Vee Ah Noht in Zee Veimah
It's time for art world progressives to let go of invidious Hitler comparisons and grapple with what's going on.
I respect Sharon Butler enormously for her work at Two Coats of Paint, and Laurie Fendrich for her paintings. But this opener of Laurie’s at Two Coats presumes goodwill that has expired.
“Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910-1945,” an exhibition of more than 70 paintings and sculptures on loan from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin to the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, runs on three tracks. The first carries the art, two-thirds of which has never before been seen in the United States. The second, via informative and well-written wall texts, follows political developments in Germany during three-and-a-half fraught decades. The third consists of the imaginations of museumgoers who, like me, can’t help but see similarities between Weimar Germany in the years leading up to Hitler’s rule and America during Trump’s rise and authoritarian presidency.
I commented:
How is it that immediately after the arson in Harrisburg, the murders in Washington, DC, and the firebombings in Boulder, all directed at American Jews and perpetrated by a Free Palestine movement that has become the darling of the American left and the arts in particular, despite its ethnic nationalism and concrete overlap with historical Nazism, arts writers are still likening Trump to Hitler? This rhetorical conceit was already spurious and dated, but now it’s irresponsible.
Laurie answered, “Franklin, that other events have American Jews as their victims in no way obviates the obvious parallels between Trump and Hitler on the rise.” Sharon did not see fit to publish my reply, which was, verbatim: Laurie, “other events” is a mousy way of describing the attempted and successful murder of Jews. But they do obviate the parallels between Trump and Hitler, because the perpetrators of that violence are identitarian socialists in league with a nationalist cause, and as such, share much more in common ideologically with Nazis than Trump does. On the contrary, the Trump administration is impeding their efforts and delivering punishment for their crimes. Unfortunately for your review, the only way in which we resemble the Weimar Republic is that domestic terror is once again mainly a leftist project. Otherwise, it’s as if Antifaschistische Aktion wanted us in the camps. Also, anyone who might describe the current situation a la Grosz would end up getting canceled.
Fondly regarded progressive readers: after the murders of Sarah and Yaron, the oft-repeated likening of Trump to Hitler hits different, as the kids say. Fine, you don’t like the president. I’m not asking you to. You may have substantive criticisms of his leadership beyond mere distaste; so do I. But when those of you who don’t know better invoke that comparison against a background of multiple, recent, and serious violent crimes against American Jews, perpetrated by progressives or beneficiaries of progressive immigration policies, you look foolish.
We who have probed the details of World War II and the origins of modern Arab nationalism deeply enough to connect them cannot take you seriously when you, having gazed at 20th-century German art, utter in a public forum that you feel like you’re living in the Weimar Republic. In June 2025, this isn’t mere silliness; it’s the kind of blithe disregard for Jewish life and suffering that characterizes much of contemporary progressivism, unfortunately.
We’re waiting for you to excoriate Hamas with the energy that you’ve dedicated to Trump all these years. Instead, it’s been two years of bupkis. During that time, you—I’m only speaking to the Americans here—have lived in conditions of opulence and liberty greater than most of the planet has ever seen. Trust me on this, I just came back from rural Nepal. While some of you were eating $24 plates of orecchiette in Tribeca last winter, some of them were washing their dishes in a patio sink in the snow. What you’re experiencing as ascendant fascism is, in reality, routine political disappointment, outrageously catastrophized. Please stop this. It’s uninformed and evinces a surfeit of privilege.
I’ve been thinking for a couple of weeks about how to respond to this outbreak of violent American Judenhass with art. No image would come to me, and rereading this bit of Ben Shahn clarified why: “The image that I sought to create was not one of a disaster, that somehow doesn’t interest me. I wanted instead to create the emotional tone that surrounds disaster; you might call it the inner disaster.” The brilliance of the Grosz painting considered in Laurie’s review is that he so aptly captured the inner disaster. She lamented that Grosz’s work affected no political change, but at least he dared to look. When I look at the inner disaster of contemporary America, it isn’t summed up by “Heil Hitler,” but by “Free Palestine.” That was exclaimed in so many words by both the D.C. and Boulder assailants. If I figure out how to make a picture out of it, I expect that its mere existence will prompt some unpleasant epithets. Let me suggest the first one: “degenerate.”
Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.
Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Art in America 1945-1970: Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism edited by Jed Perl. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.
The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is David Curcio: The Point of the Needle.
A million thanks, Franklin Einspruch, for this incisive commentary. It was exactly what I needed at this moment; indeed, its impact was such that upon reading the email version I felt compelled to navigate to your blog to resume my paid subscription, which I had put on hold because of the ballooning costs of maintaining so many various subscriptions.
As a Jew whose academic specialization was/is German literature, philosophy and culture, I have been disgusted by the specious comparisons made between Hitler and Trump, fascism and American democracy, false equivalencies that circulate widely throughout the progressive circles of today. Even some of my German friends, working academics whose field of expertise is antisemitism and the rise of Nazism, resort to such analogies. It's hugely disappointing--horrifying, in fact-- to me. You'd think that they of all people would know better. But their vision, like that of so many others caught up in the ideological frenzy of our time, is blinkered. They are comfortable having made a career of denouncing historical antisemitism of the right, but to the more blatant and much greater threat of leftist antisemitism today they close if not their eyes, then certainly their mouths. Hardly a peep out of them.
So, I thank you for having stated the case against such fallacious, ahistorical, and--as you rightly say--"invidious" comparisons. No self-respecting intellectual, indeed no thinking person, ought to be repeating this idiocy. They should be ashamed of themselves.
Good luck with that, Franklin. We're really talking about a quasi-religious cult, with all that implies. Perhaps, if it becomes too costly to carry on like cultists, they may desist or at least tone it down, but as long as their "truth" remains fashionable enough, don't hold your breath.