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Rachel Seiffert and the guilt of living on the wrong side of history

Looking back over time from the Trump presidency to the Holocaust, author Rachel Seiffert worries not that history repeats itself but that, in the words of Mark Twain, history too often rhymes.

In the divisive language of the Brexit campaign and the US President she sees too many echoes. “Trump’s shifted the posts so far but in such a clumsy and clownish and doltish way that he’s made a space for a more reasonable, more intelligent sounding fascist – fascist is too strong a word – a far-right inclined person, to come along and to be making the same promises but sounding more sensible about them, and that’s frightening to me.”

Seiffert speaks as the granddaughter of Nazis.

Her father Leslie Seiffert was a Grammar school boy born in West Ryde who was an Oxford don and met the author’s mother in Berlin and settled in Britain.

 

Read the full article by Linda Morris at the Sydney Morning Herald.