Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (9 page)

In this conversation, one of the parties clearly feels the need to communicate something about himself, while the other tries to analyze whom he’s talking to and what the conversation is really about. We don’t know how often Meyer spoke with Pohl or whether he knew him well. But he seems somewhat revolted at his cell mate’s statement that he’d have liked to have directly shot and killed another human being. He comments:

At this point in the protocol, there is an interruption, and then
Pohl expounds on the advantages of
machine-gun-equipped warplanes. Because the planes are highly mobile, one can hunt down victims instead of waiting for them to come into range:

Meyer’s questions and comments tend to be technical in nature, although he does react with emotional dismay on two occasions: when Pohl tells of killing horses and when he confesses his desire to kill someone “with his own hands.” If Pohl’s own account is believed, he didn’t need an adjustment period to get used to violence. He was apparently able to call up violent impulses almost immediately, with little prelude. Strikingly, Pohl does not describe having gotten accustomed to violence. Instead, he repeatedly expresses regret for having perpetrated too
little
violence and a desire for
more
victims.

This conversation was recorded in the summer of 1940; the events that are its subject happened in September 1939, directly after the
start of World War II. Even if we were to assume that Pohl had had months of combat experience before his exchange with Meyer, and that the experience may have brutalized his stories about his first days of war ex post facto, he was still taken out of the war long before the
drastic escalation of violence that came with
Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. It is beyond doubt that German soldiers committed crimes
against humanity in their campaign against Poland, including the murder of civilians and the execution of
Jews.
⁸⁶
But Pohl was in the air force. He hunts down and kills people from the skies, and he does not give the impression of being
ideologically motivated when he describes bombarding cities and
gunning down people. His victims have no personal attributes by which he selects them. He doesn’t care which targets he hits, only
that
he hits targets. He enjoys killing and needs no other motivation. His behavior is not aimed at advancing a larger cause or purpose, but merely at achieving the best results possible. The senseless killing resembles a hunt, a sporting activity in which the only purpose is to be better than others, in this case, by hitting more people with bullets. That’s what most angers Pohl about getting shot down. It spoiled the end result of the hunt.

In the earliest phase of World War II, without having been
brutalized himself by previous events, Pohl perpetrated a kind of violence that could hardly have been more brutal. Pohl’s individual motivations notwithstanding, such senseless hunting down and killing of people is a perfect example of what German sociologist
Jan Philipp Reemtsma called “
autotelic
violence”—violence committed for its own sake without any larger purpose.
⁸⁷
Reemtsma distinguished this type of physical violence from attempts to eradicate people because they represent an obstacle to a source of personal gain. Those are practical, instrumental motivations which, moral scruples notwithstanding, are easily comprehensible. Autotelic violence, on the other hand, challenges our powers of comprehension since it radically contradicts the civilized self-image maintained by
modern societies and their members. It undermines our
faith in the stability of our institutions and rules and, above all, in the state’s monopoly on the legitimate exercise of force. “Faith in the modern age,” writes Reemtsma, “is unthinkable without the
state monopoly on force.” The truth of this statement becomes self-evident when we imagine the carnage that would ensue if the protections offered by modern rule of law were suspended even for a single day.

Such faith is the basis for what modern individuals like to believe is their own distance from violence. Violence is considered the exception to the rule, and when it does occur, we seek explanations, even in cases where no instrumental motivations are apparent. By contrast, those who do not assume they will be physically protected constantly reckon with the possibility of
violence and are not shocked when it occurs. Faith and violence exist in a precarious equilibrium. In our world, “senseless,” “unmotivated,” or “raw” violence has to be immediately characterized as “insanity,” “rupture,” and “barbarism”—i.e., the antithesis of modernity. For this reason, sociological and
historical research on violence is accompanied by subjective moralism and often encounters serious difficulties.
⁸⁸

From a broader historical perspective, the modern age is the first time in which violence has been considered the antithesis of civilization, something to be suppressed and battled against. Violence, in and of itself, must be contained. Instrumental violence cannot, of course, be entirely prevented, but we can justify or at least explain it. We consider the use of violence to solve problems normal, whereas using violence for its own sake is pathological. Violence is a sign of someone straying from the path of modernity, indeed heading in the opposite direction. Nonetheless, as our most recent
wars illustrate,
⁸⁹
violence is in no danger of extinction. Paradoxically, we can only maintain our faith in modernity if violence is not considered part of the normal daily functioning of modern society. For that reason, we see ourselves as nonviolent, and ostentatiously demonstrate our shock when an act of violence is committed and immediately begin searching for explanations.

