The peripatetic German Jewish writer Heinrich Heine presciently foresaw the emergence of something like Nazism a century before it actually emerged in Germany. He also somehow knew that Communism would play a major role in the world to come at the time it was a fringe belief.

(From “The Pity of it All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch by Amos Elon)

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Thanks for sharing because you are right it is always interesting to see reasonable people who emerge to be wildly prophetic post hoc

Whenever I see such cases, I wonder if all their other predictions were equally accurate or equally wild. But above all, I’m interested in the principles that Heine used to arrive at his conclusions. It seems that those principles are based on the idea that new ideas (communism) are a repetition of existing concepts (absolutism) and thus can be analysed the same way, and we also encounter yet another god is dead figure, a very early one, who looked to the past to understand what aspects of life would repeat in a future with less common Christianity.

Heinrich Heine had an amazing ability to predict future events, like the rise of Nazism and the influence of Communism, even when those ideas were still far from mainstream. It’s fascinating how insightful he was.