PhD students
Jan-David F. Linke M.Sc. (Edin.)
History
Mail: J.D.F.Linke@ed-alumni.net
General Information:
2014-2018: Bachelor's programme in History and Catholic Theology at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum
2018-2019: Master's programme in Contemporary History at the University of Edinburgh
Nov 2019: Awarded Master of Science (M.Sc.) with a dissertation on "Weltanschauung. The Nazi Propaganda during Hitler’s Rise to Power (1928-1932)" (graduated with distinction / 1,0)
Since April 2020: PhD student at the Institute for Diaspora Research and Genocide Studies, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Since December 2020: Gerda Henkel Stiftung-Scholar
Research Interests:
• Comparative Fascist studies
• Awareness and perception of time and history in the 19th and 20th centuries
• Totalitarian temporalities
• National Socialism as revolutionary revitalization movement
• National Socialist strategies of political mobilization and Nazi propaganda research
Thesis:
"Time in the 'Third Reich'. National Socialist Imaginations of the Past, Present and Future"
The dissertation focuses on the "Third Reich’s" temporality and historicity. It interprets National Socialism as a revolutionary revitalization movement, tracks temporal tropes, topoi and "textures" in the cultural practices and public utterances of the Hitler regime and explores National Socialist imaginations of the past, present and future with which the Nazis endowed their even most radical aspirations "temporal meaning" and "historical legitimacy". In contrast to the Jacobins in France, the Bolsheviks in Russia or even the Fascists in Italy, the Nazis disavowed the "Jewish" idea of history as a state-driven unstoppable forwards career of transformation and progress. Instead, the Nazis, being the nemesis of statehood and history, embedded their political vision in the millennial "eternity" of Volk and race, in which the dawning "German future" was merely the fulfilling prophecy of the distant "German past".