The sort of
autotelic violence committed by Lieutenant Pohl, however, needs no motivation. It is a reason unto itself. Within a universe of purpose-driven rationality and the universal imperative to justify social behavior, autotelic violence is an erratic exception, unlike everything else in the social realm. But this view may be irrational. Do we feel the need, for instance, to account for the human sex drive? Do we try to explain why human beings eat, drink, and breathe? In all these core areas of human existence, questions may arise as to how people try to satisfy their needs. But we never question the fact that human beings want to eat, drink, breathe, and have sex. Inquiries in those areas focus on mode, not motivation, and perhaps it would be better to do the same when confronting violence. Violence, as German sociologist
Heinrich Popitz proposed, is always an option in social behavior, and in phylogenetic terms, this could hardly be otherwise.
Ultimately, the human race did not survive thanks to its peaceful demeanor, but because of the violence it committed when hunting or fending off competition for food.

The state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force in Western societies may arguably be the single greatest
civilizing innovation in human history, creating previously unknown levels of personal
security and
freedom. But that doesn’t mean that violence has ceased to be a
social option. In being transferred to the state, violence changed form, but did not disappear. On the contrary, violence can be converted back to its direct form at any time. Moreover, the state monopolization on force may regulate the central realm of society, namely, all matters of public concern, but by no means does it cause violence to disappear from other segments of society.

In the
domestic realm, people continue to use violence against their partners, children, and pets, and violence occurs frequently in relatively isolated social realms like churches and boarding schools. Fistfights and attacks are still common in public spaces like sports arenas, nightclubs, bars, and subways as well as on the street. In addition, there are regular forms of organized public violence beyond the state monopoly, for instance, at boxing or martial arts contests or performances in S&M clubs. One need only to take a drive on an ordinary highway to experience the chronic potential for violence and even homicide among perfectly normal people. It is impossible to imagine television, cinema, or computer games without violence. Indeed, as everyday reality increasingly distances itself from violence, our need for symbolic or compensatory acts of violence may even be growing. And internationally, humankind is far removed indeed from any sort of monopoly on force. States still wage
war, no matter how problematic that might be for relatively pacifist societies like contemporary
Germany.

In other words, violence has by no means disappeared from societies that consider themselves fundamentally nonviolent. It exists at all times as both a fact and a possibility, and as such plays a major role in human imaginations. That, too, is a kind of presence, even in situations where violence would seem to be absent. If we rewind history seven decades, back to the point when Pohl and
Meyer’s conversation took place, and consider how much closer to violence people were back then, we will realize that exercising and suffering from violence was something many people experienced on a daily basis.
Corporal
punishment and severity were the norm in the
Wilhelmine
educational
system of the nineteenth century. Indeed, they were considered not only permissible, but essential to a child’s proper upbringing.
⁹⁰
The educational reforms of the early twentieth century were nothing more than a reflexive response to this phenomenon. Violence continued to feature in German educational institutions of all levels as well as in agricultural labor and trade apprenticeships.

On all levels of society, violence was much more present than it is today.
Political violence was common in the
Weimar Republic, which
saw no shortage of brawls at political meetings, street fights between left- and right-wingers, and political assassinations. Moreover, everyday social interactions—between
police and detainees, husbands and wives, teachers and pupils, and parents and children—were permeated with physical violence. After taking power, the Nazis further undermined the state monopoly on legitimate force. Para-state organizations like the
SA arose alongside the actual state and operated as a kind of auxiliary police force. They exercised massive violence until the summer of 1934 without ever being called to account by the government. We have already discussed the socializing function of
violence and its capacity for differentiating groups within a society, and there is no doubt that the violence perpetrated against Jews and other persecuted groups helped raise the level of violence in Nazi society and in the everyday consciousness of its members.

A pilot and low-level officer named
Hagen, for example, described the situation as follows:

In 1940, violence was far more normal, expected, legitimate, and commonplace than it is today. Moreover, if we consider that significant
numbers of people were part of an organization whose very purpose was
violent, it is perhaps clearer why many, although not all, German soldiers did not need to get accustomed to violence. Violence was part of their frame of reference, and killing part of their duties. Why should they have seen it as something alien to their self-perception, essence, and intellect? That rhetorical question applies all the more in a case like the
Luftwaffe, where violence was carried out with fascinating high-tech tools like fighter planes and strafe bombers and experienced as a highly
attractive mixture of ability, technological superiority, and thrill.