I write from Germany. On my first rested day in Berlin, I visited one of the Schwules Museum, one of the only LGBTQ museums in the world. In the midst of viewing an exhibit there on LGBTQ culture in southeast Asia, I paused to converse with two young white women. One was a graduate student in theater, the other in the arts. Both lived outside Berlin, in far smaller and more conservative areas, and both studied English, which facilitated deep communication.

Later, in the museum’s vital LGBTQ research archives, I spoke with another young woman. She is a Ph.D. candidate who is researching the cult of hypermasculinity among right-wing men. That, in itself, should tell you bunches about her perspective.

What struck me strongest about these women was the extent to which the same language and concepts that we in the U.S. use to describe the relationship of sexual and gender minorities to the dominant culture was central to their Weltanschauung, German for a somewhat apprehensive worldview.

Take, for example, the term “heteronormative,“ which they invoked several times. “Heteronormative“ describes beliefs, expectations and behaviors that the dominant culture takes for granted, but which seem anything but normal to we who live outside the norm.

My commonality with them, however, extended far beyond language. Germany, like many countries around the world, is experiencing a rise in right-wing parties that seek to impose heteronormative behavior and structures through rigid control. Every fear the women shared about the rise of the right was mirrored by fears of my own. Our language and outlook were so similar that we could have all been Port Townsenders chatting together during a demonstration, a dog walk, or in the aisles of the Food Co-op.

The next night, I attended a stunning performance of Gustav Mahler’s Das lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) at the Berlin Philharmonic. “Where am I going?” asks the soloist (in rough translation) at the end of the final song, “The Farewell.”

“I go, I wander to the mountains.

I seek peace for my lonely heart.

I am heading home, to my abode!

Never again shall I roam to foreign parts.

My heart is still and awaits its hour!

Everywhere the dear earth blooms in

Spring and grows green again!

Everywhere and eternally

The distant places shine bright and blue!

Eternally … Eternally …”

Throughout the night and into the next day, as I toured the “Yoko Ono: Dream Together” exhibit at the Gropius Bau Museum and part of the “Topography of Terror” exhibit next door, fragments of Mahler’s songs played on repeat in my head. After realizing, for the first time, that Ono’s life work has been about transcending concepts and structures that prevent us from realizing our authentic lives and living our dreams in peace, I went outside to gaze at a superbly illustrated timeline of the rise and fall of Nazism and the Berlin Wall.

Again, I was struck by the parallels between Hitler’s Germany and what’s unfolding right now in the U.S. Just as Hitler systematically burned books, destroyed libraries, intimidated university students and intellectuals, clamped down on boundary-challenging artistic expression, and campaigned against Jews, homosexuals, and gypsies, Trump is following a similar path. Jews may initially seem exempt, but only if they accept the new pro-Isreal definition of anti-Semitism foisted upon them by a gentile. Central to the Hitler/Trump playbook is that free thought is anathema to systems of rigid control, and that the easiest way to divide and conquer is by replacing free expression with fear of the other.

One of Hitler’s first “achievements” was sacking the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute, the world’s first Institute for Sexual Science. As I stared at a photo of the Hirschfeld library plundered and in ruins, the similarity to Trump’s movement to stop diversity of thought, deport protestors at universities across the United States, and erase trans identity touched me as deeply as did Mahler’s music. Both left my heart aching for a world in which peace rather than madness reigns.

Jason Victor Serinus is a critic of culture, music, and audio. A longtime advocate for rights, equality, and freedom, he is also a professional whistler. Column tips: jvsaisi24@gmail.com