You’re Not in Casablanca

There is a scene in Casablanca where the war walks into the room. Nazi officers gather around the piano at Rick’s and sing “Die Wacht am Rhein.” Victor Laszlo crosses to the house band and orders “La Marseillaise.” The band looks at Rick. Rick nods. The whole cafe stands and sings the Nazis into silence.

That act of resistance costs them. Major Strasser has the cafe closed before the cheering stops. But for a minute, everyone in that room knows exactly who the enemy is and exactly what the singing is for.

Many of the actors were refugees from the Nazis themselves, and it shows. The movie is almost literally a product of resistance thought, and that scene holds everything you need to start to understand one kind of resistance. It does not hold every kind, and it does not hold the kind you might need to understand in the United States today.

As I lay out in my book, resistance is a process. It runs from articulating grievance to organized opposition to direct action, and it aims to slow or stop both the abuse and, if necessary, the authority behind it. But the process runs differently depending on where the abusive authority comes from. Simple resistance acts against an abusive authority that invades from without. Complex resistance acts against one that emerges from within. The difference is what it has to do, not how long it takes to do it. What sorts the two is whether the authority operates your government and shares your identity.

In a simple context, escalation to direct action against an abuser can come fast, even immediately. The abusive authority is quickly and easily identifiable as an other, the nature of the authority as alien, the scope of abuse as an enemy’s. The moral question, whether to resist, is easy to answer, so the hard questions are practical ones, like how to resist.

Some clear examples for us come from World War II Europe. The Nazis invaded France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, pretty much everybody. In each place the enemy was clear, and the need for resistance was obvious. But even then, each country went through a period of negotiation. The resistance context was the same everywhere. The dynamics that informed how the resistance emerged and evolved weren’t the same anywhere. People sized up the abuse as they understood it in the moment and sorted themselves into collaborators and resisters, depending on their risk level, whether they thought resistance was wise, or, in too many cases, on how far they agreed with the abuse.

The key moment comes when an existing identity can stretch to accommodate the abuser. Marshal Pétain led that adaptation in France when he established Vichy. A national hero, he made collaboration with the Nazis look patriotic. He took an authority that invaded from without and gave it a French face. He turned “liberty, equality, and fraternity” into “work, family, and fatherland,” replacing democracy with authoritarianism in the Vichy version of French identity.

I call simple resistance “Casablanca resistance” because the movie gets it right in nearly every element. And because a Casablanca resistance can move quickly toward direct action, the stories we tell about it are almost always about the direct action, the maquis in France or the underground in Denmark, and not about the process of choosing to act. Nobody questions that choice, in reality or in the stories, because most people don’t need the why explained. Show a swastika on the other side and that work is done, and for good reason.

None of this means resistance in a simple context is easy. Simple describes the moral clarity of the choice, not the cost of making it. Read Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat for what you need to know about how France fell so fast, and how much institutional failure and self-deception prepared the ground for what followed. Bloch would know. He was a historian who later joined the French Resistance, and the Gestapo shot him for it.

Simple doesn’t mean fast, either. For Irish resistance, British rule was occupation, not legitimate government. The moral question did not need answering. What set the limits was British coercive power, which determined how far Irish resistance could organize and escalate at any given moment. Opening that space took more than a century, from Wolfe Tone and the Act of Union to the Easter Rising, the War of Independence, and the civil war. The Wind That Shakes the Barley is useful here for the same reason Casablanca is. Two brothers join in simple resistance against British rule, then divide when the conflict turns inward and the opposition becomes one another, as each observes the other as part of the abusive authority.

Complex resistance is a world away from Casablanca, although it’s there in The Wind That Shakes the Barley. The path from grievance to opposition to direct action is so fraught that it is almost never reached in the end. An authority that emerges from within has to be made into an enemy, an other, before acting against it becomes acceptable. And the abuser almost always runs your government. The law, its enforcement, and the cultural pressures that back them all stay in place, working against you. Usually the abuser sharpens the state’s coercive power against the opposition too: the Gestapo, ICE, fugitive slave agents.

No one questions the legitimacy of acting against a Nazi. Many question the action if that Nazi is your uncle. Almost everyone questions it if that uncle is a Nazi and wears your country’s uniform.

