History in History

In his recent study of conceptions of historicity in Germany from the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich, historian Christopher Clark analyzes the articulation between the history of temporalities and that of political ideas. By subjecting Reinhart Koselleck’s and François Hartog’s theories on temporality and historicity to empirical testing, he shows how political actors’ conception of the relationships between present, past, and future permeates political decision-making processes.

A specialist in modern and contemporary German history at the University of Cambridge, Clark is known in particular for his works on the political history of Prussia in the XIX^e century. Before breaking through to a large international audience in 2012 with The Sleepwalkersa large-scale fresco devoted to the outbreak of the First World War, he had already published in 2006 a critically acclaimed history of Prussia and a biography of Emperor Wilhelm IIHe is currently working on a synthesis of the political changes that took place across Europe following the revolutions of 1848. Time and Power is, with its approximately 250 pages, a less imposing book, but it represents an important step in research on temporality and the history of political ideas.

Conceptions of time and the exercise of power

The title of the book immediately indicates what is at stake: how the exercise of power, in a political regime and at a given historical moment, is shaped by the conceptions of temporality and historicity that are those of political authorities. Clark posits the hypothesis that the way in which political leaders exercise power and legitimize themselves by inscribing themselves in history is based on their conception of time, which changes over time. He examines this hypothesis in the field he knows best: Prussian and German history. In four chapters, he studies how specific temporal conceptions are embodied in the successive political regimes of Frederick William of Brandenburg (“the Great Elector”), Frederick II of Prussia (“Frederick the Great”), the architect and first Chancellor of the German Empire, Otto von Bismarck, and finally the Nazi regime.

This approach, consisting of analyzing a succession of political regimes on the same geographical terrain, would, according to Clark, allow us to identify diachronic developments, as well as the cumulative logic and the reflexive and self-historicizing dimensions that are at work in the representation of historical time that successive regimes make of themselves. Thus, the book links in a fascinating way the history of ideas and political cultures – which questions in particular the way in which power is exercised and legitimized in a given historical society – with the theory of history – one of the central questions of which lies in the human perception of time and the relationship that individuals establish between their present, their past and their future.

Nuancing the thesis of the birth of the modern regime of historicity

Drawing on the work undertaken by Koselleck and Hartog on temporality and historicity, Clark completes their approach with a new dimension, that of political power. Unlike them and several researchers in their wake, his aim is not to establish a relationship between changes in the regime of historicity and the advent of modernity. Unlike Koselleck and Hartog, but also Peter Fritzsche who sought the “melancholy” of modern man feeling cut off from a past that had become foreign and distant, Clark does not make the French Revolution the great moment of traumatic rupture and the founding act of modern temporality.

This conclusion is partly the result, of course, of its geographical delimitation and its selection of individual case studies, but it has the merit of underlining the interest in reconsidering this thesis, which is now widely held. Subjected to empirical investigation, the supposed transition towards a regime of historicity that could be described as “modern” breaks down into a series of partial adaptations to new situations, of back-and-forths inspired by the personalities of political actors and the more or less conscious reactions to specific contexts.

The conflicts of Frederick William of Brandenburg with the States-General of his various territories during the Thirty Years’ War constitute the central issue of the first chapter. Faced with the States-General who defend their ancestral privileges, thereby revealing their perception of a continuity between past, present and future, the Great Elector invokes the need to anticipate the future and to leave the sovereign the power to make decisions freely in times of great change. If for Frederick William of Brandenburg, the State is formed in the midst of the inconstancy of time, Frederick the Great sees it as a stable reality that transcends historical changes. It is from this elevated position that the head of state then makes political decisions according to his sovereign will. Attention to the temporal flow reappears in Bismarck, who sees himself as both a great chess player and a navigator on a temporal river whose current, if impossible to change, is capable of being exploited by the statesman who knows how to discern it in the pursuit of his political objectives.

