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. I will try to work around the absence of a coherent programme by tracing influential tropes through a variety of sources ranging from speeches, printed texts, images, and the built environment to relevant strands of regime practice, and inferring from these a collective awareness. But proceeding in this way is particularly problematic for the Hitler era because it raises further questions about which sources and utterances should be regarded as characteristic of a power structure marked by the competition between different agencies. And yet, tracking the temporal textures of political and cultural utterances from across the range of the movement’s public activity does allow us to assay the ‘imagination of time and history’ that endowed the policies of a uniquely destructive regime with ‘meaning and legitimacy’.4 This chapter explores a range of public utterances and installations, but it opens with the modest and improvised museums with which parts of the Nazi movement sought both to celebrate and to commemorate the recent seizure of power.

Museums of Revolution

On 15 September 1933, a new museum opened in Berlin. Its purpose was to mark the events that had recently transformed the German political landscape. The main exhibition chamber displayed piles of weapons confiscated from communist street fighters and objects stolen from the Communist Party offices at the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus. A life-sized male fashion mannequin with rouged cheeks and a fey expression stood incongruously decked in the uniform of a fighter of the communist paramilitary organisation Rotfront, a knife, a pistol, and a dagger stuck under its belt and a cosh of twisted metal cable tied to its right hand. Next to it was a tall glass cabinet bearing the label ‘Murder weapons from the Fischerkietz’ (a poor area, formerly controlled by the communists, on the southern end of the Spree Island that is now part of central Berlin) and containing piles of hand grenades, clubs, knives, daggers, pistols, cartridges, and peaked caps bearing communist insignia. The walls were a chaos of political posters from the ‘years of struggle’. An adjacent room was set aside as a ‘Hall of Honour’: here, party banners framed neoclassical memorial arches and plaques bearing the names of fallen Nazi comrades.

The Berlin Revolutionsmuseum was initially housed in one of the new regime’s lieux de mémoire, the apartment block of the fallen Nazi activist and SA-Mann Horst Wessel on the corner of Jüden- and Parochialstraße, though it later relocated to a more impressive venue, on the Neue Friedrichstraße.5 Its founder was Willi Markus (1907–69), a friend and sometime comrade of Horst Wessel and commanding officer of the Sixth Regiment of the Berlin SA. Guests at the modest opening ceremony included friends of the Wessel family and a gathering of the local SA, including Brigadeführer August Wilhelm, fourth son of Germany’s last Kaiser, Wilhelm II. In time, the museum established itself as one of the cultural fixtures of an emerging ‘National Socialist Berlin’.6

The Revolutionsmuseum in Berlin was not the only institution of its type. There were similar foundations in Halle, Kassel, and Düsseldorf—not to mention Ehrenhallen (halls of honour) established in various other locations to commemorate the ‘achievements’ and ‘sacrifice’ of the National Socialist movement. These were not the consequence of directives from the regime, but local initiatives driven by regional or district SA leaderships, often in collaboration with the Gau authorities.7 The SA appears to have founded these institutions as a means of advertising its role in the Nazi seizure of power. Local SA leaderships were also involved in the Museum der Deutschen Erhebung in Halle, figured prominently in the Revolutionsschau in Düsseldorf, and collaborated in the establishment of Ehrenhallen. The area around the Revolutionsmuseum in Berlin was one in which SA units had faced especially determined resistance from the communists. At Parochialstraße 29, just around the corner, were the premises of what had once been the Berlin Anti-Kriegs-Museum, a crowded and rather shambolic installation founded by the pacifist Ernst Friedrich (1894–1967) that used images and objects—including photographs of maimed invalids—to invoke the horror of military violence; in March 1933, the local SA had seized and ransacked the museum, before transforming it into an SA leisure facility and torture chamber.8

FIGURE 4.1. The entrance to the Berlin Revolutionsmuseum. Photograph by the British Archaeologist O.G.S. Crawford. Source: Photo archive of O.G.S. Crawford. By kind permission of the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford University.

The choice of the name Revolutionsmuseum is noteworthy, reflecting as it does the SA’s preoccupation with the revolutionary character of the takeover and the imminence of a ‘second revolution’, in which the political achievements of January 1933 would be followed up with a far-reaching social transformation. The choice of objects and the mode of their exhibition reflected the petty resentments and hatred fanned by the ‘years of struggle’ for the German capital. Among the exhibits was a framed photograph from an illustrated supplement of 1932, showing the spacious apartment of the Jewish former Vice President of Berlin’s police department, Bernhard Weiß (1880–1951), onto which has been mashed a pair of broken spectacles. Weiß had been a determined defender of the Weimar republican order and—under the mocking sobriquet ‘Isidor Weiß’—the foremost hate figure of the Goebbels press in the capital. Nazi caricatures regularly focused their loathing on the police chief’s round, ‘Jewish’ spectacles.9 A review of the exhibition written by Joseph Goebbels and published in the party daily Völkischer Beobachter described this item as ‘a cheerful and tragic-comical reminder: Herr Isidor Weiß in person, [in the form of] the spectacles he left behind as he fled in the greatest haste [from his home]’.10

Clearly, one of the objectives of the Revolutionsmuseum was to advertise the victory of the regime (or at least of its armed shock troops) over the forces that had opposed its coming into existence. A ‘rote Ecke’ (red corner), in which captured communist weapons and insignia were displayed, was a feature common to several exhibitions of this type.11 This flaunting of trophies was not insignificant at a time when the danger of a communist retaliation was still presented in official propaganda as a genuine threat—throughout the autumn of 1933 and the spring and summer of 1934, the party press continued to cover alleged ‘red plots’ and incidents of ‘red terror’ against policemen, Nazi officials, and members of the Hitler Youth, and there were widely publicised trials against supposed communist rings, in which the description of confiscated weapons played a prominent role.12 The museum was, one commentator put it, a ‘chamber of horrors’ (Schreckenskammer) whose purpose was to impart a frisson of dread at the thought of what might have been if the National Socialists had not come to power. ‘It’s hot at the moment in Berlin’, wrote the conservative satirist Adolf Stein in the summer of 1935, ‘but an ice-cold shudder runs down one’s back in the Revolutionsmuseum’.13

