Klaus Mann's Mephisto (1936)

The Trump era is obviously a fitting time to revisit the classics of anti-fascism. However: I find that when I think back to reading, say, Friedrich Reck's Diary of a Man in Despair, in the first year of the Trump presidency—Trump Year Zero—there is a noticeable difference between then and now. At the time, reading of republican Germany's descent into dictatorship and tyranny seemed a frightening warning of one possible future. Now, turning to Klaus Mann's novel Mephisto, we find something that reads more like a chronicle, a précis, of the last three years. 

What strikes one most about the novel in light of our present experience is the sense of how quickly an apparently stable world can be overthrown—how easily the assumed bulwarks of democracy may fold under pressure. It's just beyond belief, goes one of the refrains of a brief authorial interjection in the midst of Mann's novel (Smyth trans.) The regime was supposed at some point to run up against a barrier it could not surmount. Yet it gallops along, overturning the established order in a matter of years, erecting concentration camps, hunting down and torturing its enemies, driving opponents into exile. 

Tennyson and Consolation

I know of four occasions—I remember each one vividly—in which I have been suddenly and overwhelmingly confronted by the horror of the fact that I will eventually die. None were in settings very obviously designed to inflict upon one thoughts of mortality. Twice were in the shower. Once while driving. Once after waking up in the middle of the night. 

Julian Barnes has a phrase from a novel I never quite finished that described what I felt then: the "sudden sense of the lancing hopelessness of the human condition." Barnes' point in context was that one never forgets it, when it happens. I certainly did not, in my case.

Wolves and Exiles

I was talking to a friend last night about the universal, all-consuming subject—covid—and he happened to mention in passing (or maybe not so in passing) that if things got truly dire here, he could always pull up stakes and move to Canada. After all, he had dual citizenship, having been born in our northern neighbor. 

A sudden prospect of despair and jealousy gaped before me, at mention of this. Oh right, I thought. I'm trapped. He's not. For the barest instant, I felt some tiny taste of what it must mean to be an exile or refugee, to have one's home country seen as a generator of problems, to be eyed as needy and suspect. 

Categorical Imperatives

Back in some impossible past, many news cycles ago, there was a stir on the internet over the fact that Trump's campaign manager posted a Tweet, in which he compared the president's effort to get re-elected to the Death Star's laser cannon opening fire. The response was a collective: "Umm... does he not realize they're the bad guys?"

This is only a relatively recent and light-hearted example of something that is actually deeply horrifying at the heart of this administration. Trump as both candidate and incumbent has been willing to associate himself, time and again, with what we all previously took to be the symbols of absolute evil. 

A Wraith's Progress

I was recently talking to a friend from grad school about papers we had written for class years ago. In a fit of bootless remorse, he couldn't stop thinking about how bad they allegedly were, and about all the things he'd like to do differently with them now, if he had the chance. I assured him that they probably weren't as bad as he was remembering, so we resorted to the original copy to see. 

We found one paper that was quite thoroughly-argued and excellent; but there was one thing strange about it. It kept promising that there were even more arguments on the way. "In the second part of this paper, which will be forthcoming," it would say, "we will supply more substantial historical evidence to prove this point."

Why I'd Vote for the Wealth Tax

When I was a teenager, my Republican classmates at the small Florida private school I attended were a great mystery to me. Their political decisions seemed to rest on the most ludicrous and morally offensive bases imaginable. Each election cycle, they looked at which of the candidates on the field would advance their self-interest. Then they voted (or planned to vote) for, rather than against, that person. 

This, to my mind, was getting things obviously backward. It was axiomatic that political virtue consisted in voting against one's self-interest. I voted (or planned to vote) for the Democrats precisely because I assumed they would eventually disadvantage me. They would raise taxes, including the ones our family paid. And therein lay the nobility of the gesture of supporting them. 

Con Drop

It is not every professional training that culminates in a warning not to immediately sleep with your fellow participants, but that is what happened on the occasion I have in mind today. We had reached the end of a two-day course for ministers in how to teach a sex-ed curriculum. I suppose the topic was therefore sufficiently in the air that our facilitator felt the need to address it. 

"Now, we've been through an intense experience together over the last few days," I recall her saying. "You may be having strong feelings for each other. I advise you to wait it out and not act on those impulses immediately."

I didn't need to be told twice. Or once, for that matter. At the end of two days with a roomful of ministers, many of them a good two generations older than me, this was the last thing I wanted to do. It was, to borrow a phrase from Jeremiah, "something I neither commanded nor spoke of, nor did it even enter my mind."