Fire Regime: Open Combustion, Virility, and the Myth of Prometheus in Nazi Berlin, 1933-1939

Sloane Nilsen – University of California, Berkley

It is no secret that fire was made a principal aesthetic of state-sponsored demonstrations in Nazi Berlin. It was displayed in such excess that the Jewish novelist Joseph Roth claimed that the regime had been built upon a pyromania, what he calls an illness that, before Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, had only received the attention of psychiatrists and criminologists. The irony, now, was that the mania had become mainstream through a mass politics. The sham paganism of torchlit parades, book burnings, solstice bonfires, the creation of a torch race to inaugurate the Olympics, these were the urban rites that constructed the fanaticism around a ritualized object. Fire had been transformed into a fetish, into the ‘locus of psychic investment’ of anthropologist William Pietz, attaining a sacred preeminence within the party mythology. An element had been weaponized to represent the dictatorship’s alleged regeneration of Germany and by which Germans were told to worship the dictatorship.

But such displays of power were all controlled burns. The focus on the aesthetic, I argue, has occluded the extent to which the regime was deeply apprehensive about the public starting their own fires – in other words, burns that were far likelier to become uncontrolled. The problem was that a mass adoration of fire encouraged its mass combustion in contexts unregulated by the state, a phenomenon that pushed the regime to launch extensive propaganda campaigns on fire safety, eventually expanding criminal law around arson and even militarizing firefighting prior to the Second World War. While questioning what happens when an extremism appropriates an element, what happens when a dictatorship attempts to alter perceptions of and engagements with a form of energy, my talk reveals the wider context behind Roth’s accusation of pyromania: that is, the development of the regime’s intense pyroparanoia during the 1930s.