“Hitler had to abolish democracy to take over Berlin.” — Wendy Lesser
“Ich bin ein Berliner” (I Am a Berliner), JFK famously said in West Berlin on June 26, 1963, in the face of Soviet imperial tyranny. Today, Wendy Lesser is offering the same defiance in her new book Berlin Before and After. Only Lesser offers a cautionary mirror for our times of not just post-Soviet Putin but also wannabe-tyrants like Trump.
Lesser’s loving portrait of Berlin is of a free city. She reminds us that even in Germany’s darkest hour, Berlin never actually went Nazi. The city voted left up to and including 1933, so Hitler had to abolish democracy to take it over. Nor, Lesser argues, was Nazism a reaction to Weimar Berlin’s Cabaret-style nightlife, any more than Trump is a reaction to wokeness. Economic forces, not cultural ones, she insists, enable dictators.
Today’s Berlin, as a city that memorializes its own crimes, offers America an urban lesson in acknowledging historical guilt. That’s what makes Berlin such a defiant beacon of freedom in our authoritarian age. There are more urbane cities than Berlin, but none quite as dedicated to freedom. Go there and/or read Berlin Before and After. Today we should all be Berliners.
Five Takeaways
• Our Own 1929 — or 1932? The book began as a love letter to the Berlin Lesser adopted in 2003 — the everywhere writer of Berkeley, New York, and Berlin, against Lampedusa the ultimate somewhere, who never left Sicily and carried Shakespeare through the coffee houses of Palermo. But as she wrote, America’s condition worsened: “We were not only in our own 1929, but perhaps in 1930, ’31, or even ’32 — verging on our own descent into frightening dictatorship.” Hence the subtitle’s cautionary mirror — though history, she insists, never exactly repeats itself, and the American analogies came unforced, surfacing every thirty or forty pages without hammering. Being an everywhere, she says, doesn’t make you write better — Lampedusa proves that — “but it improves your life,” and it gave her the subjects her native California never could.
• Berlin Never Went Nazi. The episode’s revelation: the city of Weimar flamboyance never gave the Nazis a majority — Berlin voted left up to and including 1933, and “Hitler had to abolish democracy to take over Berlin.” From which follows her sharpest argument: Nazism was not a backlash against Berlin’s sexual and artistic freedoms, “just as I do not see the election of Trump as a reaction to so-called wokeness or trans rights. Cultural manifestations do not cause such government changes. Economic forces do” — wealth gaps, regional deprivation, the east feeling second-class, then and now (the AfD’s heartland). The direct equivalences are rhetorical: America’s poisoned-blood language on immigrants comes “straight from the Goebbels playbook,” and the rights that flowered in twenties Germany were “instantly squished” in the thirties. As for today: the AfD polls high before Berlin’s September city elections, but the firewall holds — and the party is formally flagged by German intelligence as constitutionally dangerous. Andrew’s question stands: any vaccines for this thing?
• 1929: The Year Everything Premiered. Why that year: Grosz, Sander, and Otto Dix at their peak; Brecht and Piscator both premiering; All Quiet on the Western Front, the underrated Grand Hotel, and Berlin Alexanderplatz in the bookshops — plus Thomas Mann’s Mario and the Magician, the novella that predicted fascism; Billy Wilder still a weekly-paper journalist shooting his first film; and Christopher Isherwood arriving on the first visit that became Goodbye to Berlin and, via Broadway, Cabaret. “Only in retrospect do we see these things as major.” The culture flourished beside economic and political chaos — “having a terrible government is not inconsistent with producing good culture. Look at nineteenth-century Russia” — and when the chaos won, the exiles washed up in the German ghetto of Los Angeles: Brecht (on the beach, per this week’s Baerwald episode), Döblin, Mann. Many went back — Brecht in 1949, Piscator after — because in Hollywood and New York they “couldn’t live on the thin slice of culture,” a homesickness Lesser saw again in Berkeley’s own Czesław Miłosz, watching Americans like children playing in a sandbox.
• After Means 1989. The title’s twist: the After is not the Nazis’ arrival but the Wall’s fall. The dark half-century — twelve years of Reich, then “with barely a pause to take a breath” the divided city — is deliberately skipped: “the city is going to tell you what happened,” through what its monuments confess, like Bebelplatz’s memorial to the burned books of May 1933. Berlin now wears its freedom knowingly: graffiti flourishes precisely because speech was twice policed; May Day’s bottle-throwing is tolerated and swept up; Freiheit arrives like the choral finale of Beethoven’s Ninth — Andrew’s analogy, which she embraced with irony, since “nobody is totally free these days.” The Wall’s hothouse island remains separate from Germany half a century on. And the city stays cinematic to the point of unreality — Wings of Desire’s angels in the actual Staatsbibliothek (“I thought it was just a set”), Babylon Berlin’s set-choosers clearing away the present — with a thriller shelf to match: Deighton’s Berlin Game (freshly reread on his death), le Carré’s Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Herron, McEwan, Schneider’s Wall Jumper.
• A Mirror That Might Become Useful. Berlin’s deepest lesson is for after the fall: it is the city that acknowledges its bad deeds — monuments and plaques saying this is where we did it — while America “likes to brush it all aside and act like we’re always the heroes.” Andrew’s pushback landed: Montgomery, Bryan Stevenson’s lynching memorial, the African American Museum — “You’re right. I’m not being fair.” But the qualification sharpens rather than sinks the thesis: “we do not have a history yet like Holocaust Germany or even Berlin Wall Germany… It’s a mirror that might become useful if the worst comes about.” Meanwhile Berlin models the livable city: rent control the voters wanted to push all the way to expropriation, transit worth “ecstasies,” and a constitutional welfare clause promising a dignified existence — economic rights our Bill of Rights never mentions. The book ends aboard the M29 bus, top deck, regular fare, from the Maybachufer’s twice-weekly market (running since before 1929) across the old West to Grunewald. “Maybe you’re going to be made into a Berlin angel.” “A great fate.”
About the Guest
Wendy Lesser is the founding editor of The Threepenny Review, the celebrated Berkeley literary quarterly, and the author of a novel and twelve works of nonfiction, including You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn (winner of the Marfield Prize), Why I Read, and Scandinavian Noir. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, she has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, the Cullman Center — and the American Academy in Berlin, where her love affair with the city deepened. Berlin Before and After: A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times (Harper, September 2026) is her portrait of the city in 1929 and now. She divides her time between B...
