Julia Hell, The Conquest of Ruins. The Third Reich and the Fall of Rome, Chicago, 2019.

Éditeur : Chicago of University Press
576 pages
ISBN : 9780226588193
35 $

 

The Roman Empire has been a source of inspiration and a model for imitation for Western empires practically since the moment Rome fell. Yet, as Julia Hell shows in The Conquest of Ruins, what has had the strongest grip on aspiring imperial imaginations isn't that empire's glory but its fall—and the haunting monuments left in its wake.
Hell examines centuries of European empire-building—from Charles V in the sixteenth century and Napoleon's campaigns of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to the atrocities of Mussolini and the Third Reich in the 1930s and '40s—and sees a similar fascination with recreating the Roman past in the contemporary image. In every case—particularly that of the Nazi regime—the ruins of Rome seem to represent a mystery to be solved: how could an empire so powerful be brought so low? Hell argues that this fascination with the ruins of greatness expresses a need on the part of would-be conquerors to find something to ward off a similar demise for their particular empire.

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction. Neo-Roman Mimesis and the Law of Ruin

Part 1: After Carthage: The Roman Empire and Its Ruins

Preface
Chapter 1. In the Rubble of Carthage: Polybios's Histories and the Time That Remains
Chapter 2. Building the Roman Stage: The Scenographic Architecture of the Augustan Era
Chapter 3. Virgil's Imperial Epic and Lucan's Pharsalia, or the Specter of Hannibal and the Ruins of Rome
Chapter 4. The Ruins of the Conquered: Josephus's Jewish War and Pausanias's Periegesis
Chapter 5. Rubble, Ruins, and the Time before the End: Paul, Tertullian, and the Roman Empire as Katechon

Part 2: Neo-Roman Mimesis: Charles V at Tunis, 1535

Preface
Chapter 6. “The Imagoes They Leave Behind”: Charles's Death Masks and the Desire of the Past

Part 3: Neo-Roman Mimesis in the Modern Age: Cook's Second Voyage to the South Pacific and the French Conquest of Egypt and Algeria

Preface
Chapter 7. Against Neo-Roman Mimesis: Johann Gottfried Herder at Carthage and François de Volney at Palmyra
Chapter 8. Edward Gibbon and the Secret of Empire, or Scipio Africanus and the Savages of the South Pacific
Chapter 9. Aeneas Fragment and the Enigma of the End: Georg Forster's Voyage to the South Pacific and William Hodges's Views of the Monuments of Easter Island
Chapter 10. Caught Up in “Eternal Repetitions”: Napoleon in Egypt and Rome
Chapter 11. Repetition of a Repetition: The Conquest of Algeria, and Louis Bertrand's North African Latinité
Chapter 12. Maori in Europe: Ruin Gazing and Scopic Mastery

Part 4: From Germany's Anti-Napoleonic Barbarians to the Ruin Gazer Scenarios of the Conservative Revolution

Preface
Chapter 13. Anti-Roman Barbarians: Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Heinrich von Kleist, C. D. Friedrich, and the Fight against Napoleon in the Ruins of Germania
Chapter 14. The Second German Reich: The Struggle for Rome, or Barbarians Becoming Romans
Chapter 15. Friedrich Nietzsche's Modernist Mimesis and Gradiva's Splendid Act of Imitation
Chapter 16. Empires, Ruins, and the Conservative Critique of Modernity: Friedrich Ratzel and Oswald Spengler

Part 5: With the End in Mind: The Nazi Empire's Neo-Roman Mimesis and the Ruined Stage of Rome

Preface
Chapter 17. Hitler in Rome 1: Visiting the Mostra Augustea della Romanità, 1938
Chapter 18. Roman Lessons: Theorizing Empire, Conquering the East
Chapter 19. Creating the Twilight Zone of the Third Reich's Neo-Roman Imaginary: German Classicists, Resurrectional Performances, and the Trope of the Neo-Roman Conqueror's Fortified Gaze
Chapter 20. Resurrections in a Modernist Mode: Greeks, Spartans, and Wild Savages, or, the Restoration of Civilization's Shattered Gaze
Chapter 21. Berlin/Germania: Seeing with Roman Eyes, Building a Roman Stage
Chapter 22. Hitler in Rome 2: The Führer as Ruin Gazer, 1938
Chapter 23. Return to Carthage, or Hitler's Aeneas/Dido Fragment

Part 6: Romans or Greeks? Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger

Preface
Chapter 24. Katechon: Carl Schmitt's Theology of Empire
Chapter 25. Empire and Time: Martin Heidegger's Anti-Roman Intervention
Epilogue: Anselm Kiefer's Zersetzungen/Disarticulations

Notes
Bibliography
Index

 

 

Source : University of Chicago Press

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