Death of Democracy

 

Death of Democracy by Benjamin Carter Hett (2018) 280 pp

The subtitle tells the story -- Hitler's rise to power and the downfall of the Weimar Republic. Experiments in democracy seem rational, if not easy, until things get tough. One of the most egregious examples is Hitler’s rise to dictatorship in Germany. Professor Hett details the circumstances that bred German resentment of the Weimar Republic and enabled the rise of the Nazis. Hyperinflation, massive unemployment, famine and epidemics are all elements that can crush republics. Hett walks us methodically toward the precipice; deliberate dishonesty, public irrationality: anti-intellectualism, scapegoating, conspiracies, distrust, and greed. The Nazis called this confluence Gleichschaltung, or coordination. All the switches are flipped to the same circuit. Aside from the unspeakable horror of totalitarian regimes, the slow walk towards the acceptance of evil is the most disturbing.

All the Light We Cannot See

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (2014) 530 pages

Marie-Laure, a blind girl in pre-WWII Paris, learns to get around her community after her father builds an intricate model of the neighborhood and teaches her to notice the landmarks and count her steps. He works at the Museum of Natural History. When the Germans begin to occupy France, they flee to the coast, to the walled town of Saint-Malo, where her father's uncle lives.

Werner, an orphaned German boy, dreads coming of age, when he'll be expected to work in the coal mines, where his father died. But the scientific and mathematical aptitude of him and his younger sister gets Werner involved with learning how to fix radios. One of their joys is to listen to music and podcast-like science lessons from far away. Werner's technical skills are noticed, and he is accepted into a training camp for boys, where in addition to Nazi indoctrination, he helps develop ways to locate the source of radio broadcasts.

The stories of Marie-Laure and Werner alternate. Food, fuel, and other necessities become scarce everywhere. People disappear, including Marie-Laure's father. Bombing occurs. An evil Nazi with cancer is looking for a gem with mystical healing power, which Marie-Laure's father may have been given for safekeeping. When Marie-Laure and Werner's lives finally begin to intersect, the story becomes even more riveting.

1947: Where Now Begins

1947: Where Now Begins by Elsabeth Asbrink, 280 pages.
Asbrink moves chronologically through this year, month-by-month through a  year that she argues was a turning point for humanity, or for a good part of it. She tells us about refugees in Vienna, in London, in France, and in Palestine. She talks of the weariness the English seemed to feel in Palestine, unwilling to struggle anymore with Jewish refugeesor with the Palestinians, leaving the fate of  a one-state or a two-state Palestine up to an international committee and then to the UN. The English left India in a hurry as well in 1947. Lord Mountbatten quickly and recklessly moved ahead with partition despite the warnings of imminent violence.
Asbrink also tells of the growing hostility shown by the Soviet Union towards politicians and citizens with any ideology other than the state-sponsored one in their newly acquired satellite states.
She ably weaves the big stories with the more focused and personal in the compelling book.

The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World / George Prochnik 390 p.

Stefan Zweig was once the most popular writer in Europe and most of us have never heard of him.  Born in late 19th-century Vienna to a wealthy Jewish family he was known for both his fiction and nonfiction, most notably biographies of famous people whose lives ended in a variety of tragic ways: Marie Antoinette, Mary, Queen of Scotland, Erasmus.  As the Weimar Republic gave way to the rise of Hitler, he left Vienna forever and began a series of moves seemingly both frantic and aimless: to Paris, England, Manhattan, upstate New York, and Petropolis, Brazil, where he took his life in 1942.

Prochnik has written a strangely compelling portrait of exile, both  Zweig's and that of so many others in the pre-war years, including that of Prochnik's own family members.  He has a quiet, almost gentle style well-suited to his exceptionally erudite subject which nevertheless renders the subject accessible.  He writes that while Zweig has never regained his pre-war celebrity status, he is still well-known throughout Europe and the UK.  He is virtually unknown in the US, however, at least until recently.  I wonder if his American obscurity stems from his own story, that of the exile who came to our shores and was never at home here; so much so that he chose to leave both our country and the wider world.