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Event date:1 March 2011 10.30 – 17.00
British Library
London Room MR4

The Humanities and Arts Research Centre (HARC) at
Royal Holloway University of London presents:

Civilizational Collapse: Dystopian Imaginings of the Past,
Present, and Future (1880 – Present)

The fear of Civilization collapse is a thread that runs through much of the literature, cinema, and other media of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Whereas the Utopian moment is paradigmatically in the future, the Dystopic moment is paradigmatically in the past. Dark ages, political catastrophes, and apocalyptic ends haunt the modern. For the Western tradition, a key narrative is the ‘Fall of the Roman Empire’, but this is far from being the only catastrophic trope within modern and late-modern cultures. Twentieth-century ends of the world have ranged from alien invasion and self-destruction through to the misuse of technology or spectacular technological failure, extenuated class conflict, or an apathetic decline into barbarity or moral degeneration, alongside religious conflagration, environmental and climatic change. The sheer inventiveness of the manifold ways in which the world may be brought to an end encourages us to understand the apocalyptic urge as a central element within contemporary societies.

This workshop aims to investigate how and why the apocalyptic urge manifests itself in modern societies. We propose a multi-disciplinary approach to challenge methodological conventions and allow a triangulation of the emerging narrative within diering critical traditions. To this end, we invite contributions from across the arts, humanities and social sciences that address those.

Why Civilizational Collapse?
Anyone who studies Roman history works in the shadow of civilizational collapse, be it the end of the Republic or the end of the Roman empire. The field of study centres on an absence, an ending of a world. But the ruins and ruination of Rome are not ‘distant’ from contemporary culture; they are continuously invoked and re-imagined. Further, although the ‘end’ dominates the historiography, there is little evidence that the prevalent decline (which in some accounts lasts seven centuries)  was felt in such ‘final’ terms by contemporaries. The cultural import of ‘the End’ needs explanation. I suggest three characteristics.
a.    Collapse is culturally pervasive: Jameson argues that the utopian urge can be seen in virtually all literary production, a view of what society could be and has not achieved. Conversely, one could argue that the dystopic is similarly present, a vision of the ‘bad’ that society could become.
b.    Collapse is temporal: The moment of civilizational collapse is a moment which is beyond time, when time must have a stop (Walter Benjamin) and thus outside the normal historical sequences. After the revolution, time may recommence, but the gap is pervasive because it is not within a temporal structure.
c.    Collapse is spatial: often located in the city, often seen from above, civilizational collapse is a feature of the mass society.
d.    Collapse is psychological: there is exhilaration in catastrophe, when disciplinary structures come to an end, and there is also opportunity. Particular forms of masculinity take to the road and heroism (once more) becomes possible.
This leads to three issues which we might address
i.    Is dystopia utopia’s evil twin?
ii.    What is the chronological relationship of dystopia (present, past, and future)?
iii.    Are dystopic visions inherently conservative?

EVENT SUPPORTED BY:
Royal Holloway Humanities and Arts Research Centre (HARC),
Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome (CRGR),
Institute of Classical Studies (SAS),
British Library.

Event date:1 March 2011 10.30 – 17.00
British Library
London Room MR4

The Humanities and Arts Research Centre (HARC) at
Royal Holloway University of London presents:

Civilizational Collapse: Dystopian Imaginings of the Past,
Present, and Future (1880 – Present)

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Richard Overy: Will Civilization Crash?

The period from 1918 to 1939 was marked by powerfully polarised visions of politics in society. By 1939, the war against fascism could be represented as a war in defence of civilization against a threat that might extinguish that civilization. The stakes of the war were enormous, far beyond the fate of the nation which appears to have animated German thinking about the war effort. The effects of such extremity were to make moral radical acts, such as the mass bombing campaigns, since they became justifiable if civilization was to be preserved. The crisis of civilization is reflected in numerous publications, lectures, and newspapers through the period. It was the major trope of sociological thought. Nevertheless, there are problems in this English obsession. Despite the 1929 crash, capitalism in Great Britain restored itself relatively quickly. The empire was not under any great threat. The origins of this are complex: they lie partly in the first world war, and the great losses that resulted. That war also showed the mechanisation of slaughter that was brought about by science. Scientific and political progressivism suffered in the experience of modern warfare, suggesting a civilization about to destroy itself. Images of ‘Barbarians at the Gate’ are common, and although civilization was in itself taken for granted, a fact which no-one needed to define, it was quite difficult to locate. The masses provided a threat to civilization. Similarly, environmental degradation threatened to break with the ‘natural’ conditions of man, worries expressed in eugenics, and furthermore there was the vision of future weapons capable of bringing vast destruction and ending the institutions of civilized and killing the civilized man alongside his more humble brethren.

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Before the Holocaust: Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany 1933-1939
Birkbeck College – School of History, Classics and Archaeology in cooperation with the German Historical Institute London

25 September 2009, German Historical Institute London

At this conference at the German Historical Institute participants of the major AHRC project ‘Before the Holocaust: Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany 1933-1939’ will present some results of their research and discuss them with some leading scholars. Papers will focus on the development of the concentration camp system, the changing function of the camps within the Nazi dictatorship, the experience of different inmate groups, Camp SS personnel and the relationship between the camps and the German population. This research hopes to shed new light on the intricate relationship between terror, state and society in the Third Reich. It also seeks to uncover the foundations of the wartime concentration camps – sites of slave labour and mass extermination.

Keynote lecture:

Professor Richard Overy (Exeter)
The German Pre-War Concentration Camps: Context and Explanation

Richard Overy was educated at Caius College, Cambridge. He taught at Cambridge from 1972 to 1979 at Queens’ College and from 1976-79 as a University Assistant Lecturer. From 1980 to 2004 he taught at King’s College, London where he was made professor of Modern History in 1994. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (1977), Fellow of the British Academy (2000) and Fellow of King’s College (2003). In 2001 he was awarded the Samuel Elliot Morison Prize of the Society for Military History for his contribution to the history of warfare. In September 2004 he took up appointment as Professor of History at the University of Exeter.

Richard Overy’s publications

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Introduction by Professor Andreas Gestrich and Dr Nik Wachsmann

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Professor Richard Overy

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