pushbacks, no matter what the European Court of Justice says.” She was placed on the party’s list for the European elections, ranking ninth. Currently, the AfD has nine seats in the European Parliament, and is likely to increase that number in the June 2024 elections.

This was disturbing for me. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights just turned 75. The declaration formulated an ideal that is still not achieved, but serves as orientation toward a goal of justice. Losing that orientation means losing ourselves. We can’t be indifferent. It does matter whether we respect human rights or not.

The AfD is indifferent to human rights. The party has just been classified as “right-wing extremist” by Germany’s domestic spy agency and offices protecting the constitution.

The AfD’s ascent is partially due to the way that the difficulties and disruptions of life since the country’s reunification have become deeply ingrained in East German identity. In the economic transition that came with reunification, the West treated the East as a market to be discovered and an “outdated” economy to be dismantled.

In that shift, many East Germans ended up unemployed and found themselves shame-stricken at the employment office looking for work or fear-laden at the tax office. This felt like a loss of control—over their country and their own lives.

The AfD plays its fatal melodies on this piano.

Even though the majority of Germans do not support AfD, the overall mood is changing. Before, fascist attitudes fomented under the surface of society’s skin. Now they are breaking out. On the streets, it seems as if nothing is sacred to some people anymore. In a city in the state of Thuringia, a group of disabled people was harassed by a man with derogatory remarks. When confronted, he said, “Hopefully the AfD will come to power soon. Then you’ll all be gone.” He was endorsing eugenics, one of the crimes of the Nazi era that most of us thought had long been universally condemned.

In 2024, three states in the former East Germany will see parliamentary elections: Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia, the last of which I call home. According to polls, the AfD could win up to 35%. That would give it a blocking minority in the parliaments: All decisions requiring a qualified two-thirds majority would have to be negotiated with the AfD. Even without governing, the AfD could advance its program of racism and revocation of rights.

Björn Höcke, the state chairman of the AfD in Thuringia and the leader of his party in parliament, is considered the mastermind of the AfD throughout Germany. In 2019, a court decided he could be publicly called a “fascist.”

In December, he published a plan for what he hopes to achieve upon joining state government. He would massively deport refugees and abolish programs to strengthen democracy and civil society—a move that would specifically affect initiatives trying to establish counterbalances to right-wing populism within the population. The intelligence agencies would be reoriented to conduct surveillance only of the left. The public broadcasting system would be overhauled. And all climate protection measures would be terminated, as the AfD denies human-made climate change.

The AfD stands against everything that I have fought for in my life: the expansion of civil rights for all people, a strong civil society, refugee protection, addressing the causes of migration, effective nature and climate protection. The polling numbers scare me. The cluelessness and ignorance of the other parties, shifting into campaign mode instead of focusing on saving the aspects of democracy that can be saved, also worry me.

This is still my country, and it cannot simply be handed over to the AfD.

On my street, half of the families are involved in a neighborhood association. We take care of a soccer field for children and teenagers, rake leaves, and generally clean up. We also maintain a small forest and create bee pastures. After our workdays, we sit around the grill with a beer and talk, sensibly. Does one out of every three of them vote right-wing extremist? That seems hard to believe.

But it’s very likely that many of my neighbors are disappointed with the existing politics. Soon, we won’t be able to avoid the AfD issue anymore just to keep the neighborhood peace. The AfD constructs emergencies and grievances, only to present itself as the last resort—it lights a fuse and then claims to be the only way to extinguish it. Learning to distinguish these invented grievances from actual grievances is crucial to keeping the AfD at bay. We have to face these conversations, consciously address the party’s dangers, and name our ethical boundaries—in our families, our neighborhoods, at work, and in all political engagement.

This essay was written for Zócalo in German, and translated.

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I was more than a little startled when Konrad Adenauer approached me in the Old Market.

Sure, I was visiting Cologne, Germany, Adenauer’s hometown. But I had never imagined I’d lay eyes on the famous statesman who served as the German republic’s first post-war chancellor—much less get a wave from him.

Not least because he died six years before I was born.

But I had traveled back to 1926, when Adenauer was Cologne’s mayor, courtesy of TimeRide, a virtual reality tour.

I’m not much for tourist attractions, which TimeRide—which also operates in Dresden, Munich, Berlin, and Frankfurt—most certainly is. I took the tour, which involves entering a storefront on Cologne’s Old Market and sitting in a streetcar inside, after my colleagues at a Cologne-based democracy NGO suggested I try it. I’m glad I did.

Because TimeRide suggests possibilities not just for remembrance of difficult pasts, but also for how communities envision their democratic futures.

The idea of using virtual reality to document horrors is not new. The state of Bavaria created a virtual reality version of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp to assist with the prosecution of Nazi war criminals (VR can answer claims by suspects that they couldn’t have seen executions or the gas chambers from where they worked.) And VR has become an important tool for Holocaust museums and other sites that memorialize genocide—notably with the recent Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center exhibition The Journey Back, which takes viewers on a journey through concentration camps with survivors.

And, as with TimeRide’s Cologne 1926, VR represents a form of historical preservation, a virtual re-creation of structures and spaces that have been damaged or lost, like ancient sites destroyed during warfare in Syria and Iraq.

But such VR projects have also raised questions. Can there be equal access to history if it’s tied to an expensive technology? Could “virtually real” representations of extermination camps or war force people to relieve old traumas—or cause new ones? Might virtual reality technologies, or the images they produce, be manipulated in service of false narratives that incite violence, renew old conflicts, or undermine democracy?

These risks are real, but so is the power of the technology to construct memory. TimeRide succeeds because it does something elemental—it shows just how much human actions can destroy our communities.

I found TimeRide more haunting than some war and Holocaust exhibitions precisely because it does not show you horrors. Instead, it takes you on a tour of interwar Cologne, in a moment of  Golden Twenties bloom. After I paid my 24 euros, boarded the stationary streetcar, and put on the VR headset, the ride transported me back to 1926. Cologne was renewing its Carnival tradition after World War I, the Spanish flu, and British occupation. I was visiting a city of horses and joyous music and people wearing colorful clothes.

The streetcar ride feels real. The VR renderings are detailed (TimeRide credits dozens of artists), and vibrations and airflow provide a sense of movement and atmosphere. “We want to make history that people can feel” with technologies that “open up a completely new experience of history,” Jonas Rothe, who founded TimeRide seven years ago, has said.

In this, TimeRide succeeds. Over 45 minutes, the ride recreates some 2,000 buildings and more than 3,000 people, among them Mayor Adenauer. You wind through dozens of neighborhoods, including the Jewish Quarter, before finishing at the beginning of a Carnival parade.

But the greatest power of the ride comes once it’s over, when you walk outside into the Old Market, adjust your eyes to the sunlight, and look around. Yes, the Rathaus—the old city hall where Adenauer governed—is visible, as is Cologne’s dome, its ancient cathedral. But almost nothing else remains as it was.

Of the 2,000 buildings it rendered in virtual reality, just 26 still exist.

Humans destroyed the rest. The Nazis took power in 1933. In Cologne, they disbanded the city government, removed Adenauer as mayor, and seized his home and bank accounts. What followed in Germany is all too well-known: the Night of the Long Knives, Kristallnacht, the Final Solution, world war, and the deaths of tens of millions.

Destruction continued after the war had ended. Some structures in Cologne that survived the war were torn down under ill-considered or corrupt post-war redevelopment schemes. (Cologne’s less-than-clean politics once earned it the nickname “Chicago on the Rhine.”)

