We are Weimar Germany, or so we are told. Our wild, apocalyptic present is, in the view of a hundred professors and columnists, best understood by comparison to those restive interwar years, when Germany simmered with violence, poverty, occultisms, wild creativities, and extreme ideologies. That ferment eventually gave birth to the historical monstrosity of Adolf Hitler, just as, today, a suite of overlapping crises — the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economic collapse of 2007–08, deindustrialization, the breakdown of civil society, racial animus, you name it — has left us dancing, as the historian Peter Gay said of Weimar, “on the edge of a volcano.”
Happily, this story is fatuous. The United States in 2020 is not where Germany was in the 1920s and ’30s. Writing in the Point, the critic Morten Hoi Jensen recently argued that as despondent and feverish as we may be, we lack the one big factor that made Nazism possible: the utter devastation visited upon Germany in World War I and its wake. As Hoi Jensen wrote, “the collapse in the value of human life, the destruction of existing social structures, the moral vacuum that followed … most of us today cannot be said to have undergone anything like that.”
He’s right. And yet, on both sides of the political spectrum, people feel as if the country is falling apart, as if it is hurtling toward some grim future that they can neither understand nor avoid. If we’re not Weimar Germany, how do we understand our condition?
To begin with, we have to acknowledge that Hoi Jensen is right to qualify. Most of us have not experienced that Weimar-style disintegration, but some of us have. We all know about places in America where human life is cheap, social structures have decayed, and morality seems to have been upended. These are generally areas occupied by the poor, a category that disproportionately includes those whose ancestors were brought here as slaves. The video-recorded death of George Floyd, a black man, at the hands of Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis police officer, has pulled the plight of black Americans to the fore, touching off a massive wave of protests, some tipping into riots and looting, across the country and around the world.
The anger is not mysterious; Floyd didn’t deserve to die. The video of the incident, in which Floyd pleads for mercy and calls for his dead mother while a police officer kneels on his neck, is excruciating. And yet, there is something here that needs explaining. Close to 1,000 unarmed people, roughly one-third of them black, were killed by police officers between 2013 and 2019. A few of these deaths were caught on video and shared widely. Why has this one thrown us into such turmoil? Injustice, cruelty, poverty, murder — these always call for redress, but they don’t always summon hundreds of thousands of people into the streets.
For a more illuminating historical parallel to our moment, we should turn not to Weimar but to the decades before the First World War. They were, in some ways, a time of tremendous growth and progress. The Industrial Revolution had consolidated its gains. Science was advancing rapidly, information was whizzing around the globe, gender equality was advancing, and travel, via train and steamships, was shrinking distances and expanding human horizons.
Yet this was not only a period of excitement and invention. It was also one of anxious restlessness. The world was moving at a speed and a scale unfamiliar to humans. People were living and working in spaces — cities, factories, schools — more confined and controlled than ever before. Women complained to their doctors of frayed nerves and claustrophobia; men felt enervated, like their lives were beyond their control. Birthrates were falling, and masculinity was thought to be in crisis. Men who spent their waking lives tending machines or sitting in offices pined for heroism, adventure, and strength. Snake oils abounded. Ideologies jockeyed for position.
In his “Futurist Manifesto,” penned in 1909, the Italian poet F.T. Marinetti complained that “literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy, and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.” He went on: “We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.” We have, one hopes, learned enough from the disasters of the 20th century not to reenact Marinetti’s program, but his unfocused energy, his rage, his desire to finally do something all feel very much of our moment.
The feeling of being caged in, of having been dragged away from the real life of the body and village into a technologically mediated pseudoexistence, is as old as the Industrial Revolution. Ever since the English set up the first factories in Manchester, Romantics have cursed the flattened, disembodied, and mechanical aspects of modernity, the way that they separate us from simplicity and stability and community. The coronavirus lockdown has been an extreme dramatization of this modern condition, staged in our tiny, expensive apartments. Many of us now have no human contact at all; we live our lives entirely through screens; our finances are a mess; our agency has been stripped away; in many cases, we are forbidden from taking part in the social rituals that give our lives sense and meaning. It’s a totalizing dystopia that a prewar vitalist such as Marinetti could only dimly imagine. It is the modern condition writ small.
The death of Floyd is evil in its own right, but the consuming rage that has followed it has many fathers. Among them is a deep discontentment with the modern world that the coronavirus lockdown did not create but which it did make more palpable than ever before. The discontentment amounts to this: that our transition to industrial civilization involved traumatic losses — of faith, community, proximity to nature, and certainty about our place in the world — that were meant to be compensated with previously unimaginable freedom and prosperity. By leaving behind the things we once thought made us human, we would become gods. But only at particular times and places have there been sufficient funds to cash that check. More often than not, it cashes only for a few.
Sometimes, the bread and circuses that keep our anxiety in check vanish or grow stale, and bloodshed and fire spread through our gleaming cities. In 1914, it was something even worse. We’ve probably learned enough not to repeat anything like the Great War’s orgy of destruction. But we haven’t learned, we still haven’t learned, how to make a modernity that doesn’t make us want to take more than we could possibly have or smash the world in heartbroken protest. We’re awash in think pieces, but no one is venturing, just yet, to think about addressing this deeper current of discontent. And so back into the cycle we go. The fire of revolt was hot this time but short-lived. Next time, you never know.
Ian Marcus Corbin is a writer, academic, and entrepreneur in Cambridge, Massachusetts.