Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the legacy of the Nazi regime's exploitation of the night sky in the 1949 novel 'Project Mars,' written by Wernher von Braun. It questions the ways in which the idea of the 'post-planetary' can attract imaginaries of annihilation.

Paper long abstract:

The secret state police in Nazi Berlin [the Gestapo] exploited the urban night to launch home invasions because operating under darkness minimized the likelihood of encountering resistance. Assembling lists of ‘political enemies,’ including but not limited to German Jews, communists, and homosexuals, they sought to apprehend victims in the midst of slumber, caught unaware and unable to evade detention and deportation. Darkness formed the foundation for the practice of systematically collecting innocents and served as a means to keep the extent of state surveillance and terror hidden from the wider public through reduced visibility.

At the same time that the regime was intertwining its arrest culture with a planetary cycle, it was funding research at astronomical observatories in Berlin to surveil, collect, and catalogue celestial phenomena as part of its program of space exploration, which included the development of new weapons technologies. While the regime exploited the night sky to consolidate power on Earth, so too did it “look up” with the megalomanic ambition of transforming the solar system into a future sphere of influence. This paper assess Nazi ambitions to occupy, regulate, and expand authority into darkness through a rather unlikely source: a failed science fiction novel written by SS rocket scientist Wernher von Braun four years after the collapse of the Third Reich. It demonstrates that the imagined idea of ‘total power’ was by no means limited to the terrestrial and could even outlive the dictatorship itself.