After TimeRide, I sat for a while in the Old Market, scanning the buildings around me. I felt the fear of looking anew at this modern German city, recognizing just how fragile all of it is.

Once the intensity of the experience wore off, I found myself thinking of the possibilities. We could use virtual reality proactively, to force us to reconsider how we impact our cities and communities.

Imagine visitors to today’s massively overdeveloped Beijing taking a virtual reality tour back to the long-gone hutong neighborhoods of the capital city, which I wandered as a small child in the 1970s. Or if we could sail virtually on lakes that have dried up (like Peñuelas Lake in Chile), or take a boat through the Amazon of 200 years ago, or lace up virtual snow shoes to walk across melted glaciers.

Could we see the Indigenous communities destroyed in previous centuries by settlers and soldiers? Could we visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki before the atomic bombs? Or could we go back just two years ago to Mariupol before the Russian military destroyed it in their Ukraine war?

In my hometown of Los Angeles, a city of great imagination and thoughtless urban planning, I want virtual reality to take Angelenos back to the great neighborhoods we’ve bulldozed—the Old Chinatown obliterated for a train station in the 1930s, or the Chavez Ravine evacuated to build Dodger Stadium in the early 1960s. Could visiting that past give us more respect for our communities and neighborhoods, and ourselves?

Even more than that, I want virtual technologies to show us different futures of our communities, our cities, and our societies. This way, everyday people can deliberate and vote on what gets lost, what gets kept, and what gets built—and all the power doesn’t belong to the people and institutions with the capacity to destroy nearly everything you can see.

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Germany does not have a traditional, centuries-old national holiday, such as July 14 in France or July 4 in the United States.

But Germany is carefully attuned to dates, and how they might be used to reckon with the history of dictatorships, encourage the maintenance of memorial sites, and spark remembrance in ways that draw the public to past sins, and provide vital information and moral orientation.

Reckoning with and making restitution for the Nazi dictatorship of 1933­–1945, World War II, and the deaths and persecution of millions occupies Germany to this day—and probably will forever. The ongoing German work of remembrance around dates also should remind us of how frequently used phrases like “coming to terms with the past” (“Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung”) or “processing the past” constitute a rather helpless vocabulary, and provide only a generalizing veil for specific historical crimes.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the occupying Allies took the first steps to punish those most responsible for the Nazi regime, to reorganize the government, and to begin to compensate the Nazis’ victims. But they did much of this work at a distance. The newly installed powers within Germany, on the other hand, were more entangled in old patterns, and often remained ambivalent about the continuation of denazification and democratization. In any case, the population tended to deny and repress recent crimes and, above all, lament their own victims of the war.

But over many years, beginning in the late 1940s and into the early 21st century, Germany developed a “policy on the past” and established days of remembrance. The process took different paths in the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). But everywhere, its influences included court proceedings, historical research, art, and media, as well as political events like the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961­–2, the reunification of Germany in 1990, and debates around the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, which opened in 2005.

Over the decades, Germany would come to commemorate a number of dates—not as national holidays but in conjunction with a heterogenous group of organizations and individuals, including government. The shifting commemorations and days include the end of World War II in Europe on May 8, 1945, the anti-Jewish pogroms of November 9, 1938, and the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp on January 27, 1945.

Beginning in the late 1940s, first the Soviet-occupied zone and then the German Democratic Republic celebrated May 8 as the victory of the USSR and of anti-fascism. But the Western parts of the nation occupied by the U.S. and other Allies didn’t mark the date. In 1965, the Federal Republic of Germany’s government wanted to highlight the 20th anniversary for the first time as a kind of “end of the post-war period,” celebrating successes in reconstruction, consolidated democracy, and the prospect of reunification—but the Allies rejected the idea.

After years of routine events, in 1985, Federal President Richard von Weizsaecker made a speech interpreting May 8, 1945 no longer as a day of military defeat but as the “Day of Liberation.” He received some public criticism, but this statement marked a turning point for May 8. It reduced the attention on Germany’s own post-war grievances, and focused more attention on those whom the Nazi regime had killed and persecuted.

It has taken quite a long time to establish adequate forms and days of recollection for victims of the Nazi regime.

In 1946, the U.S. military took the first steps toward commemorating the Holocaust, remembering the destruction of the synagogue at Frankfurt’s Börneplatz on November 9, 1938. Similar commemorations followed elsewhere, with widespread media coverage throughout Germany (then divided into four zones of Allied occupation) on the 10th anniversary on November 9, 1948. But no centralized events took place.

In the Soviet Occupation Zone (later GDR, or East Germany) a “Day of Anti-Fascism” was set up on the second Sunday of September 1946.  But its strong emphasis on military and political victory soon pushed aside Jews as victims, focusing instead on the deaths of “political” anti-fascists. Meanwhile in the Federal Republic (West Germany), November 9, 1938, would gain greater importance.

Very soon, however, a different and competing line of remembrance was started as a “National Day of Mourning” for all German victims of war, following a tradition which began after World War I. This focus on the fallen soldiers and other war dead remained far removed from the fate of the victims of Nazi dictatorship, and the topics of German guilt and responsibility. Only the states of Hesse and Hamburg dedicated the national day of mourning as a “day of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism and the dead of both world wars.” During the 1950s, the victims of the Nazi dictatorship received more attention in commemoration, but the victim community remained tied to the German dead.

Since the early 1950s, Jewish communities in cities such as Frankfurt, Munich, and Berlin have driven initiatives to hold days of remembrance on November 9, along with victims’ organizations and opposition groups. Although the state did not sanction these commemorations, eventually more municipalities took part.

The number of memorial sites to Nazi victims also increased rapidly, especially after a wave of new attacks against synagogues in 1959 and 1960. In the decade leading up to the 40th anniversary of November 9, in 1978, the number of commemorative events increased tenfold. Historical research and publications began to offer in-depth accounts of the anti-Semitic November pogroms of 1938—and of the German population’s widespread acceptance of those attacks.

By the late 1970s, this day of remembrance had been firmly anchored at the national level. The federal president and other representatives of national government and parliament were observing the day, which students also study in school. This movement in turn inspired more local research, media projects, and discussions in small towns and rural areas. The American television series Holocaust, about a fictional Jewish family, also spread interest in the subject after several parts appeared on German television in 1979. The term “holocaust” became part of the German language, thanks to the show.

Today, November 9 has developed into one of the most important days of remembrance, recalling the date when Nazi organizations destroyed synagogues, attacked, killed, or expelled Jews, and deported many to concentration camps. Germans for too long downplayed this series of events as “Reichskristallnacht,” the night of broken glass, which doesn’t acknowledge the full extent of its horrors. The day of commemoration transformed November 9 into a symbol of the horrible path to the “final solution” of annihilation of German and European Jews. Germans, over time, began to understand crime, guilt, and responsibility in their historical and moral dimensions.

Other days of commemoration also advanced this process. The Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation chose a “Week of Brotherhood” in March 1952 to focus solely on commemorating the persecution of the Jews. This week was initially devoted to seeking religiously motivated mutual understanding with the small number of surviving German Jewish citizens. But it expanded over time and contributed significantly to the clarification of historical facts and responsibilities of the Holocaust. More recently, however, the week has lost importance, in part because of the secularization of society.

A different theme concerns July 20, 1944—political resistance against the Nazi regime, remembered through Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg’s failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler. As early as October 1951, the Federal Republic of Germany’s government marked this day—both to honor resistance and to counter accusations of treason by old Nazi supporters and former military personnel. Annual commemorative speeches on July 20 by high state officials, and more recent events that include some military rituals, have achieved considerable media coverage. The commemorations are effective because of the drama of the attempted assassination, and the personal story of the executed assassin, Count Stauffenberg, and his co-conspirators. But they have also come under fire for focusing on military elites rather than the resistance of trade unions, left-wing parties, and everyday people.

