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Associated Press
02-07-2025
- General
- Associated Press
Tourists leave potatoes on Frederick the Great's grave. They're perpetuating a German myth
POTSDAM, Germany (AP) — Generations of Germans believe Frederick the Great brought the beloved potato to Germany. The legend is this: King Frederick II of Prussia wanted his subjects to eat potatoes, introduced to Europe in the 16th century from South America. But the people of Prussia, which later became part of a united Germany, wouldn't touch the tuber. So the 18th-century monarch resorted to trickery. He placed royal guards and soldiers along the edge of his palace garden — thus creating the illusion that potatoes were a rare and valuable crop reserved for the royal family and its aristocratic friends. But the guards withdrew from their posts each night, creating an opportunity for enterprising locals to sneak in and 'steal' the spuds. Thus began Germany's love affair with the humble Kartoffel and Frederick's rebranding as Der Kartoffelkönig, the potato king. Except it's all fake. Bogus. Phony. Falsch! as the Germans would say. And debunking it is a royal pain for Jürgen Luh, historian of the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation, even when history has receipts. Archives of royal menus show the king instead had a penchant for Italian food and French wine. 'He never ate it,' Luh said. 'Any potato. Not boiled, not fried.' The unexciting truth is that the potato has been cultivated in Germany's Bavarian region since 1647, Luh said. Frederick's great-grandfather, Elector Frederick William, introduced it to the Brandenburg area of Prussia in the 1650s, but only because he liked the aesthetics of the plant's leafy greens. By the time Frederick the Great took the throne in 1740, the potato was grown in gardens throughout Prussia but not on a large scale. The king did actually issue royal decrees promoting the farming and production of potatoes, but his people ignored them. Potatoes did not become widespread in Prussia, in central and eastern Europe, until after the Napoleonic wars ended in 1815, after Frederick II's death in 1786. The guarded garden story, Luh said, is nonsense. And Frederick was more of a wannabe potato king than an actual one. But the fable has deep roots, and the myth makes money. To this day, visitors to Frederick's summer home of Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam, outside Berlin, leave raw potatoes and paper crowns on the king's grave. The palace's gift shops sell potato merchandise, from postcards and children's books to a 35-euro ($40) apron proclaiming the wearer as a Kartoffelkönig. Luh used to correct tour guides and visitors to the palace, but he's largely given up. Besides, he said, at least it means people are coming to Sanssouci and experiencing its rich history. 'The fact is that the legend has beaten the truth and the legend is just too beautiful,' he added. Whatever its roots, the potato is undeniably part of the German cultural identity. At Biohof Schöneiche, an organic farm outside Berlin, workers will harvest roughly 2,500 metric tons (5.5 million pounds) of potatoes come the annual September harvest. 'In most parts of the world, potatoes are considered a vegetable. In Germany it's a staple food,' general manager Axel Boehme said. 'People cannot imagine to have a meal without potatoes.' Regional recipes, passed down from every Oma (grandmother) to each new generation, debate the merits of a vinegar- or mayo-based Kartoffelsalat. From boiled (Salzkartoffeln) or pan-fried (Bratkartoffeln) to dumplings and pancakes (Kartoffelklösse and Kartoffelpuffer), the versatile vegetable is intertwined with the country's emotional heritage. Anke Schoenfelder, project manager for German potato marketing company Kartoffel-Marketing GmbH, says her favorite tuber tradition is rooted in making Kartoffel-Karotten-Gugelhupf (potato and carrot Bundt cake) for family gatherings. 'Taste is memory, right? And when this is related to your family, this is even more part of your identity,' she said. Plus, Schoenfelder added, the potato can be used as a beauty product — the juice can be good for your skin, she says — or a household cleaner, for stubborn stains on the bottom of your oven. For now, Der Kartoffelkönig's legend lives on. As Luh was speaking to The Associated Press in front of the king's grave, two tourists placed their offerings of potatoes on the tomb. One even took a selfie as she did so. 