Beyond the Zero Hour

During the immediate postwar period no single phrase monopolized designations of the current era. Many phrases competed with each other, each suggesting a slightly different point of view. Jünger's “Nullpunkt” implied a spatial perspective. Words like “crisis” and “catastrophe” suggested a state of affairs, while noun forms derived from verbs, like “end,” “decline,” and “collapse,” implied a process taking place over time, and hence focused attention on an earlier, no longer sustainable state of affairs. Holthusen's “tabula rasa” suggested a volumetric perspective, emphasizing not what had been eliminated but rather the infinite possibility of the new, an emptiness yet to be filled.

Roberto Rosselini's Germania anno zero popularized the chronological or calendrical perspective, at the same time reemphasizing the emptiness already present in the concepts of a “Nullpunkt” or a “tabula rasa.” But the concept of a “year zero” did not, in the end, fare any better than most of the other terms used in the immediate postwar period. It too gradually disappeared, to be replaced by the seemingly greater immediacy and drama of the concept “Stunde Null.” The calendar was replaced by the clock, the framework of the year by the framework of the day.

Originally a battlefield expression referring to the hour when a major military action is set to begin, the phrase “zero hour” was used during the 1930s and 1940s by anti-Nazi German exiles in order to rally the Western world to vigilance against Nazi Germany.