Today, the official commemoration day of German state organs, explicitly dedicated to all victims of the National Socialist system of oppression, and especially to the murdered and expelled Jews of Europe, is January 27. That is the day in 1945 when Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. President Roman Herzog first dedicated this day in 1996, and since 2005, it also has been International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Each year, the German Bundestag in Berlin holds commemoration events with contemporary witnesses, international experts, and political representatives, including from Israel and neighboring European countries. The state parliaments and governments of Germany, and many local authorities, also follow this practice—implying a political self-commitment of state institutions to permanently respect this occasion and its mandate.

Although November 9 retains its importance, January 27 has become a more powerful commemoration because it was established after German reunification in 1990, and it integrates the very different patterns of memory in West and East Germany.

Today, rising xenophobia, racism, and right-wing extremism are placing new pressures on Germany—and on the contribution remembrance, and days of commemoration, make to society.  Germany’s culture of remembrance may well deliver some relevant lessons and moral enlightenment necessary to secure freedom, democracy, and peace.

Since some right-wing activists quite openly proclaim allegiance to Hitler and Nazi ideology, it is much more necessary to use historical facts and moral arguments in everyday political dispute to counter their horrible beliefs and propaganda. The German pledge “Never again” will be needed on streets, in speeches, and in all kind of media for the foreseeable future.

The post How Germany Developed a ‘Policy on the Past’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On September 8, 1943, Hans Heinrich Festersen was hanged at Berlin’s Plötzensee prison. Festersen, 35, had been arrested almost a year earlier, on October 12, 1942, for violating Paragraph 175, the German law prohibiting sex between men. He received his death sentence on July 13, 1943.

Though the Nazis had broadened the law and increased its severity, gay men were not usually killed for violating Paragraph 175. So, why was Hans Festersen killed, and how did his letters from prison to his sister Ruth Marie end up in a museum exhibit in Berlin today?

From January 1940 until August 1941, German “health courts” deemed 70,000 disabled persons to be “unworthy of life.” They were murdered in gas chambers as part of the Aktion T4 program. After the program officially ended and until the end of the war, 230,000 more people with disabilities, including infants, were killed by gas and other means, including starvation, medication overdose, and neglect.

Letter from Hans Heinrich Festersen to his sister, written at Plötzensee prison, December 14, 1942. Photo courtesy of the Schwules Museum.

Festersen, the son of noted ceramicist Friedrich Festersen, was physically disabled due to cerebral palsy. He used walking aids to get around. The police arrested him along with three other gay disabled men who had been living with Festersen at a Protestant institution for the unemployed and homeless.

Crucial to the case against the four men was the 1933 “Law Against Dangerous Habitual Criminals,” which allowed indefinite imprisonment and castration of sex offenders. But according to the memorial site at Plötzensee, by 1943 “wartime criminal laws allowed for death sentences for almost any criminal offense.”

The four gay disabled men’s trial records, as historian Andreas Pretzel reports, are filled with biases against, and misrepresentations of, both disability and being gay. The court’s judgment described Festersen and his co-defendants as being “mentally weak” and “not fully sane.” Their sexuality was deemed “unnatural fornication.” Pretzel concludes that their “death sentences were aimed at the destruction of life allegedly unworthy of life.” The phrase “life unworthy of life” was the term the Nazis used when deciding which of the disabled would be killed.

Ultimately, does it matter if Hans Heinrich Festersen was killed because he was gay or because he was disabled or because he was caught up in what the Plötzensee memorial site calls “a reign of judicial terror”?

I know firsthand the challenges of interpreting a life at the intersection of identities—I am both gay and disabled. I’ve written three books with my intersectionality as a focus. I’m also Jewish. Now, living in Berlin, I’ve too often been asked which of my identities is the “most difficult.”

I’m deeply interested in Hans Festersen’s story, which is at the center of “Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer,” the exhibit I curated on queer/disability history, activism, and culture, at the Schwules Museum in Berlin through January 30, 2023.

Disability arts and culture scholar Carrie Sandahl coined the phrase on which the exhibit’s title is based in a 2003 essay. “[S]exual minorities and people with disabilities,” she writes, “share a history of injustice: both have been pathologized by medicine; demonized by religion; discriminated against in housing, employment, and education; stereotyped in representation; victimized by hate groups; and isolated socially, often in their families of origin.”

Queer history and disability history, though similar, were not quite parallel. However, with the advent of eugenics, from the late 19th century into the 20th, these histories more often ran together, culminating most dangerously during the Nazi regime in Germany.

Hans Heinrich Festersen and his sister, Ruth Marie. Photo courtesy of the Schwules Museum.

It’s relatively easy to find information on the fates of Jewish people with disabilities under the Nazi Reich. But researching the history of those killed who were both queer and disabled is far more difficult. When I asked Petra Fuchs, an expert on Aktion T4 who worked on the T4 Memorial and Information Center for the Victims of the Nazi “Euthanasia” Program in Berlin, if she knew of any, she asked if I had found anyone.

So it was quite a surprise when Birgit Bosold, my co-curator and member of the board of directors at the Schwules Museum, shared with me a 2008 local newspaper article about a commemoration of the murders of Hans Festersen and the men arrested with him. The article alluded to the men being disabled, though it mainly focused on their sexuality and their life at the Protestant institution.

It was even more surprising when, a few weeks later, Birgit informed me that five letters Festersen wrote to his sister from Plötzensee were in the museum archive. In these intimate letters, Festersen talks about his future, wanting to end his “wandering around in institutions” by marrying a “slightly disabled classmate,” whom he calls “Miss Hanna.” In his last letter in the archive, dated May 22, 1943, he wonders if he’ll be sent for sterilization. His letters included rhymed poems for his young nephew, Peter, who, decades later, donated the letters to the museum.

Clearly, amid the most difficult circumstances, Festersen kept his humanity. And when we remember the history—the lives—of those who were both queer and disabled, we humanize those who are too often looked upon as doubly “other,” or whose intersectionality is not recognized or understood.

Many (most?) of us live at the intersection of more than one identity. Exploring the connections between our multiple identities provides a deeper understanding of how our intersectional lives are lived, as well as perceived.

The post Uncovering a Life Deemed ‘Unworthy of Life’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

How strange to watch Trump’s failed insurrection on Congress unfold from one’s living room TV during COVID lockdown—sidelined by stay-at-home orders, reduced to binging the way one might devour The Queen’s Gambit or Ozark into the wee hours with snacks and pets sharing the couch. Watching an attempted coup was a strangely stupefying and passive experience.

It all looked a bit like a mash-up of movie motifs—angry white mobs with pitchforks from Frankenstein, many resembling extras from Hillbilly Elegy, self-righteously storming the seat of power, each addled MAGA-wearing inglourious basterd starring in the action movie of their life.

Even as we wondered how far the horror show would go, there were numerous moments along the way that seemed staged, performed almost pro forma, for the benefit of the larger narrative. Perhaps this was Trump’s obligatory scene, anticipated by the national audience and provided by the willing protagonist after years of veiled and not-so-veiled promises and gestures worth a thousand words.

In a sickening way, the storming of the Capitol was a real-time made-for-TV event, an entertainment designed to mainline directly to the emotions and to narcotize the critical eye, leading straight to racism, xenophobia, demagoguery, and fascism.