To the student of political temporalities, these institutions are of interest above all because the museum as an institution was (and is), among other things, an instrument for the manipulation of temporal awareness.14 The apparatus of the museum could be used both to distance the viewer from the epoch or phenomena on display and to establish a sense of immediacy. As Martin Roth has shown, the years 1924 to 1932 saw a massive growth in museum foundations, an elevation in the cultural authority of the institution, and a dramatic ‘actualisation’ of museum content—several features of the Revolutionsmuseum were borrowed from the left-leaning ‘social museums’ of the early Weimar Republic, whose exhibits were almost entirely contemporary in orientation.15 In deploying the idiom of the museum—with its labelled exhibits and glass cabinets—the makers of the Revolutionsmuseum aimed to connect the visitor with the actuality of the National Socialist transformation, while confining the Weimar Republic, whose history extended to within nine months of the moment at which the exhibition was opened, to a bygone past. ‘The Revolutionsmuseum’, said the posters on the newspaper columns in central Berlin, ‘shows the symbols of a superseded era’.16 In his commentary on the exhibition, Goebbels observed that the objects on display were mere remnants, reminders of a bygone epoch. ‘Only in the memory’, he wrote, ‘do those days of bloodthirsty [communist] terror once again rise up’.17 The purpose of these ‘symbols’ of the conquered left, another party journalist observed in 1937, was to serve as a reminder of ‘times that will never return’. The leftist posters that hung from the walls were ‘dead rags, as dead as the mottos they were emblazoned with’.18 Laid out and labelled in their glass cases, the paraphernalia of the Weimar communists resembled the mute pottery shards and metal ornaments that adorned so many museums of ethnography and Germanic prehistory.

This effort to confine the Weimar years to the past and to posit a fundamental rupture between the events of the Weimar era and those of the Nazi present was entirely in accordance with the priorities set by the public utterances of a regime that defined itself as marking a caesura between ages and inaugurating a new epoch.19 ‘It is not merely that a new government was constituted on the 30 January 1933’, Hitler declared in a speech of July 1934. ‘Rather, a new regime extirpated an old and sickly era’. The transition between the political history of Weimar and the Nazi seizure of power was to be seen as a radical temporal disconnect: ‘We National Socialists have the right to refuse that we be integrated into that line’, Hitler insisted, referring to the ‘miserable’ sequence of Weimar Chancellors between 1919 and 1932.20 Restructuring the relationship between the present and the past in this way allowed the vanquished ‘system’ of the recent past to be evacuated from the present.

This denial of continuity between the present and recent past was not unique to the National Socialist regime. We find it in the early years of the French Revolution, and the same reflex can be discerned in those Soviet museums that marked the victory of communism and modern science over the faith and superstition of the past, such as the ‘Antireligious Museum’ housed in Saint Isaac’s Cathedral, Saint Petersburg, between 1930 and 1936.21 Saint Isaac’s was stripped of all its religious effects, some of which were assembled for an exhibition on the history of superstition and religious belief. In 1931 a Foucault pendulum was installed; a fifty-six-pound ball of lead clad with bronze hung from ninety-three metres of wire suspended from the apex of the main dome, the slowly rotating plane of its swing registering the motion of the earth. The purpose was to demonstrate the displacement of faith and revelation by the experimental observation of scientifically verifiable truth. But what is striking about the National Socialist museums is the sense that what had been accomplished was not merely a break with the immediate past, but the inauguration of a new kind of time.

FIGURE 4.2. Newspaper column advertising the Berlin Revolutionsmuseum. Source: Photo archive of O.G.S. Crawford. By kind permission of the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford University.

We can see this more clearly if we examine another National Socialist museum in the city of Halle, a much more imposing foundation than its Berlin counterpart, which opened on 14 June 1934 before formations of SA, SS, Reichswehr, and Police, flanked by members of the public and local party officials. The Halle ‘Museum of the National Socialist Uprising’ (Museum der Nationalsozialistischen Erhebung) was a foundation of the Gau leadership and was intended to project the regional identity of the party in the Halle-Merseburg region. Situated in a converted water tower, it was divided into two parts. A lower section offered a spectacle similar to the one on show in Berlin: this was, as one press commentator put it, ‘no paper museum with bare statistical tables’, but a collection of ‘tangible pieces from the days of most bitter struggle’, including ‘political stickers, armbands, membership books, clubs of iron and wood’.22

FIGURE 4.3. Museum of the National Sozialistischen Uprising in Halle. Photograph from the official guidebook. Source: Kreisleitung der NSDAP Halle (ed.), Führer durch das NS-Museum des Gaues Halle-Merseburg der NSDAP. Ehrenhalle der Nationalsozialistischen Erhebung, Revolutionsmuseum, NS-Archiv (Halle, 1934).

Here one wandered through a disorienting space densely packed with posters, documents, photographs, and telling objects, such as a Litfaßsäule peppered with bullet holes, or caches of confiscated weapons and bombs. The upper storey, by contrast, housed a Hall of Honour (Ehrenhalle) for fallen Nazis from the region. This was—in the words of the official guide to the museum—‘a place of memory for the blood witnesses of the national and National Socialist revolution, a place of meditation to celebrate the new Germany’.23 Here there were no exhibits, just a large darkened space occupying the entire upper floor of the building and lined with ‘memorial niches and windows’ bearing the names of fallen comrades and of units that had distinguished themselves in the struggle. This juxtaposition of remembrance on the one hand and the turmoil of history on the other was entirely deliberate. On the one hand, as Gauleiter Rudolf Jordan put it in a speech for the opening of the museum, there was the ‘timeless struggle’ (der zeitlose Kampf) of the National Socialist movement; on the other, the ‘parliaments, with all the blabbering of day-to-day politics’.24

FIGURE 4.4. Ground floor of the Museum of the National Socialist Uprising in Halle. Photograph from the official guidebook. Source: Kreisleitung der NSDAP Halle (ed.), Führer durch das NS-Museum des Gaues Halle-Merseburg der NSDAP. Ehrenhalle der Nationalsozialistischen Erhebung, Revolutionsmuseum, NS-Archiv (Halle, 1934).

A number of the revolution museums combined memory and remembrance in this way. Even the relatively modest Berlin museum incorporated a simple shrine room with inscriptions, insignia and lists of names. The Revolution Show (Revolutionsschau) at Düsseldorf combined a triumphal process of party flags and side galleries exhibiting objects from the Weimar years with a large chamber for the purpose of meditation and remembrance, in which the lights were dimmed and the Horst Wessel Song could perpetually be heard at low volume in the background. But nowhere was this juxtaposition more starkly articulated than in Halle, where the visitor could ascend directly from the chaos of the lower story into the stillness of the memorial chamber above.

FIGURE 4.5. Upper Floor of the Museum of the National Socialist Uprising in Halle. Photograph from the official guidebook. Source: Kreisleitung der NSDAP Halle (ed.), Führer durch das NS-Museum des Gaues Halle-Merseburg der NSDAP. Ehrenhalle der Nationalsozialistischen Erhebung, Revolutionsmuseum, NS-Archiv (Halle, 1934).