The process of resistance in a complex context almost always starts with the negotiation, and it might end there, because the culture almost always works against it. People want to believe their institutions are good, so they lean into them. They want to believe political change can fix the problem, so they lean into that. When an abuser shares your identity, your culture, your patriotism, most people cannot get from there to naming the abuser as an enemy. So most complex resistance gets stuck at organized opposition, convinced that institutions will hold, elections will reset things, and time and actuarial tables will get rid of the bad apples.

Those negotiated identities often settle into a gradual accommodation with the abuse, as long as its costs fall on people who can be marked, some way or another, as an other: as Jewish, as Black, as an immigrant, as something the dominant identity can distinguish from its own. Escalation in a complex context never depends on converting a majority. It depends on moving the comfortable middle, or at least getting it to stand aside, in numbers large enough to destabilize the status quo into disruption.

Two solid examples are the patriot resistance to the British Parliament in the 1700s and the white anti-slavery resistance to the First American Republic in the 1800s. The patriots could not escalate to direct action at a scale that could contest British power until they had negotiated the British into an other, an enemy that could be struck to end the abuse. That took more than ten years, which is fast in historical terms, because the case was clear enough to the comfortable middle in the colonies to move them, or at least keep them from opposing the patriots, in appreciable numbers.

The anti-slavery resistance shows what happens when the case is not so clear. The resistance of the enslaved was simple resistance. They never needed the enemy explained to them. The republic ruled them but never once claimed them as its own. The moral question was answered at birth, and what remained were the practical questions of how. White anti-slavery resistance was complex resistance in full. The nation was them, and they were the nation. They had to develop a theory of resistance against themselves, against their Constitution, and moving enough of the comfortable middle took almost eighty years.

But neither American independence in 1776 nor the refounding of America in 1866 could have happened without that work. And that means the same authority can run both contexts at once. The First American Republic did. Which context you lived in depended on who you were.

Another obvious and legible example is resistance within Nazi Germany to Nazi Germany. That resistance gets attention, much of it on the student resistance of the White Rose under Hans and Sophie Scholl, but the parts that get attention reinforce the point. Pockets of resistance can form, recognize the abuse, target the harm, and negotiate their way into actionable difference, usually in patriotic terms. The Nazis had to become anti-German, so that acting against them became a defense of Germany. That is a sophisticated renegotiation of identity, and it had to happen in a period of aggressive nationalism that had been devoted to defining the German nation. That takes time.

The White Rose got there. Their leaflets called the fight a defense of Germany. It was not enough, because a cell can start the identity work but only a broader network can finish it. And while resistance formed in groups like the White Rose, and in conspiracies inside the army itself, it never matured to work at scale. Its members were identified, betrayed, broken up, and, like the Scholls, executed.

The better way into that complex resistance is probably the Oster resistance. It gives us all the elements, and all the limits. It formed inside the German military establishment and worked for years to interfere, on occasion, with Nazi aims. But it did not begin to cohere into action until its leaders started to worry that Hitler would lead Germany into a war it would lose, again, as in 1918.

Hans Oster was a senior officer in German military intelligence, eventually its chief of staff. He began to lose faith in the Nazi leadership early, when Hitler’s 1934 purge killed one of his own, his former superior Ferdinand von Bredow. He belonged to the German elite, high in the army’s ranks, and much of that elite had no problem with the Nazis. Most of it went along with the Nuremberg Laws. Most of it went along with the concentration camps. The broader military opposition only got skittish when Hitler started talking about invading Czechoslovakia in 1938.

Oster and his allies tried to smuggle word of Hitler’s plans abroad: that Hitler had no intention of stopping at the Sudetenland, and that his goal of Lebensraum, living space taken by force from the peoples of eastern Europe, was firmly in place. Britain and France should refuse Hitler’s demands at Munich and stop him then, while they could. No one acted on it. William Lloyd George, also haunted by the carnage of The Great War, was blinded by his committed to appeasement. Nobody else, least of all the Americans, saw much reason to bet on a coup by the same officers who had gone along with everything the Nazis had done so far. So the warnings fell on deaf ears.

