When the Nazis annexed Antiquity

A nation, wrote Renan, never holds entirely in its geography. She is rooted in the glory of her great men and the reminiscence of a heroic past. THE III^e Reich is no exception to the rule, whose advent from 1933 corresponds to a revival of the cult of antiquity. The resentment born of the defeat of 1918 and the humiliation which results from it lead the new regime to be sought upstream of Bismarckian Germany and the XIX^e century the reasons for national glory. Also the antiquity that it solicit has few common features with that which, a century earlier, Humboldt or the Schlegel brothers celebrated. She abandons the construction of a Bildung Classic to make the interpreter of the telluric forces which animate the movement of history.

It is actually to a double rewriting that the Nazi regime is engaged. At the same time as he reinvents a genealogy of the origins of the German race, he must indeed revisit the history of civilizations of which Germany proclaims the only heiress. The work of grammarians and philologists at the start of XIX^e century had placed the origins of humanity on the side of the Indus. False against this idea of ​​an Indian cradle of civilizations, the Reich places the origin of the Indo-European civilization in Scandinavia and in the north of Germany, in accordance with the ideology of the racist currents hatched in the second half of XIX^e century. Greeks and Romans, but also inhabitants of ancient Egypt and Persia, India or China, are now described as so many fridge from the Nordic branch, blonde warriors with blue eyes that the vagaries of a capricious nature have gradually made up differently. Thus emerges a Nordic Mediterranean, all of which have been influenced by Aryan civilization. “” The myth of northern origins is (…) relayed by historians and pedagogues: it becomes the official version of the history of origins under the III^e Reich (P. 41).

It is this representation of a Germany matrix of civilizations that the work produced, during the 1930s, by the academics in sight and by the dignitaries of the party, while the teaching reforms placed between 1934 and 1938 the German people’s struggle for existence at the heart of school programs. Some will try to rise against the thesis of a unilateral domination of the peoples of the North over the other German populations ; But the liquidation of ITS Leaves the field open to this aristocratic vision of history. More unexpected is the “ open reading That the Führer himself, passionate about ancient history, opposes the German-Center interpretation of the history of the beginnings of the German Reich that Himmler is trying to promote. Reader Germany Tacitus, Hitler found there confirmation of the cultural superiority of the Greeks and the Romans over the German peoples. Hence the need to attach them to the Nordic race whose ramifications thus descended to the edges of the Mediterranean.

All these debates would have only a limited historical interest, more linked to the excesses of propaganda wishing to acquire a scientific appearance, if they did not take shape, as Johann Chapoutot shows, a parallel between the reading of ancient history and the military companies of the Reich. To the symbolic annexations of the different civilizations correspond to the subsequent territorial annexations, legitimized by the idea that the German people will thus regain places of ancient influence.

The performative strength of historical discourse

Much more than a study on the place of antiquity in the representation of the Nazi regime, it is indeed a reflection on the power of history that Chapoutot offers here and which constitutes the undoubtedly the most captivating and the most innovative of its work. When in 1941 Hitler compares, when he is about to invade Russia, the feeling that his landscapes created sorry for those who felt the Romans contemplating Germany ; When the ideologues of the regime assimilate the invasion of Greece, led the same year, to a third “ migration From peoples from north to south, succeeding the one who had seen the end of the Roman Empire, they are not content to revisit ancient history, they are led by it.

History will play a central role in the representation that the new regime gives itself: the paradox of a “ third humanism Developed for the occasion illustrates all its performative force. It is indeed the story itself and, through it, the corporation of historians who are interviewed here and put on the hot seat. Historians lent themselves easily to the ramblings of the new regime, where specialists in classical languages ​​and some philosophers sometimes opposed more sustainable resistance, even if the premises existed since the beginnings of the Weimar Republic which contributed to establish without too much difficulty the ferrule of the new power on the university. But, even more, the performative force of historical discourse transforms it into a formidable ally of a totalitarian ideology as soon as the body of its critical instruments. These are the dangers that Chapoutot’s work highlights. Once the historical reality is purified, once the private history of its scientific foundation is based on the validation of the facts, nothing is no longer opposed to seeing it reduced to the only interpretative power, all the more powerful since it puts itself at the service of a political force. It is then reduced to being just a simple reservoir of maxims available at any time for the statesman, while politics is an illustration of the “ History in future ». It ceases to be the story of a bygone past but becomes the model of the present and the mold of the future.

In the center of this destructive power are the formation of a “ third humanism “, Defined by the historian W. Jaeger and the philosopher A. Baümler, and his role in the manufacture of the new German. We go beyond here the reference to the ancient example to situate ourselves at the level of teleology, the magnifying and distorted interpretation of the movement of civilizations becoming the criterion on which the policy of the Reich is model. Art and sporting events, such as the 1936 Olympic Games, by staging the Germanity of the Greeks as much as the grint of the Germans, serve as auxiliaries to a story which is now imposed on the representation that the regime gives itself. The race becomes “ The determining principle of artistic creation. It is the physical being of the whole artist who passes, sublimated but unchanged, in the work of art »(P. 231), imposing through representation the concept of harmony which is his. Inaugurating the German art museum in July 1937, Hitler publicly welcomes “ racial progress From his people, perceptible in the transformation of morphology and in the discipline of bodies. As the last part of the study shows, the Reich decorum further corroborates the vision that the regime has of itself that it does not create it. “” Olympic hospitality yields to hostility, Coubertin’s internationalism with breed exclusivism (P. 224).

Was the identification was too strong ? The last part of the book retraces the metamorphosis that this teleological history prints to the Hitlerian vision of the future of the Reich. By reincarnating in Leonidas at the head of his armies, the Führer takes up not only possession of the Greek soil but is lived in reincarnation of the Greek hero in front of his destiny. Like ancient heroes whose kléos assured the transition to posterity, he seems to accept the possibility of a defeat very early on. But, like Achilles accepting death to gain posterity, and unlike that of 1918, it does not matter to him as long as it ensures glory. Nazism must remain, commensurate with the final disaster, a heroic myth like that bequeathed by Indo-German ancestors. In a final reversal, the reference to Antiquity therefore refers the Reich either to the upheavals of life but to the certainty of death.