Notes on the Interregnum

Uncertainty reigns. It's noon on November 4, the day after the election. The votes are still being counted. It is very possible that Joe Biden won the election, but today, right now, that feels like a loss. There was supposed to be a reckoning, a great sweeping transformation where the country repudiated the occupant, reclaimed some measure of democratic virtue, and chose justice over swaggering hate and self-absorption.

I live in Knoxville, Tennessee, a generally red place with vibrant pockets of blue. Last week, I noticed, a local fan had stuck trump stickers on almost every stop sign in the neighborhood. When I went to pull one off, I noticed that someone else had already tried. Like that good neighbor, I, too, was soon defeated. Only the tiniest pieces came away, as if the stickers were principally designed not to be removed but rather to cling to whatever they were stuck to with infuriating, immortal glue. They are more like a stain than a sticker. No matter what happens next, parts of them will be there forever.

November 5

Trump continues to sow mistrust about the electoral system. I am thinking about two essays I just read with my students.

The first was Victor Klemperer's "On a Single Working Day" from his 1947 book Lingua Tertii Imperii, or The Language of the Third Reich. Born into a Jewish family, Klemperer had converted to Christianity, was a WWI veteran, and was married to a woman who was not Jewish—all of which helped him survive the Nazis, barely, and in very reduced circumstances. He was stripped of his professorship and consigned to work instead at a Dresden envelope and paper-bag factory. The scene he describes in the essay unfolds there. By the time he wrote it, Allied bombing raids had become common over the city. The workers would crowd into air-raid shelters, and into strictly segregated sections: Jewish and "Aryan."

Klemperer explained that many of his coworkers were not Nazis but that their minds had become "infected," as he put it, with fascist thinking. It happened through language, through the use of words that people unthinkingly assimilated: words like artfremd (alien) and Rassenschande (racial defilement). Through words, Klemperer argued, the whole conceptual apparatus of the Third Reich was fashioned and replicated itself. In that sense, Nazi ideas were not "beliefs" at all—at least, not in the sense of things we imagine being adopted through some conscious process of contemplation and affirmation or decision-making. Embedded in pieces of language, the ideas that made the Third Reich were naturalized and normalized through daily use, and that restructured how people thought. And then those new structures became reality itself.

This was especially true, Klemperer suggests, of those coworkers who were not that good at what is often referred to as critical thinking (he says that one coworker, Albert, "was rather better at thinking" than another coworker, Frieda). For people like Frieda—though not just for Frieda—the steady repetition of concepts was a "mind-numbing drug," a "poison," that gradually seeped into the space of thought, replacing whatever had been there earlier. One day, in a gesture of kindness and humanity, Frieda brings Victor Klemperer an apple for his wife, who is ill. Then she asks him, "with a measure of inquisitiveness and surprise: 'Albert says your wife is German. Is she really German?'" Frieda, though a non-Nazi, finds this information almost impossible to assimilate. She had so thoroughly "identified Germanness with the magical concept of the Aryan" that Klemperer's marriage was literally unthinkable.

That, according to Klemperer, was how fascism was made and how it remade the world. It operated at a preconscious level, transforming the basic architecture that made thinking possible.

The second essay my class read together was Hannah Arendt's extraordinary "The Aftermath of Nazi Rule," published in 1950, following her first trip back to Germany since fleeing her homeland in 1933. Like Klemperer, the political philosopher was also intrigued by what Nazism had done to thinking, and her analysis also focused on words, but she was interested...