The visionaries of Weimar, a century ahead of Musk and Thiel’s futurist dreams

The Right and the Left were spinning tales. They told them to others, but above all to themselves. When it came to scientific and technological fantasies, the Right in particular was running wild. The Left, in government, on the other hand, had neither the time nor the appetite for grand dreams of the future. The once-magnificent utopian visions of a bright future, of revolution and of peace had given way to disappointment, frustration, apathy, resignation and pessimism. Moreover, they were too busy defending a democracy and a Constitution under attack – fragile, misunderstood and vilified from all sides. They were too busy trying to hold together quarrelsome factions, attempting to cobble together a semblance of a majority from the constant proliferation of parties and splinter groups, of factions and aspiring leaders, and of rogue elements within each political camp. The left no longer had the desire or the capacity to fantasise, to dream big.

It happened in Weimar Germany a century ago. It is happening today in Trump’s America. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are not merely super-rich, ingenious industrialists who, in order to continue amassing wealth, have promoted – and are now following – the powerful figure of the moment. They are not merely opportunists. They have fallen in love with Trump (some, admittedly, rather belatedly). But not solely out of self-interest or convenience. It is also because they genuinely believe in him. They are dreamers with clear visions of the future. They theorise about them. They write about them at length. They are enthusiastic producers, not only of goods to be sold, but of ideologies and narratives. Coincidentally, they are all science fiction enthusiasts. In fact, several of them are also authors of science fiction and political fiction. Musk has said that his childhood reading inspired his space race, new forms of energy, and spaceships capable of ‘extending the reach of the human species’. He likes to dress up as a science fiction comic book character. The Cybertruck, the new battery-powered pick-up from his Tesla, looks as if it were designed for the set of Blade Runner. Jeff Bezos boasts of owning the world’s largest collection of science fiction books. Zuckerberg has renamed his Facebook ‘Meta’ because it promises not just a platform for exchanging messages and photos, but actual ‘multiverses’ – alternative realities. Peter Thiel ‘devoured Asimov, Heinlein and Tolkien’. His company Palantir, which specialises in surveillance and espionage technologies, takes its name from the crystal ball in The Lord of the Rings. It is well known how passionate Giorgia Meloni is about Tolkien. But perhaps this is more down to everything that alludes to values and myths from the Middle Ages, rather than what the super-technologies of the future might suggest.

It is no coincidence that, in the pantheon of tech multi-billionaires, one of the greatest American writers of the genre, Philip K. Dick, occupies a somewhat peripheral position – in the second row, so to speak. He was by no means ‘left-wing’. He was paranoidly anti-Soviet. He even went so far as to report his Polish colleague (and dissident) Stanislaw Lem to the FBI. His novels and short stories are brimming with brilliant and sinister entrepreneurs. In "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (adapted into the film "Blade Runner"), the owner of the Tyrell Corporation is far more inhuman than the replicant androids destined for forced labour on distant planets, who are ruthlessly hunted down if they dare to migrate illegally to Earth. In Ubik, the novel in which the chapters are introduced by advertisements for all manner of products, the protagonist sells hallucinations of immortality. Similarly, in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the tycoon who returns from the stars and promises boundless happiness to consumers of the miraculous drug Chew-Z—which he produces exclusively—is diabolical. A bit like Musk, a bit like Trump, in short. This is clearly unwelcome material to the current occupant of the White House, and therefore out of the question under the present circumstances.

Paradoxical as it may seem, great Soviet science fiction challenged the regime. So much so that some of the greatest writers – from Zamyatin in Stalin’s time to the Strugatsky brothers in Brezhnev’s – ran into trouble. Writing in Putin’s Russia is even more perilous. Soviet science fiction got off to an early start, shortly after the Revolution, dreaming of interplanetary travel. ‘Cosmism’ was the term used to describe that blend of science, utopia and mysticism. But the movement eventually stalled with the launch of the dog Leica and Yuri Gagarin; the Soviet Union never reached the moon. Having missed the computer revolution, the USSR collapsed. China has learned its lesson and is now outpacing everyone with ‘human-faced’ robots. At the recent Robot Olympics in Beijing, they equalled Usain Bolt’s record in the 100-metre sprint. They are absolutely charming. They are endearing. Even though – or perhaps precisely because – they are clumsy, they fall over at the finish line and have to be carried away on a stretcher. The affection they inspire could enable them to replace carers for China’s rapidly ageing population. However, these robots are not toys like the Japanese Pokémon and Tamagotchi. They work in factories, and they have been deployed as drones in conflicts around the world. China is also at the forefront of alternative energy sources to hydrocarbons, as well as artificial intelligence and the raw materials on which it is based: human intelligence—that is, engineers and scientists—and rare earth elements. Chinese science fiction obviously cannot challenge the regime. But it accommodates it with a vision of the technological future that is, shall we say, almost ‘Reagan-esque’. I am referring to the Ronald Reagan who, at one point, proposed disarmament agreements to Gorbachev on the grounds that this is what America and Russia ought to do if Earth were threatened by Martians.

