2026 Attallah Lecture – Scorched Time: Radical Chronopolitics in the Third Reich

The School of Journalism and Communication presents

2026 Attallah Lecture

Scorched Time: Radical Chronopolitics in the Third Reich

with Dr. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
University of British Columbia

Abstract
Nazism was keen to develop its own politics of time. While other forms of fascist chronopolitics appeared to cling to established notions of progress and linearity, Nazism aimed to exit history and withdraw into the timelessness of an ahistorical racial continuum in which nature absorbed politics. This variant was prominent in the early years of the regime, but the Second World War and the looming defeat gave rise to other, more radical and desperate chronopolitical speculations. Looking at tropes that arose in areas as distinct as propaganda, pharmacology and changes to the pension system, the talk will present the increasingly catastrophist and apocalyptic notions of history in the “Nazi chronobscene”.which anticipated extreme forms of current accelerationism.

Registration for the 2026 Attallah Lecture