We live in dark times and many people, over the past few years, have sought to use analogies with the past as a way of explaining the present. Is Donald Trump, somehow, a kind of bumbling Hitler? Is the latest stage of Brexit, with its extreme demonising of migrants, somehow like the latter stage of the German Weimar Republic?  Often, such analogies can be outlandish and basically silly. Other times, they may have a certain logic and can be, at the very least, interesting. In Germany, such analogies are that bit less abstract and appear almost as ghostly presences engraved…

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