In total seriousness, finishing a book about Kafka and Prague in the 1920s while watching our national disaster unfold was chilling.
Looking back at the 1920s from a post-WWII perspective makes it all seem so fated. Even small events can be tinged with an inexorable dread (even without the Kafka part). BUT THAT WASN'T WHAT WAS CHILLING.
what was so heartbreaking was that it DIDN'T seem inevitable. So many people were working in so many different arenas and walks of life for a different, more hopeful outcome.
when you go deep into a historical moment, you can literally see the moments that could lead in a different direction, and then you can see how they were foreclosed.
I spent years immersed in the work of artists, writers, editors, translators, and politicians working--if often fumbling--to bridge cultural divides while other (populist, nationalist) forces worked to deepen and exploit them.
In the summer of 2016, I argued about Trump with a man selling Protectorate memorabilia in a strange little shop in Southern Bohemia. I explained to him why I thought Trump wouldn't win. The man explained why he was sure he would.
I told him I thought America wasn't white and male enough to elect Trump. He explained how he was Jewish, and what had happened to much of his family. Then he showed me the celebrity magazines from the occupation.
I bought one of the magazines. It was an action adventure magazine with stories and games and glamour shots of Reich personalities like Göring here. 
I had spent years reading different kinds of magazines--art and literature magazines, leftist magazines, centrist pro-newspapers, even a Czech government-financed newspaper dedicated to introducing Czech art and literature to German-speaking audiences.
Looking at the publicity pictures of Nazis who had already imprisoned or murdered many of the journalists I'd been reading was beyond upsetting. But I could also see what the man was trying to show me.
For the first time, I could really see it happening. I didn't think it would, because I could see all the many more ways that it wouldn't happen. But I could see it.
Not because the man thought Trump was a Nazi--I think he kind of liked him--but because Trump understands and would like to relate to truth and propaganda and the media in the same way.
The journalist Milena Jesenská—best if misleadingly known as Kafka’s girlfriend—related differently to Nazi propaganda, was active in the Czech resistance and died in a concentration camp. Nothing in her fashion journalism that Kafka admired suggested this as an inevitable fate.
This project has left me with such a sense of loss for a twentieth century that could have included an imperfectly democratic multilingual and multiethnic country at the center of Europe
As well as an anxious conviction that every day holds possibilities for redirecting our path away from our worst futures but also the likelihood that we will fail to recognize them, wait no that’s a Kafka parable
