Årg. 20 Nr. 38 (2023): The 1930s today – Political and aesthetic legacies

In  the  aftermath  of  the  2008  financial  crisis,  which  to  many  observers  compared  disturbingly  well to the 1929 crash on Wall Street, Western democracies have been insistently haunted by the spectre  of  the  1930s.  Prompted  by  the  rising  support  for  authoritarian  and  xenophobic  parties  and movements in most European countries over the course of the 2010s, and intensified by the  presidency  of  Donald  Trump  in  the  US,  historians,  political  scientists,  cultural  critics,  and  commentators have produced an infinite number of articles, op-eds, and book-length studies taking up  the  comparison  between  the  1930s  and  today. The symbolic and imaginative power of the 1930s seems to be so extensive and so contested that representations and re-circulations of the 1930s are bound to feed polarisation and controversy, not least in a contemporary media ecology which is dominated by global digital platforms governed by polarising algorithms. If the individual contributions of this issue each in their way address the risk of the analogical exercise – and the agitated responses it generates – to congeal into clichés and other hardened patterns of thought, collapsing nuances and stimulating divisiveness, then we hope that they may also convince of the significance of continuing to do this work, despite its implied crux. What we aspire to do with this issue is to follow Susan Friedman’s instruction to work with forms of comparison that “resist the politics of domination and otherness.”

This issue is supported by The Independent Research Fund Denmark and The Danish Arts Foundation.