'I always think I should go here in the evening when I have no potatoes at home,' the historian joked. 'I could take them away and have a good meal afterwards.' Kartoffel-Karotten-Gugelhupf (potato and carrot Bundt cake) From Kartoffel-Marketing GmbH, a German potato marketing company. The measurements provided refer to weight, not volume. You will need a 10-cup Bundt pan. Serves: 12 Ingredients 9 oz (250g) high-starch potatoes (such as Russets and Maris Pipers) 9 oz (250g) carrots 1.7 fluid ounces (50 mL) carrot juice 1.7 fluid ounces (50 mL) sunflower oil 4 eggs (medium-size, room temperature) 7 oz (200g) sugar 1 packet vanilla sugar 4.5 oz (125g) almonds, ground 4.5 oz (125g) flour melted butter to grease the mold 2 tablespoons breadcrumbs Directions Wash the potatoes and boil them in salted water for about 20 to 25 minutes, until tender. Let them cool slightly, peel them, and then press them through a potato ricer into a bowl. Wash and peel the carrots and grate them finely with the potatoes, using a vegetable grater or a mandolin. Generously grease the Bundt pan with oil or butter. Coat the pan with some breadcrumbs. Preheat oven to 392°F (200°C) on the fan setting. Add carrot juice, sunflower oil, eggs, vanilla sugar, sugar, flour, baking powder and ground almonds to the mashed potatoes and grated carrots and mix with a hand mixer for about four minutes until a dough forms. Pour the potato-carrot cake batter into the prepared Bundt pan. Place the pan in the oven and bake for about 50 minutes until cooked through (if necessary, cover the pan with aluminum foil after half an hour to prevent the cake from burning). Let the cake cool completely (you can also do this on a balcony or terrace) before decorating it with icing. This is important, because otherwise the icing will seep into the cake. In a bowl, combine the powdered sugar and a little lemon juice until thickened. Pour the icing over the cooled cake and decorate with your preferred toppings like chocolate chips, for example. Let it rest a bit to allow the icing to set.
The Independent
02-07-2025
- General
- The Independent
Many Germans believe Frederick the Great brought potatoes to the country. It's not true
Generations of Germans credit Frederick the Great with introducing the beloved potato to the nation, but the popular legend reveals a surprising twist: the 18th-century Prussian monarch had to resort to cunning to convince his subjects to embrace the tuber. Despite potatoes having arrived in Europe from South America in the 16th century, the people of Prussia, a region that would later form part of a united Germany, were initially reluctant to consume the new crop. Faced with this resistance, King Frederick II devised an ingenious plan. He strategically positioned royal guards and soldiers around his palace garden, where the potatoes were cultivated. This created the deliberate illusion that the spuds were a rare and highly prized commodity, reserved exclusively for the royal family and their aristocratic circle. However, each night, the guards would discreetly withdraw from their posts, providing an irresistible opportunity for enterprising locals to sneak in and "steal" the supposedly valuable tubers, thereby spreading their consumption across the land. Thus began Germany's love affair with the humble Kartoffel and Frederick's rebranding as Der Kartoffelkönig, the potato king. Except it's all fake. Bogus. Phony. Falsch! as the Germans would say. And debunking it is a royal pain for Jürgen Luh, historian of the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation, even when history has receipts. Archives of royal menus show the king instead had a penchant for Italian food and French wine. 'He never ate it,' Luh said. 'Any potato. Not boiled, not fried.' The unexciting truth is that the potato has been cultivated in Germany's Bavarian region since 1647, Luh said. Frederick's great-grandfather, Elector Frederick William, introduced it to the Brandenburg area of Prussia in the 1650s, but only because he liked the aesthetics of the plant's leafy greens. By the time Frederick the Great took the throne in 1740, the potato was grown in gardens throughout Prussia but not on a large scale. The king did actually issue royal decrees promoting the farming and production of potatoes, but his people ignored them. Potatoes did not become widespread in Prussia, in central and eastern Europe, until after the Napoleonic wars ended