Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (3 page)

Frames of reference of the
second
order
are more concrete in a historical, cultural, and often geographical sense. They comprise a sociohistorical space that, in most respects, can be clearly delimited—for instance, the length of a dictatorial regime or the duration of a historical entity like the Third Reich.

Frames of reference of the
third order
are even more specific. They consist of a concrete constellation of sociohistorical events within which people act. They include, for example, a
war in which soldiers fight.

Frames of reference of the
fourth order
are the special characteristics, modes of perception, interpretative paradigms, and perceived responsibilities that an individual brings to a specific situation. This is the level of
psychology, personal dispositions, and individual
decision making.

This book analyzes second- and
third-order frames of reference since that is primarily what our source material allows us to best approach.

On October 30, 1938,
CBS
Radio in the United States interrupted its regular programming with a special announcement that there had been a gas explosion on the planet
Mars and a cloud of hydrogen was speeding toward the earth. Then, during a radio reporter’s interview with an astronomy professor, aimed at clarifying the potential dangers, another announcement was made about a seismic catastrophe of earthquake strength, presumably the result of a meteor hitting our planet. A barrage of news flashes followed. Curiosity seekers at the site of impact reported being attacked by aliens who emerged from the crater. Further objects were said to be striking the earth’s surface, and hordes of little green men from Mars were pressing on with their attacks. The military had been deployed, with little success. The aliens were marching on New York. Warplanes took to the air. People began fleeing the danger zone. Panic was breaking out.

At this point a change in frame of reference occurred. Up until the episode about the warplanes, the news reports were simply following the script of a radio play
Orson Welles had adapted from
H. G. Wells’s novel
The War of
the Worlds
. But the people fleeing in panic were real. Among the six million Americans who had tuned in to Wells’s radio broadcast, two million of them believed every word they heard. Many of them hastily packed their things and ran out into the streets to escape the alleged alien gas attacks. Telephone lines were jammed for hours, and it took hours more until news got around that the whole thing was fictional.
⁵
This legendary event, which established Orson Welles’s fame, vividly illustrated the truth of sociologist
William I. Thomas’s 1917 theorem: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” No matter how objectively wrong or irrational people’s estimation of
reality may be, the conclusions they draw create new realities.

That was the case with the listeners who had not heard the announcement that
The War of the Worlds
was a radio play and who thought the alien invasion was really happening. Nineteen thirties communications
technology, of course, did not allow people to quickly check the truth of what they had heard, and those who fled their apartment buildings saw crowds of other people also taking to the streets. What reason did they have to suspect they had been taken in by a hoax? Human beings always seek to confirm their
perception and
interpretation of reality by observing what other people do, all the more so in unexpected and threatening situations that make people lose their orientation and ask: what is going on here and what should I do?

The War of the Worlds
is a spectacular example, but it only illustrates how people behave when they are trying to orient themselves. Modern societies in particular, with their rich variety of functions, roles, and complex situations, demand that their members constantly interpret reality. What is happening here? How can I fulfill expectations of me? Most of these questions remain unconscious because the lion’s share of the orientation work happens automatically, steered by
routines, habits, prescripted responses, and
rules. But in cases where things don’t function as they should, when accidents, misperceptions, and mistakes occur, we become explicitly conscious of the need for what we are always implicitly doing: interpreting what is going on in front of our senses.

Naturally, this interpretative work does not happen in a vacuum or
start from the very beginning. Interpretation itself is bound to frames, perspectives comprised of many elements that structure and organize experiences as we are in the process of making them. Following the analysis of
Gregory Bateson
⁶
and
Alfred Schütz,
⁷
Erving Goffman described a plethora of such frames and their attendant characteristics. In so doing, he elucidated not only how frames comprehensively organize our everyday perceptions and orientation, but how they yield highly divergent interpretations, depending on contextual knowledge and standpoint of observation. Take the example of
fraud. For the swindler, for example, the framework of activity is a “deceptive maneuver,” while for his victim it is that which is being deceptively advanced as true.
⁸
Or, as Polish journalist
Kazimierz Sakowicz noted in his diary in the context of World War II and the
Holocaust: “For Germans, 300
Jews mean 300 enemies of humanity; for
Lithuanians, they mean 300 pairs of shoes and trousers.”
⁹

Stanley Milgram once said that he was curious about why people would rather burn to
death in a house fire than run outside without trousers. Seen objectively, this is an example of irrational behavior. But subjectively, it shows that standards of
decency can become barriers to necessary strategies of
survival, and that these barriers can be hard to overcome. In World War II, some
Japanese soldiers preferred to take their own lives rather than become prisoners of war. In
Saipan, hundreds of civilians jumped to their deaths over cliffs in order to avoid falling into American hands.
¹⁰
Even in life-or-death situations, cultural ties and duties often outweigh the instinct for survival. This is why people die in the attempt to rescue a dog from drowning, or decide to become
suicide bombers.

Where survival is at stake, cultural baggage weighs heavy and occasionally proves fatal. Or put the matter differently: in all these examples, the main problem is perceived not as a threat to individual survival, but as a danger to established, symbolic, inviolable
rules of behavior and
status. A danger of this sort can appear so grave to those concerned that no way out is visible. In this sense, people can become victims of their own techniques for survival.

History itself is not perceived. History happens. Only in retrospect do historians determine which events from a massive inventory of possibilities were “historical,” i.e., significant for the eventual way things turned out. Everyday
consciousness rarely registers gradual
changes of social and physical environment because
perception constantly readjusts itself in line with changes in its various environments. Psychologists call this phenomenon “
shifting
baselines,” and examples such as the recent changes in our communicative habits or the radical
alteration of normative standards under Nazism show how powerful they can be. In both examples, people were under the impression that everything had basically stayed the same, even though fundamental change had occurred.

