Soldaten

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

EXPECTATIONS

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.

TEMPORALLY SPECIFIC CONTEXTS OF PERCEPTION

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.

ROLE MODELS AND RESPONSIBILITIES