Accelerating Change and Trigger Events

Abstract

In the first few months of the Second World War, the German essayist Sebastian Haffner noted in the manuscript of his memoirs that before the fateful year 1933, when Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor, men were able to remain more or less coherent in themselves. Some events could well remain beyond them, taking on gigantic proportions but leaving private life relatively unscathed, sheltered in a way by institutionalized cheating (Haffner [2000] 2002: 6–7). But a foreboding of the totalitarian folly to come urged the man who was just beginning his career as a journalist during his exile in London to believe that, strictly speaking, an event is decisive when it affects the private sphere to the point of upsetting it entirely and creating a series of insoluble moral dilemmas. Classical historiography has long neglected the variations of individual intensity caused by this type of earthquake, which immediately makes us expect the worst. It has preferred to focus on the modifications of equal speed and regularity normally experienced by most political regimes. Undoubtedly, the initially hardly perceptible, then explosive, rise of National Socialism constitutes an extreme experience of a historic change of pace. Contrary to constantly evolving dynamics which favour a mental scenario of easy adaptation in the long term, most of history’s accelerations, when they occur, instead have the effect of electrifying a society’s nervous system to varying degrees, shaking the structure of personal identities.