States of Exception

Detail of Frontal Self-Portrait by Käthe Kollwitz

I was an odd little kid, obsessed with the Second World War, and I grew up into a college student still preoccupied with it, with the ideologies that animated it, with its attendant disasters and atrocities, and with the era in general. I wrote an undergraduate thesis about Zionism and Black nationalism. I read and thought a lot about the Holocaust.

Consequently, I learned, from a too-early age, that Americans do not want to think deeply, or much at all, about how and why these things, particularly the Holocaust, happened. The narrative I encountered, over and over, was that Hitler was a singularly bad man and the Germans a singularly, peculiarly obedient people (this was a great vein of humor for Boomers to mine in the 80s and 90s). It could probably only happen there, and with him at the helm. And it definitely could not happen here, because we Americans love liberty too much. We’re too independent minded, too skeptical of authority, too rebellious, too big-hearted.

This thinking persists today, decades later. American exceptionalism has become (if it was ever otherwise) tautological. We can’t be authoritarian, because we’re free. We can’t be undemocratic—we invented democracy! Freedom and democracy inhere in our land, in us, in our sacred laws. The first thing Hitler did, American conservatives darkly intimate, was take away German citizens’ guns. And they, the obedient sheep, let it happen! Not me, they say. No Gestapo man would come and take my guns away. They wouldn’t take my neighbors—I wouldn’t let them. They’d never take over in the first place. I wouldn’t allow it. We wouldn’t. At the first whiff of totalitarianism, we’d buck them.

In point of fact, of course, all of this is untrue, starting with the “Hitler took away their guns” thing. Weimar Germany had very strict firearms regulations; when the Nazis took power, they did tighten these restrictions even further for Jewish citizens and other enemies, but they loosened them for Party members. As the man said, “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

It should go without saying, but it doesn’t: The vast majority of Germans did not experience the Nazi regime as whatever you think of when you hear the word “totalitarian.” The boot did not stamp on all faces equally—it stamped on very few at all, in the big scheme of things, at least until the war started. 1930s Germany wasn’t 1984; it wasn’t even the postwar German Democratic Republic (i.e., East Germany).

Unlike the Stasi, the Gestapo did not have the manpower, the resources, or the inclination to establish a surveillance state. They did not spy on “regular people” (i.e., apolitical or pro-Nazi ethnic Germans). If you belonged to the compliant majority, they did not take your guns, or read your mail, or pay any attention to you at all (unless perhaps you were denounced by a neighbor or a jealous spouse, and even then they paid a lazy, indifferent kind of attention).

Even if you weren’t particularly compliant, they left you alone as long as you kept your dissent to yourself. The state was willing to accommodate anybody who didn’t belong to one of the minorities it sought to destroy and who did not actively obstruct its efforts. Many people—many good people, including many beloved artists and writers (like Käthe Kollwitz above)—went into “internal exile.” They retreated to the countryside or walled themselves up in their apartments and disengaged from Nazi society. Nazi society condemned them and denigrated them but left them alone, by and large.

For the vast majority of Germans, even most of those passive dissidents in internal exile, there was no reign of terror (not until the bombs starting falling, anyway). The Gestapo weren’t a sinister death squad—they were just federal police. Raids happened, people were snatched from the streets or shot in their homes, but so what? That’s what happens to criminals, terrorists, vagrants, illegal immigrants, and other unreliable elements. Whether you approve or not, it’s happening somewhere else, to someone else, and it doesn’t seem exceptional or extraordinary. You might not agree with all the new laws, but they are the laws now, and this is just law enforcement at work.

All of which is to say: Not only could it happen here, it already has. Totalitarianism isn’t equally perceptible to all. The Jim Crow South was totalitarian for Black people; for many white people, it was idyllic, practically utopian. Contemporary American life—even our present idyll under Biden, before the storm—is authoritarian in the extreme for undocumented immigrants, people subject to carceral control, the very poor, and many others. And it will get much worse, long before there are soldiers on your street or bombs falling on your roof.