| Summary: | This paper highlights how the National Socialist regime in Germany created the so-called «Selbstschutz» («self protection») in civil air defense as an «apparatus of society» (Michel Foucault) to educate the German population with regard to the new possibility of aerial bombing. Mechanisms, functions of emotional control and their relationship to concrete practices of the people involved are shown alongside a local example. Regarding the spread and development of fears, this article maintains that practices of «Selbstschutz» had to bridge the temporal gap between future expectations and actual experiences in crucial ways. Before the war, «Selbstschutz» followed its own logic of expectation of danger and risk, as exemplified in aerial-defense simulation exercises, which clashed with the reality of bombs falling on German cities later on.
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