in 1815, after Frederick II's death in 1786. The guarded garden story, Luh said, is nonsense. And Frederick was more of a wannabe potato king than an actual one. But the fable has deep roots, and the myth makes money. To this day, visitors to Frederick's summer home of Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam, outside Berlin, leave raw potatoes and paper crowns on the king's grave. The palace's gift shops sell potato merchandise, from postcards and children's books to a 35-euro ($40) apron proclaiming the wearer as a Kartoffelkönig. Luh used to correct tour guides and visitors to the palace, but he's largely given up. Besides, he said, at least it means people are coming to Sanssouci and experiencing its rich history. 'The fact is that the legend has beaten the truth and the legend is just too beautiful,' he added. Whatever its roots, the potato is undeniably part of the German cultural identity. At Biohof Schöneiche, an organic farm outside Berlin, workers will harvest roughly 2,500 metric tons (5.5 million pounds) of potatoes come the annual September harvest. 'In most parts of the world, potatoes are considered a vegetable. In Germany it's a staple food,' general manager Axel Boehme said. ' People cannot imagine to have a meal without potatoes.' Regional recipes, passed down from every Oma (grandmother) to each new generation, debate the merits of a vinegar- or mayo-based Kartoffelsalat. From boiled (Salzkartoffeln) or pan-fried (Bratkartoffeln) to dumplings and pancakes (Kartoffelklösse and Kartoffelpuffer), the versatile vegetable is intertwined with the country's emotional heritage. For Anke Schoenfelder, project manager for German potato marking company Kartoffel-Marketing GmbH, her favorite tuber tradition is rooted in making Kartoffel-Karotten-Gugelhupf (potato and carrot Bundt cake) for family gatherings. 'Taste is memory, right? And when this is related to your family, this is even more part of your identity,' she said. Plus, Schoenfelder added, the potato can be used as a beauty product — the juice can be good for your skin, she says — or a household cleaner, for stubborn stains on the bottom of your oven. For now, Der Kartoffelkönig's legend lives on. As Luh was speaking to The Associated Press in front of the king's grave, two tourists placed their offerings of potatoes on the tomb. One even took a selfie as she did so. 'I always think I should go here in the evening when I have no potatoes at home,' the historian joked. 'I could take them away and have a good meal afterwards.' Kartoffel-Karotten-Gugelhupf (potato and carrot Bundt cake) From Kartoffel-Marketing GmbH, a German potato marking company. In true European fashion, the measurements provided refer to weight, not volume. You will need a 10-cup Bundt pan. Time: 90 minutes Serves: 12 Ingredients 9 oz (250g) high-starch potatoes (such as Russets and Maris Pipers) 9 oz (250g) carrots 1.7 fluid ounces (50 mL) carrot juice 1.7 fluid ounces (50 mL) sunflower oil 4 eggs (medium-size, room temperature) 7 oz (200g) sugar 1 packet vanilla sugar 4.5 oz (125g) almonds, ground 4.5 oz (125g) flour melted butter to grease the mold 2 tablespoons breadcrumbs Directions Wash the potatoes and boil them in salted water for about 20 to 25 minutes, until tender. Let them cool slightly, peel them, and then press them through a potato ricer into a bowl. Wash and peel the carrots and grate them finely with the potatoes, using a vegetable grater or a mandolin. Generously grease the Bundt pan with oil or butter. Coat the pan with some breadcrumbs. Preheat oven to 392°F (200°C) on the fan setting. Add carrot juice, sunflower oil, eggs, vanilla sugar, sugar, flour, baking powder and ground almonds to the mashed potatoes and grated carrots and mix with a hand mixer for about four minutes until a dough forms. Pour the potato-carrot cake batter into the prepared Bundt pan. Place the pan in the oven and bake for about 50 minutes until cooked through (if necessary, cover the pan with aluminum foil after half an hour to prevent the cake from burning). Let the cake cool completely (you can also do this on a balcony or terrace) before decorating it with icing. This is important, because otherwise the icing will seep into the cake. In a bowl, combine the powdered sugar and a little lemon juice until thickened. Pour the icing over the cooled cake and decorate with your preferred toppings like chocolate chips, for example. Let it rest a bit to allow the icing to set.
