Dr. Winthrop-Young’s talk acts as part of a larger project on the influences, analogies and correspondences which link the various shades of extreme Nazi chronopolitics to the growing profile of accelerationism and catastrophism in today’s politics.
The Third Reich was keen to develop its own politics of time. It differed from other forms of fascist chronopolitics which still clung to established notions of progress and linearity. As Christopher Clark has shown, Nazism aimed to exit history and withdraw into the timelessness of an ahistorical racial continuum in which nature absorbed politics. While this variant was prominent in the early years of the regime, the Second World War and the growing possibility of defeat gave rise to other, more radical and desperate chronopolitical speculations. Looking at tropes that arose in areas as distinct as propaganda, philosophy, pharmacology and changes to the pension system, the talk will present the increasingly compressed, accelerationist and catastrophist notions of history that made up the “Nazi chronobscene”.
Bio
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (MA Freiburg, PhD UBC) is Professor of German and Nordic Studies in the Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies at UBC.
