Seite - 66 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 05/02

by replacing elected authorities with experts and successful entrepreneurs “capable of promoting the national interest”.80 This strategy is precisely that adopted by Nordenholt. The key quality of those he enlists into his elite “was efficiency”, resulting in an aristocracy formed from the “super-excellence of the human material in which he [Nordenholt] had dealt”.81 Unconcerned with egalitarianism, the novel offers a clear distinction be- tween an emergent aristocracy and the general population. The leaders and masses do not mix.82 As in Nietzsche’s works, both the “herd” and the “higher” types are necessary elements of society, but their separation – a “pathos of distance” – is essential. If the “higher” is sufficiently distanced from the “herd”, they may bring about the enhancement of life.83 This Nietzschean aristocratic division is akin to the separation at the conclusion of Nordenholt’s Million. Nord- enholt’s aristocracy resides in the new city of Asgard, named after the realm of the Norse gods, where the elite design the cities of the future. These cities are built with the skill and sweat of the labouring class, whose attention and ener- gy are syphoned into their construction.84 They are utopian places, combining practicality with beauty. Flint refers to the “faint and perfumed breezes bring- ing their subtropical warmth as they blow across the valley; and [he says] I hear, faint and afar, the sounds of music mingling with the rustling of trees”.85 The suggestion of warmth, beauty and sweet-smelling air in these final descriptions creates from an eschatological perspective a perversion of the idea of a New Jerusalem. More secularly, it is a utopian vision that forms a further justification for the novel’s advocacy of totalitarianism. The new cities of Nordenholt’s Million constitute a wish-fulfilment fantasy of urban efficiency and hygiene for the survivors involved in Nordenholt’s remak- ing of Britain. The city of the inter-war years, as Thomas Linehan reveals, was a place of “squalor, deprivation and disease, poisoned environments which brutalised the inhabitants, destroyed their health and invariably imperilled the survival of the race”.86 This was hardly the country fit “for heroes to live in” promoted by Lloyd George in 1918, and by 1923, and the publication of Norden- holt’s Million, there was no sign that his vision was going to be achieved.87 Ac- cordingly, informed by post-war zeitgeist, Nordenholt’s Million advocates pro- 80 Pugh 2006, 15. 81 Connington 1923, 236–237. 82 Connington 1923, 112. 83 Schacht 2002, 338. 84 Connington 1923, 283. 85 Connington 1923, 286. 86 Linehan 2000, 248. 87 Pugh 2009, 60. 66 | Jennifer Woodward www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 51–68