In his speech at the opening ceremony, the director and creator of the Halle Museum, Professor Hans Hahne (1875–1935), gave an account of the thinking behind the dual structure of the installation. The museum, he wrote, had been planned not as a ‘depot for more or less valuable objects’, but rather as ‘a visible extension of the Hall of Honour using the medium of the museum’ (ins Museale). The museum, Hahne suggested, served two kinds of memory. On the one hand, the exhibits downstairs would awaken many ‘inconspicuous “recollections” of the time of struggle and victory’, restoring the totality of a past experience. ‘Holes in letter boxes and poster columns once again become whistling gunshots, garish colours become highpitched screams’. But in its ‘formal totality’ (Gesamtformung), Hahne explained, ‘our museum is also a memorial for the dead’. The roots of this form of remembrance, he claimed, lay deep in the past of Nordic man. And it was a feature of Nordic memorials for the dead that they did not confine the deceased to a world beyond or below, but integrated them into the world of the living: ‘The kingdom of the dead is part of the total domain of existence (Gesamt-Daseinsbereiches) of the human community to which the dead continue to belong’.25 In short, the upstairs-downstairs structure of the Halle Museum invoked two kinds of temporality: the history of events, of conflict, disruption, and discontinuity on the one hand, and the longue durée of Germanic memory on the other.

Totalitarian Contrasts

A comparison of these exhibitions with analogous efforts by the Italian fascists to celebrate the establishment of their regime reveals a suggestive contrast. The fascist super-exhibition La Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, which went on show in Rome from 1932 to 1934 and attracted over three and a half million visitors, was no conventional exhibition, but rather a highly charged space in which one could experience ‘history in action’. A vast complex of carefully sequenced halls and rooms instilled a sense of ‘perpetual movement and instability’, of ‘agitation, compression and disorientation’.26

The contrast with Nazi temporal sensibilities is best captured in Giuseppe Terragni’s spectacular ‘Room O’, an immense chamber on the left side of the exhibition. This space was dominated by a vast photo montage extending high into an asymmetrical space. On the bottom right of the image could be seen thronging crowds of individual heads surging wavelike towards two immense turbines; rushing away from the turbines towards the upper left were masses of stylised hands outstretched as if in the fascist salute, a feature that may have been borrowed from a 1927 Soviet poster by the Bolshevik constructivist Gustav Klutsis.27 The turbines collaged along the fault line between the massed heads and the massed hands rendered explicit the historical dynamism suggested by the composition. They were aligned with the image of a letter written by Mussolini to the mother of a fascist martyr, as if Terragni wanted the viewer to understand not just that it was the party (and above all the Duce) that transformed masses of individuals into fascists animated by a collective will, but also that this transformation was achieved through a process of turbine-like acceleration.28

There was, to be sure, a memorial chamber in the Mostra, the ‘shrine of the martyrs’ (sacrario dei martiri), a darkened space centred on a simple cross inscribed with the words ‘For the Immortal Fatherland!’ and ringed by bands of dark metal into which was cut, thousands of times over, the luminous word ‘Presente!’ Here, as in the ‘memorial niches’ of the Nazi revolution museums, the dead were remembered within a perpetual present. But the structural relationship between the memorial chamber and the rest of the exhibition was fundamentally different. The visitor to the Mostra had no choice but to approach the shrine chamber through a ‘gallery of fasci’ lined with stone columns bearing a sequence of dates: 1918, 1919, 1920, and so forth; and the only way out of the sacrario led back down the gallery of the years and into the kinetic historical trajectory of the museum. There was a tension between the cool modernism of the memorial chambers and the hot modernism of the other rooms, but their purpose was above all to ‘reinscribe’ the diachronic sequence of history ‘within a ritual order’, and to present the fascist seizure of power as the completion of a historical process, not to undermine the legitimacy of history as such.29 The imposing modernist armature of the exhibition, as a reviewer in the weekly magazine Il Popolo d’Italia put it, ‘signified the enormous weight of fascism, which throws itself onto the paths of history’.30 To put it another way, in the fascist museum, history in the form of a chronological sequence surrounds and incorporates the space of memory; in the National Socialist ‘revolution-museum’, the continuum time of memory trumps and stifles history.

FIGURE 4.6. Giuseppe Terragni, Room “O” of the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (1932–34). Source: Dino Alfieri and Luigi Freddi, Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (Rome, 1933), 189.

This helps to explain the curious remark by a French visitor that the Mostra was ‘so thoroughly Bolshevist’ in spirit that ‘with a change of emblems, the piece would bring applauses in Moscow’.31 For all the differences between them, both the fascist and the Soviet revolutionary temporalities were based upon a kind of turbo-charged Hegelianism. As Stephen E. Hanson has suggested, Marxism-Leninism was based on the Marxist idea that ‘effective revolutionary praxis depends upon utilising rational time discipline to master time itself’. What resulted was an amalgam that Hanson describes as a ‘charismatic-rational conception of time’.32 And Francine Hirsch has shown that Soviet ethnographers responded to the essentialism of Nazi race theory with an insistence that ‘national cultures’ did not express primordial traits, but were rather artefacts of a ‘sociohistorical process’ that could be accelerated by the intervention of the vanguard party. The notion that the Tajiks, for example, should be musealised by means of displays highlighting the abiding and timeless strands of Tajik culture—the Tajik tea ceremony, for example—fell swiftly from favour, to be replaced by exhibitions depicting Tajiks on the historical road towards Soviet peoplehood, their progress accelerated by the interventions of the communist party.33

Soviet thinking on time was founded upon a collapsing of theory and praxis into a model in which progress and history were essentially the same thing. The Soviet ‘anti-religious museums’ did not simply contrast the present and the past as a binary ontological opposition. Rather, they imagined the demise of religion as the consequence of a developmental process that was still under way. Two French scientists who visited the Moscow Museum of Atheism in 1934 reported that they were first shown ‘the evolution of religion through the centuries’, from the earliest human communities to the intertwining of religion and temporal power in the great empires, and then taken on a tour from ancient Egypt to tsarist autocracy. As they left the museum, their guide explained that if religious faith was defunct in the Soviet Union, this was because in an age of science ‘we don’t need religion to accomplish miracles’.34 For both the Soviet and fascist regimes, it was the party that represented the apotheosis of history, a history still conceived as a forwards-driving machine of progress.35

