The Election...Eighty Years Ago

I stumbled across this photo on the internet a little while back. It's election graffiti from the 1932 German elections: it reads "Wählt Thälmann," or "Vote for Ernst Thaelmann," the candidate of the KPD, the German Communist Party, that in the years following was ruthlessly crushed. Here's the amazing thing about this photo: it was taken in Marburg, Germany, in 2008. Which means not only did it survive the 1932 elections (the KPD did not win a majority, as we know), it survived the rise of the Nazis, the brutality of WWII, and all the attempts since the war to control the narratives of history.

I've written before about those 1932 elections and about Ernst Thaelmann. The last time in fact, I pondered whether this era of elections, marked by a rise of the extreme right, would be the undoing of today's civil society. Interestingly, I failed to see the possibility of the return of a mass leftwing, popular movement. I saw the main hope, inadequate as it is, as defensive voting for Democrats. I find it worthy of note that while the mainstream of the Republican party has indeed drifted right, that the people out in the streets are no longer the teabaggers of the right but the Occupy movement of the left.

Which changes everything.

Big things are being planned for May Day, even. And frankly, despite the horrible words spouted by those horrible people on the daises of the Republican debates, and despite the transparent posturing of President Obama, they all seem a little bit irrelevant to the possibilities for the future. Not that one of them won't probably win come November, but that no longer engenders such a sense of foreboding hopelessness.

This election graffiti has survived eighty years, telling all sorts of stories about the way things were. While some of those stories are sad, with tragic endings, it occurs to me that the current story is still being told.

Yesterday in third parties...

"KPD...End This System" reads this poster from the Communist Party of Germany, ca. 1932. The Communist Party came in third in the 1932 German elections, after the Nazis and the Socialists. Without suggesting that this year's elections are as momentous as those of waning Weimar, or that the Republican/teabagger side is quite as precipitously genocidal as the Nazis were, I'd like to note that bad strategy by the left in those long-ago elections resulted in the victory of the far right.

It's easy in the upcoming election to be pissed off at President Obama's failure to advance more than a centrist agenda given his rhetoric about fundamental change. It's not wrong to point out all the defective similarities between the Democrats and the Republicans, to note that neither party is actually on the side of regular people. It's not wrong to look to long-term strategies which would repudiate the class bias of these two parties and the lock they hold on the American political system. But as I have said before, elections have winners and losers, and the fact that many people--but not enough people--think neither of these parties represents a vehicle for progress and justice is ultimately irrelevant. The year 2000 elections had a very strong showing by a left-of-center third party candidate, and the victory of George Bush was the result. (It should be noted that most third-party candidates who make a showing in American presidential elections are distinctly right of center.)

Now is a time of deep class division, but not a time of deep class struggle. Early 1930s Germany was a time of both. And yet the failure of the left with mass popular support to make strategic choices like uniting against the fascist threat meant that the vast numbers of politically active progressive forces still lost. Today in the US I think it is fair to say that the activist majority is right-wing. Those who would sit the upcoming elections out or throw a vote away on a protest candidate are doing only the ascendant teabagger movement a favor.

Should the Democrats pull off an unlikely win in the midterms, they will give us plenty of reason to be pissed off at them: that is a known danger. But a teabagger win has many disastrously ugly potentials, and if this is not 1932 Weimar Germany, it might be 1923 Germany when economic collapse sowed the seeds of future calamity.

I don't know their names but I know what happened to them

I visited Berlin in 1994, where I took these photos. In a picturesque suburb is the site of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, operated by the Nazis from the 1930s until its liberation shortly before the war's end in 1945. Sachsenhausen was a small camp: It held high-profile political prisoners like German Communist leader Ernest Thallmann and other members of the opposition, as well as random other people criminalized by the Nazi regime, including many many gay people. There were many executions there, and deaths by starvation, overwork and cruelty; the majority of inmates there were murdered by a forced evacuation out of the camp in advance of the approaching Soviet Red Army. Which is to say unlike the camps further east, it was not really an extermination factory, per se, just an unspeakably monstrous cog in the machine of Nazi repression.


"Killed and Silenced, the homosexual victims of Nazi persecution" reads this memorial plaque.


It was a beautiful late autumn day when I went there: the air was damp and thick with the smell of rotting leaves and woodsmoke. The once electrified barbed-wire fences still standing testament and giving a lie to a chilly, tranquil suburban afternoon.

It's good to see such places where awful things happened. The evil of these places is not announced like Mt. Doom in "The Lord of the Rings": Sachsenhausen is not surrounded by lava pits, flames and flying monsters but by the same mundane residential neighborhood that surrounded it only 65 years ago when some very bad regular people were in charge and some other regular people looked the other way.

I know this is all very Godwin's law of me, but it behooves us to ponder how these terrible things happened before. The freedom and relative legal equality enjoyed by gay people today in Europe and America owes a debt to those pink-triangle-wearing heroes who suffered under the Nazis. The teabagger lynch mobs in today's America who puff themselves up in defense of "traditional marriage" and in opposition to the extension of certain civil rights to gay citizens are reaching into the same arsenal of hatreds as those who have been defeated before. Let us resolve to defeat them again before they're telling us once more that "Work makes you free."