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25 February, 2019<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"\/standpoint\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/files_u28_books_dj.jpg\" "\\"Feature")
<\/p>\nA special place in Purgatory is reserved for historians who don\u2019t just write history, but write about History. Your columnist is one of them. So, evidently, is Christopher Clark, Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, whose new book Time and Power<\/em> has a long subtitle (Visions of History in German Politics, from the Thirty Years\u2019 War to the Third Reich<\/em>) and an even longer time frame of four centuries.<\/p>\n
His subject is actually neither time nor power, but something even more evanescent: how those who wielded power were influenced by their sense of history. More specifically, Clark investigates four case studies: Friedrich Wilhelm and Friedrich II of Prussia, known to posterity as the Great Elector and Frederick the Great respectively; Otto von Bismarck, who re-founded the Reich; and Adolf Hitler, who left it in ruins. Here these historical protagonists are not primarily seen from a political but from a temporal perspective \u2014 as it were, through an hourglass darkly.<\/p>\n
If you find not only the subject matter but the style of Time and Power<\/em> hard to grasp, you are unlikely to be alone. Though Clark is a master of narrative, as his highly acclaimed histories of Prussia (Iron Kingdom<\/em>) and the origins of the First World War (The Sleepwalkers<\/em>) demonstrate, here he is addressing (and impressing) his academic peers. At times, the prose gets bogged down in jargon (\u201cdiachronic\u201d, \u201cpalimpsestic\u201d, \u201cchronopolitics\u201d and \u201cchronoscape\u201d). At others, it bristles with polemical asides on Brexit, Trump, climate change and \u201cthe current wave of temporal uncertainty and disorientation\u201d.<\/p>\n
Yet the broad thrust of the argument is sustained with a scholarship so dense and an eye for analogies so acute as almost to disarm criticism. For the small number of academic specialists and the doubtless even smaller number of amateurs (among whom I count myself) who relish keeping up with \u201cthe temporal turn\u201d in contemporary historiography, this book will be a feast for the gods. For those who like their history served plain, Clark\u2019s treatise may be less ambrosial, perhaps even indigestible.<\/p>\n
For my own addiction to what might look to non-historians like self-indulgence, I blame Hugh Trevor-Roper. When I was an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, in the 1970s, a degree in Modern History required one to sit a Preliminary examination at the end of the first term. This course, the brainchild of the then Regius Professor Trevor-Roper, was intended to inspire us with a love of history by acquainting us with the greatest practitioners of the craft. It was a baptism of fire even for privately schooled students; for a state school swot like me, it was an ordeal \u2014 but also a revelation.<\/p>\n
Apart from Gibbon and Macaulay, we were expected to read at least two historians in other languages; for me, with no Latin and less Greek, that meant, in their entirety, Alexis de Tocqueville\u2019s L\u2019Ancien R\u00e9gime et la Revolution<\/em> and Jacob Burckhardt\u2019s Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen<\/em> (\u201cReflections on World History\u201d). Looking back, mastering all this was a lot to expect even geeks to master in eight weeks. Today, Oxford allows three terms for Prelims and historiography has been demoted. Foreign languages are optional and set texts are far shorter; Burckhardt has been quietly dropped.<\/p>\n
You do not need to have lived under Trevor-Roper\u2019s ancien r\u00e9gime<\/em> to enjoy reflecting on History with a capital H. Nor do you have to share the present Regius Professor\u2019s politics. \u201cThis book,\u201d he tells us, \u201cwas written during the crescendo and triumph of the Brexit campaign in Britain . . . [a campaign] animated by the appeal to an idealised past in which the \u2018English-speaking peoples\u2019 had effortlessly dominated the world.\u201d On both sides of the Atlantic, Clark claims, \u201cnew pasts are being fabricated to replace old futures\u201d. This book, he concedes, will \u201cdo little to diminish the contemporary allure of such manipulations, but it may at least help us to read them more attentively\u201d.<\/p>\n
The background to Time and Power <\/em>is the rise of Prussia from a remote backwater to great power status. Clark begins with \u201cthe History Machine\u201d: Friedrich Wilhelm, the \u201cGreat Elector\u201d \u2014 so-called because he belonged to the smallest electorate in history, the four temporal and three spiritual princes who chose the Holy Roman Emperor. He shows how the Elector mobilised \u201cthe future against the past\u201d by confronting the libertas<\/em> of the estates with the necessitas<\/em> of the state \u2014 in other words, raison d\u2019\u00e9tat<\/em>. In mid-17th-century England, Parliament was humbling the Stuart monarchy by defending liberties hallowed by tradition. In Prussia, meanwhile, the estates\u2019 appeal to the past was trumped by the permanent state of emergency dictated by an embattled present. Friedrich Wilhelm\u2019s military prowess conferred on him the nimbus not of the hapless Charles I, but of the formidable Cromwell.<\/p>\n
In his concluding tour d\u2019horizon<\/em> of the present day, Clark draws an analogy between the Great Elector and Emmanuel Macron \u2014 a juxtaposition that would, I suspect, have surprised both men. The French president would doubtless prefer to be compared to Frederick the Great, Voltaire\u2019s patron, friend and foe \u2014 an intellectual who wrote, conversed and made love in French.<\/p>\n
