Economic growth replaced history as Germany’s organizing axis of time after 1945.

Evidence

History had said no to the German state, but now the economy will allow it to assert itself. Continuous economic growth will take over from a malfunctioning history. It will thus be possible to live and accept the breach of history as a breach in memory, inasmuch as a new dimension of temporality will be establIshed 111 Germany that will no longer be a temporality of history, but one of economic growth. A reversal ofthe axis oftime, permission to forget, and economic growth are all, I think, at the very heart of the way in which the German economic-political system functions. Economic freedom is jointly produced through groWth, well-being, the state, and the forgetting of history. — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 557

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that economic growth constitutes a ‘new temporality that replaces history’ and licenses the forgetting of the Nazi past is Foucault at his most provocative — a dense, paradigm-shifting thesis about how prosperity functions as historical amnesia.
• SEED: Angle: a genealogy of how growth-economies structurally suppress national memory — comparing postwar Germany’s ‘permission to forget’ with other states that replaced history with growth, e.g. the US South or Japanese postwar recovery.