Issue 9. Reading

Fewer Americans read books today, yet book clubs are multiplying. In an age of constant screens, people gather in living rooms and bookstores to talk about history and diaries. In Berkeley, discussions center on Weimar Germany and how a democracy collapsed. People read not just to understand the past, but to search for warning signs in the present. This essay dives into the experience of a reading club.

The United States is the scene of a curious paradox. Fewer Americans than ever read books, yet ever more of us gather in book groups every few weeks to discuss them. On the first point the data is clear: the number of Americans older than 15 who read for pleasure every day has declined dramatically, a recent study showed, to a mere 16% of the population. On the second point, systematic studies are difficult to find, but bookstores now host discussion groups and publishers print books with sections at the back with titles like “Suggested Questions for Reading Groups” in a manner that never happened years ago. Many people I know belong to reading groups; one friend is a member of three. I remember nothing like this from when I was young.

It’s no mystery why reading is in decline: screens everywhere, large and small, compete fiercely for our attention. As to why book groups are proliferating, we can only guess. When I first joined one more than 30 years ago, it was because there were many classic authors that I felt I ought to read – Shakespeare, Goethe, the Greek playwrights – that I was unlikely to master on my own but could do so more easily in the company of others. Back then, joining a book group was almost an extension of one’s student days.

Our first taste of this period was Victor Klemperer’s I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941. Klemperer (1881-1960) was a Jewish philologist who managed to survive the Holocaust in his native Germany. His wife was Gentile, which earned him a little extra time. When the Nazis finally began sending Jews married to non-Jews to the death camps a massive Allied bombing destroyed Dresden, where the couple lived. In the chaos that followed, Klemperer avoided capture for the rest of the war.

His extraordinary diary gave our little group of readers in Berkeley, California, an inside look at how creeping madness can take over a country – and not a backwater country, but a well-educated, highly cultured and developed one. How does this happen? The answer we took from Klemperer was: step by step. When one step is tolerated by the public, the next comes swiftly.

First, Klemperer finds that students stop attending his lectures and seminars at the university where he teaches. Then he is dismissed from his job. Then he cannot publish the book he has written, about 18th-century France. Then “at the library I was told gently, that as a non-Aryan I was no longer allowed to use the reading room,” although he could still take books home. Then his own published books are removed from the library. Then he is no longer allowed to take books home. A friend borrows them for him. Then that becomes too dangerous for the friend. Then his typewriter is confiscated. Is it by such stages, we wonder, that Trump, with his open admiration for dictators of all kinds, hopes to impose his dictatorship on us?

Despite his plight, Klemperer never lost his empathy. When a Jewish friend moves to Palestine, the author wishes him luck, but writes in his diary, “I sympathize with the Arabs” whose land is being taken.

When you read a book like this today, and talk about it with friends who are equally worried about the country we’re living in – its slide into authoritarianism, its betrayal of Ukraine, the unabashed kleptocracy of the Trump family – it deepens the experience of reading. A book is no longer an object on a shelf, but a lesson, a warning, a window onto a piece of the past with echoes for today.

We went on to read several other books about the Nazi era, among them Timothy W. Ryback’s Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power, Robert O. Paxton’s more broadly focused The Anatomy of Fascism, and William Shirer’s massive classic, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Despite its 1,249 pages, we found Shirer’s book gripping. As an American correspondent, he was based in Berlin from 1934 through 1940 and saw first-hand many of the events he describes. These range from Hitler’s speeches to the Reichstag to the German invasion of France to the French surrender at Compiègne in 1940, in the same railway car in which the 1918 Armistice was signed. Foreign correspondents were banned from Compiègne, but, through help from a German officer who hated Hitler, Shirer managed to quietly remain on the scene.

Again and again, in Shirer’s history of those dark years, we found parallels to what is happening in the United States today. Perhaps the most ominous is the way a strongman can turn a democracy into a dictatorship by having a powerful armed force that does his personal bidding, independent of the nation’s army and police. For Hitler, this was his S.A. “brownshirts”, the ruthless party militia that rapidly assured his complete grip on Germany. For Trump, of course, the equivalent is the armed, masked agents of a rapidly expanding ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Supposedly these men are only arresting and deporting “aliens” who are in the country without proper papers, but so far they have managed to kill several American citizens and injure many more. Many of us fear that this may be the force Trump deploys, on some excuse, to prevent our 2026 and 2028 elections from taking place peacefully.

As we were reading these books, one member of our group remembered that he had a friend whose parents had lived in Nazi Germany in the early 1930s, and invited him to join us one evening. The friend’s father had been writing a Ph.D. dissertation about the Weimar government – a regime which abruptly came to an end while he was there. He was actually in the Reichstag on the very day, March 23, 1933, that body passed the Enabling Act, which essentially handed all power to Hitler and his cabinet. He left a vivid description which his son shared with us:

“We went to the Kroll Opera House, where the Reichstag now meets… we passed through the SS security line outside and Brownshirt lines inside, and were able to hear the ‘debate’. One party after another shamelessly fell into line, even the Christian Centre Party. Of course, none of the 81 Communist delegates elected just three weeks ago was present nor were 26 Social Democrats. Earlier this month, Interior Minister Frick said all of them are in ‘protective custody’ — in concentration camps ‘learning to do useful work’ (...) Hitler entered, causing a great outcry with heils and foot stamping. Two days ago he was in civilian clothes, deferring to the President in his Field Marshall uniform. Now, back in his Storm Trooper outfit with swastika armband, Hitler laid out his case at great length.(...) After the vote, the Reichstag adjourned and set no date to reconvene.”