At least that’s what Bertholt Brecht would have thought. The great German playwright, who had a front-row seat to the early acts of the Hitler show, found his answer for such theatrical manipulations in 1936. Verfremdungseffekt, shortened to the V-effekt or awkwardly translated into English as “the alienation effect,” was meant to cause a jolt that forced an audience awake and into an analytical mind. Brecht was intent that the viewer be disabused that the play they were watching was somehow predestined, inviolable, or written in stone: He wanted them to understand that what they were watching was real.

Brecht knew that reality is corruptible, particularly when presented in emotional terms by skilled storytellers. Drama can give dimension to grievance, blood and thunder, and make it all seem true as gospel. The playwright could use V-effekt to carve out alienation and distance from the emotional demands and expectations of lead characters. Rather than settling back and being entertained by the story, Brecht asked his audience to sit up and pay attention to the tells—the unconscious clues that, when put together, help reveal the fundamental manipulation taking place.

Traditionally, the playwright employs the V-effekt. But with stakes as high as they are now, it’s up to us to stop the sturm und drang. Applying the V-effekt to the events around the failed putsch demands that we jolt ourselves awake, whether we are watching it unfold on FOX, MSNBC, or 4Chan. We are participants, too, even if we are made to feel otherwise.

Perhaps it’s Azdak in Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle who most embodies the jolt that awakens the audience, destroying their illusion of being unseen spectators in the events taking place by addressing them directly. Facing rampant injustice, including the successful coup by a “Fat Prince,” Brecht stops the action and introduces us to Azdak, the witty and corrupt judge who must determine who is guilty and who is innocent. Announcing his proclivities upfront and revealing his weaknesses for wine and women, he makes no attempt to hide his unsoundness as a judge. Yet precisely because of his very human vanities, he proves to be a keen arbitor of wrong and right.

“You want Justice, but do you want to pay for it?” Azdak asks. “It is good for Justice to do it in the open. The wind blows her skirt up and you can see what’s underneath.”

Torsten Schemmel plays the role of judge Azdak in Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle (Vorpommersche Landesbühne 2009). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

This is our time to demand to see what’s underneath. According to multiple news sources, Trump-friendly internet users described the assault on Congress as “like a movie” and “the best show they’d ever seen.” The trouble, of course, is that it was not a movie. It was real. People died.

Despite identifying emotionally with their leading man, the Capitol rioters were blind to the fact that Trump actually had little or nothing to do with them or their interests. In his rabble-rousing speech at the Save America rally just before the assault, Trump promised to walk alongside his fans; of course, he was nowhere near when the deal went down.

As reality-star-in-chief, he groomed us to expect the narrative he unfolded to be performed yet again by others on his behalf. Trump’s story was designed to aggrandize him while giving his devotees their very own part in a real-life action movie.

Telling a lie over and over can make it seem true. It can also remove agency from the viewer, ceding the individual’s judgement over to the expectations of the story being told. Brecht refused to let his audience lose themselves in the funhouse mirror of such representations. “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it,” he wrote.

Watching the events of the Capitol insurrection and its aftermath, I found myself searching within for that same symbolic hammer—not as a weapon or a shield but as a tool to jolt myself awake, to shake off the dopamine effects of four-plus years of the Trump saga and to pound out an alternative to their zero-sum fallacy.

It helps to be a playwright. Our vocation is not tethered to capital in the same way as screenwriters; we can, and usually do, lose money on our creations. It dawns on most of us over time that it’s better that way, that the artistic freedom to tell an inconvenient truth can coexist somewhat—but not entirely—with capitalism. At a certain point, the narrative needs a jolt, even if it means biting the hand of our benefactors and awakening the ire of our audience.

It’s long been said that theater is an invalid at Death’s door, yet theater hasn’t expired in 2,500 years. I like to think it’s partly because the best playwrights take a hammer to the zero sum of their reality and reshape it.

The reshaping involves intellectual empathy, the ability to consider the experiences of others—not just who they are but where they come from and what they’re reacting to. Intellectual empathy can be grown, but it takes work. One must support diverse and unpredictable responses from individuals about the story they are seeing. One must deny groupthink and the urge to join the throng making pat conclusions because it feels good or it is expected of them. Intellectual empathy extends beyond the binary conventions of tribalism. It analyzes characters on and off the stage and judges them not just on what they say but what they do.

The continued indignation on both sides of the political aisle in America today is simply another narrative convention, pre-determined, even programmed deep within us. If we’re not careful, our emotional investment gets us stuck in a Marvel Comics world of superheroes and supervillains who fight for or against us. One bad real-life movie begets another.

What we need to be doing, instead, is fighting for ourselves. If we want to change the story of our country, we are the ones who need the alienation effect, and we need it now. The movie conventions of endless cause-and-effect and kneejerk action-reaction need to stop. The narrative needs a reboot.

Describing his V-effekt, Brecht writes:

Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also change. Nothing comes from nothing; the new comes from the old, but that is why it is new. Every art contributes to the greatest art of all, the art of living.

Perhaps the failed insurrection was the jolt needed to reawaken our intellectual empathy. It remains to be seen. The story is ours to tell.

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The central insight is that a country can’t face up to its past alone. Germans needed help from Jews who came back to their hometowns after the war.

Spiegel, who was born in the nearby town of Versmold in 1905, belonged to a long line of cattle traders, a typical profession of rural German Jews into the 20th century. Well-liked and respected by both Jews and Christians in Warendorf and the countryside around it, he felt a part of the community, even with the intensification of antisemitism after the Nazis seized power in 1933. But the violence and destruction of Kristallnacht, in November 1938, convinced Spiegel that Jews had no home in Germany, and he and his family fled to Brussels.

When the Nazis invaded Belgium in 1940, they discovered the family’s hiding place, caught Hugo, and deported him. (The Nazis also caught Hugo’s first child, Rosa. His wife Ruth and son Paul escaped and survived by hiding in a village in Belgium.) Miraculously, Hugo survived Dachau, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz—the infamous camp where the Nazis ultimately took the life of his daughter when she was just 11 years old.

There are many remarkable stories of survival. We read fewer accounts of those who survived the Holocaust and then came back to their local communities in Germany. The Spiegels, without Rosa, returned to Warendorf and rebuilt a life, with Hugo Spiegel starting his cattle trading business once again.

Hugo Spiegel as “Champion Shot” by Leonard Freed. From the series “German Jews Today”, Warendorf 1961 – 1962; Jewish Museum Berlin, Inv. no. 2006/198/3

It would be easy to tell the story of how Spiegel’s postwar Warendorf chose to shut its eyes to the events of the Nazi period, especially in the first decades after the war. Yet in my research about how small towns in Germany eventually confronted the recent past, I have found that there is another story too. It is one of begrudging cooperation, of gradual acceptance, and of Jews and Germans eventually working together to commemorate the past.

The road to cooperation was a difficult one. In Warendorf, not everyone was happy about the Spiegels’ return. Hugo Spiegel did not shy from noting who had been a malicious Nazi and who not—and he had to fight tenaciously for years for the simplest commemorative gestures.

In 1946, Spiegel proposed to erect a stone that listed the names of the Jews who had been buried in the local cemetery, which local Nazis had destroyed in November 1938. But after two years of wrangling, the proposal was turned back. In 1953, he suggested establishing a memorial stone to recall “the Warendorf members of the Jewish community who died in the concentration camps.” For reasons difficult to discern, it, too, was refused.

