Against Authoritarian Determinism

For German readers, Lion Feuchtwanger is a celebrated figure of the Weimar era, who was forced into exile, but left a mark on language and culture. English readers have recently rediscovered The Oppermanns, with a new edition from 2022, introduced by author Joshua Cohen. I came to Feuchtwanger’s The Oppermanns late. Since picking it up, I’ve been deeply unsettled by it – more than by any novel I’ve read in a long time.

Published 1934, The Oppermanns tells the story of a wealthy German-Jewish family in the early years of the “nationalist” rise to power. At the heart of the narrative is a family furniture business – something like a proto-IKEA of its day – offering affordability to its middle-class clients across the country. Of the four siblings, only one, Martin, truly manages the business. The others pursue lives in medicine, literature, or leisure. One of the villas in which the story unfolds is not far from where I’m located, for nearly a year now, in Berlin.

My grandfather came to this city from East Prussia to study law and started a small business as an attorney before being forced to close it, with the Nuremberg Laws. He wasn’t of the Oppermanns’ class, but he might have furnished his flat with their wares. He grew up in poverty and aspired, I imagine, from a young age, to belong to the city’s liberal bourgeoisie. The company’s showrooms promised that kind of belonging.

So, I could only have thought of my grandfather while reading the book. What gives the novel its shattering power is that it was written before the Holocaust, the period when he lived and worked here. Its characters do not know where German politics is headed. In their living rooms, they exchange views on a preoccupying question: what’s going on with the rise of the Nationalists? They try to assess, emotionally and rationally, how worried they should be. Zionism appears, here and there, mainly as one option for emigration, not necessarily a central one. Mostly one for the less privileged. My grandfather reached Palestine in 1936.

“It Could Happen Here”

Comparisons between Germany in the 1930s and today’s Israel have always struck me as clichés—exaggerated, parochial, historically flattening. For some years now, the warning “it could happen here” has been voiced almost daily among Israeli liberals, and on the pages of our newspaper of choice, Haaretz.

The same distaste for platitude, I think, emerges from Cohen’s masterful introduction to the volume, written from New York, with Biden in the White House: “Under the Trump presidency, many would-be Cassandras quoted (and misquoted) the dead Germans and German Jews of Weimar; many warned of a Weimar sequel occurring here at home; comparisons were drawn between the storming of the Capitol and the Reichstag Fire.” Cohen is writing, of course, about Trump’s first Presidency.

Distaste for hyperbole aside, the last couple of weeks in Israel have been particularly dramatic, not only due to the continued, daily atrocities in Gaza; but also due to serious setbacks in the internal struggle for what is left of Israeli democracy. One recent example was the initiative to oust Member of the Knesset, Ayman Odeh, the most principled voice for cooperation among Palestinians and Jewish Israelis for peace and social justice. On almost any given night, including as I write these words, violent settlers attack Palestinian communities in the West Bank and set fire to their belongings. For some of us, “it could happen here” has increasingly transformed into “it is happening here”. I imagine Cohen is now experiencing an anxiety that is not entirely different, following Trump’s immigration raids in Los Angeles.

In other words, reading The Oppermanns at this time therefore breathed new life into the analogy between what happened then and what is happening now. However, rather than observing, once again, that “it could happen here” (Israel), the book also serves as a chilling reminder that it could have not happened in Germany. The novel’s most devastating insights emerge from the never-ending living room conversations: what comes next? The most reasonable and wise characters are those who resist panic. Such conversations invariably reminded me of conversations my Israeli friends and I are having over dinners here in Germany. In the book, the relatively more optimistic family members turn out to be disastrously wrong. Could we be just as mistaken in our own pessimism?

A tempting but corrosive thought about Israeli politics – and about many other places – is that we have already embarked on a one-way road to authoritarianism. This “authoritarian determinism”, sometimes presented as a kind of seasoned realism, assumes that political trajectories continue unidirectionally. There is a world of difference between the many political contexts in which authoritarianism seems to be on the rise. And yet, a common question seems to be asked: in the face of authoritarian determinism, what can be saved of the democratic process? Until when does it make sense to hold on?

