Once again—never before—too late: Competing modalities of temporal comparison in German politics (1790–1945)

Introduction: Toward a typology of temporal comparisons

Temporal comparisons are a powerful tool in political argument. They can be employed to achieve lots of things. Politicians may appeal to a glorious past or an idealized future in order to make a case for radical change, be it a return to former times or a “great leap forward.” Alternatively, politicians may evoke bad historical examples as a reminder that things should be left as they are—or, conversely, that one should reject history and try something completely new. Or they may point to the uncertainty of both, past experiences and utopian ideals, in order to call for piecemeal adjustments rather than revolution. In short, contrasts between “now” and “then” can be framed to fit conservative as well as reformist, reactionary, as well as revolutionary agendas. On a less philosophical level, and irrespective of ideologies, temporal comparisons may also be used for a countless number of more mundane purposes such as vilifying an opponent (“xy is a demagogue like Goebbels”), raising a scandal (“an unprecedented swamp of corruption”), demanding immediate action (“we risk falling behind abc”), or dramatizing a situation (“the worst crisis since World War II”).

Any attempt at classifying temporal comparisons should take account of their remarkable versatility of usage. Who exploits references to the past (or future), when, in which way, and for what purposes is a fascinating topic for political historians and one that would profit from a typology of temporal comparisons. However, our very brief survey of sample utterances should warn us against prematurely defining fixed relationships, or elective affinities, between specific linguistic forms of enunciating temporal comparisons and particular ideologies or rhetorical functions. As the above examples have shown, contrasts between “now” and “then,” claims of unprecedentedness (“never before”), analogies to past events or people (“once again”), and allegations of advance or backwardness compared to others (“far ahead”/“too late”) may serve a multitude of political objectives and can be embedded in contradictory ideologies. It would be bold to expect stable relationships between certain semantical and syntactical features of temporal comparisons (form) and their use value in political argument (function).

Even so, it still seems to be a promising approach to establish a very basic formal typology and then search for conjunctures and patterns of usage in particular historical periods. Having identified conjunctures and patterns, one might proceed to pin down, and explain, more specific ways of verbally expressing the basic types with regard to concrete situations and communities of practice such as political parties or even prominent individuals. This is what I set out to do in the following sections, choosing German politics in the period between the French Revolution and the end of the Second World War as a test site.

The typology that will be tested in view of its value for analyzing political argument is based on three modalities of temporal comparison already mentioned: (1) historical analogies, that is, comparisons that stress similarity between, or even equate, the past and present (“once again”); (2) claims of unprecedentedness, that is, comparisons that claim absolute novelty, or even incommensurability, of the present in relation to the past (“never before”); and (3) comparisons that postulate an anachronism of some present state with regard to developments elsewhere or a supposed universal course of history (“too late”/“far ahead”). The temporal adverbs used here as short-hand formulas are of course not meant to be exclusive. All three modalities, as well as the basic then/now form of temporal comparison, may in fact be verbally expressed in many differing ways. However, an extensive reading experience has shown that my typology is flexible enough to embrace almost all temporal comparisons that appear in relevant source materials. At the same time, it is sufficiently clear-cut to allocate the various formulations unequivocally either to the basic form (then/now) or to one of the abovementioned modalities.

The time frame of the analysis, although quite long for a short article, is arbitrary to some extent as is the choice of Germany as a testing ground. There is nothing in the proposed typology itself that would prohibit its application to earlier or later periods in history or to other political communities, including non-Western ones. The period chosen, the age of modern revolutions and violent clashes of ideologies, is nevertheless an exciting one for studying the interplay of all three modalities of temporal comparison. Following Koselleck’s insights (1975; 1985) about the emergence of a holistic and processual understanding of history since the late 18th century, one might expect a decreasing invocation of particular historical examples to be followed on the one hand, but more frequent appeals to visions of history as a whole on the other hand, hence a changing pattern of the “once again”-type. At the same time, claims of unprecedentedness (“never before”) and allegations of advance or—more prominently in Germany’s case—backwardness (“too late”) should also gain significance. It remains to be seen, however, whether Koselleck’s findings, derived primarily from elaborated statements of political philosophers and historians, need modification when the investigation turns to the realm of day-to-day politics.

Sources have been chosen accordingly. This article relies on a broad range of public speeches held both within and outside parliamentary assemblies, including radio addresses, as well as on selected pamphlets, newspaper articles, letters, and diaries commenting on, or directly intervening into, ongoing political debates. If great thinkers like Hegel or historians like Ranke are quoted occasionally, their voices are also interpreted in the way advocated by Quentin Skinner (2002): as “moves” in political disputes rather than as parts of their grand philosophical designs or master narratives. The focal points of interest in each of the following sections (on the three types of temporal comparison) are debates around Germany’s frequent upheavals and reactionary setbacks since the 1790s: the impact of revolutionary France and Napoleon’s challenge, the unsuccessful revolutions of the 1830s and late 1840s, the years of profound crisis between 1917 and 1923, and finally the rise and fall of Hitler and the Nazis between 1933 and 1945.

“Once again”: historical examples and analogies in political argument

In an often-quoted article, first published in 1967, Reinhart Koselleck argued that the topos historia magistra vitae lost its persuasive force when a new conception of history came to the fore in the late 18th century: history was now seen as a singular and unified process leading into an open future (Koselleck 1985: 21–38). As a consequence, the old idea of learning lessons from histories told by historians was undermined, Koselleck said, to the extent that the future was envisioned as something new, and the past was understood as a unique chain of interlinked events—forever gone and therefore unrecoverable. Accepting that argument, one would expect a sharp fall in the use of temporal comparisons of the “once again”-type. However, it has been remarked that past events, whether told by historians or experienced firsthand, continued to be invoked for pragmatical purposes all through the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in political conflicts (Becker, 1999: 21). A closer look at Koselleck’s article reveals that he was well aware of that continuity, for example, when he referred to Leopold Ranke’s appeal to the “book of history” full of lessons, which Ranke made as a political journalist in the 1830s (Koselleck, 1985: 31–32, 295). Moreover, Koselleck emphasized that the dissolution of the old topos did not preclude learning from history at all, but the learning was now of a different kind. It would either be an “instruction through frequent experience” (Kant), for instance, from failed attempts at revolution, or an education oriented by a comprehensive understanding of “History as a totality” (Koselleck, 1985: 37–38). An example for such an understanding was the experience of “acceleration and retardation” which constituted a repetitive structure of its own and would be renewable in the future (Koselleck, 1985, 36). In light of Koselleck’s own hints, one might criticize him not for having overlooked continuities, but for having chosen a misleading title for his article: The idea of history as a teacher for life was not dissolved by the new conception of history, but transformed and, in a way, even extended to encompass new kinds of historical learning (see Bouton, 2019).