Then, in 1960, Spiegel tried again, and began working towards a memorial to both the Jews who lay in the Warendorf cemetery and those “who died in the years 1933 to 1945.” Warendorf finally accepted the proposal in 1968. Two years later, in November 1970, a quarter century after the end of the war but early for such commemorations generally, the town unveiled the new memorial, with the mayor and Hugo Spiegel assuming center stage at the ceremony.

There were not many Jews like the Spiegels who came back to make their homes in the very towns where locals had jeered and howled with approval when the Nazis destroyed and desecrated synagogues. The Spiegels certainly remembered how Hitler’s stormtroopers wrecked the small synagogue on Freckenhorster Street, tearing up prayer books and Torah rolls, and tossing them on the street.

Most of the more than 200,000 Jews still alive in Germany when the Nazi government capitulated in April 1945 were from Eastern Europe, and by 1950 the vast majority of them had left the displaced person camps for the United States, Israel, and other countries. Only around 25,000 Jews remained in West Germany, and 2,000 in the East. Most were German-speaking and chose to live in big cities, where anonymity guaranteed a quieter life. Fewer returned to their erstwhile small towns, and in the general vicinity of Warendorf they probably numbered not more than a few hundred.

Interestingly, a lot of them were cattle traders, with genuine ties to the rural world. They included Hermann Michel, who survived Theresienstadt, and came back to his native Burgsteinfurt, where he ensured that the synagogue was commemorated early on; and Hans Frankenthal, a survivor of Auschwitz, Dora-Mittelbau, and Theresienstadt, who returned to the town of Schmallenberg, only to encounter a much more recalcitrant community in which old Nazis quickly occupied key positions and confidently told returning Jews, “One has to forget.”

But if we go beyond these noteworthy if infrequent cases of genuine returnees, we see that many Jews came back to visit hometowns in order to honor deceased parents and grandparents who died (one wants to say fortunately) before the horrors of the Holocaust began. As air travel became affordable in the 1970s, their numbers increased. And their first stop was typically the local cemetery.

In 1933, there were still some 1,700 Jewish cemeteries in Germany. In the 12 years after their seizure of power, Nazis desecrated or destroyed at least 80 percent of them. But most were only partly destroyed. In the postwar era, Germany remained the home of over a thousand Jewish cemeteries, their cracked and broken stones overgrown with weeds and brush. Neo-Nazis, hooligans, and ill-tempered and inebriated teenagers knew of them, and perpetrated hundreds of desecrations between 1945 and 1999. They desecrated some Jewish cemeteries numerous times—the cemetery in the small village of Randegg near Lake Constance in 1945, 1966, 1970, and 1986, for example.

Yet it was precisely when returning Jews gathered the courage to complain about the state of the cemetery in their home town, or to ask why there was no plaque or sign stating what had occurred during Kristallnacht, that something began to move among local people. This was often the moment that the work of commemoration began.

The local movers and shakers who sought to recognize the past were of different ages and occupations. They were schoolteachers, archivists working in a tiny office in the town hall, women from the preservation society, retired mayors and their wives who had time on their hands, idealistic high school students, and people who knew the Jews or family members who had come back. Their politics are not easy to pin down. Not a few Bavarians who reached out to returning Jews supported the Christian Socialist Union, one of Germany’s most conservative parties.

I have used this map to track when these communities put up a sign near the cemetery that told of the fate of the local Jews during the Holocaust, or a plaque noting where a synagogue once stood. The timelines show activity in the late ’40s (right after the Holocaust), followed by silence in the ’50s, the beginnings of work in the ’60s, a slowdown in the early ’70s, an uptick in the second half of that decade, and a commemorative explosion, starting in the early ’80s, and continuing thereafter.

In the midst of this commemorative explosion, in 1987, Hugo Spiegel died, and was buried in the very Jewish cemetery he had spent so many years trying to reconstitute. Three years later, largely on the initiative of its private citizens, the town erected a memorial stone for the synagogue and for the “Jewish citizens expelled, taken away, and murdered.” Caught up in what was now Germany’s pervasive culture of remembrance, Warendorf also renamed the small side-street leading to the synagogue “Hugo-Spiegel-Strasse.”

Historians sometimes attribute the impetus for these acts of remembrance to the famous trials (especially the Eichmann and the Auschwitz trials of the early ’60s) and, later, to the mini-series “Holocaust”, which aired in West Germany in 1979. But I am skeptical. In my investigations, I rarely read of local activists—those school teachers, archivists, and retirees—who mention being inspired by the miniseries (though some invoke the trials). Instead, I often see another logic at work.

Especially in the ’60s and ’70s, the fortuitous occurrence of German-Jewish cooperation, in this or that town, often made the difference. Sometimes an organization was behind it—the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation, for example. Sometimes, it was a Jewish émigré or survivor coming back, and striking up a conversation. The USC Shoah Archive, colloquially known as the Spielberg Archive, has many such stories of return (indexed as “post-conflict visits”), including testimonies of some German Jews who rejected such visits, and who simply could not fathom why others would want to go back and visit.

German-Jewish contacts increased in the ’80s and ’90s, as scores of towns and small cities began to stage so-called “visitor weeks.” Large cities, such as Frankfurt am Main, Stuttgart, and Hanover had been staging them since the ’60s, asking hundreds and hundreds of Jews to return. In the last two decades of the 20th century, many smaller places followed suite, and invited the surviving Jews, now living across the globe—from Buenos Aries to Pasadena, from Tel Aviv to Paris—back to their home towns in Germany. The towns also paid for the trips.

For a whole week Germans and Jews talked about what had occurred, what has happened since, how their kids were doing, and where to go shopping. Regional politicians, and sometimes even national ones, attended too. Typically, the mayor spoke, local notables offered their reflections, and writers read deeply felt poetry aloud. Visiting Jews also got up and gave speeches, usually offering words of reconciliation. As the town served coffee and cake, Germans and Jews who were once neighbors looked at old pictures, putting together the shards of what was once a genuine community. Photos and transcripts of the proceedings were published in the local newspaper, and sometimes reproduced, complete with lists of attendees, in small books.

If we can believe newspaper interviews and follow-up statements, most Jews were glad they went back to their German hometowns, just as the Germans in those towns were proud of the steps that their local communities had taken. Often after one town had its “visitor week,” other communities in the region soon followed, wishing not to be left behind. More teachers got involved, and more students—even the bored ones. Soon the very definition of Heimat, of home or hometown, changed. No longer was the history of town X or Hamlet Y thinkable without the Jews who once lived there, and the wrong that had been done to them.

By the ’80s and ’90s, there were also larger, national developments that pushed Germans to enter into their history more truthfully: country-wide essay contests on the subject of Germany and its past; the galvanizing effect of a president, Richard von Weizsäcker, whose measured, precise, and sensitive words helped a nation think more deeply about its own history; the constant drum of prominent politicians, publicists, philosophers, and historians reflecting on an “unmasterable past”; and another infamous anniversary in 1988, marking 50 years since the November Pogrom. Meanwhile, all manner of organizations, such as the History Workshop (Geschichtswerkstatt), had sprung up, urging communities to look more critically at their Nazi past.

When it’s finally written, a good history of how Germans faced their past will show the constant feedback between the local and the national. Actually, it will do more than that—for Germany’s past was hardly its own. The turn to an honest telling of the German past had long been a transnational undertaking, with foreign eyes observing it with keen interest for decades. In important respects, it was also a German-Jewish undertaking.