Ever since its inception, science fiction has imagined worlds and realities, as well as alternative social systems. Sometimes these were benevolent, progressive utopias. At other times, they were nightmares. We tend to call them dystopias. They are not merely fantasies. They reflect things, trends and fears that are very much present in reality. But utopias too have turned out to be nightmarish (things of ‘nowhere’, which exist nowhere). ‘Real socialism’ was part dream gone wrong, part nightmare come true. The bigwigs in Silicon Valley are competing to paint a picture of a future of space travel, interplanetary – indeed, even interstellar – exploration and mining. It’s just a pity that Proxima Centauri, where the nearest Earth-like planet might be found, lies 4.24 light-years away from us. The fastest spacecraft imaginable would take between 70,000 and 80,000 years to reach it. We’ll have to make do with the solar system for quite some time. Space tourism is already on offer, whilst we wait for ultra-luxury resorts to become viable on the Gaza ‘Riviera’, in Crimea, in Albania’s last remaining nature reserves, or in Greenland. They are already profiting from contracts with NASA and the Pentagon. The Golden Dome, announced by Trump at the start of his new presidency—the planned space-based missile interceptor system (7,900 new satellites, more sophisticated than those in Musk’s Starlink)—looks set to be the military contract of the century, indeed of all time. The Congressional Budget Office has just released an estimate suggesting it is set to cost 1.2 trillion dollars (1,200 thousand billion, 12 million million). By comparison, Reagan’s Star Wars programme (which was never actually built – the threat alone was enough to bring down communism) was a mere trifle.

Yet in recent times, reality has surpassed fiction. American science fiction had managed to imagine "The Man Who Bought the Earth" (Cordwainer Smith, 1964). It had not managed to imagine a president promising $5,000 to every American if they ensure his majority emerges unscathed from next November’s mid-term elections. It would cost him over a thousand billion dollars. It will be tough, with the US debt having just exceeded 40,000 billion dollars. You can try imposing tariffs on the rest of the world to raise cash all you like. However many new ones they come up with every day, the figures don’t lie. The techno-tycoons, however, do not confine themselves to crunching numbers and doing business. Nor do they limit themselves merely to politics. They have their own conception of the world, their own Weltanschauung. They are novelists. They are revolutionaries. They want to change the world. They are not utopians. What they imagine, they put into practice.

In this world of fantasy, democracy is not a priority; indeed, it is an obstacle. Just as it was in the 1920s and 1930s for the detractors of the ‘Jewish Republic’ and the ‘corrupt democracy’ of Weimar. Germany in those years produced a vast array of works of fiction, technological imagination and futuristic ideas. It is far less well known than American science fiction from the same period. This is partly because these works are in German and have not been translated into other languages. What opened my eyes to a perspective I was previously unaware of was a collection – not a new one (published in the 1990s), but still unrivalled – by Peter S. Fischer: Fantasy and Politics. Visions of the Future in the Weimar Republic (University of Wisconsin Press, 1991)It is not just Fritz Lang’s famous film, Metropolis, released in 1927 and based on the book by his second wife, Thea von Harbou, from the previous year. The story is set in an imaginary 2026, in which underground slaves are sacrificed daily to the machine Moloch, the technological monster of steel. Keeping them subjugated and docile, with a city of pleasures centred on sex and drugs, is a shady character – a half-Jewish, half-Japanese man – the embodiment of the ‘Jewish threat’ and the ‘Yellow Peril’. Leading the final rebellion is a heroine, a sort of female Führer, aided by the master’s son. Metropolis, as corrupt as it is magnificent, is clearly inspired by the New York of Art Deco skyscrapers. The central theme is that without a leader, a chief, and absolute faith, Western humanity is lost. The film, an absolute Expressionist masterpiece, was not to the liking of the left, who regarded it as an insult to the working class and to socialism. The right, on the other hand, liked it. It suited them that the emancipation of the workers was led by a hard-line leader, a strong woman or man, rather than by one of the tired traditional parties. Siegfried Kracauer, the most eminent critic of German cinema during the Weimar era, noted that the heroine ‘could very well have been invented by Goebbels’, that is, by the head of Nazi propaganda.

