The Italian writer Siegmund Ginzberg began writing 1933 syndrome (Gatopardo) almost six years ago, when we had not yet gone through a global pandemic nor had Russia invaded Ukraine. Donald Trump had not led the assault on the Capitol either, Italy had not built prisons abroad for asylum seekers, nor had the extreme right gained the largest number of MEPs in the history of the EU. That is why Ginzberg warns in the text that any coincidence between the historical facts he mentions and the examples that come to the reader’s head between pages are just that, coincidences. “I don’t have solutions or recipes, I just offer food for thought,” he says. But your warning prevents us from advancing through each chapter with the same feeling of déjá vu which he himself recognizes, with numerous phrases in which we can change the name of the protagonist, at different moments in the story, and so that the text continues to reflect reality.
“We are approaching the 30s of the 21st century. The crisis that threatens Europe, America and the entire world is different from that of then. And yet, it is impressive to see how certain situations are repeated, not identical, but similar, analogous,” writes the intellectual and journalist of the Italian Communist Party newspaper L’Unita. As soon as the interview with elDiario.es from Rome begins, he insists that he prefers to talk about analogies and not similarities. “The text is from 2018, I couldn’t imagine that Trump would be president again or that we would have a female prime minister in Italy.” [Giorgia Meloni] who denies the neo-fascist origin of his party. I just hope it helps to understand what is happening.”
With journalistic overtones and numerous literary references, the essay reviews the factors that facilitated Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in the 1930s and delves into the symptoms of Nazism between the economic crisis, the use of immigration, distrust in politicians and the role of the media. They are symptoms of the past, but, as the author says, “they resurface and threaten to bring us dangerously close to a past that we thought we had overcome.”
Ginzberg emigrated in 1956, at the age of eight, to an Italy “that was not as racist or rejecting immigrants” as today. “They were very welcoming to a Jewish boy who came from Türkiye,” he says, acknowledging that as an immigrant he feels very closely one of the issues that forms the backbone of his book. The demonization of immigrants carried out by right-wing and extreme right-wing parties around the world is interchangeable throughout the entire text with that carried out by the Nazis against the Jews.
“It wasn’t difficult to imagine the analogy. German antisemitism, in theory, was inspired by French antisemitism and American antisemitism. At that time, the most important American industrialist, Henry Ford, was also a rabid anti-Semite. And Hitler adopted his thesis about the Jews,” explains Ginzberg. “People were afraid of immigrants because they saw millions arriving from the East fleeing wars, poverty. “People were afraid of that and Nazi propaganda used it against the Jews.”
The immigrants that nobody wants
In 1933 syndromeGinzberg writes that “what matters about a lie is not its veracity or its plausibility, but the emotions it arouses.” In Germany at the time, fiction authors and a large sector of the press fueled hatred against Jews and immigrants by linking them to crimes of all kinds. Today Vox hangs posters in the Madrid Metro to spread hoaxes such as that rent aid falls on immigrants and Trump returns to the White House after claiming in the campaign that Haitian immigrants stole pets from Springfield (Ohio) to eat the animals. “If that’s not hate, then I don’t know what is,” says the writer.
Ginzberg assures that then as now it is enough to replace “Jews” with “illegal immigrants, or simply “migrants.” 1933 syndrome remember that attempt by the United States to distribute the Jews that Germany wanted to expel from the country by holding an international meeting with 32 countries. ”In words, the international community was understanding and supportive,” says Ginzberg. ”It turned out to be an absolute failure.” A newspaper of the time titled the news “Nobody wants them.”
Today we have become accustomed to reading headlines like “The 6,000 migrant minors that nobody wants” or, in the case of a center to welcome them in Madrid, “Nobody wants La Cantueña”. The rejection of the distribution of migrant minors is one of the pillars of Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s opposition while Vox suspends budget negotiations with the PP for discussing this issue with the PSOE. “There must be a strong predisposition, a deep-rooted prejudice, to awaken such broad and enthusiastic support for hatred against those who are different,” reflects Ginzberg, for whom Nazi ideologues spoke to an “already convinced” public.
The author argues that it is important to recognize the difficulty of talking about immigration without falling into the traps of the extreme right. “If we are also faced with an orchestrated campaign of lies about immigrants, then it is very difficult to fight against that,” he says. In the case of Germany, he points out that this hatred came from the envy of German society towards the Jews “because they are cultured, rich, successful, happier than them.” His second hypothesis is the opposite sentiment, since migrant Jews were among the poorest sectors of the population.
