By james art 
On October 10, The Atlantic premiered “Night in the Garden,” a disturbing seven-minute-five-second video made from film footage that American documentary filmmaker Marshall Curry happened to find.
The footage shows the 20,000-strong rally held by the American Nazi Party – the German American Bund – at Madison Square Garden in New York on February 20, 1939.
Historically speaking, the Bund’s anti-Semitic evening was the apotheosis of farce. After the outbreak of World War II in Europe in September, the Bund disintegrated. German American immigrant leader Fritz Kuhn was imprisoned and lost his American citizenship in 1943. He was later deported to a West German prison, where he died in oblivion in 1953.
But still, Curry’s film struggles.
A facsimile of Nazi fascism in New York: the huge blockhouse crowd—garden beds—swastikas, flags, a drum corps, brown shirts, Aryan youths, and a forty-foot figure of George Washington towering over the deed.
The crowd stands in a fit of Nazi salute. Kuhn takes the podium and launches into his anti-Jewish hate speech with casual arrogance. Laughter and excitement. Violence. And the secondary thrill of it among the onlookers when, taking the stage in protest, unemployed Brooklyn plumber Isador Greenbaum is brutally beaten by brownshirts.
The NYPD probably saved his life.
Outside the darkened circus, mounted police attempt to maintain order as New Yorkers engage in street battles with Bund members leaving Madison Square Garden.
Amazed, Curry said Atlantica that, as if in some episode of The Twilight Zonethe footage made him wonder if “the story might have taken a different path”. Could this have happened in New York? As he realized, the footage from the film was not only real, but also “felt eerily familiar, given today’s political situation.”
And indeed, The Guardian (Oct. 18) reported that Donald Trump is now planning to culminate his “blood poisoning” anti-immigrant crusade at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 27, one week before A US presidential election that has far-reaching implications. Because indeed Australians, like many others around the world, will have their own reasons to worry that Trump’s October 27 event will recall the mass rally of American Nazis held in the Garden on February 20, 1939 – which will recall the events in the real Reich.
On 12 October, SBS News Australia was one media outlet that noted that “about 50 balaclava-clad men … in Corowa, on the Murray River … huddled under a banner that read ‘white men strike back'”. The rejection by the government was suitably swift. Beyond this echo of history as a farce, however, along with the US election it reminds us that white supremacist populism is not just a corrosive American problem.
As Curry intended, everyone, especially students, should watch Night in the Garden. Because it comes as a cautionary “provocation,” a jolt to complacent assumptions that history is automatically on the side of good.
Check out the premiere of Marshall Curry’s “A night at the Garden” video with his commentary embedded in the Atlantica.