For the National Socialists, by contrast, the idea of history as an unstoppable forwards career of transformation had much less appeal. ‘Every people has its own rhythm’ wrote the poet and publicist Carl Maria Holzapfel (1890–1945) in an op-ed reflection on ‘The Rhythm of Time’ for the Völkischer Beobachter, a newspaper in which reflections on the nature of time are surprisingly frequent. For the German people, it was the pattern of seasonal renewal and death, ‘the polarities of the solstice in nature’, that set the ‘pulse-beat’ of existence. Time, in this sense, was just ‘a portion of eternity’; the great revolutions—including the putative revolution of 1933—were not just moments in high politics, but ‘hours of renewal’ for all members of the ethnic community, ‘hours in which every one of us experiences God in the most extraordinary way’.36 The National Socialist regime did not seek to revolutionise the paradigm of linear history from within, powering it up for the needs of an all-transforming party, but rather sought to evade history altogether, to slip out of it into the racial continuum-time of a transhistorical memory. In this, it resembled Mircea Eliade’s archaic man, who ‘sets himself in opposition to history, regarded as a succession of events that are irreversible, unforeseeable, possessed of no autonomous value’ and can apprehend past events and individuals only in the form of timeless archetypes.37

Among those who propagated this rejection of history in its conventional form was Adolf Hitler himself. In Mein Kampf, the future dictator argued for a break with the state-focused historicism of the old German Empire. At the core of the old historicism had been a bogus legal theory whose core axiom was ‘preservation at any price of the current monster of human mechanism, called State’. The problem with the classical concept of the state, he argued, was its elevation of the state to an end in itself. But this doctrine, he suggested, was an inversion of the true order of priorities: ‘The State is a means to an end. Its end is the preservation and the promotion of a community of physically and psychically equal living beings. This very preservation comprises first the racial stock and thereby it permits the free development of all the forces slumbering in this race. . . . States that do not serve this purpose are faulty specimens, even miscarriages. . . . We must sharply distinguish between the State as a vessel and the race as the content. This vessel has meaning only if it is able to preserve and to protect the contents; in the reverse case it is useless’.38 By ‘severing’ the state from ‘racial obligations’, he asserted, the ‘bourgeois world’ had emptied the state of its meaning. And the chief beneficiary of this de-ethnicisation of the state was ‘the Jew, Karl Marx’, who ‘was able to draw the ultimate conclusion from those erroneous conceptions and opinions about the nature and the purpose of a State’.39 What had once been understood as the driver and focal point of historical change was here demoted to the tool of an alien power and the negation of history’s truly central actor—the Volk. In Mein Kampf, Hitler associated the very idea of history-as-progress with ‘the Jew’ who first establishes himself as the supposed ‘benefactor and friend of mankind’, then ‘suddenly also becomes “liberal” and begins to rave of the necessary “progress” of mankind’. By this means, Hitler went on, ‘the Jew’ had made himself ‘the spokesman of a new time’; ‘praising all progress, but most of all, of course, that progress which leads others to destruction’.40

From all of this it followed that the forms of historical education inherited from the old empire were poor nourishment for the youth of the German nation. The current condition of historical education was such, Hitler wrote, that it would have been ‘much better and of greater benefit to the nation’ if the Germans ‘had not studied history at all’. ‘For one does not learn history merely in order to know what has been, but one learns history in order to make it a teacher for the future and for the continued existence of one’s own nationality. This is the end, and the history lessons are only a means to it’.41 The task of the future must therefore be—if one took such utterances seriously—to establish an ever more perfect identity with the remote past, out of whose still uncontaminated timbers the house of the future would have to be built. In the ‘longing for a common [German] fatherland’, Hitler wrote, there lies ‘a well that never dries; especially in times of forgetfulness and of temporary well-being, it will again and again forecast the future in recalling the past’.42

Such was the redemptive power of race that it could suspend the linearity of history. No event need be irreversible if the charisma and force of the race remained intact: ‘Any defeat can become the father of a later victory. Any lost war can become the cause of a later rise, every distress the fertilization of human energy, and from every suppression can come the forces of a new spiritual rebirth, as long as the blood remains preserved in purity’.43

We find a similar re-patterning of time in the major German mass-audience mega-exhibitions of the 1930s. There was, to be sure, no systematic regime-driven policy on museums and exhibitions, and such efforts as there were to align all museums with the regime’s priorities foundered in the face of local and regional rivalries.44 Even among and within those institutions committed to placing their research in the service of the regime, there were bitter factional struggles driven by vanity, envy, and professional competition.45 And yet a survey of major exhibitions reveals a common underlying template. Ewiges Deutschland, for example, curated in Berlin by the Reichsstelle zur Förderung des deutschen Schrifttums and the Prussian State Library in 1934, aimed to awaken in the minds of visitors an awareness of ‘the eternal’ (das Unvergängliche) in German literature, in order to ‘bring German present and German future into new relationships with German ethnicity (Volkstum) in the past’.46 Das deutsche Antlitz im Spiegel der Jahrhunderte, which opened in Frankfurt in 1937 under the curatorship of the City of Frankfurt and the Rassenpolitisches Amt of the NSDAP, argued that the foundations of all culture lay in the ‘inherited powers of race’; it aspired to expose ‘the unchangeable and constant blood-values of our people’ that had been obscured by the ‘vicissitudes of its history’ (Wechselfälle seiner Geschichte).47 Here, too, history was mere contingency, a sequence of more or less random divergences from an underlying pattern that bestowed meaning on the past, the present, and the future. The mega-exhibition Deutsche Größe, which opened in Munich on 8 November 1940 and then toured the country attracting a total of 657,000 visitors, was more emphatically historical in its content and far less focused on racial themes. But even here, the linear sequences of ‘history’ were folded into a millennial chronoscape. The Germans of 1940 appeared in this exhibition as the direct heirs and executors of the Ur-Germans of prehistory, so that the re-energised ‘history’ of the present culminated in an encounter with the distant past.48 ‘Eventually the steel arch of the German armies [in the First World War] extended from the Baltic to Alsace, from Flanders to the Crimea’, the Munich historian Karl Alexander von Müller declared in the catalogue of the exhibition. ‘And in almost every place where their boots struck the ground, old memories rang like echoes of our past’.49 What struck and moved the visitor to this exhibition, one anonymous reviewer observed, was not the momentum of history unfolding, but ‘a frisson of awe at the prospect of that which is immortal and transcends the centuries’.50

Even the exhibition Gebt mir vier Jahre Zeit, which opened amidst a storm of publicity on 30 April 1937 and was intended to advertise the transformation of Germany over the four years since the seizure of power, subordinated the developmental logic of history to a temporally flat ontological opposition between the new time and the old. As Joseph Goebbels reminded visitors in his opening speech, the only way to show what the National Socialists had achieved since the seizure of power was to juxtapose the present with the ‘hopelessly devastated time’ whose legacy the Nazis had inherited in 1933. This exhibition, he announced, would take the form of a ‘spectacle of oppositions’ (Schau der Gegensätze), for the contrasts between then and now were as profound as ‘between day and night’.51 There was no attempt here to ‘re-actualise history’ or to ‘involve the observer in a sequence of actions’; this was revelation, not history.52

