L’History determines politics, not the other way around. Germany is learning this. And in this federal country, everything passes through the regions, including evil, which progresses, so to speak, in compartments. The neo-Nazi AfD party won Thuringia. A painful reminder of history. In 1933, Alfred H. Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in New York, was living in Stuttgart, Württemberg, for health reasons. He witnessed the Nazi takeover of the region and observed the extraordinary speed with which a civilized order complied with savagery. He recorded his impressions in four articles that, in the United States, interested almost no one at the time; it was not until the end of the war that his work was published.
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Overnight, and without causing the slightest disturbance, Württemberg descended into barbarism. The administration worked; the shopkeepers opened at the same time as usual; and, in the squares, the sellers of flags and swastikas made a fortune. Barr wrote: “The newspapers that survived echoed with the glory of the National Resurrection. Rathenau Street, named after a social-democratic statesman assassinated by the Nazis in 1922, was renamed Goering; postcards of the Leader, looking menacing, his arm raised in a fascist salute, bloomed in all the shop windows; and there were parades day and night.” In short, it was a party.
