The United States was still the top of science and culture, now they threaten to derive into fascism. Our guest author personally found out how that could happen.
Whenever American friends visited us during Donald Trump’s first term in Berlin between 2017 and 2020, I greeted them at the door of our apartment with a loud “welcome to freedom”. At that time, this remark was admittedly meant ironic. After all, American soldiers and diplomats played a crucial role in the maintenance of the freedom of the (West) Berliners in the post-war period.
Now that Donald Trump is back in office, I welcome visitors from Washington, DC and other parts of the United States with these three words at our apartment door. However, these words have quickly received a more tragic than ironic meaning.
When I moved from Germany to the United States a few decades ago, a turn to an autocratic state was completely unimaginable. At the time, I could have already imagined even less that events that are currently in the United States under Trump would lead to the normalization of tragic German turns around 1933.
Stephan-Götz Richter is the editor of the English -language magazine The Globalist, which he founded in the United States and is now steering from Berlin. Richter Scale is called his own column. The Globalist on Instagram, LinkedIn and x to find. His German -speaking guest comments can be found here.
A cultural country suddenly becomes a regime
But when I recently read Sebastian Haffner’s “Memoiren of a German, 1918 to 1934”, I was shaken when his autobiographical report came to the years 1933 and 1934. The author describes the takeover of the Nazis, which he had witnessed as a young lawyer in Berlin. In order to escape the Nazis, he emigrated to London and later became known primarily as the author of the 1979 book “Comments on Hitler”.
Since my school days, the grotesque pictures of this time have been well known to me – with storm troops that marched through the streets of Berlin to celebrate their takeover with torches. What Haffner describes beyond this is the osmotic way with which the Nazis sneaked into the everyday life of Germans. A country that had recently been at the head of contemporary science, art and culture suddenly accepted a despotic regime that continued to attract the screws.
So I got a very unpleasant knowledge when I read. Until Donald Trump came back into office in January 2025, the United States were also at the height of contemporary science – and a country with a very strong civil society.
Now, a few months after Trump’s second inauguration, it becomes clear to the world that the model for what is happening in the United States today is not just the shameful “project 2025” or the systematic hollowing out civil society in Hungary by Viktor Orbán. Rather, it increasingly takes on threatening parallels to how German citizens suffered from an authoritarian rule to a dictatorship over nine decades ago.
The discussion about the emigration of scientists is currently beginning to repeat, but this time in the opposite direction, i.e. from the United States. The Trump regime is opposed to science and bourgeois freedom-if it is not even systematically aimed at engaging the country into a civil war.
It is important to recognize that the signs of social decay in the United States, which are manifested today, have been visible for at least 15 years. Donald Trump is, like the AfD in Germany, the beneficiary, but not the author of these developments.