Only in retrospect does a slow process, at least one perceived as slow, such as the
breakdown of civilization, congeal into an abrupt event. That happens when people realize that a development has had radical consequences. The
interpretation of what people perceived within a process that later turned into a catastrophe is a very tricky enterprise—not least because we pose our questions of what people knew with our own hindsight as to how things turned out. Historical actors, of course, possessed no such knowledge. We view history from the end to the beginning and are forced to suspend our own historical knowledge in order to say what people knew at any specific historical juncture. For that reason,
Norbert Elias has proposed that reconstructing what people did not or could not have known is one of the most difficult tasks of social science.
¹¹
Or to use the terminology of historian
Jürgen Kocka, we could describe this task as the “
liquification” of history, the conversion of facts back into possibilities.
¹²

On August 2, 1914,
Franz Kafka in Prague wrote in his diary: “Germany declared
war on Russia—afternoon: swimming lessons.” This is just one particularly prominent example of events that later observers learn to see as historic not being perceived as such in the real time in which they come together. Indeed, if such events are even registered,
it is as a part of everyday life, in which a variety of things are perceived and compete for people’s attention. Even an exceptionally intelligent individual like Kafka can find the outbreak of a
war no more noteworthy than a swimming lesson later in the day.

From a historical perspective, one can say that the
groundwork for a war of annihilation had been laid long before the
German army attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. At the same time, it is doubtful that the soldiers who received their orders that morning truly realized what sort of a war they faced. They expected to make lightning-quick advances, as had been the case in
Poland,
France, and the
Balkans, and not to wage a murderous frontline campaign with previously unprecedented ferocity. Moreover, there was even less reason for them to anticipate that in the course of the war groups of people that had no immediate connection with the hostilities would be systematically eliminated. The
frame of reference “war,” as it had been previously known, did not presume anything like that.

For the same reason, many Jewish Germans did not recognize the dimensions of the process of exclusion of which they would become the victims. Instead many viewed Nazi rule as a
short-term phenomenon that “one will have to get through, or a setback that one could accept, or at the worst a threat that restricted one personally, but that was still more bearable than the arbitrary perils of exile.”
¹³
The bitter irony in the case of Jews was that while past discrimination meant their reference frame did indeed encompass
anti-Semitism, persecution, and larceny, it also rendered them unable to see that what was happening in the Third Reich was of a different, absolutely deadly order.

On June 2, 2010, in the German town of
Göttingen, three
bomb
squad specialists lost their lives in an attempt to defuse an unexploded bomb from World War II. German media reported extensively on the accident, and it caused a considerable outpouring of sympathy. Yet if the bomb had killed three people in 1944 or 1945, when it was actually dropped, it would have attracted little attention beyond the immediate families of the men killed. During wartime, such deaths were nothing unusual. In January and February 1945, some one hundred residents of Göttingen were killed in bombing raids.
¹⁴

Historically speaking,
violence has been enacted and experienced in very different ways. The extraordinary
abstinence from violence in modern society, the fact that the public and to a lesser degree the private spheres are relatively free from force, is the result of the civilizing influence of separation of
state powers and the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force. These achievements have allowed for the enormous sense of
security that is an integral part of modern societies. In premodern periods, people were far more likely to become the victims of direct physical violence than now.
¹⁵
Violence was also far more present in the public sphere, for example, in the form of public punishments and executions.
¹⁶
It is therefore reasonable to assume that the frames of reference and the experiences of committing and suffering violence varied throughout history.

As discussed earlier,
roles make up an extensive social arena, especially in modern, functionally differentiated societies, and each type of role brings with it a certain set of responsibilities for those who choose or are forced to play it. Roles represent an intermediate level between cultural ties and responsibilities, and group-specific and individual interpretation and action. Within many roles, we may not even be aware that we are acting according to their standards, although it is obvious that we in fact are. They include all the roles
sociologists use to differentiate between societies: roles of gender, age, social origin, and education. The sets of responsibilities and norms they entail are consciously perceived and questioned only in exceptional cases. Nonetheless, such self-evident, everyday roles influence our perception, interpretation, and behavioral options, while they themselves, as is especially the case with gender and age, are subject to normative rules. People expect a different sort of behavior from an elderly lady than from a young male, even though there is no specific catalogue of dos and don’ts, to say nothing of laws. As members of society, all of us “know” such rules implicitly.

The situation is different with explicitly adopted roles, for instance, those we take on in the course of our careers. They bring along new sets of responsibilities to be learned. If a person who has been studying mathematics gets a job at an insurance company, his set of responsibilities
changes dramatically, affecting norms of attire, working day, communication, and what that person considers important and insignificant. Other fundamental transitions happen when people become mothers or fathers, or when a pensioner retires from the working world. Furthermore we can observe radical role changes when people enter “
total
institutions”
¹⁷
such as a cloister, a prison, or—as is particularly significant for the present context—the military. Such institutions—say, for instance, the Wehrmacht or the SS—claim total dispensation over the individual. Individuals are given uniforms and special haircuts and thereby lose control over the enactment of their own identities. They no longer do with their time as they see fit but are constantly subjected to external compulsion, drills, harassment, and draconian punishment for violating rules. Total institutions function as hermetically sealed worlds of a special sort, directed toward producing a finished result. Soldiers do not just learn how to use weapons and negotiate various types of terrain. They are taught to obey, to subjugate themselves to hierarchy, and to act on command at a moment’s notice. Total institutions establish a specific form of socialization, in which
group norms and responsibilities have far more influence on individuals than under normal social conditions. The group to which one belongs may not be freely selected, but it is the only group to which one can relate. One is part of the group because one was assigned to it.
¹⁸