Daily Mail
25-06-2025
- General
- Daily Mail
JOHN MACLEOD: What truly lies behind a smile (and how our late Queen had loveliest one I ever saw)
It was a balmy Windsor evening in 1878 and her grandson, Prince William of Prussia, was in attendance as Queen Victoria entertained the distinctly deaf Rear-Admiral The Hon Fitzgerald Algernon Foley to dinner. Conversation lagging, she asked kindly after his sister, whom said Admiral foggily mistook for the recently wrecked training-ship Eurydice – which he had just raised and salvaged, hence this coveted invitation for soup-to-nuts at the Royal table. 'Well, Ma'am, I am going to turn her over and have her bottom scraped…' As the future Kaiser Wilhelm II would dine out on for the rest of his life, Victoria 'hid her face in her handkerchief and shook and heaved with laughter,' as others present gnawed their napkins, or a knuckle, in desperate suppression of mirth. 'Yet,' as Elizabeth Longford intoned in an early, 1983 biography of our own late Queen, Victoria's great-great-granddaughter, 'only two photographs have ever been published of this amused old lady smiling.' Smiling is precious, personal – and, on occasion, political. As I thought lately when a text-messaged pinged from my dentist, suggesting I book what said BDS calls my annual check-up and what I like to call smile-maintenance. I happen to be blessed with a natural lighthouse-smile, at least since I quit smoking in 2014 and my gnashers lost the impression of tenemented Partick c 1969. And that, bar two wisdom-jobs I wisely had extracted in 2004 - I focused hard on the ceiling as the redoubtable dentist braced his left foot against the chair - all the MacLeod fangs survive and my two lonely fillings have been deftly maintained since the Callaghan administration. One is, indeed, gold, though you'd need to be tickling my tonsils to have the chance for a glimpse: the queue to do so is oddly short. But among the things I missed most, amidst the bemasked foggy-specs era of you-know-what half a decade ago, was the inability to lighten or defuse so many social, supermarket-aisle situations simply by beaming. I ended up hoisting my left hand in a sort of me-Tarzan-you-Jane placatory habit instead, and we were well into 2024 before I finally broke it. In September 2022, when all was over, I was briefly in sole charge of the family home in Edinburgh and an Amazon delivery dude called just half a minute before I was safely home with the Scottish Daily Mail and my lunch. I enthused. I sprinted. I gabbled. Moments later, I beheld him. I was late and he was Polish, but I raised an arm and beamed and, in an instant, our lad Zycinski glowed back in parallel ivory-castles. If you heard that wonderful What's up Doc? episode on Radio Four the other day – presented by identical twins Chris and Xand van Tulleken, still available on BBC Sounds – you will already know that smiling is a gesture both placatory and defensive. We do not usually switch on the famous grin with people we live with, or see every day. That's a realm of grunts, gurgles and downplayed chuckles. We smile for sought-after and hopeful significant others, eminent strangers, and potential foes. The gesture – not that I endorse van Tulleken evolutionary nonsense – is, like the chimpanzees recruited of yore for P G Tips ads, actually a fear-based grin. I am here, this is me, and I am no threat to you. In fact, the loveliest smile I ever saw – personally, and just for me, across St George's Gallery in Windsor Castle – was in April 2002 and from our late Queen, who for the Golden Jubilee had heroically invited the company of 500 of her best friends In the British media. An experiment she never repeated. To her, the Press was a necessary evil and, though I enjoyed banter with Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, to him we were a wholly unnecessary evil. For half a century on the throne, Elizabeth II had the daunting competition of her mother, her face blessed with a natural smile even in repose. The Queen's natural expression was earnest. Humourless. Late in life, she managed to make a joke of it. 'Oh, look, Philip, I've got my Miss Piggy face on…' But, even before she turned thirty – touring Canada and the USA as Princess Elizabeth; the Antipodes in 1953 as new-minted Queen – folk jibed at how often they beheld an unsmiling face. Even though, as she once justly protested, she would smile till it hurt. 'My mother is a star,' she once flared, around 1985. 