None of this is to suggest that the museums of the National Socialist era were in some categorical sense ‘unmodern’. No one who visited the German museum exhibits at the Paris World Expo of 1937 could be in any doubt about the aesthetic and technical modernity of many German museums. And Hall 2 of the Berlin exhibition Gebt mir vier Jahre Zeit (Give Me Four Years’ Time, 1937), designed by Egon Eiermann, was a brilliant and formally innovative example of a space designed to immerse the visitor in a dynamic and overwhelming experience.53 Its most striking feature was the drastic variation of scale: at the heart of the space was a machine so immense that it dwarfed the crowds milling around it. Only a few steps away was a long tract of miniature railways showing freight cars being loaded with raw materials by tiny human figures. The argument seemed to be about the immense multiplier effect of industry, with its capacity to translate the work of individual humans into achievements stunning in their power and scale. Yet the claims made for the dynamism and modernity of industry were not translated into claims about the regime itself. By contrast with Room O of the Roman Mostra, the depiction of productive power and accelerated effort served not as a metaphor for the political transformation of Germany by the National Socialist movement, but rather as a spectacular demonstration of the raw power at the disposal of the new regime.

The Nearness of the Remote Past

Germanic prehistory was an area of special interest to the temporal activists of the regime. The Reichsbund für deutsche Vorzeit, a pressure group with close links to the Amt Rosenberg, coordinated efforts to raise the profile of Germanic archaeology by developing a more attractive, informative, and accessible mode of exhibition.54 The aim was to depict the millennial evolution of Germanic life both as a self-enclosed and autochthonous phenomenon capable of warding off alien influences and as something vivid and proximate to contemporary experience.55 The early years of the Nazi dictatorship witnessed a sharp growth in archaeology and prehistory at the universities and the subject expanded dramatically across research institutes and in the teaching training sector as well, encouraged by a public endorsements from Hermann Goering.56 Archaeological and prehistorical themes were prominent in schoolbooks and attracted much attention in novels, cinema, collecting cards to the extent that one could speak of prehistory as a propagandistic ‘advertisement’ for the regime.57

Not everyone in the regime shared this enthusiasm for Germanic prehistory. Hitler at times expressed scepticism about Himmler’s enthusiasm for Germanic archaeology. ‘It’s bad enough’, Alfred Speer recalled him saying, ‘that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is starting to dig up these villages of mud huts and enthusing over every potsherd and stone axe he finds’.58 Hitler’s own awareness of Germanic racial continuity was less geographically specific than Himmler’s. His racial history was a millennial narrative in which the achievements of the Third Reich were bound to ‘re-enact’ those of the Roman Empire at the height of its power, a viewpoint reflected in his strong preference for neoclassical forms in the public architecture built and planned for the present and future National Socialist Germany. In this respect Hitler differed from those enthusiasts of deutsche Vorgeschichte (such as Hahne) who celebrated the Nordic and the Germanic in opposition to Rome. But whichever of these variations one adopted, the novelty of the resulting chronoscape was evident: the recent political history of Weimar would become astronomically remote, while the millennial antecedents of the new regime—either Greek and Roman antiquity or the long and obscure history of Germanic settlement in Central and Northern Europe, or both—came to seem (or were supposed to seem) very near.

This was the vision that was institutionalised in the cultural work of the SS-Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage).59 But it also shaped the agenda of many local actors. In a speech of February 1937, Gerhard Körner, director of the Lüneburg Museum, declared that the new racial laws issued in the previous year were the ‘boundary stones’ of the latest research in prehistory and that the principal objective of this discipline must be the ‘rediscovery of Ahnenerbe’. Research, he went on, must meet the needs of the present: ‘The service consists in this: to explore the history of our forefathers in such a way that political insights can be drawn from research: to use the cultural legacy in order to extend research into customs and belief, to explore that which is unique to our people and specific to the thinking and feeling of our race’.60

There was a direct connection between this reorientation and the efforts to musealise the Nazi seizure of power, because the director and designer of the Museum of the German Uprising in Halle, Professor Hans Hahne, had been a prominent exponent of a new discipline in which the study of prehistoric Germanic settlement and the methodology of ethnography blended with völkisch racial ideas to produce an ultra-essentialist and biologistic account of the genesis and evolution of German life in Europe. For this method of studying the remote past, Hahne popularised the term Volkheitskunde. In 1912, he was appointed director of the Provinzialmuseum zu Halle, a rather dusty institution founded in 1884 that housed the collection of the ‘Thuringian-Saxon Association for History and Antiquities’. Under Hahne’s supervision, the provincial museum was transformed: under its new name, the Landesanstalt für Volkheitskunde acquired a large main building for the purpose of exhibiting the collection and hosting conferences and colloquia.

Hahne took the lead in developing a mode of exhibition practice that would render visible the continuities between the present and the prehistoric past of the Germanic peoples. Maps, models, and illustrations were used to bring alive the scattered remnants of ancient settlements. The aim, Hahne wrote in 1914, was to ‘lay bare the threads that connect us who live in the present with the [world] of prehistory . . . , for our culture of today and the culture of the prehistory of our country is linked above all by the identity of our blood with that of our forebears’.61 This implied, among other things, working against the contemporary preeminence of classical archaeology, and against the tendency to ascribe the more sophisticated archaeological discoveries to Roman workmanship or influence—a number of Hahne’s early works focused on refuting various ‘Roman hypotheses’ in defence of an autonomous ‘German archaeology’ concerned with ‘self-contained existential groups and cultural circles’ whose identity was shaped by a harmonious relationship with a specific natural landscape.62

Hahne’s understanding of his discipline had always been völkisch in orientation, but it was only in the years following the end of the First World War that biological and racist perspectives began to dominate his thinking. It was in these years that he became an exponent of a ‘politically applied biology’ for which ‘racial science is the foundation and key to world history’.63 Hahne’s idea of history was not about disruption, conflict, and change, but about the eternal return of a cyclical existence marked out by the seasons. He was enthralled by the various seasonal rituals that could still be observed in the rural and small-town communities of Thuringia—an example was the Questenfest, a communal ritual of allegedly ancient Germanic origin associated with the little town of Questenburg in the Harz mountains in which a wreath possibly signifying the sun was hung from a ten-meter-high pole, to be burnt and replaced amidst singing and celebrations on the Whit Monday of each year. Hahne and his collaborators became practitioners of Brauchtumsforschung—the study of custom—and documented a range of local seasonal rituals. So fond was Hahne of these observances that he invented sunfeasts and Jahresspiele of his own, scripted with passages from the Edda and performed by bands of local children and adolescents.

