Apparently,
the solar eclipse truly was awesome for those lucky enough to be exactly in
what I now know to call “the path of totality.” For the rest of us, not so
much. But even without experiencing the
awesomeness that was fully visible in Jackson Hole or Nashville, there was
still something remarkable—and unexpectedly humbling—about the whole
experience. Like so many others, I’m sure, I read all about it in the days
leading up to the big event. But of all the articles I came across, the one that
had the biggest effect on me was one written, not in the last weeks or days,
but a cool eighty-five years ago.
The
article, published without a by-line in the New York Times on Sunday, August
14, 1932, pointed out that Americans who wished to experience a full solar
eclipse had basically two choices: to clear their calendars for August 31 of
that year and look up (ideally after having learned how to look at the sun in
eclipse without harming their eyes), or to do whatever it was going to take to guarantee
a very long life since the next chance for most Americans to see a total
eclipse was going to be…in 2017, towards the end of August. (There was,
admittedly, a third possibility too: readers not reasonably expecting to live
until 2017 but who thought they might well make it to 1970 were offered the
possibility of moving to Florida, the only state from which the eclipse of that
year was going to be visible. And there also the possibility of seeing a full
solar eclipse in the northernmost regions of the country in 1979, but this was
dismissed as at best a long shot in that seeing it was going to require
observers “to brave the possibilities of a blizzard and 40 degrees below zero weather.” So that, plus the iffy March weather in
Florida, basically left readers with two viable options: preparing either for
an event two weeks off or for another more than three-quarters of a century in
the future.)
It
was a long time ago, admittedly. But since I was already there, I spent some
time perusing the rest of that newspaper from so long ago in which the article
appeared. (You can too: click here.) And what I found was America trying to come
to terms with Nazism…and only marginally succeeding.
The
German elections of the previous month had ended in legislative chaos—the Nazis
won 230 out of 608 seats in the Reichstag, making them the largest party
represented but not one possessed of the majority necessary to govern. This led
to Hermann Göring becoming president of Germany and to the onset of negotiations
regarding Hitler’s place in the government, but the lead article on page one of
the paper (“Hitler Demands Office as Dictator; Hindenburg Bars It”) is almost
achingly naïve in its sense of things. This is 1932. For those who might be
unfamiliar with his background, Hitler is helpfully described as an “Austrian
house painter.” And the article itself, by Frederick T. Birchall (regarding
whom, see below), explains the chaos that was reigning in Germany in the wake
of the recent election in terms that readers today will find, to say the very
least, remarkable: “Tonight,” Birchall writes, “whether law and order shall
prevail in this republic or whether it will be plunged again into the
turbulence that marked its beginning depends very much on the whim of this same
Hitler and the strange aggregation of semi-fanatics who surround him and are
trying, as there is good reason to believe, to goad him to extremes to which he
alone probably would never proceed.”
Towards
the end of the article, a lone paragraph addresses Nazi anti-Semitism: “The
Association of Germany Jewish citizens,” Birchall reports, “placed before
President von Hindenburg today an exhaustive record of what they said were
anti-Semitic threats and insults by the National Socialists from the platform
and press, together with acts of terrorism committed on Jews. The President
replied that he deeply regretted and strongly disapproved of infractions on constitutional
and religious rights of German citizens and sent the documents to the Ministry
of Interior for examination.” Can you
imagine that? A president who can find the words to condemn Nazi anti-Semitism
but without feeling any sort of concomitant need to distance himself totally
and absolutely from the Nazis themselves! It all seems so heartfelt, so
sincere…and, of course, so tragically futile.
What
would Frederick T. Birchall have made of Charlottesville? That is actually more
interesting a question than it sounds at first. Birchall was a well-positioned
observer—a Brit by origin and American by choice, he began working as an editor
at the Times in 1912 and ended up winning a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting
from Europe in the 1930s. Seeing the Nazis, who just a few years earlier were
dismissively derided by most Germans as thugs and extremists, rising step by
step to positions of power must have seemed amazing. Being present as Germany embraced a political
philosophy based on the absolute repudiation of the very liberal values and
norms Germany itself had in large part brought to the world, even more so. But
watching on as Germans showed themselves again and again willing to ignore the
Nazis’ fiercely violent anti-Semitism and racially-motivated fanaticism—or
rather to look on their radical racism as something akin to the political
equivalent of the bitter aftertaste sick people with their own best interests
at heart will gladly endure for the sake of swallowing medicine that promises
to restore them to good health—that must truly have seemed unbelievable.
Something of this was captured a few years ago in Erik Larson’s In the
Garden of the Beasts, a very interesting book that I recommend highly about
the first American ambassador to Nazi Germany, William E. Dodd, and his life in
Berlin from 1933 to 1937. But Birchall filed hundreds upon hundreds of stories
from Germany in the 1930s, all available at the New York Times online archive,
and they tell their own story of a nation descending into an abyss of its own
making precisely by refusing to repudiate Nazism when it still might have been
possible to act decisively and definitively in the nation’s best interests, of
a nation weirdly willing to take the danger that inheres in the mindless embrace
of extremism and violence seriously and not seriously at the same time.
Did
Birchall know about the total eclipse of the sun on the last day of August in
1932? I’m sure he read his own newspaper daily, so how could he not have? He
died in 1955, but if he were alive today to comment, would he find it uncanny to
see America again grappling with the forces of intolerance, supremacism,
bigotry, anti-Semitism, and racial hatred as the skies dim overhead? My guess
is that he would have! And although I understand that Shakespeare was entirely
right when he wrote that “the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves,” I imagine
Birchall would join me in finding it more unnerving than amusing to see our
nation again combining a deep sense of awe at the majesty of the
universe with a sense of befuddled amazement at the sight of actual American
citizens hoisting aloft actual Nazi flags and shamelessly chanting anti-Semitic
slogans as they marched through what just a few days earlier would have been
described by anyone as one of America’s most delightful college towns.
Elsewhere
in the Times of August 14, 1932, we read about a meeting in Geneva of one
hundred delegates representing, between them, twelve million Jews in twenty-five
countries to discuss “the situation” affecting Jews throughout the world. I’m
sure this was a sincere, hopeful effort. How could they have known what was
coming? Should we mock these delegates now for not being able to imagine
Treblinka then? Or should we respect them for doing what they could with
the information they had? They surely understood the potential for Nazi
anti-Semitism to turn even more violent than it already had…but how could they
possibly have imagined genocide on the scale about to be unleashed upon the
Jewish world? Certainly, they meant to do good. Possibly even they did do
good. But, as we all know, whatever good they did manage to accomplish was
unable to stem the tide of unimaginable viciousness about to be unleashed
against their co-religionists in Europe? Did the Americans among them return
home in time to see the sun vanish briefly from the midday sky and find in that
experience an ominous portent? Was there anyone among them among them
conversant enough with talmudic lore to connect the events under discussion in
Geneva with the passage in Tractate Sukkah that declares a solar eclipse to be
a siman ra— “a bad omen”— for the whole world…and thus to feel even less
hopeful about the future of European Jewry? I suppose there may have been some
talmudists among the delegates, but that only prompts me to look eighty-five
years into our future and wonder if someone writing in 2102 will look
back and wonder how people back in 2017 cannot have found troublingly deep ominousness
in an eclipse that made the day dark just ten days or so after Charlottesville?
