In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

278 CODES
gins draining of the Pontine Marshes as a means of enlarging the nation's
territory (Conquista della Terra, 51). Adolf Hitler emphasizes an interest
in both history and geography in the description of his high school years:
"My best efforts were in geography, and perhaps even more so in history.
These were my two favorite subjects, in which I was the best in the class"
(Hitler, 8). Instead of trying to play down the tension between his efforts
to assume leadership of the German nation and his birth in Braunau, on
the Austrian-German border, Hitler presents this relation as a providential
sign of his own historical vocation. Geopoliticians know only the
contrast between inside and outside, and therefore neutralize the ambivalences
typically found in border spaces and transitions: "Today I
consider it my good fortune that fate designated Braunau as the place of
my birth. For this small town is situated on the border between those
two German states whose reunification seems, at least to us of the
younger generation, a task to be furthered through every possible means
every day of our lives ... Common blood belongs in a common Reich"
(Hitler, 1). The ideal of "living inside" goes along with a moralization
of space. Whoever lacks space, according to Hitler, is condemned to
physical and mental disease: "Now let us imagine the following: In a
basement apartment consisting of two stuffy rooms lives a worker's
family of seven people ... In such circumstances, people live not with
one another but on top of one another ... The poor little boy, at the age
of six, senses things which would make even a grown-up shudder. Morally
infected, undernourished, his poor little head covered with lice, the
young 'citizen' wanders off to elementary school ... The three-year-old
has now become a youth of fifteen who despises all authority. Familiar
with only dirt and filth, the young fellow knows nothing that could rouse
his enthusiasm for higher things" (32-33). If claustrophobia and the
obsessive desire to occupy a spacious Center are among the key motifs
in Hitler's Mein Kampf, they constitute the exclusive topic of Hans
Grimm's 1,300-page novel Yolk ohne Raum (Nation without Space).
Grimm shares Hitler's belief that a lack of individual and collective space
is associated with disease. His protagonists hate "the unbearable German
confinement, within which the members of the community become
necessarily quarrelsome, servile, base, and malformed" (671). Yet
Grimm emphasizes that acquiring colonies would not solve the problem
of national space. The only conclusion that his hero Cornelius Friebott
can draw after many years in Southwest Africa is that he must return to