Hahne’s deepening engagement with the traces of a cyclical time that possessed intimations of temporal depth and continuity was more than a merely intellectual preoccupation; it was a refuge from the predicaments of history. For Hahne personally, it was clearly connected with the trauma of the First World War—or more precisely of the war’s traumatic close, amidst defeat, economic uncertainty, and political unrest. In a letter of May 1919 to his mother, Hahne gave expression to a sense of dislocation: ‘The thoughts of every waking and sleeping hour, indeed of every hour, are a motley, wild confusion. These days, everything one “thinks” is built on mood, physical condition and random influences, in fact one doesn’t really think any thought through to its conclusion, because everywhere there are barbed wires of ifs and buts. So one does, step by step, what the day, what the hour demands, absorbing nothing and hoping, as appearances warrant, for much, little or nothing’. In a curious passage from this letter, Hahne fuses his misery with the idea of history itself. The printing press, he wrote, has turned out to be the work of the devil: ‘I can’t love Gutenberg any more, I would almost like to erase him—was [the invention of print] really a kind of progress? The whole idea of progress seems more dubious to me than ever’.64 There are echoes here of what Mircea Eliade called the ‘terror of history’—a condition of radical heteronomy, of exposure to the random agitations of an environment rocked by upheavals whose outcome is utterly unforeseeable. The historian Hans Rothfels put the same point in a different way when he observed that the ‘shock to German historical consciousness’ caused by the First World War launched historians on a quest for ‘the exemplary’ in German history.65 But the enthroning of archetypes inevitably suppresses contingency, in the manner of Eliade’s ‘man of archaic culture’ who ‘tolerates “history” with difficulty and attempts periodically to abolish it’.66

The Triumph of Prophecy over Contingency

Once we become attuned to this re-patterning of temporality, we find it almost everywhere we look in the world fashioned by the National Socialists. It was already implicit in the substitution of the Volk for the state as a central organising concept in political and historical thought. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany, the state had been a crucial reference point in German historical and political awareness, not just because it was believed to endow the unruly forces of society with cohesion and significance, but also because it was the agency through which, more than any other, history was imagined. By contrast, as we have seen, the Hitler regime emphatically rejected the state as the goal or focus of historical striving. Much that had once seemed integral to German history now appeared as an alien intrusion. ‘We now recognize’, the National Socialist historian Adolf Helbok declared in 1936, ‘that our past existence as a state was not always carried by the powers of our own race’. ‘Over long stretches of our development’, he added, ‘we were led astray by alien forms’.67 Hitler captured a similar intimation in Mein Kampf when he ascribed the phenomena of class-formation and ‘progress’ to the influence of Jewish agitators.68 A temporality centred on the Volk—not as a population, but as a transhistorical racial essence—was likely by nature to be nonprogressive and nondevelopmental. The history of the Volk could ultimately only be a chronicle of its identity with itself, of its refusal to succumb to alien power and influence.

This had profound implications for the historicity of the National Socialist regime. Bismarck had prided himself on the statesman’s skilful management of the historical forces whose contention generated the churn and motion that history was made of. Hitler offered a starker vision. In his universe, the interplay of forces took place under the iron rule of a struggle for existence. This was no chess game, but a battle to the death. Nature, Hitler wrote, ‘does not know political frontiers. She first puts the living beings on this globe and watches the free game of energies. He who is strongest in courage and industry receives, as her favourite child, the right to be the master of existence’.69 The fundamental choice in politics was always a binary one: to survive and triumph or to go under. Hitler knew only one future, the preordained victory of ‘Aryan’ forces over every opponent.70 The interplay of forces possessed in itself no intrinsic legitimacy—it was a means to establishing the hegemony of one force over the others. The decisional structures of Bismarck’s timescape were now obsolete, for this was a world where the defining task of politics was no longer to balance interests but to pursue a single foreordained goal.71

Adam Tooze’s thought-provoking juxtaposition of Gustav Stresemann with Adolf Hitler illuminates how sharp the contrast between a conventionally ‘historical’ understanding of the past and one centred on racial destiny could be.72 Hitler and Stresemann were exponents, as Tooze shows, of diametrically opposed understandings of what history, and specifically economic history, meant. Stresemann, the author of a doctoral dissertation on the Berlin retail business in beer, embraced the idea of an economic history driven by the heterogeneous stresses of an economy marked by internal stresses and the exposure to international pressures. Even an industry as localised in its sourcing as beer was susceptible, Stresemann argued, to the fluctuations of a modernising economy and the impact of disruptions emanating in dysfunctions of the global system. Mastering these challenges would thus require pragmatic adjustments to changing conditions.73

By contrast, Hitler envisioned an economy sufficient unto itself, securing by conquest the resources it needed, autarchic, centrally controlled, oriented towards shared goals, and immune to international pressures. Stresemann became an annexationist during the First World War, because he believed that Germany’s interest lay in securing dependable access to continental markets large enough to allow it to compete in terms of economies of scale with the United States. But while Stresemann sought access to markets and consumers, in order, as it were, to insert Germany under the most advantageous terms possible into the ‘economic history’ of the future, Hitler eventually resolved to enslave or exterminate the consumers and people their evacuated lands with Germans. Far from being the objects (or even the subjects) of international market forces, the Germans would create a history-proof self-sustaining millennial production system of their own. The völkisch ideologue Hermann Wirth (1885–1981), founder of the Ahnenerbe-SS, wrote in 1928 of how a reawakening Nordic racial consciousness would lead to ‘a redemption from the otherwise inexorably encroaching total mechanisation and materialisation, from the mammonism with its cult of the moment, which we know as “world economy” ’.74 This was a violent rejection of heteronomy, of an order in which the nation is forced to live within someone—or something—else’s time. For the Germans under Hitler, the road out of history was to lie in the virtually limitless expansion of biological space, the conquest of Lebensraum. The Volk would flow out across the European plain, suspending the operations of Weltwirtschaftsgeschichte, precipitating the Germans at the end of history and the beginning of the unruffled, ethnographic, millennial time of the Third Empire.75

The imprint of this historicity can be discerned in Hitler’s modus operandi as a politician. Hitler was perfectly capable of working in an incremental and tactical way, in the manner of modern politicians. His manoeuvring among the partisan formations of the Weimar Republic, his negotiations with Hugenberg and the ‘Harzburg Front’, his management of opposition within the NSDAP, his dissimulation at the Ulm Reichswehr trial, and the brutal opportunism of his foreign policy after 1933 all reveal an operator of great tactical skill in the mould cast by Bismarck. Yet if Hitler expressly rejected the notion that politics was ‘the art of the possible’, this was not hypocrisy or self-delusion.76 Rather it reflected the subordination of conventional means to unconventional ends. In formulating his ultimate political objectives, Hitler oriented himself towards end states, vanishing points at which all the demands of the present could be presumed to have resolved themselves. His political calculus was not founded on probabilistic predictions that incorporate an element of contingency and presume factors beyond the control of the calculator—rather, it was articulated under the rubric of will and prophecy. Whereas prediction represents the projection into the future of a noncyclical historical time in which numerous possible risks and gains have to be weighed up, prophecy, as Reinhart Koselleck observed, draws no fundamental distinction between past, present, and future; it anticipates an end that is already given; it is posited upon the projection of millennial time into a promised future.77