The story of Hugo Spiegel and his family is instructive. His son Paul did not follow his father into the business of cattle trading, but instead became a writer for the Jüdische Allgemeine, one of the most important Jewish newspapers in Germany. In 1993, Paul Spiegel would become a major figure in the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and in 2000 its president. In that year, he also helped found an organization against xenophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism: Gesicht Zeigen! Für ein weltoffenes Deutschland e. V.M The name translates as: “Show your Face: For a Germany Open to the World.” The people of Warendorf evidently approved. In 2001, the town publicly honored Paul Spiegel.

There are many lessons—local, national, and transnational—that we could learn from this German-Jewish story: the importance of community work, the necessity of reaching across divides, and the crucial role that local schoolteachers, archivists, retirees, hobby historians, and preservationists may well play in the great transformations of a nation’s memory.

After reading literally hundreds of accounts of towns from Bavaria and Baden in the south to Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein in the north, I am especially impressed by the patience of these local actors. For it is they who put in the many years of work that often went into convincing town councils to repair a cemetery, put up a plaque, restore a synagogue, rename a street for a famous Jewish son or daughter, or add a monument in the central square of a hometown that had once wronged its former citizens. In many cases, they would also be the first to admit that they had help, and that the work of memory was not a German effort alone.

Another lesson is that, while tearing down hurtful monuments has its time, the necessary if arduous road of putting up the right monuments—fixing the wording on plaques, bringing histories together, commemorating forgotten victims and unsung heroes—runs through communities, town after town. It is a long road, and in the United States, it is still ahead of us.

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I live a brisk walk away from the home of our most famous native son, Ludwig van Beethoven. In 1812, the composer, who had health problems that might have made him vulnerable in this pandemic, headed off to a retreat ordered by his doctor. While there, he wrote to an unnamed woman, in one of his famous “Immortal Beloved” love letters:

Be calm my life, my all. Only by calm consideration of our existence can we achieve our purpose to live together.

Through good fortune and management, this time of COVID-19 has provided Germans considerable opportunity for calm consideration—and reconsideration.

Before the pandemic, we had become tired of her, our eternal Chancellor, Angela Merkel. She had burdened Germany with the gigantic humanitarian task of receiving more than 1 million refugees in 2015. We were exhausted with all the resulting change in our communities, and with the political turmoil, and were ready to see her head off into retirement.

But as COVID-19 arrived, we realized how much we needed calm. Chancellor Merkel has provided a good deal of it in her modest and rare appearances. Of course, Germany’s robust health system, and its enormous capacity, has also projected an air of transparent confidence, which has been embraced by citizens.

Merkel’s calm has been unbreakable, even when she herself was exposed to the virus and forced to quarantine. This calm is so appreciated that she is currently the most popular politician in Germany, with the approval of 64 percent of the population.

Besides her calm, the Chancellor also combines two strengths: First, she addresses the people as democratic partners and as her equals. She does not claim to have higher authority—and she certainly does not claim total authority. Second, her scientific education is a great virtue in a situation that demands facts and science-based reasoning.

In Germany, now, we are discovering how intimate the links between democracy, science, and health really are.

At its best, our health system combines those values in a transparent fashion that explains in part why COVID-19 has done less damage here. You don’t have to take my word for our health system’s ability to handle the emergency. You can see it by clicking here. The website immediately finds hospitals for every city and region of Germany, their capabilities, and their current capacity. It is so accurate that if you were an emergency responder, it could help you decide where to take a patient.

And, should you want to see how Germany as a whole is handling the epidemic, there are three categories of hospitals listed on the register: low-care ICU, high-care ICU, and ECMO, which stands for Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, the treatment for people whose condition has not been stabilized on a ventilator. If the hospital is color-coded “green,” it means that the hospital has plenty of capacity. “Yellow” means reserves are being stretched, and “red” means that the hospital is working at full capacity in its intensive-care capabilities.

Viewing the obvious capacity in this register has a tremendous calming effect on us all.

Our health care system is linked to a highly efficient governmental system of scientists and experts. Professor Christian Drosten, the virologist who developed the COVID-19 tests for China and was early in preparing Germany’s pharmaceutical industry and many laboratories for mass testing, works at Berlin’s Charité hospital. So when Merkel declared a state of emergency—in calm and reassuring words—the testing could begin efficiently. 

To understand the German health system, one must realize that it is a cooperative, but not a state system. Although it is regulated by the public authorities, the system is supported by more than 100 independent non-profit insurance funds, which have to compete for members. These “sickness funds,” as they are sometimes called, are associated with different professions and companies, and have democratic structures, with regular people having to make decisions, including what gets covered. And once you are in a fund, you can’t be kicked out.

Since 2005, Merkel has supported and promoted this participatory system of health care. She and the federal states of Germany—the country has 16 states—have also built up a system of public health care that was initiated under Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Norbert Blüm, his legendary social minister. By and large, this system supports the elderly and sick so they can live as long as possible in their home environment, and are not dependent on the help of their acquaintances, family, and friends.

The hospitals in Germany are thus relieved of the burden of dealing with chronic care and can build up capacity to concentrate on the most serious cases and emergencies.

As a result, the German health system is nowhere—not even in COVID-19 outbreak areas—near a capacity problem. This emphasis on home care, as opposed to nursing homes, may be part of the explanation for Germany’s relatively low death rate from the pandemic.

All that being said, our low death rates from COVID-19 are also the result of some significant luck. Still, our participatory social and health systems, combined with a style of politics that treats citizens as responsible partners, have proved their worth in the relative calm people feel. This calm feels like success, and it strengthens our confidence in the German government system, which emphasizes deliberation and power sharing. It’s noteworthy that right-wing politicians and parties have lost popular support in the crisis, perhaps because there is little popular resentment to tap.

Germans have also learned again, through COVID, just how important the interaction between politics and science is. I feel fortunate that we have free and independent science journalism. (For an example of such German journalism—and an innovative new payment system for independent journalism—I would draw your attention to this platform of “reef” reporters.) 

I relate all of this not for nationalistic pride, but to send a message of hope and encouragement. I have many friends and partners in the U.S., which as of this writing has more cases and deaths than any other country. I know so many people have lost, or will lose, a dear relative or friend. May they be well remembered.

I find myself wishing that the U.S. would allow itself a sip of the healing portion of a quiet and calm political style, and a turn toward a participatory public social system. Such a style, and such a system, would fit the American preference for freedom. I hope that as the U.S. seeks salvation from the pandemic, it will consider this direction and not a more authoritarian centralism.

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Every now and then, a newspaper story will publicize an unmasking of a picture-taker or subject in a frame: a man buys a stack of negatives in a Barcelona flea market only to discover a forgotten talent. A woman in California tracks down the true story of a sick Minnesota child. But these are the exceptions. More often than not, the people depicted in found photographs and their stories remain stubbornly anonymous, lost to time.

That refusal to bare their secrets, however, is often integral to their appeal.

Photos of strangers have much to teach us. There’s a distinct pleasure in enjoying the contextless art of what are often unexpectedly intimate time-capsules. In the age of facial recognition software, when nearly everyone has a Google trail, found photographs feel exhilarating—revolutionary, even—in their refusal to offer up easy answers.

The people who collect these snapshots are increasingly getting attention as being part of the found art tradition associated with Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. A collector can take the mundanity of one nameless family’s life, for instance, and use it to examine a forgotten chapter of colonialism in Mozambique.

Or, if you’re German photo collector Jochen Raiss, you can curate found photographs to tell the story of when people dressed up in polar-bear costumes.