It is therefore no surprise that temporal comparisons of the “once again”-type were still thriving after 1789—in Germany as elsewhere in Europe. Some of those comparisons continued along traditional lines, using single events as relevant examples. Increasingly, however, comparisons were made to bring the present in line with general laws to be found in history as a whole and especially in the recent experiences of—failed or successful—revolutions.

When news of the French Revolution reached the crumbling old German Empire, and German travelers began writing about events in Paris, temporal comparisons became a popular tool. In the early phase of widespread enthusiasm, sharp contrasts between “now” and “then” or claims that “never before” the world had seen such a happy reversal dominated the reports. Only a few years later, when the revolution entered Germany through French troops occupying the Rhineland, comparisons of the “once again”-type came to the fore. Some of the parallels served to praise the abruptness of the break with the past. Others relied on historical examples to denounce the revolution’s plunge into a violent carnage. Georg Forster, a celebrity in Germany for having been one of Captain Cook’s companions on his journey around the world, was among those who remained faithful to the revolution. In November 1792, Forster gave a speech in the French-occupied city of Mainz in which he exhorted his fellow citizens to imitate the French and shed off the yoke of slavery. “Somewhere,” he said, and he meant France, “the good must emerge first and spread from there around the world.” And to bring home his message, he invoked a famous citizen of Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of moveable type in printing, as an example: “Someone from Mainz invented the art of printing, and why should not a Frenchman invent the liberty of the eighteenth century?” (Forster, 1981: 42). A few months later, in April 1793, now stuck in exile in Paris because Prussian and Austrian troops were about to reconquer Mainz, Forster still adhered to the revolutionary cause. “Perhaps,” he wrote to his wife, “the French are condemned to be martyrs for the benefits which the Revolution will bring in the future, in the same way as the Germans in Luther’s time had been martyrs for the common weal by accepting the Reformation and defending it with their blood” (Landauer, 1990: 548). Forster’s parallel between the German Reformation and the French Revolution highlighted the world-historical necessity of both, and therefore—that was his point of comparison—the bloodshed they caused was justified. Later German authors, including the mature Hegel, called up the same parallel, but with a moderately reformist agenda in mind. For Hegel, the German Reformation had already achieved all—or most—of what the French aspired to in their Revolution, and hence the (protestant) German states of the 19th century did not need to imitate the French (see Hegel, 1970: 526–527). This double-edged usability of a historical parallel illustrates the point, made above, that linguistic forms of temporal comparison are not linked to ideological preferences.

Returning to Forster once more, still in Paris in June 1793, now under the impression of impending terror, he reminded his wife of another historical analogy: “Do you remember the first volumes of Gibbon’s account of the Roman Empire when it became prey to the praetorian guards? Things here now look exactly the same as they were in Rome at that time.” But even if Forster found harsh words to condemn the “tyranny” and “rampant violence” around him, he clinged to his view that the present was a transitory stage toward a better future (Landauer, 1990: 555–556). Meanwhile, most observers in Germany, even those who had sympathized with the Revolution, had turned decidedly against it. Those critics too used the analogy with late Republican Rome, but squarely equated it with Jacobin France: “It is Rome after Sulla’s return, or that of Octavius and Antonius,” commented one “B” in August Hennings’s journal Genius der Zeit (Hennings, 1794: 333). The same analogies were good to defend or denounce revolution.

With increasing distance from the French Revolution, it became itself a major point of reference, a quasi-familiar “space of experience” (Koselleck, 1985: 267–288) for conservatives and revolutionaries alike. Parallels to what had happened between 1789 and 1794, as well as during the Napoleonic aftermath, abounded in 19th-century political discourse all over Europe. In France, the “mimetic” quality—farcical or tragic—of all revolutionary attempts up to the rise and demise of the Second Republic 1848–52 and the Paris Commune of 1871 has often been pointed out (Deinet, 2001). The most sarcastic comments on that obsessive urge to repetition in words, symbols, and deeds were Karl Marx’s famous opening statements in his book on Louis Bonaparte’s Eighteenth Brumaire, first published in 1852 (Marx, 1985: 96–97). Left-wing revolutionaries were by no means the only ones to have recourse to examples of the French Revolution. Perhaps not so curiously, from the 1830s onward, conservatives in Germany and Europe often took comfort from the fact that the more recent revolutions they witnessed seemed to have less dramatic consequences than their great predecessor. Thus in December 1830, the aging Friedrich Gentz, known for his early German translation of Edmund Burke’s diatribe against the French Revolution, was satisfied that the system of popular sovereignty, as it was now defined in France after the July Revolution, could coexist peacefully with a legitimate monarchical government elsewhere. So much so indeed that Gentz felt justified in drawing a parallel to England’s friendly coexistence as a constitutional monarchy with the “purely monarchical states” in other parts of Europe since the 18th century. As a second parallel, he also adduced the reconcilement of Catholicism and Protestantism in German territories after long years of bloody wars (Gentz, 1840: 179–180). A few years on, in 1837, the Catholic conservative Joseph Maria von Radowitz, an officer in Prussian service, was even more optimistic. In an article in the Berliner Politisches Wochenblatt, he compared the factual outcome of the July Revolution with the “analogies to the past” and the expectations of “repetition of earlier experiences” which the upheavals of 1830 had aroused in the beginning. “Everywhere,” Radowitz noted maliciously, “the inconsequent revolution has beaten the consequent one—and fixed, at least for the moment, a state of affairs that one would have declared to be impossible after the experiences of earlier times” (quoted in Becker, 1999: 152).

