Dr. Winthrop-Young publishes “‘We are Germans. We are perfect, and we are dead’: Aspects of Nazi Chronopolitics in Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night” in Anglia 144/2.
Katharine Burdekin’s classic dystopia Swastika Night (1937) depicts a 28th-century world in which Nazi Germany reigns supreme. Much of the scholarship confronts the novel’s extreme gender politics – above all, the enslavement and defacement of women – that foreshadow later dystopias like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
This paper addresses the other significant feature of Burdekin’s Nazi empire: the complete destruction of all non-German history in the wake of the Nazi triumph. Germans alone possess chronopoetic agency, they alone can make history, but that history appears to be coming to an end, which raises the question how those impacted by the Nazi “cultural bomb” (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o) can rediscover their lost agency. Drawing on contributions by Hannah Arendt, Hans Blumenberg and Christopher Clark, among others, the essay analyzes how Burdekin spins out the various–and frequently contradictory–shades of Nazi chronopolitics.