“Anyone who listens to the people (Volk) realises that there is a widespread desire for a strong dictator, for an iron fist to take the reins and intervene in the course of world history. It is not uncommon to hear people say: ‘If only someone would finally restore order and come to our rescue. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Brüning [the ‘technical’ chancellor and financial expert, whose austerity measures exacerbated the crisis, Ed.], or Hitler, or a prince, or a labour leader!’. ‘Only a minority do not want to hear talk of dictators: politicians, the gentry, those who own shares and have bank accounts’: so said the Catholic Nazi Joseph Fischer-Hartinger in 1932. It is a veritable chorus of prophetic voices, a profusion of catastrophic or liberating visions. In all their forms: irrationality and violence, literary aestheticism, low-brow propaganda and high literature. They had a vivid imagination, on both the right and the left, though more so on the right. The right imagined ‘German technological geniuses’ and ‘atmospheric barriers’ to defend a threatened Germany, capable of blocking every radio signal from abroad – a precursor to the Golden Dome. In Weimar popular culture, the engineer-inventor had taken over from generals and statesmen in the role of heroes. They were ahead of everyone else in physics, almost on the verge of inventing the atomic bomb before the Americans. Von Braun built their rockets, and once the war was over, he went to build them for the Americans. Losing their best minds because they were Jewish, however, proved fatal. On the left, there were those who had anticipated the age of robots (for example, Ludwig Dexheimer in Das Automatenzeitalter; The Age of Automata, published in 1931, is set in the year 2350). Isaac Asimov was a Jewish refugee who arrived in New York in the 1920s from Russia, which was in the throes of civil war. Had Trump and ICE been around, they would have sent him back.

All right-wing German literature of the 1930s shares a common thread. An aversion to Jews (the ‘others’, the ‘intruders’, the immigrants of that era) and an equally visceral aversion to the Republic and its ‘Jewish’ Constitution. They were vehemently opposed to the Jews and to the Weimar liberal democracy, accusing them of having betrayed Germany, of having ‘stabbed it in the back’, of being in league with its enemies, indeed of embodying the very same multifaceted enemy: international Jewry, the plutocracy of the great Western bankers and Asian Bolshevism. A united Europe did not yet exist; otherwise, they would have turned on that too – indeed, above all on that. Victimhood flourished in every possible form (they want to destroy Germany, exterminate the German race, wipe out its culture), alongside fantasies of revenge and retribution. The ‘capitalist’ republic also had bitter enemies on the opposite side, from the left. On several occasions, brown-shirted and deep-red-shirted groups had joined forces to attack social democracy and capitalism. This is still happening in Saxony. If the AfD’s Nazi nostalgics fail to form a government on their own, and the CDU insists on not bringing them into a majority, Sahra Wagenknecht’s red-brown faction will seize the opportunity to offer them their anti-establishment crutch. It is not certain that it will end as it did in 1933, when Hitler – whose electoral fortunes were on the wane rather than on the rise (his party had slipped back to just over 30 per cent) – was co-opted into a centre-right coalition government. No, not again; it cannot happen. Let us hope not. But there is a deadly compulsion to repeat history in the air.

Narrative – turning the story on its head by telling it differently – plays a decisive role. Then as now. Certain statements, when repeated today, echoed tomorrow, and hammered home by the media, eventually become conventional wisdom—or even the voice of the people. Crises always trigger a powerful compulsion to believe every piece of nonsense, every item of fake news, and one can never predict where these ‘great fears’ might lead. Thankfully, back in the 1930s, there was still no television or so-called ‘social media’. Radio was still in its infancy, before the Nazis realised its value and monopolised it. There was, however, a deluge of printed material. Thousands of publications, headlines, books and pamphlets, which we would have completely forgotten had we not had Fischer’s essay to hand to remind us of them one by one. One is spoilt for choice. They range from Hans Heyck’s Deutschland Ohne Deutsche, published in 1930, to Im Jahre 2000 im Dritten Reich from 1933, authored by an unspecified Schmid. The former is an anti-Semitic pamphlet that bizarrely accuses the Jews of hindering the progress of science. Ironically, it borrows its title from the novel by the Viennese author Hugo Bettauer, who in the 1920s had prophesied a City Without Jews. The second work, whilst appearing to celebrate Hitler, is in fact a critique of what had been promised but never delivered.

Even Hitler had his own Vannacci. He had them eliminated almost immediately after his appointment as Chancellor. Ernst Röhm, the leader of the SA – the paramilitary organisation that had for years been the mainstay of the National Socialist Party – was murdered by the SS, along with almost his entire senior staff. The reason: they wanted to pursue their own revolution, distinct from that of the Führer. Of the Strasser brothers, the leading figures of the ‘left-wing’ faction of Nazism – the so-called ‘Nazi-Bolsheviks’ – one, Gregor, was killed during the Night of the Long Knives itself, whilst the other was forced to flee into exile in America to save his life. Dictators do not tolerate competition within their own ranks. Stalin, too, had unceremoniously eliminated all his opponents within the Party, whether real or suspected. Historians still debate whether it was Hitler who gave him the idea for the great purges, or vice versa. The menu is a rehash of things we’ve seen before, things that have already been chewed over. So much for new worlds. ‘The same things keep coming back,’ as the protagonist of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities would say.