On most pages of this book it comes to past notions of Time and their significance for the Actions of political actors, Prussian especially. Only on the last pages of Christopher Clark comes up with a daring leap in our presence. Then, at the latest, it becomes clear that it was him from the beginning to the present, to the loss of future confidence, which characterised Western societies for decades, and their political Agenda. It is the connection of time is interested in the idea and the political action space, Clark.
His output hypothesis, that in the respective notions of temporality – the linear-progressive, cyclical recursively or in a state of constant decline – reflected what ideas of the political options for action to believe the actors of an era.
You can read Clark’s new book so at least two Leitinteressen: an essential historical and is concerned with the outstanding figures of the Prussian-German history, and the testing section in the course of the last decades in the history of science-led research, debates on a specific, spatially limited, but also under much political interest, and asks how the concepts of time and historicity, to create political spaces of Action, expand or narrow, and how in this way, as a rule, the rights of corridors in the future, which are then more or less single-minded.
Christopher Clark is outweighs a brilliant storyteller
the amount of interest in reading but also in both cases, at his own cost. Christopher Clark is a brilliant storyteller who understands also to prepare dry matter stimulating and in the analysis of interspersed episodes placed so that they illuminate like a spotlight, the narrative strands. And at the same time, he is an accomplished analyst of the self-presentation of politicians, of searching the Scriptures to casually placed explanations for why the person had to act the way he acted and by the skill and determination of the best available. The idea of changing times and of their own positioning in them is one of the motives of these justifications.
That, Clark has concentrated on the Prussian-German history from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century as the period of investigation, in the light of his researches on the Hand. Among the historians of his Generation, will hardly find one who is familiar with the history of Prussia is better than he is. The theming of national-socialism goes beyond his well-groomed area of research. It was obvious, because here is a historical image, which stands in radical contrast to those of the Great elector, the great king, Frederick II., and of the Reich Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Singular it was, however, in the twentieth century, by no means, even if it is different from the temporality notions of the other two totalitarian systems, Italian fascism, and Soviet communism.
national socialism and the “eternal” customs of the people
The fascism of Mussolini-style was oriented to the restoration of Roman greatness and celebrated the power of the people of the Renaissance as a prerequisite to the achievement of this objective; he was so fixed in the past. The Soviet communism was present as past, as quickly by advancing through the stages on the way to the future, was so radically future-oriented. Of both difference and the temporality of the idea of national socialism, in the “eternal” customs of the people, the Germanic myths, the Andes, the changing of the seasons with the alternation of growth and decay, and the ideas of space, which was compared to the time industries and, of course, were decisive.