Why apocalypse stories surge as narrative fades

end-times narratives – A new issue of Mittelweg 36 tracks the paradox of our era: end-times stories grow more popular at the same time many thinkers argue that narrative itself is in decline. From politics wrapped in emotional “placeholders” to zombie fiction that freezes storytelli

The end-times story has not gone away. If anything, it has multiplied—climate collapse, democratic erosion, technological acceleration, and war all folded into a shared sense that the future is irreversible. Yet the very thing apocalypse relies on, narrative, is supposedly losing its authority.

This contradiction sits at the center of Mittelweg 36’s examination of the paradox: “Why has the end-times narrative become popular precisely when narrative itself seems to be ending?” The editors connect what looks like a cultural shift to broader diagnoses of late modernity: shared historical horizons and collective projects have dissolved into fragmented streams of information. Contemporary culture. they write. shows a conservative preference for “the reproduction of familiar patterns. ” producing “an omnipresence of small. meaningless narratives. ” with no grand narrative capable of inspiring consensus.

In that atmosphere, apocalyptic thinking spreads—not primarily as religion, but as a cultural structure for organizing uncertainty. The Apocalypse becomes a way to frame chaos by pointing toward an imagined end point. End-times narratives. the issue argues. “sidestep certain problematic aspects of storytelling. ” including its teleological orientation. its false claim to realism. and its assumption of causality. The paradox is sharp: the stories that promise closure flourish even as other accounts of reality are said to have lost their grip.

The issue also insists that the “post-narrative” idea is not outside narrative at all. Even claims that society has entered a “post-narrative” age depend on a narrative of decline and exhaustion. The end of storytelling becomes one more story about the end—recursive. self-reproducing—so that narrative survives by narrating its own disappearance.

That recursion shows up in politics, where the word “narrative” is now everywhere—and, increasingly, nowhere in particular. A German thinktank recently claimed that narratives help to “reduce complexity. guide current and future-oriented strategies. encourage cooperation and increase predictability.” But when politicians in the Bundestag invoke narratives—whether “pro-Russian or anti-Semitic narratives” or “the narrative of a green transformation”—they rarely provide any information about their content. The term inflates until it functions less like a description of meaning and more like an emotional signal.

Literary scholar Niels Werber pushes that problem into focus. In a traditional concept of narrative, he argues, meaning emerges from the ordering of events. Contemporary “narratives” instead operate like placeholders for meaning intended to evoke an emotional response. Werber contrasts enduring narratives that provide “purpose. stability and direction” with the fleeting logic of platform capitalism. where “storytelling is story-selling.” Under the pressures of the attention economy. narrative becomes a vacuum filled with ephemeral snippets designed to stimulate consumption.

As that vacuum widens, politics turns less predictable. The issue describes a politics shaped by “an unpredictable, discontinuous, unforeseeable” character—chaos and volatility rather than stable explanation. Social movements. it says. flare up like swarms in response to “brief. powerful stimuli” and die away before they can have lasting impact. In an atomized, algorithmic society, current affairs resemble Brownian motion: they can be statistically modelled but not sociologically explained.

The monster story is doing similar work, only in fiction. If fictional monsters are “metaphors that express the underlying fears and anxieties of their culture. ” the issue asks what fear the twenty-first century’s favourite monster—the zombie—reveals. Literary scholar Elana Gomel suggests that zombies. as undead hordes without agency or speech. express fear of “the way language becomes decoupled from meaning in the age of the mass media and the internet.” Unlike vampires or aliens. zombies are fundamentally repetitive and “anti-narrative.” Zombie fiction depicts relentless waves of attacks: “a potentially endless chain of confrontations. with each new episode repeating the basic pattern rather than functioning as a step toward closure.”.

That structure alters the shape of apocalyptic storytelling itself. The issue traces a contrast with the Book of Revelation. where the sequence moves from catastrophe to rebirth through the revelation of hidden knowledge. Zombie fiction suspends that process indefinitely. Revelation and salvation are replaced with endless continuation. “Rather than yet another apocalyptic narrative, the zombie invasion is an apocalypse of narrative.”.

Gomel goes further: the zombie virus becomes a metaphor for language itself. It endlessly replicates, detached from intention, spreading like digital information. “Precisely because the zombie is a blank entity. it can serve as a stand-in for loss of referentiality in discourse.” In this view. zombie fiction reflects a culture dominated by digital media where narratives no longer reveal stable truths or provide meaningful closure. but endlessly circulate. reproduce. and consume themselves.

Still, the appetite for an ending isn’t random. The issue brings it back to how humans try to make meaning out of time. Robert Musil observed in A Man Without Qualities that “it would be an uncanny world if events simply slunk off” without some final confirmation that they had truly happened. Historian Achim Landwehr argues that this desire for neat endings shapes dominant historical narratives, which are structured by teleological assumptions. Because beginnings only become recognizable retrospectively, “the end is the beginning of historical narration.”.

From Hegel and Marx to Spengler and Fukuyama, modern historiography imagines history in reverse, as progress toward some final resolution. The discourse of the Anthropocene. the issue says. reproduces this logic too. presenting climate crisis as both an apocalyptic endpoint and the culmination of modernity’s faith in progress. But the same form of narrative—the “collective singular, unilinear, causal-logical and teleological” kind—helped produce the Anthropocene itself.

Then comes the friction that breaks linear storytelling. Ecological crisis unfolds across vast and overlapping temporal scales that resist linear narration. To rethink the problem. Landwehr turns to “porosity. ” developed by German intellectuals living in Naples during the hyperinflation crisis of the 1920s. In their writings, Naples appeared porous because boundaries between public and private, old and new, constantly dissolved into one another.

For Landwehr. porosity becomes a model for “a mode of thinking that is anti-systematic and open to interpretative connections.” Instead of treating epochs as sealed and linear. historians should recognize temporalities that overlap and persist within one another. He therefore advocates a more descriptive. “nebulous historiography. ” with a focus on surface-level complexity and open-endedness rather than coherence and closure.

Mittelweg 36 narrative decline apocalypse end-times zombie fiction Elana Gomel Niels Werber Bundestag politics platform capitalism Anthropocene teleology porosity Achim Landwehr