-Analysis-
HAMBURG — The year 2025 has just begun, but it feels as if the icy wind of history is constantly blowing down our necks. In view of the rise of the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the re-election of Donald Trump in the U.S., warnings are being issued across all political camps about a possible remake of the darkest turning point in German history.
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The Jusos, the youth organization of today’s Social Democratic Party (SDP), has recently put up posters for the upcoming national election with a 1930s-style font saying “Voting for the Far Right is So 1933.” At the same time, Friedrich Merz, the center-right CDU/CSU alliance’s candidate for chancellor, has declared that “One 1933 is enough for Germany.”
What seems even more worrying is that the next federal election, the one coming after the one next month, will take place in the year 2033, exactly 100 years after Adolf Hitler came to power.
But will this be of any help, conjuring up the dark ghosts of the past to predict our future?
Germany in 1933
We’re five minutes away from 1933 is the translated title of a book by intellectual Philipp Ruch. In Ruch’s opinion, Germany is currently no better protected from a takeover by the AfD than it was in 1933 from the Nazi Party. “This book takes a look into the future and invites us to suspect and prevent,” he wrote.
As with Merz and the Jusos, a surprisingly orthodox belief in history and its “compulsion to repeat” is revealed here, as psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud would have called it. The purpose of the book is clear: to free people from their fatal blindness to this inevitable return of disaster.
A bizarre “revival of the idea of fate in a world that once seemed committed to the belief in progress,” as Italian writer Nicola Chiaromonte put it in his 1971 book The Paradox of History.
But the truth is that the very specific situation of the winter of 1932-33 in Germany cannot be compared with the current political situation. The historical starting point, as Jens Bisky wrote in his excellent book, The Decision, about the years 1929 to 1934, was more than confusing; the whole country was still dominated by the emotional and financial distress of losing World War I and living in a wrecked country.
And after the crash of 1929, the global economic crisis plunged Germany into a maelstrom of disorientation, famine, political trench warfare, murder and street fighting. In 2025, however, we can afford the luxury of conducting a federal election campaign in which the debate is centered on health insurance contributions on capital gains and the question of which migrants should be repatriated.
Different times
The point here is not to trivialize the current dangers posed by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal territorial greed, the new right-wing nationalism, and the erratic rationality of U.S. President Donald Trump. Awareness of our past helps us to be vigilant when the separation of powers is damaged or when naivety or arty interest gains the upper hand — as in Austria.
But in Germany, despite all the parallels we like to draw, we have not yet faced a crisis as stark as we did in January 1933; neither the polarization nor the centrifugal forces have reached the size they had back then. As I write these lines, the most common search query on Google Germany is the release date of the new Playstation 6 video game console.
We are not 5 minutes away from 1933; we are 92 years after.
We are not 5 minutes away from 1933; we are 92 years after. No society will ever beam itself back to a historical state that has been overcome. And — this is crucial — unlike back then, in Germany we always have the negative historical blueprint in front of our eyes. Back then, as we faced the slow rise of the Nazi Party, no one could draw a warning parallel to the past: It was something completely new, and only the most alert minds sensed its epochal danger early on.
People staggered through the early 1930s in Germany in a state of dismay — described in a way that is as frightening as it is enlightening by German writer Erich Kästner in his 1931 novel Fabian. In a world that has become amoral, the protagonist Fabian searches for a new morality — but cannot find it.
The world is off the rails
“The world is off the rails” was Kästner’s diagnosis at the time, as his alter ego character Fabian put it. But he too could not think of any way to counteract the risks and side effects; there was no leaflet on how to interpret the future in the Weimar Republic.
And there couldn’t have been one: Even in 1931 or 1932, it was not yet clear what kind of 1933 would follow. It is always naive (and very convenient) to claim historical inevitability in retrospect. Instead we must, “expose ourselves again to the fundamental uncertainty of the historical situation,” says University of Jena historian Franka Maubach.
That requires courage because “such historical enlightenment must dare to make the risks of an open future comprehensible.”
People conjure up historical parallels out of fear.
And yet, some of the things that were true for 1933 are also true for 2025. When German director Dominik Graf recently made Fabian into a film, he explained: “Today’s world is moving again in the coordinates, longitudes and latitudes of the mentalities of the ’20s and ’30s.”
But Volker Kutscher, author of the novel that inspired the Babylon Berlin TV series, warned the public against this danger in an essay for German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel: people conjure up historical parallels out of fear, and this fosters a sense of fatalism that erases the reality that history never really repeats itself.
Nazi comparisons age poorly
Even more crucial than the skewed historical comparisons is the emotional-psychological dimension of the constant invocation of “Weimar conditions” and the “new 1933.”
It trivializes the conditions of our tragic pas. Because all comparisons of our world today with the barbarism and bestiality that began in Germany on Jan. 30, 1933 and killed millions of people is simply underestimating the unthinkable horrors of that time.
All Nazi comparisons age very badly. Just think of former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s calling political rival Heiner Geissler “the most gifted German demagogue since Joseph Goebbels”; or former Justice Minister Herta Däubler-Gmelin’s parallels between the methods of former U.S. President George W. Bush’s and those of Adolf Hitler; or Jens Spahn’s warning that “for the first time since Hermann Göring” we see antisemites in the German parliament.
History repeats itself twice — first as a tragedy, and then as a farce.
It is arduous but important that we look for new arguments for the present, arguments that draw their persuasive power from their own depth and not from the invocation of a past in which today — unlike in 1933 — everyone can very easily place themselves on the right side.
And you also think you are on the right side if you quote Karl Marx. After all, he had already said that history repeats itself twice — first as a tragedy, and then as a farce. But what Marx wrote in 1852 is much more enlightening: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living… precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service.”
That is a great description — the ghosts of the past are put to use, used, and they “weigh” on us like a “nightmare.”
Rookie mistake
Marx would say calling everything we don’t like “a new 1933” is a rookie mistake. Quoting Marx himself “the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.”
Yes, let us look for a new language; let us look for new answers to the pressing, frightening and disturbing questions of our present. Let us not make it too easy for ourselves by constantly invoking the black-and-white pictures of 1933. The Israeli Holocaust researcher Yehuda Bauer summed it up with the following formula when talking about antisemitism: “It is not like 1933. But it is still dangerous.”
Only when we approach the otherness of the political complexities of our time can we see them eye to eye in their true forms.
The 20th century in Europe was in some ways a deeply abnormal century.
Or should we look a little further back? Christopher Clark, a historian who teaches in Cambridge and who has precisely described the imponderable nature of historical developments based on the situation before World War I in his 2012 book The Sleepwalkers, convincingly warned against the constant references to the 20th century.
It is human to keep looking for historical comparisons, but the danger is that they are almost always used by politicians in a manipulative way or to present current developments as “inevitable.” It is important to recognise “that the 20th century in Europe was in some ways a deeply abnormal century, both in its ultra-brutal first half and in its super-peaceful second half,” Clark said. He added a surprising piece of advice: To understand our chaotic and confusing European present, he recommends looking back to the 19th century.
“If we can just look past the nightmare of the 20th century, we will recognize many patterns from the 19th century: turbulent, changeable, chaotic but strangely familiar.” That sounds very interesting. If we take a look back and try to understand 1833, then we might understand 1933 — and maybe even this strange 2025.