But Macron\u2019s record so far does not remotely stand comparison with old Fritz. His 2017 speech at the Sorbonne (where else?) urged Europe to end its \u201ccivil war\u201d in order to \u201cconstruct . . . genuine sovereignty\u201d. Clark sees parallels here with the Great Elector\u2019s subjection of his estates. Macron warned that \u201cfor too long we were sure in our belief that the past would not come back\u201d. This sense of foreboding about the return of a terrible past is comparable to the Elector\u2019s use of the Thirty Years\u2019 War, which had ravaged Germany early in his reign, as a warning of what might happen if his subjects defied him. Macron\u2019s deployment of the past to justify the aggrandisement of power \u2014 in this case the power of the Europe at the expense of the nation states \u2014 is surely no less of a \u201cfabrication\u201d or \u201cmanipulation\u201d than Boris Johnson\u2019s or Trump\u2019s. The only difference is that Clark\u2019s sympathies lie with the EU.<\/p>\n
Friedrich Wilhelm also anticipated present-day leaders by employing one of the leading scholars of his day, Samuel Pufendorf, to write an official history of his \u201clife and deeds\u201d, which chronicled his conflicts with and triumph over the estates \u2014 and incidentally established the sobriquet \u201cGreat Elector\u201d (Grosser Kurf\u00fcrst<\/em>) by which he is still known to posterity. No doubt Macron would be glad of a similarly versatile and obliging court historiographer \u2014 step forward Bernard-Henri L\u00e9vy \u2014 but any attempt to attach \u201cgreat\u201d to his name risks the same fate as that of the Great Elector\u2019s contemporary, Louis XIV: despite all the efforts of royalist historians, \u201cLouis le Grand\u201d has never stuck.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Historian King\u201d, on Frederick the Great, astonishes by the virtuosity of an author worthy of a subject who was himself a virtuoso in the use of power. From his unpromising origins as history\u2019s mostly notorious case of paternal abuse \u2014 the young Fritz\u2019s ogre of a father had his best friend executed in front of his eyes \u2014 he became the very model of an Enlightenment despot. Clark shows how Frederick was indebted for his \u201cpolitics of stasis\u201d, governed by immutable, timeless laws, to the Newtonian physics of his day. His brilliant historical writings enabled him to exercise absolute control over his posthumous reputation.<\/p>\n
Frederick\u2019s determination to escape from his father overshadowed his life; only in this context does the full significance of his homosexuality become clear. The ambiguous legacy of a figure simultaneously apostrophised as \u201cthe soldier king\u201d and \u201cthe philosopher king\u201d extends even into the Third Reich, with its camp cult of masculinity and paranoid persecution of \u201cperversion\u201d. Just how far Frederick\u2019s expression of his gay identity could go becomes clear in an extraordinary poem in French, \u201cLa Jouissance<\/em>\u201d (\u201cLust\u201d), fleetingly referred to here and mistakenly described as \u201clost\u201d in Iron Kingdom<\/em>. Dedicated to \u201cMonsieur Algarotti, the swan of Padua\u201d, the poem fantasises about his lover in the arms of \u201cCloris\u201d and culminates in an untranslatable description of orgasm that is too good not to quote: Baiser, jouir, sentir, soupirer et mourir<\/em>,\/Ressusciter, baiser, revoler au plaisir<\/em>.<\/p>\n
Clark\u2019s chapter on Bismarck, \u201cBoatman on the River of Time\u201d is, if possible, even better. He reproduces an 1875 cartoon of the Iron Chancellor playing chess with \u201cPio Nono\u201d, Pope Pius IX, at the height of the Kulturkampf<\/em> between Bismarck and the Catholic Church. This leads to a marvellous digression on chess and the accelerating tempo of modern politics, applying the profound theories of Wilhelm Steinitz, the first official world chess champion, to Bismarck\u2019s Realpolitik. Chess metaphors are ubiquitous in history, but never more revealing than during the era of \u201cblood and iron\u201d.<\/p>\n
In \u201cTime of the Nazis\u201d, Clark investigates museums and monuments to contrast the Third Reich\u2019s technocratic, even futuristic, modernity with its leaders\u2019 atavistic regression into an \u201cahistorical, racial continuum\u201d that made the Holocaust seem like an imperative. Clark lets the German historical profession off lightly: he argues that the Nazis were too obsessed with the prehistoric past to focus on rewriting the historical one: \u201cOddly enough, the books and articles produced by the professional historians of the Nazi era are the last place we should look for traces of [ideological] manipulations.\u201d Yet history obviously mattered hugely to the Nazis: why, otherwise, would they saturate a highly educated society with propaganda based on the idea that the Germans had a uniquely tragic yet noble past, as a prelude to their uniquely glorious destiny? Indeed, that view of German history outlived the regime for at least a generation, not least among many historians. The abysmal depravity of the Third Reich eludes Clark\u2019s study of its historicity \u2014 perhaps because, unlike Frederick and Bismarck, Hitler never really comes into focus here. Radical evil defies abstract analysis.<\/p>\n
I hope Professor Clark\u2019s Time and Power<\/em> will find readers outside the guild of his peers. Alerting us to a scholarly Meisterwerk<\/em> such as this is what a magazine like Standpoint<\/em> is for. And there is much to be learned from these erudite studies of \u201cthe warping of temporality by power, the appropriation of historicity by the claimers of sovereignty\u201d. I only wish that academics would broaden their minds sufficiently to examine their own political prejudices with the same mordant alacrity that they devote to others. Even Regius Professors.<\/p>\n
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