Learning about those grim days gave us a more informed basis to compare Hitler’s rise to Donald Trump’s – especially Trump’s draconian second term in office now under way, marked by one assault on democracy after another. We discussed the many similarities. One, of course, is that people underestimated the ruthlessness of both men. With Trump, we should have been more prepared, having seen his first term and his strident encouragement of the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol. But still, even though we knew the second term would be worse, few Americans were prepared for what we’re seeing now: a frenzy of blatant corruption; missile attacks on boats that might – or might not – be transporting drugs; the kidnapping of another nation’s head of state.

There are so many more similarities between the two regimes. With rare exceptions, big business goes along with Trump in the same manner that it did with Hitler. All the major American tech moguls attended his 2025 inauguration, and virtually every large American corporation has chipped in to help finance the grand new ballroom he is building at the White House. The Nazis staged book burnings; Trump’s officials have ordered nearly 600 titles removed from military libraries of all kinds, including those of our service academies – the four-year colleges that train future officers. And then, like Hitler, Trump has purged the military itself, firing or sidelining some two dozen generals and admirals, since any dictator needs the unconditional loyalty of those below him. Finally, Trump, like Hitler, does his best to stir up hate. For Trump the target is immigrants, especially those with darker skin. For Hitler, of course, it was the Jews, and – I had not fully realized until reading Shirer – Poles and other Slavs, whom he talked about with almost equal venom.

I should say, though, that millions of us still have some hope for our country. Comparing the Nazi era to the United States today has also made us pay attention to the differences. Several encourage me. For one thing, despite shameful efforts to please him by key television executives, Trump has not been able to silence critical journalism in the manner that Hitler did. There are still strong opposition voices and good investigative reporting in American newspapers, radio, TV, and filmmaking. Secondly, despite a Supreme Court which usually lets Trump do whatever he wants, our lower and intermediate federal courts have protected people’s rights with many good decisions – a few of them, remarkably, rendered by judges Trump appointed in his first term, when he was less extreme than he is now.

Finally, I rejoice that we are the United States. One of the early things Hitler did was to dissolve all the German state legislatures. Trump cannot do that. Our states have considerable power, which they can use for good or ill. Several of their governors have spoken out boldly against Trump. One, JB Pritzker of Illinois, sounds like he’s been reading the same books we have, for he has explicitly compared Trump to Hitler. My home state of California defies Trump in other ways. A crucial one is energy policy. Trump denies manmade global warming, cancels renewable energy projects and boosts the oil, coal, and gas industries. But California proudly generates two thirds of its electricity from renewable sources and that percentage rises every year.

Our book group has recently turned to reading books by authors from Central and Eastern Europe – a part of the world, of course, that has felt the wrath of both Hitler and Stalin. As it happens, one of our members lives in the very house – high on a ridge above Berkeley with a view over San Francisco Bay – that was once occupied, during his long years of exile, by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Czesław Miłosz. It is interesting to imagine, when we meet there, what this man who thought so deeply about tyranny might say if he could join the conversation. Will we come to feel that we have to leave the United States, as he felt he had to leave Communist Poland?

We recently finished reading the work of another exiled Central European, the Austrian author Stefan Zweig’s memoir, The World of Yesterday, one of the great 20th-century autobiographies. Zweig mailed the manuscript to his publisher from Brazil in 1942, the day before he and his wife, in despair at the Nazi conquest of Europe, jointly committed suicide.

He and his friends had never dreamed that Hitler could so quickly seize total power in a Germany that had been a democracy. Like the other writers we read, he was struck by the relentless, step-by-step takeover, “one dose at a time, with a short pause after administering it. One pill at a time, then a moment of waiting to see if the conscience of the world could swallow that particular pill. And … the conscience of Europe … was quick to say that it was not taking sides, because all these violent acts were perpetrated within the borders of Germany.”

Zweig’s eloquent book begins long before that dark time. He celebrates the pre-1914 world when Europe seemed ever more closely knit together, and when artists and writers from different countries felt they belonged to a truly international republic of letters. He describes his deep friendships with novelists, painters, and musicians from across the continent. Among them were the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini; the French novelist Romain Rolland; and the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren, whom he translated into German. In Paris, awed, he visits the studio of the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Rodin talks with him, then notices a sculpture that he thought was finished needs more work. He completely forgets Zweig’s presence as he takes an hour to sculpt some changes to it. Zweig was always trying to get closer to the process of artistic creation, amassing a large collection of original composers’ scores and writers’ manuscripts, taking great pleasure in one page of Balzac’s that was a “battlefield” of corrections.

Zweig saw his dreams crushed twice, of course, for the cosmopolitan, interconnected Europe he so loved and believed in went up in flames both in 1914 and again in the 1930s. His picture of the First World War, including a long trip in a railway car full of wounded Austro-Hungarian soldiers, their doctors running short of medicine and bandages, is searing. And then, twenty years later, he saw darkness cover the continent again. You can understand the despair that led him to later take his own life. But were he alive today, I’m sure he would take heart from the success of the European Union, embodying the dreams that he and many others had more than a century ago. And, in a world with too many Trumps and Orbáns and Putins, its very existence should give the rest of us hope as well.

Illustration: Nika Aheyeva