Literature A US journalist in Berlin in 1931 and right-wing populism today
"The End of Democracy" is the title under which literary scholar Oliver Lubrich is publishing eleven reportage essays by Dorothy Thompson. The US journalist wrote them in Berlin in 1931 and 1932. They are disturbingly topical.
06.11.2025, 10:03
SDA
In the 1920s, Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961) was the first woman to work as a correspondent for high-reach US media, first in Vienna and then in Berlin. From 1931 to 1934, she wrote about the downfall of the Weimar Republic as a reporter for the "Saturday Evening Post" in Philadelphia.
For example, in May 1931: Joseph Goebbels in the Berlin Sportpalast, the same place where he was to give his infamous speech on total war twelve years later. In 1931, Goebbels agitated against the Treaty of Versailles. Thompson observes the audience, "simple-looking men and women", 90 percent from the lower middle class. Their party, the NSDAP, was a party of the petty bourgeoisie, the journalist concludes. "This social group became radicalized out of fear of social decline," says Oliver Lubrich in an interview with the Keystone-SDA news agency. He is publishing Thompson's reportage essays under the title "The End of Democracy". The book will be available in stores from (today) Thursday.
"Basically the Trump effect"
She notices how skillfully the NSDAP staged Goebbels' appearance: Lighting effects, modern sound technology, flags, uniforms. "Like a movie production," comments Lubrich. "The Nazis used the latest media to appeal to the emotions."
Thompson found Goebbels himself unimpressive. She describes him as a "little man" in a double sense. "This is reminiscent of how she described her encounter with the future dictator in her 1932 book 'I Met Hitler'," says Lubrich. Thompson initially underestimated Hitler, but then understood that many people recognized themselves in his "pompous mediocrity". "That's basically the Trump effect. Academics in particular could not imagine that such a person would ever become president of the USA."
Thompson looks at the German youth, who are disappointed with democracy, capitalism and the West and want a fundamental upheaval in conditions. She interviews Reich Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, who distinguishes between cyclical and catastrophic crises. According to him, crises become catastrophic when economic and psychological factors coincide. As Thompson observes, they can destroy a democracy.
Conspiracy ideology and hysteria
"A crisis can become fatal if conspiracy ideologies fuel a general hysteria," says Lubrich. He is Professor of New German Literature at the University of Bern. He came across the now almost forgotten Thompson and her articles as part of a research project on traveling to dictatorships. And the psychological aspect of crises, which interests Thompson, is also a reason why her texts fascinate him.
At the time, the Germans felt humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles and the reparations imposed on them by the Allies after the First World War. Lubrich points out that emotionalization can continue even if its trigger has disappeared, as was the case with the reparations in 1932. "Applied to today, this means, for example, for the migration issue that the numbers are decreasing, but the excitement remains. Once a polarization has been created, it develops a momentum of its own that takes on a life of its own."
Thompson by no means minimizes the economic crisis of the Weimar Republic. According to Lubrich, she "shrewdly" recognized that an economic policy that privatized profits and socialized losses triggered fears of decline in the middle class.
The drug of right-wing populism
Lubrich considers Thompson's realization that people act against their own interests to be another "spectacular insight". "Right-wing populism works like a drug. It gives you feelings and you accept the consequences." This insight also helps us to understand many things today: "For example, that economically disadvantaged people vote for a multi-millionaire who enriches himself personally because his offer to act out resentments against foreigners and the educated provides so much satisfaction."
Lubrich also finds it remarkable how Thompson identifies a "transnational political climate change": an international rise in nationalism, growing xenophobia and a general tendency towards isolationism, which she brilliantly mocks as the "gray squirrel complex". The native squirrel seemed threatened by the foreign gray squirrel. "We also experience such conspiracy narratives of the 'great exchange' and 'foreign infiltration' today," says Lubrich. In the early 1930s, Thompson describes how people wanted to keep everything foreign out and therefore raised tariffs - "and the same people who were angry at everything foreign then became angry because this tariff policy had devastating consequences," says Lubrich. This creates a vicious circle.
Rural population against the city dwellers
In addition, Thompson describes the right-wing populist movement in 1931 and 1932 "as a revolt of the rural population against the city dwellers". "Today, we can observe major differences in voting behavior between urban and rural areas in Germany and the USA, as well as in Switzerland," says Lubrich.
In his epilogue in the book "The End of Democracy", the literature professor makes no reference to the present, unlike in the interview. In addition to the parallels, there are also differences. "The Germany of today is not the Germany of 1931 or 1932. It is not a presidential system in which people can rule by decree." This can be observed in the USA today. "What's more, the left in Germany is not anti-constitutional and the conservatives are not making common cause with the radical right, as they did in the Weimar Republic," says Lubrich.
But the parallels are striking. That makes for disturbing reading. Just as Thompson conveyed the dying republic and a society on the brink of collapse to her American audience back then, as a contemporary witness she conveys to today's readers a time in Germany that only seems to have passed at first glance. This is what makes her reportage essays so explosive.