The specificity of the Nazi regime compared to other totalitarianisms

In the fourth chapter, devoted to the Nazi regime, Clark is less convincing in his demonstration of the connection between political decision-making processes and conceptions of temporality. This is probably partly due to his choice to approach temporality this time through the study of exhibitions and museums intended to transmit to the general public ideological representations relating to the past of the regime and the Germanic people. Even if he does not completely neglect them, the historical or programmatic writings of the protagonists of the regime play only a minor role in his argument, while they formed the bulk of the sources in the other chapters where they made it possible to connect their conceptions of time to their political actions.

Of course, some variability in the use of sources – and the resulting imbalance – is inevitable in a study of such a chronological scope, since the same type of sources are not available for all periods. As regimes change, so do conceptions of the state and of what constitutes politics, and so do the modes of written expression of political leaders. But Clark does not adequately explain why exhibitions and museums would be the most appropriate sources for understanding the exercise of power in the case of the Nazi regime.

The interwar period and the rise of Nazism were years of intense debates about the conception of time in Germany, corollaries of the deeply unstable political climate. It is no coincidence that the book in which Martin Heidegger places time at the center of ontological reflection, Being and Timedates precisely from these years (1927). Moreover, Heidegger’s ideas on temporality as the horizon of all understanding of being were formative for Koselleck in his thinking about historicity. With regard to cultural practices, Robbert-Jan Adriaansen’s research on German youth movements in the years preceding Hitler’s seizure of power demonstrated their central concern with escaping the linear course of time and achieving, through practices such as round dancing and the summer solstice festival, an experience (Experience) of eternity. More generally, the oxymoron “conservative revolution” coined in the 1950s to characterize the intellectual debate in Germany during the Weimar Republic and the early years of the Nazi regime already signals the extent to which the idea of ​​a linear progress of time was the target of critiques that associated static and cyclical visions of time. Clark’s choice to focus on museums and exhibitions does not allow for these aspects to be taken into account.

A specialist in Prussian history, Clark is less familiar with the Nazi period, for which he is, moreover, confronted with a historiography and a considerable mass of sources from which he necessarily had to make a pragmatic selection. He justifies his decision by the desire to discuss the interpretation first formulated by Emilio Gentile, and taken up by many researchers after him, according to which the three totalitarian regimes of the 1930s and 1940s – Nazism, Italian fascism and Stalinism – have in common the fact of being political religions. The comparison of exhibitions mounted by the three regimes allows Clark to differentiate the ways in which they position themselves vis-à-vis their past and project themselves into the future. For him, the accentuation of the religious aspects shared by these totalitarian regimes obscures the distinctive character of Nazi temporality – which consists in a desire to escape time in order to re-establish the People’s community transhistorical, the ideal of a unified, unchanging and conflict-free popular community.

The delicate question of Sonderweg

The notion of will is found in the background in each of the four chapters. It takes various forms: princely will in Frederick William of Brandenburg and somewhat differently in Frederick the Great; will to power in Bismarck; Volkswille among the Nazi leaders. The concept of will appears as the hinge between those of time, state, power and decision. Clark does not develop it in depth, which seems linked to his hesitation to make the German example a special case. He knows only too well that by pushing his argument in this direction, it would lead to the highly contested thesis of the Sonderweg, the isolated and particular trajectory of Germany towards modernity which would explain, according to some historians, the Nazi catastrophe. This is an interpretation that Clark rejects by engaging in comparisons with other geographical areas allowing him to relativize the specificity of his case studies.

However, his oscillation between a recognition of this specificity that would precisely legitimize this selection of cases and his attempt to normalize German history harms his objective of showing the cumulative and reflexive dimensions of the succession of temporalities. To what extent did Bismarck rework the conceptions of temporality of the two sovereigns who had, before him, marked Prussian history in such an important way? Does the Nazi period represent a radical break or is it, despite the differences, inscribed in a fundamental continuity with the preceding history? The conclusion outlines interesting avenues of response, which would have deserved to be developed. Despite Clark’s unfulfilled ambitions, Time and Power is a promising opening for research on the relations between regimes of power and historicity.