“We are Germans. We are perfect, and we are dead”: Aspects of Nazi Chronopolitics in Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night

Katharine Burdekin’s classic dystopia Swastika Night (1937) depicts a twenty-eighth-century world in which Nazi Germany reigns supreme. Most of the scholarship deals with 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 (1985). The 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 destruction of their memory and history can rediscover their lost agency. Drawing on contributions by Christopher Clark, Hannah Arendt and Hans Blumenberg, among others, the essay analyzes how Burdekin spins out the various – and frequently contradictory – shades of Nazi chronopolitics. Ultimately, overcoming the suppression of women and reversing the annihilation of historical agency and consciousness fundamentally depend on each other. 1