Christopher Clark. Time and Power: Visions of History in German Politics, from the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich.

Abstract

Discussions of the temporal turn are generally framed by reference to the work of Reinhart Koselleck and François Hartog. Now, Christopher Clark’s new book will have to be added. Time and Power: Visions of History in German Politics, from the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich is a sustained and profound meditation on the sense of time and temporality in history. It engages with the theoretical writing on historicity and power, and it develops a fascinating analytical narrative of (Prussian) German history from the seventeenth century to the present. Clark demonstrates how the “historicity of . . . regimes” evolved (3), which questions both the distinction Koselleck made between premodern and modern time and the often-invoked distinctiveness of the German experience. The first of four chapters is devoted to the efforts of Elector Frederick William (the Great Elector) to reconstruct his lands at the end of the Thirty Years War. He had come to power in 1640, inheriting a scatter of territories across northern Germany. Many of these lands were repeatedly overrun during the long war, and the urgent task of reconstruction was linked with the aim of safeguarding the future of these lands. This meant making demands on the estates, which generated increasingly polarized arguments. The various estates (which in Ducal Prussia were still subjects of the Polish crown, to which they appealed for protection) invoked historical arguments in defense of their ancient liberties. The elector pointed to the future and insisted on the necessity of his demands for the preservation of the polity. Before long, he employed scholars such as Pufendorf to develop a supportive narrative that invoked the past but was shaped by the elector’s vision of Brandenburg’s future. Clark plausibly argues that the elector’s Calvinism played a significant role not only in the creation of a Calvinist ruling elite in (predominantly Lutheran) Brandenburg but also in the development of a new rationalization of the state, inspired partly by the elector’s own early observations in the Netherlands. The ultimate outcome of these developments was the elevation of the Great Elector’s successor as King Frederick I in Prussia in 1701, who was still an elector in the Holy Roman Empire but with enhanced prestige and authority.