Orwell: 2+2=5 (2024)

This absorbing documentary by the Haitian director Raoul Peck takes off from the entries in Orwell’s diary while staying during the last years of his life in a cottage in Jura, a windswept village in rural Scotland, putting the finishing touches to his novel "1984." Orwell’s notes on totalitarianism and events and people in his life become the fulcrum around which the director weaves his novels, political commitments and experiences, and his personal life. The centerpiece of this documentary is "1984," with scenes from several film adaptations of the novel, along with shots of past and present authoritarian personalities organized around the three memorable slogans of the ruling party of “Oceania”: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength. Sharing center stage with political figures like Putin, Trump, and Netanyahu are Big Tech titans like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.

One is never bored as dramatic images of fascists, Stalinists, and fellow travelers past and present succeed one another on the big screen—and, yes, this film is best seen on the big screen. Probably the most striking of these are scenes of the January 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol, which have lost none of their shock value. These remind us of what might well be tagged an “Orwellian” phenomenon: that while democracy is often portrayed as the polar opposite of fascism, it can also be its enabler, as when democratic choice resoundingly installed the unrepentant fascist who encouraged that insurrection as president for a second time four years later. Indeed, fascism installed by democracy is the most dangerous species since it is the most enduring.

Riefenstahl (2025)

Leni Riefenstahl, the subject of this well-crafted documentary by Andres Veiel, has been the object of constant fascination on the part of filmmakers. This is not only because she was a member of their profession, but also because her films were stunning if disturbing examples that fascism could produce great art, and that this could mobilize people to suspend their rational and ethical faculties and follow the pied piper over the cliff.

One of her rationalizations for not acting against Hitler, which she angrily asserted during a tense TV interview shown in the film, was “What could I do, go against him when the German people were mesmerized by him?” Here she conveniently forgot that with her films "Olympia" and "Triumph of the Will," her art contributed to that mass hypnosis. And, being an intimate of Hitler and Goebbels and architect Albert Speer, it is impossible that, as she persisted in claiming till the end of her life, she did not know about the mass killings and forced labor they were inflicting on what they regarded as the "racially and socially undesirable." Clearly, the clean bill of ideological health that the US Army denazification campaign gave her at the end of the Second World War was not deserved.

But probably what has been most disconcerting about Riefenstahl is not that she kept denying her intimate relationships with the leading fascists or that she knew about the gas chambers, but that her art was in synch with fascist ideology, and fascist art, in her hands, could be truly exceptional, as socialist realism could be in the hands of the Russian film-maker Sergei Eisenstein. As the historian Richard Evans has written, what was striking about Riefenstahl’s art “was how much of it, including the great Nazi propaganda films, was the product of Riefenstahl’s own independent aesthetic judgment. From start to finish, over an extraordinarily long period, her work had a striking consistency, reflecting cultural attitudes toward the natural world, the human body, physical prowess, the mystical celebration of masculinity in the individual and the group, that fitted effortlessly into the ideology of the Nazi Party.”

While not explicitly stated, the film points to the inconvenient truth that artists like Hitler, Riefenstahl, and Speer, and philosophers like Goebbels, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt, were in the forefront of the Nazi counterrevolution, along with thugs like Goering, Himmler, and Rohm. What motivated them? Partly what they regarded as the decadence of bourgeois art and the smugness of bourgeois thinking. Partly disillusionment and disgust with the give and take, the compromises, of "normal" bourgeois politics, which they regarded as “unheroic.” The alternative they offered, the "exceptional" state that was a fusion of the transcendental and the thuggish, was, of course, not only worse; it beggared the imagination.

From Weimar to War (2025)

From Weimar to War, directed by Nick Randall, puts the spotlight on that turbulent period after the First World War, when Germany’s first experience with liberal democracy ended in a train wreck, with Hitler’s assumption of absolute power in 1933. The documentary touches on the various factors that doomed the Weimar Republic, but in the hierarchy of causes, it places the emphasis on the truly onerous conditions the victorious allies placed on Germany as the price of peace: acceptance of responsibility for starting the war, payment for the costs of the war borne by the allies by an exhausted state with little capacity to do so except by incurring massive loans from the United States, and the loss of all its colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.

This reading of the German tragedy is obviously inspired by John Maynard Keynes, who made his name with the book “Economic Consequences of the Peace,” published soon after the Versailles peace conference, which predicted the crisis and chaos that would engulf Germany by the Carthaginian peace imposed on it by the allies. The Treaty of Versailles practically ensured that those who wished to overturn it, like the Nazis, would hold the moral and political high ground during the 13 unlucky years the Republic lasted.

But this is not a socially deterministic film. The way things turned out depended greatly on Hitler’s personality—his ability to turn his imprisonment for the failed Munich Putsch into an asset, his oratorical gifts, his combination of ruthlessness in dealing with his enemies and cunning in winning over potential allies like Big Business, a gift for totalitarian organizing or Gleichschaltung, and a superb sense of timing when it came to making the move for the kill. The documentary brilliantly showcases these dimensions of Hitler’s persona.

The theme running through the film is Nazism’s promise “to make Germany great again.” This is not unintended since its unstated aim is apparently to issue a warning that there are similarities between Weimar Germany and the US in the Trump era, where the slogan of the far right is “to make America great again.” Though each era and country is unique, the parallels are uncomfortably obvious.

Like Weimar Germany, the US is dealing with a legacy of defeat in imperial wars in the Middle East. Trump is stoking victimhood, claiming the US is a victim not only of China but of America’s allies and the whole world, which have abused its “generosity.” The US economy has been crippled by financialization and deindustrialization, and to restore its old glory, Trump is declaring trade war on practically all countries, forcing US corporations to leave China and reshore to the US, and demanding foreign corporations invest billions in the US. As in the Weimar Republic, there are scapegoats and internal enemies, the principal ones being immigrants and the Democrats. And, of course, violence, as in the last days of Weimar, is becoming more and more attractive as a way of settling political scores, as the assassination of far-right agitator Charlie Kirk underlined.

Then there’s the question of personality. Trump’s profile is not the same as Hitler’s, but there are some striking shared characteristics, the most important of which are utter self-confidence, shamelessness, and an iron determination to mold society according to his preferences.

In response to the Jan 6, 2021, Insurrection, I did a program for Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now,” where I said, “The United States is entering its Weimar era.” What has happened since then has merely deepened my worry that America’s liberal democracy may well end badly, like Weimar. OK, I won’t lapse into determinism here: there may still be time to head off a train wreck, but the window of opportunity is closing fast.