Germany has some of the strictest historical regulations in the world and views the Holocaust as a unique event, unlike anything else. Gessen’s essay wove together official and unofficial ways in which the Holocaust is remembered, how the Boycott Israel movement in Germany is portrayed as anti-Semitic, and how the right today accuses critics of anti-Semitism. The German-Israeli Society indirectly accused the essay of anti-Semitism, which is important considering that Gessen is Jewish and has a grandfather who was murdered by the Nazis. The ceremony was later rescheduled without the involvement of the Böll Foundation.
Load
Given the complexity of historical comparisons and the fact that the Internet has become a living example of where bad analogies, especially about Nazi Germany, are rampant, I found myself wondering what responsibility an author has in making such comparisons.
According to Gessen, who is visiting Australia this month, there is nothing unique about historical comparisons; there are just the “basic” duties required of all writers: “They have to use your voice, they have to use your words, they have to use your platform and be as accurate and honest as they can be at all times.”
As Gessen suggested, historical comparison unravels the present, especially during a crisis. It saves the reader from getting lost in the relentless chaos of social media and 24-hour news coverage, and instead challenges us to look back and find meaning.
Unfortunately, such insights are not always comforting. Gessen uses the wisdom of earlier thinkers, often survivors of totalitarianism such as Václav Havel or Arendt herself, to illuminate the present moment, suggesting that history can repeat itself.
“There is no such thing as a one-to-one comparison in history or in life,” Gessen admits. Reality is far too complex for an unqualified comparison. How, for example, can one compare the stagnant Soviet life articulated in Gessen’s non-fiction book with The future is historycompared to our superfluid information landscape?
“I was thinking about the static and dynamic dimensions of totalitarian propaganda,” explains Gessen. The static dimensions are the fixed ideology, the public face that is known in the West. “In school, you learn that the working class rules our country (the former Soviet Union) and is good, and the bourgeois class is bad, and these things will never change.”
Less appreciated were the so-called dynamic dimensions of Soviet life. These required citizens to anticipate subtle changes in the official leadership. “You have to be careful … because your life depends on it,” explains Gessen.
“You can only learn what you are supposed to know by listening to what the regime tells you, because you cannot acquire this knowledge independently because it has no connection to reality. And I think that is the Trumpian model,” says Gessen. It is also “the life experience of many Americans … what they hear, what they are told, has nothing to do with their life experience.”
The Man Without a Face by Masha Gessen.
Gessen, who wrote a biography of Vladimir Putin in 2012, The man without a facesays that both Trump and Putin lie not to deceive but to attack the notion of truth. So by fulfilling their responsibility, a writer can counteract this. One technique Gessen uses is the academic practice of defining words to restore meaning to an eroded landscape.
Gessen says an editor wanted Gessen to use poll numbers to claim President Joe Biden was acting “undemocratically” by refusing to resign. But as they point out, there’s a huge gap between poll numbers and democracy. The editor was “this super-smart, well-informed person who, in my opinion, didn’t take the time to think about the definition of a term we throw around all the time.”
In Surviving the autocracyGessen quotes the Russian poet Sergei Gandlevsky, who explains that journalists have to rebuild the trust of a deeply cynical public after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He advocated the “language of the hardware store,” that is, the use of simple, unadorned sentences. “That’s good writing hygiene,” argues Gessen, citing as an example a phrase like “rust belt,” which is so laden with deindustrialization baggage that “everyone associates their own ideas with it.” Gessen argues that it is easy enough to throw off this baggage and list all the states that the “rust belt” includes.
For Gessen, journalists helped normalize Trump with their “objective style.” They took “horrific things” and “translated them into political language in their reporting, making them almost invisible.” One example was a letter from Trump to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. “The journalist shouldn’t call it diplomacy, because that’s not what it is – it’s a confused letter that sounds like it was written by an eight-year-old.”
Load
Gessen is currently working on a book about “imaginative political projects” in which he examines the “Parallelpolis,” a theoretical model developed by Czech and Polish dissidents in the 1970s that describes how to be political in a totalitarian regime. Rather than clashing with power, this model proposes a ready-to-use alternative in the event of regime collapse.
Gessen had just finished revising a chapter on the Israeli community village of Neve Shalom (Wahat al-Salam) when the October 7 Hamas attack changed everything. They realized that it was not enough to look at political projects in isolation, as the original theory had suggested. They had to place them within the host country’s aggressions and geopolitical ambitions. “Now I’m revising it again,” says Gessen.
The work of comparison seems to be as alive and fluid as the present moment.
Masha Gessen will perform at the Wheeler Centre at The Edge, Federation Square, Melbourne on 21 August (wheelercentre.com). They will perform at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at Carriageworks in Sydney on 24 and 25 August (festivalofdangerousideas.com).
