Soldaten

When frames of reference are ignored, academic analyses of past actions automatically become normative, since present-day standards are enlisted to allow us to understand what was going on. As a result, past wars and violence often appear bafflingly “horrible,” even though horror is a moral and not an analytical concept. Moreover, the behavior of people who exercise violence appears abnormal and psychopathic, despite the fact that when we reconstruct the world from their perspective their rationale for using violence is entirely logical and understandable. Analyzing frames of reference allows us to view the violence of World War II in nonmoral, nonnormative fashion. The aim is to understand the preconditions for psychologically normal people to do things they would not otherwise do.

We have to distinguish between different orders of frames of reference:

Frames of the first order are the broad sociohistorical backdrop against which people of a given time operate. They are what sociologist Alfred Schütz called “the assumptive world,” the things we pre-presume must be the case. They include categories of good and evil and true and false, what is edible and what is not, how much distance we should maintain when speaking to one another, and what is polite or rude. This “world as we feel it to be” has its effects on us less as beings capable of self-reflection than as creatures influenced by the unconscious and our emotions.⁴

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.

FUNDAMENTAL ORIENTATIONS: WHAT IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING HERE?

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.