'My daughter-in-law is a star. What does that make me?' Elizabeth the Steadfast, as it proved, beloved and respected – though the Queen was well in her seventies before reaching that haven. It is striking, looking back and over a longer arc of modern history, how late it is before we actually see many folk smiling. The Mona Lisa musters the faintest simper. The Laughing Cavalier a predatory smirk. It is only in the late, late 1700s we actually start to see people allowing the corners of their mouths to turn upwards just a little – in his landmark 1969 TV series, Civilisation, anent the Enlightenment, the late Sir Kenneth Clark enthused of the 'smile of reason' – and, through Victorian times, people never seemed to betray such vulnerability at all. The two surviving images of Queen Victoria actually looking amused involved, respectively, a grandchild playing up and a 1900 carriage-ride amidst exuberant Dubliners and the real issue was, of course, the slow shutter-speeds of her era. But there is also the horrific cultural fracture of the Great War. Before it, we have a gazillion surviving images of boys and youths in happy sporting teams, genial clubs and the Boys Brigade and so on, arms draped over one another, hands on mutual knees, cheek-to-cheek chumship and evidently poised to kick seven bells out of their opponents. Afterwards, we are suddenly in an era where it is all crossed-arms, upright posture, stern gazes ahead and where you sense – mere opponents duly defeated – said lads might then happily knock seven bells out of each other. On top of that, we have the ensuing decades of when cameras were still rather slow affairs and when, even in my lifetime, many public figures still had terrible teeth. Denis Healey, Denis Thatcher, Charlie Haughey, Mick McGahey– yellow, jaggy tartar-clotted leers. In the vanguard of a new political master-race, John F Kennedy blithely re-invented the modern professional politician as The Beatles recast the pop group. Hatless, 2-button suited, narrow tie, a glowing grin, permanent tan and a big, newscasterish TV head. But even Kennedy, as someone once shrewdly observed, was careful whom he was snapped smiling with: no photo-opportunity shared with Nixon or Khruschev betrays more than a scholarly frown. In 2007, out to neutralise two widely polled negatives, SNP media-handlers gave two flat orders. 'Smart-Alex' Salmond was not to appear on any campaign imagery with a grin; Nicola Sturgeon, 'Nippy Sweetie,' was never to be photographed without one. Back in 1997, the Tories foolishly declined what could have been their best campaign stroke in the history of ever. An image of a Colgate ring-of-confidence Tony Blair, exquisitely captioned, 'What lies behind the smile?'
Washington Post
19-06-2025
- General
- Washington Post
He was a pioneer of gay and trans medicine. Then the Nazis took power.
The Nazis called him 'the most repulsive of all Jewish monsters.' One savvy American publicist called him 'The Einstein of Sex.' He was world-famous for his claims that every human being mixes feminine and masculine traits; that all forms of sexual desire and gender identification are natural; and that race is a social construct. He was Magnus Hirschfeld, a pioneer of gay and trans medicine in Germany in the first decades of the 20th century, and two new books resurrect his life and work, arguing that he has been largely, and wrongly, forgotten. Hirschfeld, or Magnus, as journalist Daniel Brook familiarly refers to him in his jaunty new biography, 'The Einstein of Sex,' was a crucial figure in the history of queer rights, and one of the most important voices in helping to establish the permissive, sexually fluid culture of Weimar Berlin. He was born into a society of strict norms and prohibitions. Prussia in the 19th century understood sexuality in starkly binary terms, and anything that wasn't 'normalsexuell' was against the law, as outlined in a notorious statute known as Paragraph 175. Hirschfeld, whose father was a prosperous doctor, was in some sense destined for medicine. He recognized his own homosexuality early in life, and that awareness propelled his conviction that homosexuality was innate and, as such, could not be cured and should not be punished. Yet even after he received his medical degree, he identified more with the journalists and writers in his milieu than with his fellow doctors. He would put all his talents to good use: At his Institute for Sexual Science, founded in 1919, he treated patients who did not conform to strict German notions of sexuality; he created and sold early sex hormones, and even provided surgical options for those wishing to transition. Hirschfeld believed that masculine and feminine traits can mix together in countless ways in a single person (he estimated more than 43 million possible varieties). He fought, for a while with some success, for the recognition of this fact. It was his writing for a wider public that brought him renown. He caused waves as early as 1896, anonymously publishing a pamphlet, 'Sappho and Socrates,' that disputed the notion that homosexuality is caused by childhood trauma. (Sigmund Freud's 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality' espoused