Radowitz’s statement is an example of what I call, following Régine Robin (1973: 40–41), “rejected discourse”; in this case, the rejection of an analogy that was popular at the time; 1830 was no repetition of 1793. In fact, historical analogies were almost as often rejected as they were made, but the very contestedness is another proof that the practice itself was well alive in the 19th and 20th centuries. Contests could either apply to the propriety of a parallel as a whole or merely to certain conclusions that would derive from it. The popular parallel between the German Reformation, the French Revolution, and a possible German revolution is a case in point. As mentioned above, the mature Hegel had pointed to the Reformation in order to deny the necessity of a new revolution in Germany. By contrast, radical democrats in the 1840s like Johann Georg August Wirth did just the opposite. For Wirth, the present was the moment to make up for what had remained unfinished in Germany’s 16th century: “The same movement is gathering pace again, as in the 16th century, the analogy is perfect” (quoted in Becker, 1999: 244). Hence, analogies to past upheavals could be used as a source of inspiration, as in Wirth’s case, or as a reminder that no further action was necessary, as in Hegel’s case.

While such controversies about particular analogies were quite frequent in revolutionary contexts, there were rare instances in which the practice of drawing parallels was rejected completely. Thus, in 1844, the liberal journal Die Grenzboten criticized radicals like Wirth for recycling past examples: “As there is nothing completely similar in the nature of things, so it is impossible to transpose one epoch into another and revive the law of a certain time in another time” (quoted in Becker, 1999: 216). At first sight, such a statement seems to confirm Koselleck’s claim that the modern age of revolution dissolved the historia magistra vitae topos. Paradoxically, however, it was the experience of accelerated change itself which made it possible to reformulate even the rejection of parallel-making into yet another historical analogy. The certainty of sudden changes in past, present, and future was now a major lesson to be learnt from (recent) history. And, in the same way as with particular analogies, that new type of “once again”-comparison could conveniently be employed by both, revolutionaries and reactionaries, to console themselves in the face of temporary setbacks of their own cause.

The German Revolution of 1848/49, especially in its expiring phase, is full of hopeful analogies of that kind on both sides of the political spectrum. Democrats on the left tried to overcome their disappointment by relying on the experience that revolutions always followed their necessary path or, in the words of the radical journal Der Beobachter, their “inherent laws,” which—rather sooner than later—would end up in a new and more forceful revolution (quoted in Becker, 1999: 336). A right-wing journal like the Prussian Kreuzzeitung on the other hand also pointed to the “natural path that we find in all revolutions,” but here the conclusion was that a revival of the “same revolutionary elements” was impossible; only an “entirely new revolution would be possible” and—this was the comfort-giving point—it would take a long time until this might happen (quoted in Becker, 1999: 297).

In the period between 1917 and 1919, the comparisons of the “once again”-type used by left extremists were remarkably similar to those used by the radical left in 1848/49. The regularity of former revolutions was seen as a guarantee for final success, whether in the early stages of triumph or in situations of imminent defeat. Thus, as early as April 1917, Rosa Luxemburg, the intellectual leader of the communist Spartakus group, hailed the outbreak of the Russian Revolution by claiming that it confirmed “an old historical experience: There is nothing more unlikely, more impossible, more phantastical than a revolution until even an hour before it erupts, and there is nothing more simple, more natural, more familiar than a revolution the moment after it has fought its first battle and won its first victory” (Luxemburg, 1974: 255) And as late as 14 January 1919, one day before she was murdered by right-wing Freikorps soldiers, Luxemburg still expressed unbroken confidence in the “inner law of life” (inneres Lebensgesetz) of all revolutions. For the revolutionaries themselves, she explained in her last article for the newspaper Die Rote Fahne, temporary defeats were nothing but an inevitable passage to accumulate experience for the next step forward; by contrast, for the forces of so-called “order,” temporary victories founded on “bloody massacres” made their speedy downfall all the more probable. “The revolution will rise again tomorrow and, to your horror, its trombone sounds will announce: I have been, I am, and I will be!” (Luxemburg, 1974: 533–538).

Horror was indeed a prominent feeling on the bourgeois-liberal and conservative sides of the German political scene in 1918/19. For a short moment at least, those groups had lost their calmness and were no longer confident, as the Kreuzzeitung had been in 1848/49, that the “natural path” of revolutions would, once again, turn out in their favor. What they feared instead was a repetition in Germany of one particular—and entirely new—kind of revolution: the Russian Bolshevik revolution. The national-liberal Gustav Stresemann, who later became the Weimar Republic’s foreign minister, expressed those fears when he declared in December 1918 that “should the present spirit of dissolution continue, we will find ourselves in the same situation as Russia one year after the workers’ and soldiers’ council took over” (Stresemann I, 1926: 232). In general, by 1918, bourgeois politicians like Stresemann continued to compare the present revolution with earlier turning points—distant or recent—in German as well as foreign history, but they no longer professed a belief in a law-like regularity of all revolutions, let alone history as a whole, a belief that had been strong among liberals and even conservatives in the mid-19th century.

On the moderate side, including mainstream social democrats, the utter confusion that followed Germany’s defeat, the Revolution of 1918, and the Versailles peace treaty unleashed a wide-ranging search for historical parallels of all sorts to provide helpful lessons or underscore the exceptional drama of the situation. The general instability reinforced a more traditional style of arguing with singular exempla. Hardly any of those examples went unchallenged. Thus, in November 1918, Stresemann equated Germany’s collapse with Carthage’s defeat in the war with Rome (Stresemann I, 1926: 205), while a month earlier the diarist Kurt Riezler, advisor of the deposed chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, had even gone as far as putting the future German fate on a par with that of the dispersed Jews (Walther, 2008: 324). In February 1919, the liberal democrat Friedrich Naumann used his first speech to the Weimar national assembly to declare it a (better) copy of the 1848 Frankfurt assembly, a comparison that would become very popular—and contested—among members in the following months (Gruhlich, 2012: 87 (Naumann), 79–104). In the same speech, Naumann drew a parallel between the present world situation, dominated by America, and the situation of 1813–15, dominated by Russia, and he also compared the League of Nations with the Holy Alliance (quote in Gruhlich, 2012: 46). In contrast, a few months later, the theologian Ernst Troeltsch interpreted the League of Nations as an instrument of Anglo-Saxon world domination and compared it with the Roman Empire (Troeltsch, 2015: 130). Other contested parallels referred to the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, to Prussia’s salutary crisis after the defeat by Napoleon in 1806, or to the rapid recovery of France after its defeat of 1871. Germany’s trajectory in time stood at the center of all those parallels. Except for the communists and independent socialists, nationalism was the dominant frame in any search for relevant historical precedents.