Holding On to Contingency

For some historians, in the Palestinian national movement and beyond, Zionism is a teleological project. Its essence, they argue, could only have developed in one direction: toward the erasure of the Palestinian people.

For example, in a recent conversation on the podcast Arab 48, the brilliant sociologist Honaida Ghanim described Zionism as an essentially religious project, now revealed as fundamentalist. As far as I understand, Zionism did have a theological core (as a descriptive observation, not a normative one). But I remain deeply uncomfortable with any idea that its religious component spelled a non-democratic future from the get go.

In Einat Weizman’s recent film, Agenda Item: Erasure, the same thesis of authoritarian determinism also features prominently. Six figures belonging to the Israeli anti-occupation left reenact the text of a real governmental meeting concerning the events of the Nakba, the violent 1948 displacement of Palestinians. Sounds and references to the current war of annihilation in Gaza are superimposed. The sense of a continuity in destruction is as tough as it is unescapable.

Despite their tragic ending, however, what The Oppermanns show is that any uniformity of historical progress only emerges in hindsight. This basic truth is not due to a lack of foresight, of sophistication, or of critical thinking. One can only understand one’s own historical moment in terms of a multiplicity of possible political futures.

Perhaps there are also scholarly historical tools that insist on such contingency; and that can therefore also serve as an antidote to the pull towards authoritarian determinism. Recently, historian and genocide scholar Amos Goldberg described such a method, in an essay dedicated to a historian friend of his, Alon Konfino (who passed away a year ago). Goldberg writes:

Alon was deeply committed to the contingency of history—that is, to the idea that it has a random and unpredictable dimension. Even if events are not entirely accidental, since they have causes and a certain direction, they are not inevitable. He believed this wholeheartedly, and in his writings on both subjects, he devoted considerable thought to it. He insisted that neither the “Final Solution” nor the Nakba were preordained, even if they were, of course, not random. In this, Alon challenged two extreme positions. In the case of the Final Solution, he distanced himself from the determinism of the view that saw it as arising almost inevitably from Nazi antisemitic ideology, as well as from the determinism of the view that regarded it as the unavoidable outcome of the Nazi bureaucratic machine […]

In precisely the same way, Alon explained the Nakba. Here too, he rejected the position of Ilan Pappé, for example, who regarded the ethnic cleansing as the inevitable result of orders and planning from above—for instance, in the form of the well-known Plan D from March 1948. Just as firmly, he rejected the views of historians like Anita Shapira, who argued that the Nakba occurred accidentally as a result of the course of the war, not due to any fault on the Jewish side but primarily as the responsibility of the Arab side.

The realisation that both histories could have been different—and that in the sense their meanings are still open questions—is analytically compelling. But I think right now it might also be a moral imperative.

Contingency and Action

The reach of contingency also includes the shorter historical arc through which we Israelis now live: the trajectory from the horrific events of 7 October to the present. The fact that we are now well within the unfolding of a genocide against the Palestinian people does not mean that this was inevitable from October 2023. And it certainly does not mean the same dynamic must continue. It surely can continue. But we may only understand the present moment if we also consider alternative trajectories—and what may lead to them.

From our own perspective, when we sit and discuss the unknown future in the living rooms of our rented flats, we are right in experiencing history as radically unpredictable. The Oppermanns’ holocaust-in-the-making is not yet a holocaust as “foundational past” (Konfino’s term), or laden with “memory culture”. It is shifting sand, not stable soil. And the Bill to oust Odeh? Despite all odds, it has failed to obtain approval. One ultra-religious party is cross with Netanyahu. And so, the voice for equality and for social justice will—for now—still have his seat. I think it is fair to say that all of us who are roughly within Odeh’s political camp felt like we picked up a windfall.

The deeply disorienting sense of impending authoritarianism that many now have, may ultimately prove prescient. There are few places where “it could happen here” can still be brushed off as a mere platitude. And yet, whatever we do, only by preserving that sense of contingency can we maintain the capacity to act.