The continuing success of right-wing populist parties and Trump’s presidency are worrying at best. Many people feel powerless, hoping that this situation will soon pass. Lion Feuchtwanger contemplated very similar problems in his trilogy Wartesaal (Waiting Room), which he wrote between 1930 and 1939. Feuchtwanger ‘s observations of national socialism in the 1930s were almost visionary and already entailed a theory of swarm intelligence, decades before this phenomenon was actually described.

Courtesy of Arno Declair.