William Morgan: Will this give MAGA design ideas?

I am forever searching boxes of postcards in antique stores and junk shops, looking for scenes of New England houses, villages, or landscapes. Imagine my surprise, when amidst a bunch of old Easter Bunny cards, Adolf Hitler appeared.

Like an horrific version of a commemorative first-day cover, this was postmarked less than a month after the Anschluss — the forced unification of Germany and Austria into “One People, One State, One Leader’’.

There must have been thousands of these cards ready to mail. The cards had stamps of both countries, but the German one packs punchier nationalistic realism, with two handsome Aryan youths waving the swastika flag.

There have recently been a lot of memes, satirical skits, and genuine concern about parallels between the current American presidency and 1930s Germany. For example, will the word Anschluss be resurrected if the United States invades Canada? After all, we are two former British colonies sharing (mostly) the same language and somewhat similar cultures, as do Germany and Austria.

Politics aside, Hitler’s propaganda machine had better designers than our current maximum leader has, and this relentless artificially tanned tyrannical toddler, with his Palm Beach Baroque gilded backdrops, will never be half as handsome as the 20th-Century’s maddest madman.

In any case, our wannabe strongman, like the unsuccessful Viennese art student, may well implode in a fiery Götterdämmerung.

Everything about Hitler is grotesque, yet his Wagnerian propaganda had a certain style that precluded clownish long red neckties

William Morgan is an architecture writer based in Providence, and author of numerous books, the latest of which is The Cape Cod Cottage (Abbeville Press). He’s a descendant of one of the Lexington Minutemen.  The Battles of Lexington and Concord took place on April 19, 1775, launching the American Revolution.