The movement of German expressionism, as I know it, flourished during the era of the Weimar Republic in the 1920’s. Its highlight, for me, was the work of Kaethe Kollwitz (d. 1945), especially her harrowed images of impoverished children and her anguished sketches of young, often wounded soldiers. But that era’s pathos was perhaps even more strikingly announced by images of Das Massemensch – best translated, I think, as “the human masses.”
Adolf Hitler and his most vocal supporters reveled in this kind of imagery, their assumption being that those faceless multitudes needed a Leader, der Fuehrer, if they were going to be freed from their political and cultural captivity. Which meant what?
Every college history major learns the oft-quoted statement by George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I wonder how many American Church people today are caught in that dilemma: just, as it were, doing the same old thing, again and again. Without facing up to the unavoidable Trumpian signs of our times.
Donald Trump is an embarrassment, for sure. But he’s surely much more than that. The biblically rooted expression the demonic crosses my mind. Donald Trump, as I see him, is the demonic incarnate, our Adolf Hitler in waiting. Better, perhaps, our Hitler incarnate. Consider the acts of Der Donald thus far, as Hitler redivisus.
Hitler rabble-roused against “the elites.” Check. Hitler praised and seduced business mogols. Check. Hitler cashed in on longstanding German hostilities toward an alien minority, the Jews; for Trump, immigrants. Check. Hitler reclaimed longstanding cultural images of the dominant male versus the subservient female. Check. Hitler either sought to co-opt or to repress labor unions. Check. Hitler waged a campaign against what he called “decadent bourgeois art,” by which he meant geniuses such as Kaethe Kollwitz, Oscar Kokoska, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Max Beckmann, while celebrating the gushing sentimentalities of the popular art of his era. Witness Trump now trying to taking over the national arts with a spirit of triumphant bathos. Check.
Many in Hitler’s time tried to resist. Members of labor unions, university communities, civic organizations, churches, and some political parties attempted to stand up against the Nazi Behemoth. But it was often too little resistance, too late. Even a plot to assassinate Hitler failed, by historical accident if not just by plainly ineffective planning.
I learned long ago as a college sophomore that the one thing you can learn from history is that you can’t learn from history. But that doesn’t mean that you have to be stupid about history. Are the signs of our times telling us anything at all? Are we not indeed living in an era of Der Massemench? And over against it all, are we now not being called to passionately resist the principalities and powers of death embodied in the Trump movement?
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