Germany in 1932 versus the US in 2020: Sarah Bridgins on "Germany Puts the Clock Back"
I was pretty sure I was making a mistake when I opened up Germany Puts the Clock Back by Edgar Ansel Mowrer. It was one month before a U.S. election that has been described as the last chance to save the country from the grip of an aspiring authoritarian. Of the hundreds of books on my shelves was now really the time to read the one detailing the collapse of democracy in Germany that ushered in Hitler’s rise to power?
The answer, at least initially, was yes. My decision to start reading it was partly motivated by a habit of turning to history in moments of trauma and stress, a coping strategy I developed 6 years ago when my father died suddenly. At a time when I felt overwhelmed by a horrible event that made no sense, I found it oddly comforting to attempt to deconstruct and understand vastly more horrible events that seemed to make vastly less sense. During this whole nightmare year of 2020 I’ve once again found that books about history (as well as, who am I kidding, celebrity memoirs) are the only ones that can even begin to distract me. I hoped that by reading someone else’s account of watching a democratic government slide into authoritarianism I could somehow gain a better understanding of our current unpredictable and dangerous political moment.
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I learned about Germany Puts the Clock Back from Erik Larsen’s book In the Garden of Beasts, which is also about the years leading up to the Third Reich. Edgar Ansel Mowrer was a journalist who worked for the Chicago Daily News and began reporting from Berlin in 1923. In 1933 he published Germany Puts the Clock Back and won the Pulitzer Prize. That same year, as a result of his writing, he was forced to leave Germany under threats to his life by Nazi officials.
Germany Puts the Clock Back is out of print, which is hard to believe given how vital it feels today. One of the elements that makes this book seem so unsettlingly contemporary and fresh is Mowrer’s tone. This is not a dry journalistic artifact. Mowrer is not afraid to use exclamation marks to draw attention to some outrageous hypocrisy or half-baked political philosophy, and despite the seriousness of the subject matter, he occasionally displays a sardonic sense of humor. He describes Hitler’s monetary theory as one that “would not fool an intelligent adolescent.” In reading his book I was often reminded of a quote about journalistic best practices that I’ve seen circulating on social media in recent months:
Mowrer was telling his readers that in Germany in 1932 it was definitively, torrentially raining. The roof was about to collapse.
Part of me was reluctant to read the book because I was afraid I would see so many parallels between what Mowrer experienced and our current political crisis that it would make me even more terrified and hopeless about the future. This turned out to be naïve—not because there aren’t parallels, but because trying to make any kind of blunt analogy between historical periods and events means willfully ignoring the nuances of reality. America in 2020 is not Germany in 1932. The many essential differences between the two make any kind of simplistic comparison, while tempting, fundamentally inaccurate. One factor Mowrer emphasizes, for instance, is that Germany’s democratic government was only 13 years old when it collapsed, and that the German people were never all that excited about democracy to begin with. Until that point Germany had essentially been a military dictatorship. The country’s military leaders only agreed to the establishment of a democratic government in the hopes that doing so would persuade the Allies to grant them more favorable terms in the Treaty of Versailles, following Germany’s humiliating defeat in WW1. When this failed to happen and the treaty’s punishing terms were revealed, many Germans grew bitter and disillusioned.
So the value in reading Germany Puts the Clock Back isn’t in making one-to-one comparisons between Mowrer’s reality and the one we’re living through in America today. It’s in making note of the variety of seemingly timeless strategies used by rising authoritarian regimes to create fissures in the foundations of democratic governments that cause them eventually to crumble. To that end there are absolutely lessons to be learned.
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Mowrer’s book is divided into 24 chapters. Each one explores the political, cultural, and economic forces that led to a German rise in nationalism and a rejection of the democratic values of the Weimar Republic. Mowrer describes a population that was angry and adrift in the wake of World War I. The economy was a mess and millions were unemployed. While the Social-Democrats who made up the backbone of the Weimar Republic believed in their new government and wanted it to succeed, they were also unwilling, for what they saw as practical and political reasons, to cut ties with the officials who’d held positions of authority before the war. These militarists, monarchists, and authoritarian sympathizers continued to work in the government, undermining its aims from within and biding their time until their power could be restored. It was similar to Trump appointing the guy who sued the EPA 13 times to run the EPA, except in this case the disruption it caused was an unanticipated consequence rather than the explicit aim.
