Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part series by Manfred Henningsen, formerly a political science professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he taught for fifty years until his retirement in 2020.
by Manfred Henningsen
If you’re familiar with German historian Ernst Nolte’s 1963 classic, The Three Faces of Fascism, you’ll note that America plays no role in this work. The focus is on France with the Action Francaise, Mussolini’s fascist Italy, and Hitler’s Nazi Germany. The current attempt by American intellectuals to compare Trump and his MAGA movement with the historical phenomenon of European fascism indirectly follows Nolte’s model.
Certainly, before the election victory of Donald Trump and the Republicans, attempts were made in various media to link his movement with nationalist mass movements in the USA in the 1930s. These forgotten phenomena have been shown in documentaries by Ken Burns and others on public television (PBS) since the storming of the Congress building provoked by Trump in January 2021.
The writer Philip Roth had already described this semi-fascist American milieu in detail in 2004 with his novel The Plot Against America and the portrait of Charles Lindbergh as the victorious opponent of F. D. Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election. But the more these comparisons were made, focusing above all on the end of the Weimar Republic and the eventual appointment of Hitler as Chancellor on January 30, 1933, the further the discussion moved away from American reality.
This dissimilarity of the comparison was illustrated by Trump’s astonishing election victory and the new balance of power in Congress. The Republican Party, dominated by Trump, has a majority in both houses of Congress. With the already existing conservative majority of judges in the Republic’s highest court, the Supreme Court , the election effectively abolished the separation of powers enshrined in the constitution.
This political constellation has nothing to do with Weimar in January 1933.
In contrast to Trump’s election victory, Hitler did not become Chancellor by a majority of German voters. The NSDAP suffered losses in the last free Reichstag elections in the Weimar Republic in November 1932. President Hindenburg, whose opposition to Hitler as Chancellor was well known, was pressured into a decision by a cabal of conservative nationalist politicians because there was no Reichstag majority for any other candidate. The subsequent majority support for Hitler in Germany was guaranteed by the flight of most social democratic politicians abroad and the imprisonment of the communist cadres and their detention in spontaneously established concentration camps, thus eliminating the left-wing opposition parties in the Republic.
The comparison of Trump’s MAGA movement with the overwhelming support of the Nazi party by the German population after the Reichstag fire in February 1933 and the so-called Röhm-Putsch in the summer of 1934 was confirmed by the images of the enthusiastic acclamation of Hitler at the 1935 Nuremberg party convention captured by Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary of the event. The comparison of Nazi Germany with America at that time is important for another reason.
The anti-Jewish racial laws associated with that convention were brought about by Hitler with reference to Jim Crow laws and racial segregation in the southern United States, as detailed by Yale law professor James Whitman in his book Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (2017). (“Jim Crow” was the stereotypical caricature of black actors in minstrel shows and was chosen by whites in the southern states to express their contempt for the equal rights legislation.) The reference to the racial segregation of the Jim Crow period after the American Civil War is also present in the discussion about the extermination of European Jews at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, as can be seen today in the exhibition at the Wannsee-Villa in Berlin where the conference took place.
The Jim Crow period takes on greater significance in the context of the discussion about whether the current MAGA movement in the USA is fascist, given the interest of Hitler and the Holocaust planners Heydrich and Eichmann in this period of American history. Because it seems that the Nazis, and especially Hitler, recognized that white racism, which had been used to justify and maintain slavery since the founding of the USA in 1789, had not been abolished by the Civil War.
Slavery as an institution was abolished, but that did not mean that the 4 million freed slaves were suddenly accepted as equal citizens. Black men were given the right to vote through the 15th Amendment to the Constitution (1870), and large numbers of black representatives were elected to state legislatures, but in the southern states black voters were increasingly prevented from exercising this right by force. Whether Hitler informed himself in detail about political developments in the USA after the Civil War is less interesting than the astonishing phenomenon that he, who to this day is considered alongside Mussolini the exemplary representative of this fascist era recognized the ideological similarity in the Jim Crow phase after the war.
This recognition of this similarity is not only missing from current discussion, but also from the official memory of American history.
Stay tuned for Part II of this series…
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Manfred Henningsen Bio:
A prolific author, Henningsen’s latest book is Regimes of Terror and Memory: Beyond the Uniqueness of the Holocaust (Political Theory for Today).
Manfred Henningsen was born in 1938 in Germany’s northern-most city, Flensburg. He grew up in a post-war country that was occupied by the victors of WWII and whose citizens refused to come to terms with the terror Nazi Germany had perpetrated on the Europe it had conquered. The experience of this deafening silence, which was caused by denial, shaped his interest in political legitimacy and authority in Germany and other societies. Apart from returning frequently to German history in the 20th century and the processing of Germany’s violent past, his interest shifted to the U.S. when he became a fellow at Stanford’s Hover Institution. In 1970 he became a professor at the University of Hawai‘i.
His research interests were originally centered on themes in political thought and the philosophy of history. He still publishes essays and articles in European and American publications on political thought. His main focus at this time, however, is concentrated on a project dealing with terror and memory. (This is the subject of his latest book). How do societies that have been governed by regimes of terror deal with the aftermath of this violence? Most societies practice denial when it comes to acknowledging macro-criminal chapters in their history and refuse to confront the impact of this history on their own people and peoples they conquered and terrorized. In addition to Germany, South Africa is an exception, whereas Germany’s ally during WWII, imperial Japan, is the best illustration of the general rule.