The Analogy Wars

By John Podhoretz

Sunday, May 24, 2026

 

For a decade, we’ve been awash in analogies between America in the Age of Trump and Germany in the two decades following World War I. The central feature of these analogies, of course, is that they inevitably lead to the likening of Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. I’m so old that I remember when Ronald Reagan was the second coming of Hitler and George W. Bush was too, but the Trump-Hitler analogizers assure me that this time it’s different. Oh, how they long for the Republicans of an earlier era whom they or their predecessors in the Establishment slandered and reviled at the time! No, see, this time, these intellectually disingenuous folk insist, democracy really is at risk. This time it’s on the verge of being overtaken by a dictatorship.

 

Now, let me stipulate for the record that I believe Trump’s response to the 2020 election and his encouragement of the riot on January 6 are among the most sordid turns of any modern presidency. But all I see, through thick and thin, is that our system is holding the line against the efforts Trump and his people have made against the good working order of the Constitution—as it did, by the way, when Joe Biden and his people also used “emergency powers” and non-existent authority to suspend basic American rights during Covid. All this is exactly what did not happen in Germany, which barely had a system in place anyway after World War I because its form of government had been destroyed.

 

But lately, an analogy between the United States today and Germany 90 years ago is beginning to haunt me. In recent months I have read two extraordinary novels originally published many decades past, retranslated from the German, and rereleased in the past two years. Recovered from their obscurity, Effingers and The Oppermanns are among the most affecting works of literature I have ever read—in part because of the unexpected and unfortunate resonance they have with the present.

 

They were rediscovered, as their translators tell us in their introductions, because their portraits of rising authoritarianism in Germany reflect our moment. These translators, and their publishers, believe these books are warnings of Trump before Trump, and we must therefore read them in horror and either gird ourselves for a dark dystopian future or man the barricades to prevent that future.

 

But these translators and publishers have it backward, because Trump is exactly the point at which the analogy breaks down.

 

The two novels are about families who prosper in the 19th century due to entrepreneurial energy and zeal, at which point they must contend with modern forces and new ideas that separate them from their roots and tear them apart. The startling commonalities between the two books are the direct result of their reliance on a common literary model, Thomas Mann’s multigenerational family novel called Buddenbrooks. But there is a key difference between the rise and fall of the Buddenbrooks family and the fates of the Effingers and Oppermanns. Mann’s novel ends with the family in ruins in the 1880s due to self-inflicted wounds. The Effingers and Oppermanns must contend with an outside force determined to ruin them. For they are Jews, and the Nazis are coming.

 

The author of Effingers is Gabriele Tergit, and her novel was published in 1951 to very little notice. It is a highly detailed, extraordinarily realistic, and astonishingly clear-eyed account of three generations in the life of a family, and it concludes in 1948 with a description of the now-devastated Berlin, emptied of all Effingers and their kin, their homes blasted to pieces. No one is left to remember them at all, though there is one relative who survives—a daughter of the family who moved to Palestine in 1938.

 

A solitary Zionist girl is also a character in The Oppermanns, the work of Lion Feuchtwanger, one of Germany’s most famous and successful writers in the 1920s and 1930s. While Effingers is a small masterpiece, The Oppermanns is something larger, something grander, something far more uncanny. It’s like a work of prophecy. Feuchtwanger wrote it in real time, during the year 1933. He and Tergit both describe the tightening of the Nazi noose brilliantly, but Tergit was describing a past she had lived through and come out of on the other side. Feuchtwanger was chronicling in detail, as though to a daily diary, how the Nazis came to power, consolidated power, and systematically destroyed the institutions of power to replace them with new ones of their own.

 

And he showed terrifyingly uncanny foresight about where it would all end.

 

The book’s concluding section is about a man who is sent to a concentration camp. Remember, his book was written and concludes…in 1933.

 

The Oppermanns is a book about the Final Solution published a decade before the world would learn that it had been put into motion. From the quotidian practices of the nascent Nazi regime, Feuchtwanger saw how it would work and how it would all end, years before the Nazis themselves came up with the systematic plan for it.