Compared to the broad historical space of experience that was opened up in the crisis of 1918/19, the scope of “once again”-comparisons used by the National Socialist leaders was remarkably narrow. Once in charge, the main historical parallel they fell back upon again and again was the story of their own “movement” in the years before accession to power. Apparently, Hitler and his companions were so dazzled by their own success up to 1933 that they could think of no better example to describe what they envisioned for Germany after 1933. Just like the Nazi party had risen from a criminal splinter group to an almighty ruling party, Germany—an outcast nation since 1918—should now rise under their leadership to become the most powerful nation in Europe. In a speech in the Berlin Sportpalast (10 February 1933), a few days after he had been appointed Reich Chancellor, Hitler even narrowed down the parallel to his own person: “Just as I have worked for 14 years […] to build up this movement, and in the same way as I have made it grow from seven men to 12 million, so will I, and will we, build and work for the resurrection of our German people. And just like today the leadership of the German Reich has been handed over to our movement, so will we lead that German Reich to greatness and life again, and in doing so we are determined not to be led astray by anything (applause)” (Wende, 1994: 570–571). Hitler’s demand that Germany should be made “great again” insinuated a former happier state of the nation. Yet, Hitler and the Nazis were notoriously vague when it came to locating that supposed former greatness in historical time. What they had in mind was neither a resurrection of the medieval German Reich nor a revival of the Bismarckian Empire. Rather, what they hoped to revive were the unfulfilled dreams of the “forefathers” (Wende, 1994: 571) and especially their quest for national unity and honor that had been betrayed again and again, and most severely by the revolutionaries of November 1918 and the Weimar “system.” In the Sportpalast speech of February 1933, Hitler explicitly named the “two million” Germans who had fallen in the Great War as those who rightly demanded that their legacy should now be redeemed (Wende, 1994: 573–574). If there was any moment in German history that the Nazis wished to retrieve, it was August 1914, a brief moment of complete unity at the beginning of the Great War. 1933 was meant to be a reenactment of August 1914. The exiled Thomas Mann sensed this very clearly: “The whole ‘revolution,’” he noted in his diary in March 1934, “was meant as its restoration” (Mann, 1955: 135).

The analogy between the early struggles of the Nazi movement and Germany’s fight against her enemies—internal and external—remained a persistent feature in Hitler’s and Goebbels’s speeches up to the final phase of the World War. A case in point is the propaganda minister’s Sportpalast speech of 18 February 1943, in which he used the lost battle at Stalingrad to mobilize his audience for a “total war.” Several times in that speech, interrupted by cries of “Heil” and applause, Goebbels explicitly compared the present necessity for swift and rigorous action in the war with the methods used in the party’s “years of struggle” (Kampfzeit) (Wende, 1994: 669, 672, 675, 679, 681, 685, 693). Hitler himself reverted to the parallel in his last radio address on 30 January 1945, the twelfth anniversary of his accession to power. Conjuring up the “spectre of asiatic Bolshevism,” he closed his speech with a pathetic appeal to the German people, especially his “old combatants and all soldiers,” to gird themselves with an even harder spirit of resistance “until we—once again—can lay down on the tombs of the dead of that gigantic fight laurel wreaths decorated with ribbons bearing the words ‘and yet, you have achieved victory’” (Wende, 1994: 715, 721).

During the war, the Nazi leaders extended their repertoire by a small number of topical analogies repeated until their very end. The unlikely victory of King Frederick the Great of Prussia against a grand coalition of enemies was one of them. The assurance that there would never be “a repetition of a November 1918 in German history” was another. Hitler employed both analogies in one breath already in his war declaration against Poland on 1 September 1939—the reference to Frederick in an affirmative, and that to November 1918 in a negative sense (Domarus II, 1965: 1316). In the later stages of the war, the Nazi orators, Goebbels in particular, blew up Germany’s war efforts to a historic fight against two enemies who, according to the propaganda minister, had remained essentially the same for time out of mind: the “eternal” Jew acting in various disguises on the one hand, the Bolsheviks, now often equated with “Asia” or “the steppe” on the other hand. In his total war speech of February 1943, Goebbels conflated vague memories and myths about those enemies into one temporally multilayered myth about Germany’s recurrent, epical, and global-historical mission to exterminate them once and for ever (Wende, 1994: 670–674, 677–678). Hitler’s last proclamation of 16 April 1945 to the “soldiers of the Eastern Front,” now fighting in the outskirts of Berlin, echoed that vision: “This time, the Bolshevik will experience the old fate of Asia; he must and will bleed to death in front of the capital of the German Reich” (Domarus II, 1965: 2223).

Although some of the analogies used by the Nazis, for instance, the references to Frederick II, had been commonplace before, their general way of employing parallels and examples was exceptional. It has often been remarked that the Nazis’ vision of history had an eschatological quality that resulted in a tendency of blurring the borders between past, present, and future (Clark, 2019: 202–205). As we have seen, a prominent means of verbalizing that time perception was equations that merged several temporal layers into one great drama to be (re)enacted and finally solved in the present. In the Nazis’ minds, and in Hitler’s personal worldview, this led to a fusion of horizons: The purpose of world history had to be realized in Hitler’s own lifetime (Blumenberg, 1986: 80–85); and that special regime of time explains at least in part the murderous brutality of the Nazi regime in their deeds.