“These two interpretations are far from being contradictory,” he adds. “We see it every day: those who most abhor immigrants are also those who most repudiate the elites, whom they accuse of ignoring the unrest ‘of the people’, of those ‘left behind’.” Just as Ginzberg was writing these lines, the Italian Minister of the Interior declared on television that those who pity the immigrants, refugees and castaways from the Mediterranean who will be accommodated in “three-star hotels” should worry about the needs of Italians in difficulty.
Then as now, none of these statements would have the impact they achieved without the role of the mass media of the time and the social networks of today. “As soon as they occupied the Government, they took over the media outlet that had proven to be more important than the entire press combined. “They got their hands on the radio,” he writes. Ginzberg remembers that in 1933 a cheap transistor was presented at the International Radio Fair, held in Berlin. The device was baptized “the people’s receiver” or “301”, after the date of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, January 30. In just six years, 70% of German homes had a transistor.
“Who knows what they would have achieved if they had also had television and social networks,” he writes. Now he recognizes that he was one of many who wondered what tycoon Elon Musk was doing buying Twitter. “He has given all his broadcasting power to Trump and has returned the favor with much more than he invested,” he comments. A few days after the interview, Musk spent several hours criticizing a US Congressional budget plan that prevented the government from shutting down due to lack of funds. The parliamentarians ended up voting against it.
Ginzberg also admits, in the case of Nazism, the feeling that the main witnesses of the danger that lurked did not always describe it as such. When he was appointed chancellor, “the American newspaper The Nation had considered Hitler as the ‘theatrical’ expression of a generalized popular protest” while The New York Times He reassured his readers by stating that in Germany “everything continues as before.” The Italian intellectual warns of the “normalization” into which the media can fall by remembering that in 1938 the American magazine TIME chose Hitler as personality of the year —in 2024 the recognition has gone to Trump—. “That seemed normal to them, but then Hitler was already planning the worst and his anti-Semitism was quite terrible,” he laments.
Interest in news, but not in politics
“The emergence of Hitler and the threats to freedom of the press had awakened readers’ interest in news, although not in politics,” says Ginzberg. Meanwhile, in the decade before 1933, politicians, journalists and analysts ignored another detail: “In fourteen years they had had thirteen chancellors and twenty-one governments that did not achieve stability. However, during that period, the decisions of the electorate had been essentially unchanged (…) The dividing line was established between right and left. But at that moment a party emerged that declared itself “neither left nor right,” but “of the people.”
Even so, he writes that “it is extremely tempting to blame the voters, the people who allow themselves to be deceived,” but he supports the opinion of other intellectuals who point to the economic causes that led Nazism to have the “critical mass” of voters, enough support to seize power. “Germans voted mainly according to their economic interests, opting for the parties that cared most about their problems, or at least that’s what they promised,” he explains.
Nazism took advantage of it. They dismantled all charitable and solidarity associations to replace them with the “Directorate for the Welfare of the People.” Ginzberg reports that they boasted of “the largest social entity in the world,” still considered “the mainstay of Nazi social engineering.” The organization managed everything from pensions to rent to unemployment or disability benefits, hospices, loans and even health insurance.
“You will understand why I felt a chill in 2018, when I heard Vice Presidents Salvini and Di Maio refer to the General Budget Law as an ‘investment for the happiness of Italians,’” he explains. “I am scared by a present that imitates the past blindly, unintentionally, perhaps without realizing it,” the author writes. Although Ginzberg admits that “Qanon, the Madrid Forum, Trump’s Project 2025 and Salvini’s ‘the Beast’ have not invented gunpowder” and we do not lack examples of “undesirable” leaders who have won democratic elections, “believing that we can exorcise them Comparing them to the Duce or the Führer is absurd. In addition to being fallacious from a logical and historical point of view, it is counterproductive.”
“I am not afraid of the four imbeciles who glorify the fascist or Nazi past, but I am a little afraid of those who pretend not to know what they are saying or what they are doing, those of “I didn’t mean…”, “I am a fascist?”, says the author. “It takes very little for a light anger, an affable ‘I’m not a racist, but…’ to transform into implacable hatred, into a ferocity that does not listen to reason.” Despite the collection of analogies between past and present that his essay includes, he insists that politics “remains the only thing that can save us.”
But how can it save us? Ginzberg speaks of resistance in the private sphere such as that exercised by German women married to Jews and who protested against their deportation. “The fight for human rights, for vulnerable people, for the LGTBI community…” emphasizes the Italian intellectual. “That may be the way, perhaps not to defeat them, but to stop them. I hope so, I am full of hope and desperate at the same time.”
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