After Hitler’s victories in 1939 and 1940, much of the military opposition collapsed. What remained narrowed to one goal: removing Hitler himself. After the July 20 attempt on Hitler’s life failed, the network was smashed. Most of those still in a position to act against the Nazis gave it up as useless or settled in to wait for the Allies to do their resistance for them. Oster wasn’t among them. He had been forced out of military intelligence in 1943, before the one real blow was attempted. He was arrested after July 20 anyway, and executed in April 1945, three weeks before Hitler killed himself.

That is the complex resistance problem in miniature. The Nazis’ abusive authority had never been subtle. As outlandish as their extremism often seemed, they were rarely guilty of overstatement. What finally moved the military opposition was the threat Hitler posed to Germany, which they understood as themselves. Then they could negotiate Hitler into their resistance terms as an enemy of their Germany, when his militarism threatened to destroy it. But they were establishment elites, and the Germany they were defending was their establishment. That threat would never be legible to a comfortable middle the officers had no way to reach and no interest in reaching, and with the Nazis’ control over internal affairs almost complete, the conspiracy could never expand into a broader opposition.

Moments of real resistance against the Nazis occurred from almost the very beginning, and they kept up throughout the war. What never happened was the evolution that would have connected those moments into a coherent movement. Too many Germans, the subjects of Daniel Goldhagen’s work, were sympathetic to too many of the Nazis’ goals, especially their antisemitism, to be much concerned with opposing how they pursued them. Historians have fought for decades over how deep that sympathy ran and where it came from. Whatever its sources, the sympathy did its work. Important forces in German culture, not just its political culture, kept the pockets of resistance from maturing. What did not exist was resistance that could contest Nazi power with enough power of its own, and that difference makes all the difference when the goal is ending, or at least slowing, the abuse.

Historians of Nazi Germany spent decades arguing over other aspects of resistance inside the Third Reich. Ian Kershaw focused on categories of activity, reserving the word resistance for those who actively worked toward regime change, with the conscious aim of bringing the system down or preparing for the moment it fell. He filed everything else under opposition or dissent: opposition for action against particular policies and intrusions that never challenged the regime itself, dissent for the grumbling, nonconformity, and private disagreement that never became action at all.

Martin Broszat’s work is somewhat more useful for us, especially the concept he coined, Resistenz, for those institutions that fashioned themselves as buffers against the abusive authority. Broszat borrowed the word from immunology, and he meant it that way: not fighting the infection, just limiting how far it penetrated your own tissue. What mattered to him was effect, not intent, which is what separates his category from Kershaw’s. In strikingly self-serving terms, the men who ran the universities, the bar, the Catholic Church, the scientific community, and other institutions could confuse the preservation of their work and structures and traditions, shorn of the people erased by the Reich, with a kind of resistance. They, in a sense, ran a Germany that could survive Hitler, and they could count that survival as a sort of resistance without ever challenging Hitler’s authority.

The framing travels well. Substitute the categories and you have the United States today. Call it what it functionally was: self-preservation, resting on a confusion of the institution with the state. That confusion is real because the people who run institutions come to believe that what they administer is the nation itself, so keeping the operation intact feels like keeping the country intact. Resistenz names the feeling. It changed nothing about the abuse and did nothing for its victims.

So the answer to why resistance in Germany never reached scale is not a mystery. It is just complicated, and no one wants to tell a story like that.

That includes the most prominent historians of resistance. Halik Kochanski’s Resistance, her 900-page history of the underground war in occupied Europe, is the definitive account of simple resistance during the war, and I owe it a debt. I devoured it, country by country, as a predicate for understanding resistance in the first place. But the book explicitly excludes resistance inside Germany as not resistance at all, precisely because “[m]uch of the German opposition to Hitler was not anti-German and it did not want Germany to lose the war,” so “internal opposition within a conquering nation has nothing in common with the resistance in the countries it has defeated and occupied.” She is right about the difference but wrong about what it means. An authority that emerges from within is harder to identify, harder to other, and harder to act against than one that arrives in tanks. That is exactly why we need to study it.

So when you look at abusive authority where you live, ask yourself one question: Has it invaded from without, or emerged from within? Did it arrive in a tank, or through an election?

If it’s the second, then the story you need isn’t Casablanca.