“Never before”: The rhetorics of exception and polemics

The range of functions for which comparisons of the “never before”-type were used in 19th- and 20th-century German politics was more restricted than in the case of “once again”-comparisons. Strictly speaking, any serious assertion that “never before” a certain phenomenon had occurred required a totalizing cognizance of history in the enlightened or idealist understanding described by Koselleck (1975). In practice, however, never before-assertions were rarely combined with elaborated opinions about history in general, but in most cases served as rhetorical tools in ongoing short-term altercations. In that sense, they could be a means to dramatize a certain moment, to overstate one’s own merit (“the best ever”), to vilify an opponent (“the worst ever”), or simply express surprise or raise attention. In other words, never before-assertions were crisis talk and did not necessarily imply a profound understanding of history as a unique process. It is therefore safe to assume, though an empirical proof lies beyond the scope of this article, that never before-comparisons can be found in all historical periods.

Even so, the French Revolution, especially its outbreak, certainly was an outstanding moment that provoked emphatic declarations of unprecedentedness which were applied to world history as a whole. For a famous example, one might point to Hegel’s retrospective appraisal in his lectures on the philosophy of history, originally held in Berlin in the 1820s, where he said that “[n]ever since the sun has stood in the firmament and the planets have revolved around her has it been seen that humankind relies upon its head, i.e. on its thoughts, and builds its real world in accord with them” (Hegel, 1970: 529). Many more contemporary acknowledgments of the Revolution’s universal novelty might be quoted, and it is telling that not only sympathizers like Georg Forster (see Landauer, 1990: 533), but also opponents recognized the radical nature of the Revolution’s break with the past. The already mentioned “B” in Hennings’s journal Genius der Zeit was one of them: “The first phase of the Revolution,” he wrote, “differed from everything similar that ever happened in the world owing to a certain glimmer of humanity and clemency which heralded the end of the 18th century as the period of triumphant humanism” (Hennings, 1794: 373).

Whereas Hegel or the anonymous “B” looked at the novelty of the Revolution in terms of its ideas or values, other German observers considered the rapidity of change itself to be its major innovation. Thus, in 1793 Friedrich Gentz commented on the new experience of being outpaced by events in the introduction to his translation of Burke: “Never has that change been so conspicuous as in that jumble of great, new, and unheard of Revolutions” (Burke et al., 1991: 20–21). For conservatives like Gentz, the unheard-of dynamism unleashed by the French Revolution, and continued in a despotic guise by Napoleon, was above all a menace that needed to be quelled. Early German nationalists on the other hand saw it differently. They apprehended the disruptions inaugurated by the Revolution, and more drastically by Napoleon, as an opportunity for a new beginning. For instance, Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation, publicly held in French-occupied Berlin after the Prussian defeat and published in 1808, started off with a lengthy reflection on the temporal fractures brought about by Germany’s loss of independence. Fichte did not content himself with the conventional remark about the unprecedented rapidity of the course of time in the last 3 years (“giant strides”), but he insisted that his audience “should now recognize as bygone past” what he himself had designated as “present” only a few years ago. And he continued with a call to realize that a foreign time regime had been imposed on the Germans which they needed to reject to regain sovereignty over their own time: “Whatever has lost its independence has also lost its power to intervene in the course of time [Zeitfluß] and determine its content freely; if it remains in that state […] it will no longer have a time of its own, but will count its years by the events and epochs of alien peoples and empires. It could raise itself from that state […] under the condition that it would wake up to a new world and, with its creation, begin a new epoch of its own in time” (Fichte, 1978: 11–12). A new—national—time of its own, Fichte’s hoped-for break not only with an unrecoverable past, but also with the synchronous time regimes of foreign powers and alien peoples amounted to nothing less than a proposal to escape the enlightened conception of world history as a unique and unified process shared by most intellectuals around 1800.

While the French Revolution and Napoleon’s European adventures caused many observers to indulge in assertions of novelty, the same cannot be said for the more moderate—and mostly failed—German revolutions of the mid-19th century. There was indeed a remarkable dearth of comparisons of the “never before”-type as far as the revolutions around 1830 and 1848 were concerned. The only statements remotely echoing the earlier feelings of rupture around 1800 were still relative to those overpowering models. For instance, when the left Hegelian Arnold Ruge wrote in 1842 that “the removal of the debris of former times” (Zeitenschutt) had always been a task, but that in this respect “no time before our own has had a more vivid awareness of the urgent need that each day something needs to be done” (quoted in Becker, 1999: 235), such a statement still implied no more than a relative intensification of an attitude that, in principle, had existed before. The same is true for the numerous press comments which, in early March 1848, stressed the unprecedented speed (a few days only) with which the old regime in France had been swept away this time (see Becker, 1999: 279). Revolution as such was nothing new in the mid-19th century, and in the German 1848 bourgeois-led revolution, the obsession of searching for historical (and legal) precedents was so strong, even among the more democratic forces, that the fight against this tendency and the assurance that a fresh start (“tabula rasa”) was desirable, already amounted to a radical pronouncement (see Becker, 1999, 283–284).

A relative scarcity of comparisons of the “never before”-type is again noticeable in the turbulent years between Germany’s defeat in the First World War and the subsequent inner struggles until the early 1920s. Surely, an ardent patriot like Stresemann sought to magnify the events when, still full of hope for victory, he asserted in January 1916 that the German people had “stood the test in this war more than any people ever in history,” or when almost 3 years later, in December 1918, he expected “the most terrible peace dictate ever made to subdue a people” (Stresemann I, 1926: 104, 219). Yet, such combinations of a superlative with a temporal adverb obviously belonged into the category of rhetorical amplification rather than that of seriously meant propositions about the course of history. Moreover, such utterances usually remained limited to Germany’s national history only as when the diarist Harry Graf Kessler called the month of October 1918 “the blackest in German history” or wrote on 10 November 1918 that “never ever the entire framework of a great power has been pulverized so completely in so short a time.” Incidentally, only 2 days later Kessler himself, a dandy par excellence, toned down his previous superlative, noting that the revolution had only caused “little swirls” in Berlin’s street life “which quietly flowed around it in its accustomed streams”—another indication of the mostly hyperbolic purport of “never before”-comparisons (Kessler VI, 2006: 606, 628, 632). Also into the category of hyperbole fell self-comparisons such as Hugo Preuß’s claim in February 1919, addressed to the Weimar national assembly, that “never before in German history a parliament had such unlimited powers” (quoted in Gruhlich, 2012: 86) or Stresemann’s invocation in October 1923, when he took over as Reich chancellor in the midst of hyperinflation and the Ruhr conflict with France, that “hardly ever a cabinet has had to assume leadership in German politics in more difficult times of adversity and misery than today” (Stresemann II, 1926: 86). In short, the crisis years between 1917 and 1923 elicited a fair amount of calls to recognize the situation’s exceptional character, but in most cases, these were either overtly rhetorical in character, or they came along in the shape of ordinary then/now contrasts which did not suppose a radical break, but merely pointed to partial differences in terms of a “more” or “less,” “better” or “worse.”