 

There are three Oppermann brothers. One is a renowned doctor. One is a celebrated scholar and bon vivant. One runs the family furniture business that pays for their extraordinarily comfortable life. Over the course of the novel, the furniture business is slowly but surely squeezed and then taken over by an Aryan “partner.” The scholar is kicked out of his club, denied the right to publish, loses his home and his art collection, and is driven into exile. The doctor, who had created a revolutionary method of administering anesthesia, is driven from his hospital by a Nazi raid targeting 24 Jewish physicians.

 

The son of the businessman is targeted for abuse by a Nazi teacher at his high school for supposedly defaming a great German hero of the past. He is told to be reasonable, to recant, to apologize. These people just need to get their way, and there’s no harm and no foul if you try and give them a little of what they want. This is what happens, page after page, in both novels—the efforts to accommodate, make peace, find a workaround for the hatred. But there can be no workaround. There is no way to live as reasonable and civilized people when the people who have the truncheons and the guns and the power to write laws are determined to drive you low, drive you down, drive you out, and are happy to see you dead.

 

The schoolboy sees the future unfolding before him. And commits suicide.

 

Again, written in 1933.

 

So what here resonates so strongly for me, then? The analogy the book really offers is about the accommodation of evil—and in our day, not of those to the right to Trump, but of the liberal establishment to the unambiguous political violence being embraced by their fellow progressives. This is evidenced by the peculiar hunger to change the topic and ignore the ramifications of the assassinations of a young political speaker on a college campus and a health-care executive getting a cup of coffee on a New York City street. And that, in turn, is mirrored and matched by the mute impotence with which they are greeting the takeover of their ideological bubble by people who are actively scapegoating Jews and blaming us for the evils of the world.

 

It is a short distance from the unwillingness of House Democrats to censure an anti-Semitic congresswoman in 2019 to the apparently successful Democratic primary candidacies of an open supporter of the Hamas slaughter of Jews in the Michigan Senate race and a well-to-do WASP with a Nazi tattoo in Maine. The failure of one effort to cauterize a suppurating wound ends up seven years later with an entire party in a state of sepsis—one of the two major political parties in the most important country on earth.

 

The establishment, we now realize, has been standing by for decades. I’m talking, just to take one example, about the Harvard admissions officers who have seen to it—because the outcome could only have come about due to conscious design—that their undergraduate classes have no more than seven Jews out of every 100 students. They do not trumpet this, for after all, their consciences are clear, because they believe they are acting on behalf of worthier causes; admitting different kinds of people from different kinds of groupings is their mission. And what is unspoken, but known, is that Jews are trouble. No, not because Jews protest and make demands, but because they lead others, the ones they want to let in, to protest against Jews and make demands against Jews and blame the university for it all. And that’s very unpleasant. Best not allow Jews in; you keep the peace without them.

 

This is how it starts. This is what happens to the scholar in The Oppermanns. And the student in The Oppermanns. And the businessman in The Oppermanns. And the doctor in The Oppermanns. This is how they come for us.

 

And this is where the translators and saviors of The Oppermanns and Effingers have it exactly wrong. The analogy to 1933 is there, because the mob is there, because the Jew-haters are there, because the genociders are waiting for their chance. But miraculously—and I think I mean that literally, that “miraculously”—there is a force staying their hand.

 

And it isn’t the monster of their nightmares. It’s the president himself, who has empowered his Justice and Education Departments to fight for the rights of Jewish students on campus. It’s the president himself, who targeted the worst anti-Semite in Congress for defeat in an Arkansas primary. It’s the president himself, who has become the best friend the Jewish state has ever had.

 

He doesn’t like the restraints of the Constitution. He seems unbothered by people in his ambit using his power to enrich themselves. He wants to use the justice system to punish his enemies. All these things are bad—very bad. But he is fighting for and alongside and with Jews. So anyone who, after all this time, continues to look at Donald Trump and see Hitler—well, that person can go straight to hell.