Hitler often referred to himself as a prophet, most famously on 30 January 1939, when he ‘prophesied’ the extermination of European Jewry in the event that ‘the Jews’ were to ‘succeed’ in plunging the states of Europe into ‘another world war’, by which he meant a war involving the United States. This promise, to which Hitler repeatedly returned, has drawn much attention from historians of the Holocaust, because it appears to set the scene for the escalation in mass murder from August 1941, when Churchill and Roosevelt signed the Atlantic Charter and the subsequent transition to a policy of continental extermination after December, when the United States entered the war.78 There was an element of primitive blackmail in Hitler’s formulation, in the sense that it identified the Jews as hostages, whose fate would be sealed as soon as America ventured to enter the conflict. But the fact that he chose to articulate the threat through prophecy is important, because it framed the future as something ordained and inherited: ‘I have often been a prophet in my life and was generally laughed at. During my struggle for power, the Jews primarily received with laughter my prophecies that I would someday assume the leadership of the state and thereby of the entire Volk and then among many other things achieve a solution of the Jewish Question. . . . Today I will be a prophet again’.79

The ‘redemptive antisemitism’ of the Nazi regime was itself a form of inverted prophecy operating in a millennial time frame.80 The promise supposedly given in Paul’s Letter to the Romans that the Jews would ultimately be restored to Christ, though its meaning had always been contested, was long taken to support the millenarian expectation that a Jewish conversion en masse would usher in the end of days for Christians and Jews alike. But this presumption of an intimacy between the Jews and salvation, an influential theme in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German Lutheran and Pietist theology—was secularised and inverted in the nineteenth century, when the view gained ground that the Jews would bring about the end of days only in a secular and negative sense—hence Treitschke’s inverted Pauline slogan: ‘Die Juden sind unser Unglück’.

Two different chains of thought converged in the eschatology of Nazi anti-Semitism. One was the secularised form of the old eschatology, in which it was promised that the Jews would expedite the completion of Christian history, a tradition whose hermeneutical instability created space for the inversion of millennial hope. The other was its radically supersessionist elaboration, in which the logic of the eschaton, of a future accessible only through prophecy, remained, but the Jewish place in it did not. The old eschatology was still latent in the future visions of the nineteenth-century anti-Semites, in which Jews busied themselves accelerating processes of cultural and political fermentation and decay, severing the links between Christ and the nation and reversing the priority of the New Covenant over the Old. The new eschatology manifested itself in the Nazi vision of a future entirely purged of Jews, in which the redemptive agency of the Jews had been replaced by that of the German Volk, whose status as the new Chosen People had long been a central theme of the Protestant German national movement.

In a future emptied of Jews, the entire history and culture of the Jewish people would belong to a remote past. Nowhere was this idea more clearly articulated than in the efforts of the SS in Prague to establish a Jewish Central Museum, staffed by indentured Jewish experts pulled from the ghettos and brim-full of looted devotional and cultural objects, that would in the future recall the vanished religious, social, and cultural life of still-to-be-exterminated Jewry in Central Europe.81 This was perhaps the single most perverse institutional articulation of the Nazi regime’s eschatological timescape.

A similarly preemptive structure can be discerned in the urban transformations planned and sponsored by the National Socialist regime. The phenomenal scale of these plans is well known: over fifty city centres were to be completely reconstructed around an ensemble of immense north-south and east-west axes, gigantic halls and assembly areas, and domes and towers that dwarfed all nearby buildings, including the largest cathedrals. These projects were intended to send out signals internationally, proving that the German nation was ‘not second-rate, but the equal of any other people on earth, even America’.82 But they also served to anchor the regime in a millennial timescape. If the glory of ancient Greece and Rome could still be glimpsed in ‘the wreckage and fields of ruins of the old world’, this was because both of those ancient states had invested effort in the construction of splendid public buildings whose broken profiles still dominated contemporary memory of them. It was not the ‘villas and the palaces of individual citizens’ that communicated the splendour of ancient Rome, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, but rather ‘the temples and the thermae, the stadia, circuses, aqueducts, basilicas, etc., of the State, which is to say: of the entire people’.83 How crass, then, was the contrast with the Berlin of his own time: ‘If Berlin were to meet the fate of Rome, then the coming generations could one day admire the department stores of some Jews and the hotels of some corporations, the most imposing works of our time, as the characteristic expression of the culture of our days’.84 Viewed from this perspective, the neoclassical monuments and edifices planned by the regime were appeals to a millennial future, a future in which Germany, too, would be judged by its ‘ruin value’. This was no passing fantasy, but a theme that appeared repeatedly in the dictator’s speeches and conversations. Only a people capable of endowing a remote posterity with an enduring artistic heritage possessed a ‘moral right to life’, he declared in an ‘Address on Art and Politics’ of 1935; such an art must possess the power to express the greatness of the people, even if that people were itself to perish without trace.85 In September 1941, Hitler imagined a future in which the Slavs of Eastern Europe would survive only as the helot inhabitants of reservations policed by the Germans: ‘We shall be their masters. If there is a revolution, all we shall need to do is drop a few bombs on their towns and that’s that. Then, once a year, a troop of Kirghiz will be led through the Reich capital in order that they may fill their minds with the power and grandeur of its stone monuments’.86

Common to these reflections (and one could cite many more) was the tendency to look back from the vantage point of an anterior posterity upon an already accomplished future. Future Kirghiz slaves gaze up in awe at monuments that have yet to be built. The ruins of great edifices speak to future humans of the achievements of a vanished people. ‘Architecture’, Eric Michaud remarks, in a formulation that neatly captures the weirdness of this vision, ‘was to propel the German people to its common destiny by revealing its true grandeur in funeral monuments’.87 The logic of prophecy, which frames the future as something inherited from the past, was at work here, just as it was in the efforts of the SS in Prague to establish a ‘Jewish Central Museum’. In general, the Nazi movement exhibited prophecy’s traditional preference for final states of affairs, for the painting and realisation of Endzeit scenarios—Endkampf, Endlösung, Endsieg.