The uses of “never before”-comparisons in the Nazi period partly differed from those of the early Weimar period. Early after his accession to power, Hitler was cautiously avoiding claims that his “revolution” constituted an absolute break with all previous history. In his Sportpalast speech of February 1933, the furthest he went was to say that back in 1918, he had defined his “own approach” to solve the German problems which was “new”; and in his Reichstag speech on the Enabling Act a few weeks later, he declared that “hardly any revolution of such a dimension has proceeded in such a disciplined and unbloody manner as the rise of the German people in these weeks” (Wende, 1994: 563–564, 597). Hitler’s words appear subdued indeed when compared to the way in which, around the same time in Italy, his later ally Benito Mussolini praised the uniqueness of his Fascist party’s achievements: “A party that totally dominates a nation,” he wrote in the Enciclopedia Italiana, “is a new fact in history. Correlations and comparisons are impossible” (Nolte, 1984: 216).

Despite his initial caution, Hitler was less reserved when he applied never before-statements to his enemies. The November Revolution, he said in 1933, was a “crime without precedent in German history” (Wende, 1994: 578). Polemics against adversaries within and outside Germany remained a principal use of never before-assertions all through the Nazi era. In that polemical genre, the exiled critics of the regime were at least as outspoken as the Nazis themselves. “Never before in the world and in history has there been a more idiotic demagogy,” noted Thomas Mann in his diary in March 1933, and as if in direct reply to Hitler, he added that “[t]his Revolution boasts of its unbloody character, but was in fact the most venomous and murderous that ever was” (Mann, 1955: 99, 109).

At the end of the War, the Nazi leaders stepped up their rhetorics of exception. To the extent that they now interpreted the war as the decisive stage in an epic struggle between the German race and its “Jewish-Bolshevik” enemy, Goebbels and Hitler stressed the unprecedentedness of the threat should that enemy prevail. “The present menace for the Reich and the European continent eclipses by far all the threats the occidental world [Abendland] has ever encountered,” Goebbels declared in his total war speech of February 1943. And in his last radio address of January 1945, Hitler himself evoked the eventuality of an Allied victory as the “most dreadful fate ever” for the German people, and to underline the apocalyptic character of his message, he did not even hesitate to implore “the Almighty” who (allegedly) had created the German people so that “defending its existence is indeed doing his work” (Wende, 1994: 671, 718).

While the Nazis braced themselves for doomsday, their German critics in exile stepped up their rhetorics of exception as well. As early as September 1943, Thomas Mann tuned up his German listeners in one of his BBC radio talks to the Nazis’ unparalleled demise: “Their megalomaniac satanism wants their downfall to be unlike any other that ever happened.” And in February 1945, directly responding to Goebbels’s interpretation of the war as a final turning point in the struggle against the Jew, Mann declared the “extinction of the most monstrous mischief known in world history, namely Nazism” to be a “necessity, if life on earth shall ever be bearable again” (Mann, 1955: 705, 735). In his BBC broadcasts, Mann did not content himself with exposing the singular evilness of the Nazis—and of the Germans who supported them—merely in ideological or military terms. From January 1942 onward, when he first explicitly talked about the mass murder of the Jews, he repeatedly reminded his German listeners of the almost irremediable guilt they heaped upon themselves in bringing about a “moral and physical destruction of humanity […] of such a scale, so appalling, so hopelessly unforgettable that one cannot foresee how, in the future, our people can live as an equal among brother peoples of the earth” (Mann, 1955: 647). Since then and until today, the Nazi crimes against the Jews and other peoples have been seen as the epitome of evil, unprecedented in world history and—hopefully—unrepeatable.

‘Too late’: Contests about Germany’s special path

Comparisons that identify an asynchronicity of the simultaneous have been a common device in Western history at least since the mid-18th century. Their purpose commonly was—and still is—to insinuate a relative advance, in most cases of the comparer’s we-group (one’s own nation, the “civilized” peoples, “the West”), in relation to other groups considered as backward (an enemy nation, “uncivilized” peoples, and non-Europeans). Isolated occurrences of such comparisons may be traced back into Antiquity, for example, when Thucydides claimed that “the old Hellenes lived according to the same customs as today’s Barbarians” (see Grafton, 2019: 19). There can be no doubt however that there has been a massive upsurge of that type of comparison since the Age of Enlightenment in which they were often combined with a general vision of world history conceived as progress. In Western sociopolitical thought that practice of “progressive comparison” became habitual during the 19th century and helped to initiate a competitive dynamism of quests to overtake, or avoid staying behind, a rival—a form of competition that would involve all sorts of collective entities: empires, nations, enterprises, and social groups (Koselleck, 1985: 248). In recent decades, postcolonial critics have condemned that kind of comparison—not without success—as an inadmissible scholarly practice in the historical and social sciences (Chakrabarty 2000). Nonetheless, progressive comparisons are flourishing in many academic and practical pursuits of life, including world politics. In the shape of numerical or visual comparisons (rankings and visual charts), their impact is probably even greater today than it was in the 19th or early 20th centuries.