this theory of trauma's influence; Hirschfeld and Freud regarded each other as opponents.) By the time Hirschfeld published 'Berlin's Third Sex' — a term he was ambivalent about — in 1904, he was writing under his own name and offered readers a detailed tour of his adopted city. If one wanted a true picture of Berlin, he argued, 'one could scarcely ignore the impact of homosexuality, which has fundamentally influenced both the shading of this picture in detail and the character of the whole.' As Hirschfeld's fame grew, so did his vulnerability. He was attacked by right-wing soldiers in 1920, stoned on the street and injured so badly — his skull was fractured — that the New York Times reported him dead. But gradually, he and his colleagues at the Institute for Sexual Science did make change. Brook vividly depicts the way in which the city of Berlin itself — then experiencing explosive growth, and less tied to tradition than other Northern European capitals — provided a conducive blueprint for the kind of sexual freedoms that flourished in the wake of World War I. When Christopher Isherwood, then a young unknown, came to Berlin from England, he did so because 'Berlin meant boys.' Fittingly, he roomed in an annex attached to Hirschfeld's institute. Brook succeeds in bringing his subject to fresh life, including a description of Hirschfeld's world travels in 1930, which he undertook to lecture and research. Embarking on that trip, Hirschfeld might have suspected that he would never live in Germany again. The shadow of Nazism had already fallen when he left. By the time he got back to Europe, his native country was under the thrall of Adolf Hitler, whose movement despised everything Hirschfeld stood for. With his young Chinese lover, Tao Li, in tow, Hirschfeld ultimately settled in France for the final few years of his life. Where Brook traces the story through the more traditional form of biography, and engagingly so, Brandy Schillace takes a different tack in 'The Intermediaries,' widening and deepening the social context of Hirschfeld's life and work. Schillace, a medical historian, braids Hirschfeld's work with the scientific and political backdrop against which he operated. Schillace's writing about the new field of what would be called endocrinology is especially vibrant. In 1849, the German scientist Arnold Adolph Berthold became interested in rooster testicles. In his lab, he removed some of them entirely; in other birds, he unhooked the glands from the fibers connecting them to the nervous system and relocated them to the roosters' stomachs. In the castrated roosters, no secondary sexual characteristics developed. But for those whose testes had simply been moved, the glands reimplanted, and the birds displayed all the usual signs of sexual development. Berthold concluded that the powerful glands did not need the animal's nervous system to function; they seemed to emit blood-borne 'messengers' that continued to work with or without the input of the brain. These messengers would, a few decades later, be named hormones. Berthold's work laid the foundation for a story about what is 'biological,' and therefore 'natural,' in the body. And in Germany, 'natural' meant 'good.' If the mind/brain had nothing to do with the secretions that controlled sexual development, then sexuality was simply a biological fact: innate, natural and good. Schillace's book can have an academic density that is usefully, powerfully dispersed when she invokes one of Hirschfeld's most consequential patients, Dora Richter. Born in 1892 and assigned male, the future Dora — or Dorchen, as Hirschfeld would affectionately call her — grew up in an isolated mountain village far from cosmopolitan Berlin. From the time she was small, she wanted to wear the same dresses as her sisters. Where Daniel Brook offers a snapshot of Dora in 'The Einstein of Sex,' Schillace uses her case as one strand stretching almost the full length of her narrative, following Dora through years of disguise and heartbreak, rejection and abuse. Dora's efforts to live as a woman left her vulnerable to unspeakable violence and extortion. She fell in love again and again, with varying results. She identified as a woman who loved men, not as a homosexual. This alone made her case a revelation for Hirschfeld, by the time he met her. In 1931, at the Institute for Sexual Science, Dora became the world's first patient to receive gender-affirming surgery. She lived another 35 years with the body she had always wanted, and had government paperwork certifying her preferred name and gender. As for Hirschfeld, the final years of his life were marked by exile and defeat. In 1933, he sat in a Paris movie theater and watched a newsreel showing a bust of his own head being marched into a Nazi bonfire (being bronze, it did not burn). Stormtroopers had seized tens of thousands of files from his institute, amassed over a lifetime of research, all destined for the flames. Some of those files contained intimate details of Nazi Party members who were decidedly not normalsexuell themselves. His life's work destroyed, Hirschfeld never managed to finish his magnum opus, a tract on race and sexuality around the world, based on his extensive travels. He died on his 67th birthday. A century later, it is an astounding tragedy that his life's great battles remain all too modern. Casey Schwartz, a Book World contributing writer, is the author of 'Attention: A Love Story.' Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin By Daniel Brook. W.W. Norton. 303 pp. $32.99 A Weimar Story By Brandy Schillace. W.W. Norton. 340 pp. $31.99
Telegraph
19-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
We are witnessing the death of American democracy
Contrary to general belief, Weimar democracy did not die when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933. It died the year before under Franz von Papen, a national conservative with social-Darwinist views and a visceral hatred of liberal modernist 'filth' in all its forms. One of his first actions was to end execution by the guillotine – deemed too Jacobin – and return to the ancient Prussian practice of death by the axe. Von Papen exploited a street clash between Communist Red Front dockers and Nazi Brownshirts on Prussian territory to carry out a constitutional coup against the elected Social Democrat government of Prussia, by far the biggest and most important of Germany's self-governing states. He seized control of policing and state security on the pretext that the Social Democrats were failing to uphold law and order. Historian Sir Richard Evans says this Preußenschlag (Prussian coup) of July 1932 was the critical moment in inter-war Germany, opening the door for much that followed. What Donald Trump has done by activating the California National Guard against the protest of the governor, and then bringing in US Marines – both of which his critics argue are unconstitutional – is a very light version of Preußenschlag, but in some ways it is worse. The street protests in Los Angeles were the result of his own theatrical stunt. You could be forgiven for thinking he deliberately provoked the alleged 'rebellion' in order to set this precedent. One can see now why Trump moved so fast to purge the top echelons of the US defence department, including the three judge advocates general. These officials rule on whether military orders are legal, and when they should be disobeyed. They are legally independent by Congressional statute. Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, told us why they had been sacked: it was to stop them posing any 'roadblocks to orders given by the commander-in-chief'. Did Trump mean it when he told his generals to 'just shoot' American protesters during the Black Lives Matter riots in 2020? We may find out. He also fired the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and others deemed symbols of 'diversity, equity, and inclusion', although one might suspect another motive. An earlier chairman – General Mark Milley – refused to ratify the Putsch of Jan 6 2021, and therefore stopped it stone dead. 'We don't take an oath to a king, or to a tyrant or dictator. We take an oath to the Constitution,' he said. Trump is attacking California on several fronts at once, shrewdly judging that Governor Gavin Newsom is the perfect foil. He is stripping the state of its powers under the Clean Power Act to impose tougher pollution rules than federal levels. He has signed an order blocking California's plan to phase out petrol cars by 2035, and another stopping it capping nitrogen oxide emissions. He now is threatening to withhold federal disaster aid for wildfires. Trump called him 'Governor Newscum' and added in his inimitable style: 'You know, hatred is never a good thing in politics. When you don't like somebody, you don't respect somebody, it's harder for that person to get money if you're on top.' Forgive me for sounding jaundiced, but decades ago I covered the Republican crusade under Speaker Newt Gingrich to restore states rights and check the usurpations of federal power. Gingrich and his party are now egging on the federal military occupation of states that stand in Trump's way. James Carville, veteran Democratic strategist and Clinton-fixer, says the Democrats should bide their time and 'play possum', betting that Trump will self-destruct under the contradictions of his own policies. The bond markets will do the job for them. Congress will drop back into Democrat hands like a ripe fruit in the 2026 mid-terms. I never expected to find myself impugning the ruthless Mr Carville for credulous