Yes, polar-bear costumes. Polar Bears, a new series assembled by Raiss, who works as a photo editor in Hamburg, unearths a forgotten genre of people who exuberantly put on the suits of these great, wooly, arctic beasts. Thus costumed, these folks flash their toothy grins on the ski slopes or squash themselves in between couples at the beach or comically attempt to seduce young women (it’s always men, Raiss notes, who are depicted in the costumes) with their overlarge bear paws. The collection of photos, which was published late last year, is an unexpected joy, capturing a fish-out-of-water whimsy that feels removed from time.

Raiss, who has been collecting historical amateur recordings for nearly three decades at flea markets and second-hand shops, first earned a cult following by curating photographs of smartly dressed German women posing in trees. He posted these portraits on his website, imperfekt.photography, and then in two volumes, the best-selling Women in Trees and a sequel, More Women in Trees. The curious images of well-dressed women in trees, as captured on black-and-white film, can be enjoyed in a void. Or, considered within their timeline (the genre appears to have been popular from the 1920s to the 1950s), the idiosyncratic images of these women, dressed in their Sunday bests and folding themselves among arboreal nooks and crannies, can present a jarring look at individuals who lived through, and may have been part of, Hitler’s Third Reich.

Polar Bears, Raiss’s latest offering, explores another forgotten form of everyday surrealism. Today, the polar bear has become indelibly linked to images of melting ice caps and a warming world. But in the popular imagination at the turn of the 20th century, the creature embodied the primal, the exotic, the fearsome. Seen in this light, transforming these ferocious bears by dressing up as them to pose feels like a particularly bold joke. And if the set-up has been lost to time, what does it matter when the punchline still delivers?

Grounded in German imagery—whether it’s the shores of the Baltic Sea or the German Alps—the trend of dressing up in polar-bear costumes appears to be a distinctly Deutsche invention. Just what made Germans so crazy about dressing up as polar bears has been lost to time. Perhaps an ad campaign by the German Steiff plush toy company (which lays claim to having the “world’s first stuffed toy bears with moveable arms and legs”) deserves credit. Or, possibly, billboards for a zoo inspired the photos. Raiss suggests an enterprising photographer at a seaside resort may have been the root of the phenomenon. Whatever the case, the origin story isn’t half as interesting as the images themselves.

There’s a silliness and a sweetness to the more than 70 photos amassed in Polar Bears. Magical realism may be the best way to describe the visual vertigo of the collection. Certainly, watching the bears, with their overlarge paws and curling smiles, attempt to interact with their surroundings is a radically different framing of the polar bear as we know it. But that’s the point. Polar Bears invites us into a happy fantasy of a world different than the one we inhabit. One where we can imagine we might one day have the chance to waltz with a polar bear.

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Likhachev was not the only person who recalled gifts of food during detention. While researching concentration camps around the world, I learned that even the memory of food helped sustain prisoners, linking them to distant friends and family and building bonds between detainees. Through interviews, written memoirs, and even archival “recipes,” the way in which imaginary feasts created community in places that were beyond hope came up again and again, revealing how even in its absence, food defines and shapes the most rudimentary forms of society.

Real food, of course, offered more sustenance than reminiscence could provide. But many concentration camp systems failed to feed prisoners enough to survive, and administrators wielded food as a weapon of control. Enduring forced labor as a teenager at Monowitz—part of Auschwitz—Elie Wiesel described hunger reducing him to “nothing but a body. Perhaps less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time.”

Though his experiences were horrifying, Wiesel was fortunate enough to have avoided the gas chamber during selection. But extermination through labor—a combination of brutal work and deliberately limited rations—further culled prisoners assigned to the worst work details. Detainees died of gastroenteritis, pneumonia and a host of conditions that easily took hold as prisoners slowly starved to death.

In these conditions, access to additional food was critical. A post working in the vegetable cellar of a camp, such as the one German communist Margarete Buber-Neumann found in the Soviet Gulag in 1939, could provide a way to expand on the watery soup and bread typically allocated to prisoners. Buber helped to keep herself and others alive with stolen food.

Sometimes prisoners were buoyed by food from loved ones, as Likhachev had been touched by the present of a cake. Held with thousands of other suspects at the National Stadium in Santiago, Chile, in fall 1973, Felipe Agüero recounted the joy of receiving a care package in detention, but also how the meagerness of what was sent—a few cigarettes or a little bread, maybe some chocolate—revealed that hard times had come for family on the outside, too.

Where they could not scrounge or steal real food, captives turned to their imaginations. Despite the most desperate conditions, concentration camp inmates routinely spent their fleeting idle moments discussing recipes. At Neuengamme, not far from Hamburg in northern Germany, after work in factories, digging in clay pits, or dragging rubble out of bombed-out streets, during the only time they had to try to remain human, detainees talked about their homes and families, their previous lives that had vanished forever, and their favorite meals. They had little else to live on. As the war dragged on, life expectancy for new arrivals at Neuengamme dwindled to 12 weeks.

Shared recipes preserved from this era of camps found improbable publication with In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin. This 1996 compilation included a series of recipes that had been collected in the Nazi camp of Theresienstadt. A detainee named Mina Pachter had gathered recipes from inmates in the camp and given them to a friend to carry to her daughter, if he found a way to survive. After Pachter died, the collected recipes took more than 20 years to make their way into the hands of her daughter in New York, who eventually decided to publish the instructions for making such dishes as chicken galantine, liver dumplings, stuffed goose neck, asparagus salad, plum strudel, and chocolate torte.

The book was condemned by some who called it “sick,” wondering if cookbooks from Auschwitz or Treblinka would soon follow. The recipes themselves were often missing key ingredients or had completely mismatched measurements that made them useless. Others lauded the publication as Holocaust literature rather than a literal cookbook, a memory of how detainees consoled themselves in humanity’s darkest hours.

More cookbooks emerged over time, but not necessarily for publication. At the age of 12, in the women’s camp at Ravensbrück in Germany, Nurit Stern listened to adults commune with each other. “Hungry people can only dream about food,” she explained in 2016. “I was a child. I didn’t know anything about cooking. I memorized the recipes and wrote them down.” The small notebook she cobbled together out of stolen materials ended up enshrining the women’s recipes—chopped liver, goulash, stuffed cabbage rolls, and cholent with kishke—for posterity in Yad Vashem’s archive. Stern explained the role the recipes played for people struggling to maintain their humanity. “These women used their memories and imagination to memorize this most basic experience… Many chose this way to protect their sanity.”

Nurit Stern made this recipe book as a child to record the recipes she heard adults discussing in the Ravensbrück camp. (The letters “FKL” stand for Frauenkonzentrationslager, or “Women’s Concentration Camp.” Courtesy of the Yad Vashem Artifacts Collection.

While recipes and fantasies about unlimited food helped detainees endure the everyday horrors of the camps, the issue of food has also been used as a tool of propaganda to keep the public from sympathizing with detainees.

During internment of Japanese-Americans in the Second World War, a series of allegations about detainees being “pampered” in camps centered around food. One New York Times headline from May 1943 reads, “Wyoming Senator Asserts Japanese Go Unrationed and Have Vast Stores of Food.” While much of the U.S. was using ration tickets to buy food, Senator Edward Robinson accused detainees of hoarding meat and mayonnaise in the camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, claiming they had enough supplies on hand to feed the camp population for “three years, seven months and fourteen days.” The actual historical record on Heart Mountain, not surprisingly, contains references to late food shipments in insufficient quantities.