Modern and contemporary Germany is an interesting case to study contests about comparisons that suggest a time lag in one direction or the other. Various narratives of a German “special path” (Sonderweg) and especially the idea, popular among observers within and outside Germany, that it was a “belated nation” rest on such a comparison, in this case with Germany’s Western neighbors whose trajectory was set as a universal—or at least European—norm. The formula “belated nation” was created by the philosopher Helmuth Plessner who used it as a catchy title for the second edition (1959) of a book whose text had remained largely unchanged from the first edition (1935) and whose argument, as Koselleck has shown, was much more nuanced than the title would indicate. Koselleck’s judgment about the theoretical value of the formula as such, and related conceptions of backwardness generally, was quite harsh: “It [the formula, W.S.] postulates an exclusive teleology ex post, which allows only one alternative: fulfillment or failure. […] Either the normalized timetable is realized or one is too late. Tertium non datur” (Koselleck, 2000: 363).

The latest German politician who was confronted with the formula—and failed—was Erich Honecker, general secretary of the East German communist party until 18 October 1989, who stubbornly refused to switch to a reformist course despite Mikhail Gorbachev’s warning that “those who come too late will be punished by life.” Irrespective of the question whether Gorbachev actually employed the exact words attributed to him by press agencies on 7 October 1989 and later acknowledged by him (see Bock, 2014), one can be sure that he must have been aware of the multiple resonances which his warning would mobilize in the minds of historically educated Germans, including Honecker himself. Gorbachev’s remark indeed invited listeners and readers to search for historical parallels. Plessner’s catchword of Germany as a “belated nation” was one of those reminiscences that could be called up in the situation of October 1989.

The topos however had a much longer history in German politics. For Honecker and the East German communists, trained Marxists, another resonance must have been ringing in their ears. None other than Marx himself had supplied one of the most prominent formulations of the topos of Germany’s belatedness. In his earliest political pamphlet, the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, published in 1844, he described the “German status quo” as an “anachronism” compared to the state of France even fifty years earlier: “If I negate the German state of affairs in 1843, I am hardly in the year 1789 according to the French calendar, and even less in the center of our present age. Indeed, German history adulates itself of a movement which no other people in the historical firmament ever performed or will imitate. For we have shared the restorations of the modern peoples, without having shared their revolutions” (Marx, 1970: 379). Undoubtedly, communists like Honecker knew these—and similar—passages in Marx’s work almost by heart, and so the space of experience tapped by Gorbachev’s warning reached back at least into the 1840s. Marx himself generalized the idea of the asynchronicity of the simultaneous in the preface to the first volume of his Capital (1867): “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future” (Marx, 1983: 12). Once again, Germany was the “less developed” country that Marx had in mind here, while England, no longer France, was now the country that was “far ahead” and showed the pathway to the future.

In the 1840s, Marx was not alone in criticizing Germany’s retardation. His voice was only one in a chorus of many who despaired of the political standstill. The chorus comprised radical democrats like Karl Nauwerck who complained that the Germans “once again allowed other peoples to overtake them” (quoted in Becker, 1999: 236) and also a liberal-minded Prussian state minister like Theodor von Schön who, in 1840, confronted the newly inaugurated king Frederick William IV with a warning that anticipated Gorbachev’s words: “If one does not take time as it comes, seizing the good within it and promoting it in its development, then time punishes” (quoted in Koselleck, 1985: 296). In an ironical mode—as rejected discourse—the topos of Germany’s supposed backwardness even reached the conservative side of the political spectrum. In an article for the Kreuzzeitung of 2 November 1848, Friedrich Julius Stahl ridiculed the idea that “[n]owadays a nation is only taken seriously if it has performed a glorious revolution, and a constitution is only deemed perfect if it is based on a glorious revolution” (quoted in Becker, 1999: 298).

Absence of a successful bourgeois revolution, of liberal constitutionalism and democratic rights for the people: those deficits were the basic ingredients of a non-Marxist German Sonderweg narrative already in place in the 1840s and variegated in manifold ways up to the historians of the Bielefeld school in the 1970s and 1980s. Belated fulfillment of national unity, Plessner’s story, became part of that narrative in the sense that, in Germany, the nation state was not achieved and formed by a democratic movement from below (in 1848), but by a monarchical government from above (in 1871).

On the conservative and national-liberal sides of the political scene, this narrative was either rejected or treated with great reserves. In this regard, the crisis years between 1917 and 1919 posed a major challenge for the parties of the moderate right. Up to the last year of the war, nonadherence to Western ideas of liberal democracy was preached by national-liberal propagandists as part of Germany’s own raison d’être. German liberty, the historian Friedrich Meinecke exclaimed in January 1917, consisted in not accepting the “normative constitutionalism” (Normalverfassung) that President Wilson, the “Worldpresident,” wanted to impose as a condition for peace; rather Germany should stick to its “own individuality” and its right to “give the law of its political existence to itself” (Wende, 1994: 51). Similarly, Thomas Mann’s lengthy pamphlet Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, published in the days of the armistice in 1918, can be read as a complete rejection of the idea of a universal normal path represented by the Western powers to be followed by the Germans (Mann, 1988). Insisting on national singularity as a positive value was one way of contending with the accusation of being too late compared to others. It was an attempt to escape the dynamism of “progressive comparison” and its underlying conception of history as a universal and unified movement in which some actors, considering themselves as “advanced,” would set the pace for all others.

Both authors, Meinecke and Mann, gradually converted to parliamentary democracy in the early 1920s. Active national-liberal politicians like Naumann or Stresemann were even more ready to partially accept the narrative of Germany’s political retardation. In February 1919, Naumann conceded in the Weimar national assembly “that we urgently need to insert ourselves into the new worldtype” proclaimed by President Wilson and that “[i]t would have been better if we had performed this insertion earlier and more voluntarily” (quoted in Gruhlich, 2012: 46). And 2 months later, at a party rally of his German People’s Party, Stresemann lamented—self-critically—that the pre-war German bourgeoisie had been too “saturated” and “oblivious of its cultural and political ideals” and that these deficiencies were responsible for Germany being “too late in entering the path to the parliamentary system” (Stresemann I, 1926: 254–255).

