How It's Used

"Unusually, Chagall signed the work in Cyrillic—a brief commitment to Russian rather than western art. Chagall's nemesis was Malevich, who ousted him from Vitebsk and turned the city into the headquarters of suprematism, house style of the revolution until 1923. We watch it evolve here from Malevich's cubo-futurist depiction of the tubular, metallic-sheened 'Aviator' to the painterly end-game 'Black Square', which to Malevich represented zero hour—the uprooting of the old order—as well as referencing the absolutist, spiritual power of Russian icons. Kandinsky explained that his abstract compositions such as 'Black Spot' suggested an awakening soul as a point of light flickering icon-like in darkness. It is significant that two of abstraction's three creators were Russian: Kandinsky, Malevich and their contemporaries saw the movement in terms of Russian spiritual sensibility."

"One of the most successful raids of the First World War was against a series of German trenches northeast of Calonne on the night of Jan. 17, 1917. The enemy lines ran through the core of the coal mining district of Lens, and were strongly fortified. The 2nd Division's 4th Brigade orchestrated the miniature set-piece battle that would throw some 860 specially trained Canadian troops against the enemy lines. The bulk of the raiders came from the 20th and 21st Battalions, who were supported by engineers and machine-gun units. With several weeks to prepare for the operation, the attacking troops broke down into five units and went over practice grounds behind the lines. The leaders were hard trench warriors who had seen considerable combat on the Western Front. Methodical gunfire targeted barbed-wire obstacles. As the zero hour approached, sectional leaders and NCOs took to patrolling No Man's Land to familiarize themselves with the ground. The raiders were confident and ready."

"When my thoughts turn to wreckage, and there's a lot of it about these days, I tend to think of Germany's 'Stunde null,' or zero hour, the moment in 1945 when a once powerful nation faced its utter moral and material bankruptcy, the rubble of its collective suicide.

"No doubt that's because I lived in Berlin in the 1990s, at the time when the capital returned there from Bonn and a reunited Germany felt confident enough to face the ghosts of its darkest hours. Berlin was still raw, its past present at every turn, and so the miracle of Germany's post-war recovery was palpable."

"'The basic problem for the east Europeans is that the west and the Russians have a fundamentally similar view. The war ended in 1945. It was zero hour. And then things got better. The east Europeans can't see it that way,' said Timothy Snyder, a Yale University historian who is running a Vienna project seeking to reconcile opposing perspectives on European history. The utterly different experiences of the second world war and the cold war in eastern and western Europe and the fact that the western narrative of what happened has tended to prevail are the source of intense resentment."

“It's zero hour in the Massachusetts Senate special election race to replace the late Ted Kennedy. The action is all on the Democratic side but thanks to state Attorney General Martha Coakley's name identification and financial advantages this is a race that has been—as Jmart recently noted—defined by its distinct lack of excitement. Barring a major upset, Coakley will cruise to the Democratic nod today with Rep. Mike Capuano, who, even though he is almost certain to come up short, has acquitted himself well, expected to come in second.”

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