Time and Power by Clark Christopher

Author:Clark, Christopher [Clark, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780691181653
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

Time of the Nazis

IN THE SPRING OF 1935, the Swiss writer and journalist Max Frisch visited the National Socialist mega-exhibition ‘Miracle of Life’ in Berlin. Frisch was fascinated by the technical perfection of the exhibits: in the vestibule he marvelled at a ‘glass human being whose internal organs are shown by a system of internal lighting, a work of cutting-edge German technology’. There were flawless models demonstrating the circulatory system and the workings of the heart, so that one was ‘constantly astonished at the way in which the gifted exhibitors managed to render almost unimaginable concepts visible’. A room adorned with slogans displayed huge images of ‘blond young men with spades’ and ‘girls with long hair’. Only when one moved beyond the opening halls did the underlying political purpose of the exhibition become manifest: idealised images and supersized models of the perfect Nordic body were juxtaposed with degrading depictions of the congenitally ill, Jews, and other ‘non-Aryans’. This was a celebration not of the human being as such, but of the ‘Nordic human being’.

Strangest of all was the massive ‘bell of life’ in the main hall. Four times the size of a human being, the bell dominated a central court dedicated to ‘Family, People, Nation’, chiming once every five minutes to announce that nine new Germans had been born. Beneath the tower in which the bell was suspended, sand poured through an oversized hourglass, signifying that over the same five-minute interval, only seven Germans had died—a net gain of two. One’s thoughts, Frisch recalled, were constantly being interrupted by the clang of the bell. Its purpose was obvious enough: to demonstrate the inescapability of biological time.1

This chapter builds a case for the distinctiveness of National Socialist temporality. It swims against the current of those recent studies that have viewed the German and Italian regimes as expressions of a generic ‘fascist’ temporality or have bracketed the three totalitarian dictatorships together as ‘political religions’.2 The political religion literature on National Socialism and its totalitarian contemporaries is now vast. Studies of this kind have done much to illuminate family resemblances among the totalitarian regimes by highlighting the liturgical character of public ceremonial or focusing on common themes, such as rebirth, acceleration, the glorification of an idealised past, and the appeal to myth and ideas of eternity. This chapter does not deny these commonalities, but it is concerned with what was distinctive in the National Socialist regime’s intuition of its place in time.

Extrapolating a timescape from the cultural practices and public utterances of the Hitler regime is not a straightforward enterprise. We cannot speak, in the case of the ‘Third Reich’, of a conscious or coordinated effort to restructure formal temporal frameworks. There was no attempt to redesign the calendar, as occurred under the French Republic, and the aspiration to replace Judaeo-Christian liturgical calendars with ‘pagan’ or ‘Germanic’ substitutes remained confined to marginal groups.3 Nor was there a single coherent ‘temporal dogma’. This is not a unique difficulty; none of the regimes examined in this book produced such a thing.

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