{"id":155024,"date":"2026-08-29T06:44:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-29T06:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/155024\/"},"modified":"2026-08-29T06:44:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-29T06:44:09","slug":"what-berlin-teaches-us-about-resisting-tyranny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/155024\/","title":{"rendered":"What Berlin Teaches Us About Resisting Tyranny"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cHitler had to abolish democracy to take over Berlin.\u201d \u2014 Wendy Lesser<\/p>\n

\u201cIch bin ein Berliner\u201d (I Am a Berliner), JFK famously said in West Berlin on June 26, 1963, in the face of Soviet imperial tyranny. Today, Wendy Lesser<\/a> is offering the same defiance in her new book Berlin Before and After<\/a>. Only Lesser offers a cautionary mirror for our times of not just post-Soviet Putin but also wannabe-tyrants like Trump.<\/p>\n

Lesser\u2019s loving portrait of Berlin is of a free city. She reminds us that even in Germany\u2019s darkest hour, Berlin never actually went Nazi. The city voted left up to and including 1933, so Hitler had to abolish democracy to take it over. Nor, Lesser argues, was Nazism a reaction to Weimar Berlin\u2019s Cabaret-style nightlife, any more than Trump is a reaction to wokeness. Economic forces, not cultural ones, she insists, enable dictators.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s Berlin, as a city that memorializes its own crimes, offers America an urban lesson in acknowledging historical guilt. That\u2019s what makes Berlin such a defiant beacon of freedom in our authoritarian age. There are more urbane cities than Berlin, but none quite as dedicated to freedom. Go there and\/or read Berlin Before and After. Today we should all be Berliners.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cHitler had to abolish democracy to take over Berlin.\u201d \u2014 Wendy Lesser \u201cIch bin ein Berliner\u201d (I Am…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":155025,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[99],"tags":[112,190],"class_list":["post-155024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-berlin","tag-berlin","tag-germany"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/117177449824980678","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155024\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}