The very idea of food for detainees remains a highly politicized subject—partly because detention is seen as a way to punish a targeted group, even when governments deny that punishment is the goal. In 2005, a group of political activists who saw reports on American torture as “military bashing,” assembled a book of their own: The Gitmo Cookbook. Gathering recipes for halal meals including curried eggs, tandoori chicken, and Lyonnaise rice that the Navy had developed to serve those held on the Cuban base, the book’s authors aimed to show just how well detainees in American custody were treated. Nearly a decade would pass before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Torture Report verified many of the worst accusations of torture and abuse of detainees.

Why do propangandists feel the need to ascribe gluttony, extravagant meals, or hoarding to detainees? Food is so basic to existence that our common need for it provides the root of our ability to empathize with one another. This empathy lies at the heart of how society functions. When propagandists want to show that those held without trial do not deserve empathy, or are abusing it, they use stories of lavish food as a way to further isolate detainees from society.

A similar principle is at work when prisoners take comfort from the shared ritual of imagined meals. Written and spoken recipes offer a performance of survival when survival is uncertain. They provide detainees the kind of social interactions that camps are typically created to prevent. Sharing the desire for a specific food prepared a specific way further takes the animal impulse to survive and transforms it into art, reasserting the shared humanity of both the teller and the listeners.

Food offers those closed off from society a way to resurrect its ghost behind barbed wire. In China’s Xihongsan Mine labor camp in 1961, prisoner Harry Wu recalled “food-imagining parties.” Inside stone barracks atop a tamped mud floor, Wu described how one person would take a turn, and the next night, another detainee would reciprocate.

Wu was himself altogether ignorant of cooking but joined in, using invention where experience failed him. Before going to sleep, inmates lovingly narrated the creation of a favorite dish, sometimes a secret recipe from childhood or something specific to their home province. “We would explain in detail how to cut the ingredients, how to season them, mix them, and arrange them on the plate.” Once the dish was ready to eat, the detainee would first describe the smell, and then the taste. Decades later, Wu recalled the spell that was cast. “Everyone,” he wrote, “would listen in silence.”

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But for Hitler, this air of imminent national revolution had come too soon—because no one yet realized that he should be Germany’s natural leader.

This was his own fault. For years, he had steadfastly refused to be photographed and had not given anything about himself away in his speeches. Instead, he had relied solely on the power of his voice to create a following for himself. And while his carefully choreographed speeches had been sufficient to turn him into the enfant terrible of Bavarian politics, Hitler concluded that his chances of becoming the face, or at least a face, of the national revolution were close to nil if people did not even know what he looked like.

So he went to the opposite extreme—producing picture postcards of himself and distributing them widely.

Hitler’s radical recasting of his public image in 1923 went further than that—and said a great deal about the kind of leader he was aspiring to become. A garden-variety demagogue might have simply created an outsized image for himself, an inadvertent sort of cartoon. Hitler did something more sophisticated. He made the case for a new kind of leader, and created a semi-fictional alternative version of himself that would fit his own job description.

To sell the idea that he was Germany’s savior-in-waiting, and to boost his profile outside of Bavaria, he wrote a very short autobiography to be published together with a selection of his speeches. In the autobiography, he told the story of how his experiences as a young man provided him with revelations about the nature of politics that would allow him to save Germany from misery and make it safe for all times.

But publishing such a self-aggrandizing portrait would have repelled Germany’s traditional conservatives, so Hitler searched for a writer with impeccable conservative credentials willing to pretend to have written the book. Doing so would come with a double payoff: Hitler’s shameless act of self-promotion would be concealed, while the impression would be created that he already was in receipt of widespread support among traditional conservatives.

This led Hitler to Victor von Koerber, a blue-eyed and blond young military hero and writer. A North-German aristocrat, von Koerber was attracted by the promise of a new conservatism fused with the youthful idealism of National Socialism.

The book—published under the title Adolf Hitler, sein Leben, seine Reden (Adolf Hitler: His Life and His Speeches)—was banned soon after publication, limiting its intended impact. Yet the book sheds light on how Hitler—in a moment rife for demagoguery—managed to rise to the top against all odds.

Hitler often paid lip service to the myth—which tends to be believed by historians to the present day—that he was only “a drummer” who was doing the bidding of others and had no ambitions to lead Germany into the future. But in the book, he put into the mouth of Koerber his own determination that he was “the leader of the most radically honest national movement […] who is ready as well as prepared to lead the German struggle for liberation.”

Hiding behind Koerber’s name, Hitler could get away with pronouncing himself Germany’s “messiah.” His autobiography-in-disguise repeatedly uses biblical language, arguing that the book should “become the new bible of today as well as the ‘Book of the German People.’” It also directly compares Hitler to Jesus, likening the purported moment of his politicization in Pasewalk to Jesus’s resurrection:

“This man, destined to eternal night, who during this hour endured crucifixion on pitiless Calvary, who suffered in body and soul; one of the most wretched from among this crowd of broken heroes: this man’s eyes shall be opened! Calm shall be restored to his convulsed features. In the ecstasy that is only granted to the dying seer, his dead eyes shall be filled with new light, new splendor, new life!”

Given that he wrote this stuff, Hitler’s need to pretend to be a mere “drummer” is simple: He had to square the circle. On the one hand, he desired to put himself in a position to head a national revolution. On the other hand, Germany’s conservatives had their own political ambitions. Hitler could only advance by pretending that he would be their tool, while attempting to create the impression that his support among them was already larger than it really was.

The Hitler of this episode belies the common misconception that he was a primitive, raging, and nihilistic dark elemental force. Rather, he was a man with an emerging deep understanding of how political processes, systems, and the public sphere worked. His study of propaganda techniques while serving in World War I had provided him with an appreciation for political narratives that would help him plot his way to power.

Getting Koerber to release his autobiography helped Hitler create a politically useful narrative. By making the case for a new kind of leader, without explicitly naming Hitler, it insidiously created the public perception of a gap that only he could fill: a man without a pedigree coming out of nowhere with an innate gift for seeing the hidden architecture of the world and hence to build a new Germany. In short, Hitler cleverly exploited the way the German political system and the public sphere worked, so as to build a place for himself.

Demagogues come in several varieties, from populists with no genuine core beliefs to ideologues of various political convictions. They include rational as well as irrational actors. Some are figures who know when to retreat to moderation, and others never know where to stop, thus planting the seed of their regime’s self-destruction. The problem is that it is only in hindsight that we can tell how any specific demagogue will develop.

Koerber and other conservatives thought that they simply could use Hitler. But they did not understand, at least in 1923, how the common language and style of demagogues-in-the-making looks very similar at the beginning, while their inner selves vary greatly. Unlike many others, Koerber of course knew how clever a political operative Hitler was, but the young aristocrat could not really see into Hitler and misjudged him.

When confronted with emerging demagogues, in moments when people yearn for strongmen and novel kinds of leaders, history thus cannot tell us until it is too late whether an individual is a Hitler, a Franco, a Lenin—or, for instance, a populist who, while flirting with authoritarianism, ultimately manages to withstand its seduction.

Victor von Koerber eventually learned the hard way that the person he had imagined Hitler to be when lending his name to him was a very different man from the one who would rule Germany. He grew disillusioned with Hitler in the mid-1920s after seeing how he presented himself once his trial (in the wake of his failed putsch) had finally transformed him into a public figure.

In the late 1920s, Koerber began issuing warnings about the dangers Hitler posed to the world. But by then, it was already too late to stop him. Once the Nazi Party was in power, Koerber helped a prominent German Jew to get out of the country. And then Koerber began to feed the British military attaché in Berlin with intelligence. Koerber ultimately landed in one of Hitler’s concentration camps, which he barely survived.

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