Comparisons of the “too late”-type (or the inverse type of “far ahead”) in which Germany was one of the comparata were remarkably absent in the Nazi leaders’ pronouncements. This absence is hardly surprising given the fact that those comparisons rest on the ideas of universal progress. The Nazis however would never be content with making Germany just a model to be emulated by others. Their ultimate aim was to end the progressive and competitive mode of historical existence altogether and replace it with an eternal state of equipoise dominated by the Third Reich alone (Clark, 2019: 207–208). In such a constellation, only one mode of a “too late”-statement would make sense: a self-comparison of Germany’s actual state with Germany’s state as it should be in order to reach the desired end even faster. Hitler’s memorandum on the Four Year Plan 1936 contained an example of that mode of reasoning when he referred to the “principle that one would not be able to catch up in centuries what one now neglected in months of peace” (Hürten, 1995: 271). Speeding up Germany’s rearmament in the arms race with rival powers was the pragmatical purpose of this utterance, yet it is telling that Hitler framed it as an inner-German diachronic self-comparison. There was at least one field, the evaluation of contemporary art, in which Hitler taunted others with a reproach of being anachronistic. In his opening speech for the Great Exhibition of German Art in Munich on 19 July 1937, he ridiculed certain artworks that called themselves “modern” for being in fact “highly antiquated” and even “lagging behind a period in which stone age people scratched images of what they saw in the walls of their caves.” German art, however, in Hitler’s view, did not partake at all in the logic of a “modern” art scene which demanded that each new artwork should surpass previous ones by being novel in some fancy way. “German art,” Hitler said, “shall be an eternal one” (Eikmeyer, 2004: 140, 129). Thus, whether in politics or visual art, Germany’s path should be to step out of a competitive regime of progressive comparisons with others and realize instead its own—eternal—völkisch essence.

In 1935, the expatriate German philosopher Ernst Bloch, a Marxist exiled in Zürich, first published his book Erbschaft dieser Zeit, in which he developed at length the theorem of the asynchronicity of the synchronous and called Germany “the classic country of asynchronicity,” not least because it had “not achieved a bourgeois revolution until 1918” (Bloch, 1992: 113). The second edition of Bloch’s book, first published in 1962, contained a short piece originally published in Prague in 1937 entitled Gauklerfest unterm Galgen (Jugglers’ party underneath the gallows). That piece was Bloch’s comment on the Munich Exhibition of German Art and the parallel exhibition of so-called “degenerated art.” Bloch used the article as yet another occasion to exemplify his theorem. For him, Hitler’s “temple” of German art was a “kitsch museum” representing “putrefaction,” while the hall of so-called “degenerated art” was in fact the real “pinacotheca” and represented the “future.” Bloch went on to analyze the inner contradictions within a Nazi ideology that had oscillated between an irrational worship of primitive barbarism indulging in the celebration of “blond brutes” on the one hand, and a philistine inclination for “plush sofas” and “plaster figures and antique crown glass windows” on the other hand. For Bloch, both currents were of course equally asynchronous, but the Munich exhibition of German art represented the “defeat” of the primitivist current in Nazi ideology (Bloch, 1992: 82, 84–85). Bloch’s comments belonged to the more sophisticated versions of the anachronism reproach against Nazi Germany.

In the course of the World War, the reproach was taken up by many other exiled Germans who joined Allied propaganda efforts to speed up German defeat. Thomas Mann’s BBC radio talks to German listeners are noteworthy because back in 1918, he had been one of the fiercest advocates of a nationalist protest against entering the pathway mapped out by the Western powers. Now, in the early 1940s, he was most outspoken in his condemnation of the Nazis’ and the Germans’ refusal to recognize the signs of the times. In late 1942, Mann called Hitler “the last, miserably belated […] and just nauseating embodiment of the conqueror type.” Moreover, he also criticized the Nazis’ recent “discovery of Europe” not just as a propaganda trick, but as a “rather belated discovery” if compared to President Roosevelt’s idea of a “world civilization.” Mann even directly quoted the American president who had rejected the expression “western civilization” as no longer adequate and had pleaded instead for a “world civilisation which, for the first time, unites the cultures of Asia, Europe, and the two Americas” (Mann, 1955: 682, 679). Significantly, Africa remained excluded from Roosevelt’s (as well as Mann’s) vision for the future, but the significant point in our context is that Mann not only accused the Nazi propagandists of belatedly adopting a (fake) program of European unity, but that he discarded the European idea itself as no longer up to the spirit of the age which, for him, was represented by the program of his new hero, President Roosevelt.

Conclusion

The present article could provide no more than selected examples, focusing on German politics, to illustrate the coexistence of different modes of temporal comparison in the period since 1789 and up to 1945. The examples have shown that German politicians and observers made continuous use of historical analogies and parallels (“once again”), novelty claims (“never before”), and assertions of anachronism (“too late”) all through the 19th and 20th centuries. Contentions about those comparisons were quite frequent. In most cases, those contests only concerned the choice of comparata or tertia comparationis, whereas the legitimacy of all three modalities of comparison as such was rarely questioned.

If taken as abstract figures of argument, all three modes were neither exclusively monopolized by certain political ideologies, parties, or speakers, nor were they bound to certain periods of time. Contrary to what one might have expected, the use of historical examples and analogies has proven to be the most robust practice of comparison—applicable by almost everyone and in almost any situation of practical politics. Novelty claims and (self-)accusations of being “too late” were less ubiquitous; their use value was mainly rhetorical and polemical, their occurrence more limited to situations of imminent crisis.

On a level below these general findings, certain preferences on the extreme left and right sides of the political spectrum have become visible. Politicians and observers on the left—Marxists in particular—were most outspoken in advocating a mode of comparison by which lived events were put in relation to universal and approved laws of history. By contrast, politicians and observers on the right—especially nationalists and most emphatically the Nazis—were most keen to reject the validity of those supposed laws; they pleaded for an exit option consisting in the right to define and live in a particular, national time regime which, in the case of leading Nazis, was combined with an eschatological worldview. Bourgeois German politicians and observers of a more moderate outlook—conservative or liberal—navigated between those options depending on the situation. But, apparently, this is a provisional hypothesis in need of further evidence: the events between 1917 and the early 1920s constituted a crisis in which those moderate actors felt most sharply torn between sticking to an idea of Germany’s own trajectory through history on the one hand and admitting that Germany should insert itself into a universalist regime of “progressive comparisons” on the other hand.