Other points Mowrer makes rang familiar as well. Politically, the Left was divided into factions leading them to functionally join with a united Right in contributing toward a lack of support for a democratic government. He notes, “Eleven and a half million followers of Karl Marx. . . were agreed in abhorring the Republic’s tolerance for capitalism,” while “fourteen million Nationalists deplored its democracy.” Many government officials were holdovers from the pre-war autocratic era; many judges who had been given lifetime appointments were, too. In a chapter titled “Irremovable Judges” Mowrer writes, “In the case of no other body, save that of the Army, was the unhappy optimism of the Republicans better demonstrated than by their failure to fill the benches in every court in Germany with Democrats who could be trusted to protect the new régime against all attacks.” The result was a starkly unequal judicial system that favored the wealthy, and was often overtly politically biased against those attempting to exercise their democratic rights. Communists and Republicans were targeted for strict punishments, while National-Socialists (Nazis) were literally permitted to get away with murder. “A Communist workman in Remscheid who, after an altercation with a group of National-Socialists, fired a revolver six times in the air to frighten them, received two years’ prison (author’s emphasis). Fifteen National-Socialists who killed a certain Bassy (communist) in Bankau were acquitted by the judge on the ground that the ‘behavior of the dead man’ was responsible for the murder.” It was impossible for me to read this and not think of, among other things, the civil unrest of this year, when peaceful protesters were beaten by law enforcement and decried as thugs while right-wing armed militia members were hailed as patriots.
Although Hitler is referenced throughout the book, Mowrer doesn’t write about him in detail until Chapter 19, “The Leader.” In this and the concluding four chapters, Mowrer describes Hitler’s astonishing rise and the Centre and Social Democrat parties’ attempts to keep his power in check. In reading about Hitler’s massive rallies, his appeals to xenophobia and anti-Semitism, and his calls for violence against his political opponents, it’s hard not to make comparisons to our current president. However, I would argue that’s more because authoritarians tend to have certain traits and playbooks in common than because of other, more specific similarities. Mowrer himself compares Hitler to both Mussolini and corrupt Chicago mayor William Hale Thompson.
Still, reading these chapters is chilling. In one, “A Showman of Genius,” Mowrer describes packed halls in which thousands of supporters listened rapt as Hitler railed against “The System” (the democratic Republic), blaming the Jews who supposedly controlled it for everything from the high unemployment rate to the inability of single women to find husbands. Mowrer writes, “If [Hitler] had not become a political prophet, he might equally well have been a great preacher, a great actor, a ring-master (his entire appearance suggests the circus), a magnificent producer of theatrical spectacles, or an unequaled advertising manager.”
Germany Puts the Clock Back ends right after the November 1932 Reichstag election, which resulted in the Nazis losing seats, but no parties gaining a majority. When the book was published in January 1933, Hitler had risen to chancellor of Germany and the Reichstag had been dissolved, effectively ending the Republic.
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Finishing the book did, in some respects, leave me worried about the future of our country in the way that I had feared. It also left me feeling unexpectedly, cautiously, hopeful. In the opening pages, Mowrer describes “The Rape of Prussia” in July 1932, when Franz Von Papen, then Chancellor of Germany who had aligned himself with Hitler, removed democratic members of the Prussian Cabinet and replaced them with enemies of the Republic. Many hoped the blatant unconstitutionality of the action would prompt a national strike by the German population, but such a development never came and the officials were forced out. Mowrer writes, “Well over fifty percent of the Germans . . . had, at least for the time being, decided against democracy.”
Whether 200 years old or 10 years old, a democracy is only as strong as the people by which it derives its power. The last four years have been a terrifying test, but I have been heartened by the thousands of protesters marching for civil rights, and the millions of voters who have already cast their ballots for the November election. If they are any indication, we are nowhere close to giving ours up without a fight.
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Sarah Bridgins’ poetry collection Death and Exes won the 2018 Sexton Prize and is forthcoming from Eyewear Books. Her essays have appeared in Bustle, Tin House, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere.
