What Becomes a Naughty Nazi Most?
Talking about Hitler, or Trump, like you're saying something ignores that the full measure of the man, as it's taken, is much more about our reduced circumstance than the so-called "power" of evil.
“It is the curse of the great man to step over corpses.” — Henrich Himmler, 1941
I had dinner with a Nazi once. Not a neo-Nazi, those fetishized skinhead warriors and worshippers at the cult of strength. No, a real 1940’s type of Nazi.
The occasion? The marriage of his son. His son, my friend, had been adopted, purportedly from Jewish parents, as a way for the father to expiate his war guilt. My friend had been frank about his father’s past, which seemed easy because the old man, at this point, was well past “all of that”.
Moreover, the father would be picking me up from the hotel where I had been staying in Hamburg and we’d be traveling to the wedding site together. Punctual, unsurprisingly, he seemed like a hale fellow well met, slapping his meaty hand against my hand by way of a shake and a greeting.
Climbing into his car he offhandedly threw over his shoulder what I’ve now come to recognize as the pre-notification of assholishness: "I hope you don’t mind,” he said with a laugh, “but I’m a frank talking man.”
“Well, that makes two of us,” I said as I slid in.
That’s it. No punchline. Just a professional fighter sipping bourbon, getting his hair cut all while chatting away with his haircutter about the good things that Hitler did.
And sure enough as we drove through Hamburg he had started to probe. First wide. Then deep. Which was fine by me. Until it wasn’t and after asking where else I had been to and I had mentioned Japan he went in hard, and clumsily, on Asian stereotypes.
Which got me to the “I couldn’t take it” portion of this story because in the end, someone must say something about such things. A move that is much preferred over saying absolutely nothing.
“So, what did you do here in Germany?” I asked after he had told me that he was retired.
“Well, I worked for oil companies,” he said. “Spent a lot of time in Africa…”
And before he could dig deep on that continent’s connections to my skin color, I said, simply: “Before then.”
“I was getting my PhD.”
Then a weighted pause from me…”before then.” And his eyes caught mine in the rear view mirror and we stayed there because it was now totally clear precisely what I was asking about.
What he did then suggested a sigh without actually being a sigh. “Well, I fell for the whole thing hook, line and sinker…” he said. “And then we rebuilt Hamburg to the city you now see today.”
I chortled, Round 1, me. But it came with a cost. He was angry now and I couldn’t really figure out why. I mean he had started it, because when we could have just chatted about the weather, he trundled into race.
The wedding itself was great, though at the start of the reception, when the entire wedding party donned novelty glasses with large noses and bushy eyebrows, in what was supposed to be a fun-loving imitation of the Jewish-identified groom, I knew that this was only the tip of a much more gooned-out iceberg.
Whether it was Goring’s bowls of jewels that he used to run his fingers through to relax or Trump’s golden toilets, it’s all so small and cheap…
“Thank you all for coming to the celebration of the marriage of my son,” he said, surveying the room. “My opening remarks will be in english, for our American ‘friends’.”
“But I will now switch to German…because this is Germany and we are Germans and so they will have to suffer.”
“Ich verstehe vollkommen, was Sie beide meinen und sagen!” I yelled this out from the table where I had now risen. In German I had just told him that I understood perfectly well what he both meant and said.
And through the remainder of the evening, with a night that poured so much rain on the island where the reception was held that we later had to be evacuated, he and a progressively larger group of his associates would gather in klatches, look at me, and whisper among themselves. They would then suddenly appear on either side of me, asking me detailed but disconnected questions about my personal life.
It wasn’t the answers that they were interested in, it seemed. But as they got physically closer and closer to me it was clearly a much more of them taking stock of me deal, and I am quite sure that were it to have been 1941, this evening would have concluded in a very different way. Different from being just followed around by a gaggle of men in their 80s who were working up the nerve for one last stand. Or one last pogrom.
All of which came rushing back when a former associate texted me a podcast clip of a known associate of ours extolling the virtues of Adolph Hitler. That’s it. No punchline. Just a professional fighter sipping bourbon, getting his hair cut all while chatting away with his haircutter about the good things that Hitler did.
In his workplace he is not alone. A flat-earthing associate also had gotten into some sort of trouble recently for big-up’ing Hitler. As has Kanye West. As has Elon Musk. Or the MAGA movement in its entirety with Jewish space lasers and Mel Gibson drunk-ranting about perfidious Hebrews.
All very reminiscent of that junior high school phase where boys draw swastikas on their loose leaf binders and embrace a cult of strength that makes attacking the world such an attractive proposition. On getting older it doesn’t take too much figuring to understand that sucker punching your way to success is quite easy and possible to do if you attack those who never see it coming.
Like the Latinos for Trump who now find themselves in sobbing memes as what they got from Trump is not at all what they expected to get. So much more and so much less.
Deportations and detentions, by masked men in unmarked vehicles, that are seeing mostly women and teenaged girls, grabbed and wrestled to the ground before being handcuffed and hauled off to a future as of yet unknown. That’s what they got. Not the so-called gang members, or cartel associates that they had been told would be corralled.
In a parking lot in Nashville, Tennessee, I spot a woman climbing into a well-kitted out pickup truck with a legend that filled up the entire back window: Trump + Jesus: What We Need Now!
Hannah Arendt had oft-talked about the banality of evil when discussing the events of the 1940s but this — the puerile way of conceiving power and its exercise being the only real strength there is — seems so far away from the Hamburg that had magically rebuilt itself that had it not been seen, it would not have been believed.
Hitler, Trump, developmentally disabled combat athletes seem to exhibit an attraction to a unidimensional conception of power that underscores their lack of it. Indeed, if you remember that every act of murder in the Third Reich was also accompanied by acts of theft, it is easier to understand what kind of cheap grifters and hustlers these so-called great men were.
Whether it was Goring’s bowls of jewels that he used to run his fingers through to relax or Trump’s golden toilets, in the final analysis it’s all so small and cheap and stands in direct opposition to the magnitude of suffering that they visited on the rest of us in the small time that they had to do so. But its power, its magical power, and one that’s been an earmark since we’ve seen it all in action is in its camouflaging of it’s real objective and intent through a bullshit and faux cloak of…nobility?
In a parking lot in Nashville, Tennessee, I spot a woman climbing into a well-kitted out pickup truck with a legend that filled up the entire back window: Trump + Jesus: What We Need Now!
Messianic ideation, a willing resistance to any kind of doubt, an open hostility to analysis or insight, and eventually, and finally, some terrible blood-born tragedy to top it all off.
And then we’ll rebuild America…to the country you now see today.
TICKETS?!?!? GET YOUR TICKETS HEEEEERRRRREEEE…..
"pre-notification of assholishness" Nice! Of course, these days, after the official ass-holing of America kicked into high gear back in 2016, you don't even get the "frank" preface. it's expected, encouraged and celebrated. Great piece, as usual. Enjoyed killing on the beach, although I winced whenever you took a step on the beach, sensing you shifting weight off the knee. But like a great fighter, you went the distance. Hope your tour is going well. Best, G.