History had said no to the German state, but now the economy will allow it to assert itself. Continuous economic growth will take over from a malfunctioning history. It will thus be possible to live and accept the breach of history as a breach in memory, inasmuch as a new dimension of temporality will be establIshed 111 Germany that will no longer be a temporality of history, but one of economic growth. A reversal ofthe axis oftime, permission to forget, and economic growth are all, I think, at the very heart of the way in which the German economic-political system functions. Economic freedom is jointly produced through groWth, well-being, the state, and the forgetting of history.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, loc. 557