Oddly enough, the books and articles produced by the professional historians of the Nazi era are the last place we should look for the traces of these manipulations.88 Hitler’s writings never became the template for a new historiography. The ‘folk history’ (Volksgeschichte) that flourished in the Weimar and Nazi years did idealise the rural past and stigmatise modernisation as a negative counterfoil to preindustrial harmony, but it also tended to merge the emphasis on racial continuity with other approaches, including progressive and developmentalist forms of social history, producing a range of hybrid historiographical modes that varied in the intensity of their commitment to racial thinking.89 The regime never got around to prescribing a specific agreed mode of historical writing, beyond calls for an approach more firmly centred on race and Volkstum.90 Even the Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany run by the historian Walter Frank (1905–45) was riven by professional rivalries and competence struggles within and between the Rosenberg office, the Interior Ministry, the SS-Ahnenerbe, and the education ministry of Bernhard Rust.91 There was no shortage of historians willing to ‘work towards’ the regime, but the conventional practices of their craft proved resistant to swift and fundamental change. And in any case, this short-lived regime collapsed before the ideas of the new leadership could work their way with any consistency into historiographical practice.92

Conclusions

In a radio speech announcing the anti-Jewish boycott on 1 April 1933, Joseph Goebbels declared that ‘the year 1789’ could now be ‘expunged from the history books’.93 His confidence that one could empty out and substitute the meaning of a date, thereby unmaking the past, was characteristic of the supersessionist temporality of a regime obsessed with anniversaries, the recurring markers of its own brief history. By investing the red-letter day 14 July with new meanings, Goebbels implied, one could overcome, supersede, an abandoned past. And it is interesting in this connection to recall a remark from Goebbels’s commentary on the Berlin Revolutionsmuseum. The ‘most interesting and valuable object of all [those on display]’, he observed, ‘priceless for any collector, was a laissez-passer from Paris to Nice dated 25 Ventose of Year 5 (1794) of the French Republic and bearing the signature of Robespierre’.94 This document had been pillaged by the SA from the communist headquarters at the Liebknecht House. The Revolutionsmuseum, Goebbels implied, had captured and neutralised the imagined future of the French Revolution, trapping it within its own very different timescape.

Overcoming the French Revolution meant not only breaking with the idea of rights, individual liberty, and political citizenship associated with the great Revolution in its opening phase, but also escaping from a kind of time—a régime d’historicité—that had been inaugurated, or at least whose advent had been accelerated, by the events in France. More than any other event in modern times, Peter Fritzsche has argued, drawing on the arguments of Reinhart Koselleck, the French Revolution made possible the idea of history as a ‘continual iteration of the new’, as a runaway train, as a sequence of ‘moments’ or ‘events’ that, because they are not anchored in a cyclical temporal structure, can play through at any speed.95 History was no longer confined to the past; it was unfolding in the present and doing so with an unpredictable violence and destructive force that seemed unprecedented to contemporaries. One can argue about the extent to which the foundations for this transition had already been laid down before the revolution, but the place of the revolution in accelerating it seems beyond question.

In the context of the three totalitarian regimes, then, National Socialist temporal awareness appears rather distinctive. Underlying the dictatorship’s vision of its place in time was a radical rejection of ‘history’ and a flight into deep continuity with a remote past and a remote future. It would be ludicrous to suggest that this amounted to a homogeneous period temporality or that the temporal awareness we have been exploring was equally valid at all times and for all groups and individuals. Recent research in this field has stressed the plurality of contemporaneous chronoscapes and the difficulties elites have always faced in attempting to suffuse societies with their own temporal awareness.96 It may well be, moreover, that this regime’s peculiar timescape was more forcefully articulated at some moments than at others (the opening phase of the Hitler dictatorship, for example, or the apocalyptic years after Stalingrad). Even within the regime’s leadership, as Frank-Lothar Kroll has shown, a range of quite diverse ‘philosophies of history’ shaped the political thought and praxis of the leading National Socialists.97 The same can be said of the ‘racial science’ of the Nazi era, which was riddled with inconsistencies and factional strife.98

But these ideological variations should not be allowed to obscure the contours of the intuitions that were common to them all. There were doubtless important differences between the blood-and-soil agrarianism of Richard Walter Darré, the biological ultra-racism of Himmler, and Rosenberg’s weird amalgam of Aryanism, anti-Semitism, and Spenglerian cultural theory. But common to them all was a way of thinking about the past and the future that reflected an intuitive grasp of the same fundamental chronoscape. Rosenberg found in the forms of the prehistoric German peasant house the ‘prototype’ (Urtyp) of the Greek temple that the Nordic tribes had once ‘brought’ to Greece. Himmler saw in the hardy Soviet resistance to the German invasion evidence of long-submerged Germanic hereditary material that could be salvaged for future generations. Darré dreamed that the future would bring a recursion to the pre-Christian, preindustrial life of the ancient Germans. All three held in contempt the kind of analytical and ‘over-intellectual’ history produced by history professors.99

To be sure, this regime derived some of its charisma from its ability to align itself with ‘themes of modernization and industrial progress’—a feature exemplified in the person and career of the amoral technocrat Albert Speer.100 But the question I have asked is not whether the regime was ‘modern’; in many respects, it obviously was. My question is rather how we should conceptualise the relationship between its modernism and those attributes that suggested a fundamental disavowal of modernity. Which was the more fundamental? Which takes us deeper into the self-awareness of this regime, its capacity to make sense of itself? Important as the linear energies of productivisation and force maximisation were, they were embedded into a larger, nonlinear temporality. And this was the chronoscape that in turn endowed what came to be the ultimate and definitive objectives of the regime—the destruction of European Jewry, the murder and enslavement of Slavs, the biologisation of politics, the extirpation of the socially and sexually deviant, the construction of vast neoclassical edifices, and the acquisition of an immense continental Lebensraum—with ‘meaning and legitimacy’.101 Not everyone needed to inhabit the new timescape—Albert Speer, for example, did not. It sufficed that those who did not were willing to place themselves in the service of those who did.

Herein lies the difference between the German and the Italian dictatorships. Like National Socialism, Italian fascism aimed to transform the lived relationship between past and present. The excavation of ancient structures in the Italian capital was intended not to preserve a bygone past, but rather to ‘blur the spatial and temporal boundaries between Roman antiquity and fascist modernity’. The ancient and renaissance pasts were to be mobilised in the service of fascist countermodernism, with ancient Rome as ‘a dynamic vital force, to be enacted in the present’.102 The commonalities between the ‘hybrid’ temporalities of National Socialism and Italian Fascism are undeniable, but the difference is equally important, namely, that whereas the fascist regime projected these chronopolitical manipulations onto a temporality whose logic remained essentially historical, linear, and modernist, the German regime adorned itself with modern attributes but articulated its ultimate and defining claims in terms of an ahistorical, racial continuum.103