naivety. Declaration of interest: he once carried out a black ops campaign against me personally from an office in the White House, which I no doubt deserved, all is forgiven anyway. Playing possum is what the German Social Democrats did in the early 1930s. Reading the first two volumes of Sir Richard Evans's magisterial trilogy, The Coming of the Third Reich and The Third Reich in Power, I am struck again and again by the refusal of the moderate middle to face up to what was happening. They had a touching faith that the courts would save them. But the judges were ideologically captured, or frightened, or did what most human beings do in turbulent times: they pre-emptively adapted to keep their families out of trouble. The Social Democrats made another fatal error. They assumed that Hitler's eccentric mish-mash of economic policies would lead quickly to a crisis, greatly underestimating the lift from neo-Keynesian rearmament, so like Trump's gargantuan deficits. American democracy has much deeper roots but the imminent bombing of Iran by the US air force gives pause for thought. There may be excellent reasons to knock out Iran's nuclear capability, though doing in this way, flippantly, like a power-drunk despot, conflating non-proliferation with regime change, drives the final nail in the coffin of Western moral credibility. That said, polls suggest that almost 80pc of Americans would applaud the destruction of the Fordow nuclear site, and most would support cutting off the head of the serpent in Tehran. Trump might face a Maga revolt on the edges but the larger bounce in popularity would let him steam roll opposition to his tariff war, his climate war, and his 'beautiful big bill' – a giant transfer of income from poor to rich. I don't believe Steven Bannon's warning that intervention will 'tear the country apart', unless the bombing mission goes awry. The strongman glow will open the window further for Trump's takeover of the deep state. He has already fired the heads of the FBI's intelligence, counterterrorism, criminal investigations, as well as the heads of the Washington and New York offices. He has purged the justice department, now run by a Lord High Executioner from The Mikado, openly touting an enemies list of 'conspirators'. He has forced private law firms to bend the knee. He has put in a loyalist in charge of the CIA, who inconveniently reported in March that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. But that was then, when Trump stood for America First, and staying out of forever wars was policy. He has fired the head of the eaves-dropping National Security Agency and its top officials. He has purged the head of the Federal Trade Commission, who is independent by law, like the chairman of the Federal Reserve. America in 2025 is obviously not Germany in 1932. The Weimar republic was already a cauldron of political violence. That year was the worst of the Great Depression. The country was seething with rage over the cultivated myths of the 1918 'stab in the back' and the Carthaginian peace of Versailles. It is even less like Germany in 1933 when the Nazis used their three cabinet seats to take over the Prussian and federal interior ministries. Within five months the Social Democrats leadership was dead, or in Dachau, or in exile. All rival parties were shut down. No independent newspaper survived. Every organisation from the labour unions, to male choirs, sports teams and beekeeper clubs came under Nazi control. But it is not the same America that was my home for long stretches of the late 20th century. Over the last few days alone: a Democratic US senator was manhandled to the floor, handcuffed and dragged away for asking a question; the Democrat comptroller of New York was seized and handcuffed by masked federal agents after demanding to see a judicial warrant; a Democratic state legislator in Minnesota was murdered with her husband at home, and a state senator was shot and badly wounded, both by an assassin with a hit list of 45 officials. Judges have so far issued more than 60 rulings that curb or restrain Trump's legal overreach. A shocking number have either been threatened, directly or through their families, or face calls for impeachment. 'Our constitutional system depends on judges who can make decisions free from threats and intimidation,' warned judge Robert Conrad, director of the administrative office of the US courts, in testimony to Congress. To no avail: the House judiciary committee shrugged it off, more or less blaming the victims. The drift of events was disturbing even before Iran offered Trump a fresh gift from Mars. I fear that many more lines in the sand will be crossed in the heady aftermath of a surgical video war on the Ayatollah, if that is where we are headed. Play possum if you want. Trump will eat your lunch.
