Everything Old Is New Again … Dangerously So

Sixty years ago, the folksinger Bob Dylan sang about how the times were “a-changin’.” That laconic observation, so true in 1964, is even more so today. 

I recently was reminded of that when I received an out-of-the-blue email from a New York-based film producer who’d discovered my book A Complex Fate: William L. Shirer and the American Century (which McGill-Queen’s University Press published in 2015). Because I’m Shirer’s biographer, the producer was keen to know if I’d be willing to do an interview for a planned Netflix documentary series in which I’d recount his experiences in Nazi Germany.

In case you don’t know, the Chicago-born journalist-turned-broadcaster was one of the most famous and influential American media figures of his time. From mid-1933 until late 1940, Shirer reported from Berlin, first as a print journalist and then as a correspondent for CBS radio. During these “nightmare years” – as he so eloquently described them – Shirer observed the rise of Adolf Hitler from a front-row seat and came to know many of the leaders of the Nazi party.

Shirer wrote about all this in his 1960 book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and in his other books and writings. That weighty volume was one of the most widely read and influential non-fiction books of the twentieth century. Shirer’s magnum opus has sold millions of copies worldwide; it remains in print, and still is widely regarded as one of the “go-to” sources for anyone seeking to understand the evils of the Nazi era.

It's been almost a decade since I wrote A Complex Fate. When it was published, the book garnered favourable reviews and attracted the eyeballs of readers who had an interest in the Nazi era or in the history of journalism. However, as they say, that was then; this is now. The times still are a-changin’. Only now it's at warp speed.

Just nine years have passed, but the world is a very different place than it was in 2015. Justin Trudeau hadn’t yet brought his “sunny ways” to Ottawa. Donald Trump was still a brash blowhard who was known mainly as a real-estate developer and the host of a cheesy “reality” television show. And the global Covid pandemic was still almost five years in the future. A Complex Fate, like other non-fiction books about the WWII era that were published back in 2015 was just another interesting historical narrative. Too many people nowadays have scant interest in – and ignorance of – history. Or at least they do so until the past suddenly rears up and threatens to repeat itself, as it’s now doing when rising tides of intolerance, authoritarianism, and antisemitism threaten to wash over our world.

A rising Greek chorus that includes the makers of the Netflix filmmakers who’ve chronicled anew the evils of Hitler and the Nazis, is sounding the alarm while pointing out the terrifying parallels between events of today and those that roiled the 1930s and pushed the world over the precipice and into the madness of the bloodiest war in history.

In retrospect, it occurs to me that A Complex Fate was a book that was written a decade ahead of its time. The dark themes that I explored in my Shirer biography are resonating again, and that is something about which I can only have mixed emotions.