Antimilitarism – Something like malaria

The Second World War is coming to an end. A small group of German civilians are on the run from the advancing Red Army. There is also a Wehrmacht soldier among those fleeing to the west. He says to the others: “We still have something; we win. The leader follows a very specific tactic; First he lures everyone in, and then the secret weapons come.” To which a Hitler Youth replies to him that he too hopes for the “effect of the new weapons”: “And in three years everything will be rebuilt – more beautifully. The plans are all ready and waiting in the Führer’s desk.”

They were still widespread right up to the last days of the war: the delusion, the fanatical belief in “final victory” and the obsession that the beloved leader would have the upper hand in the end and lead the Germans into a bright future.

The dialogue quoted above between the Wehrmacht soldier and the Hitler Youth can be found in Arno Schmidt’s 1946 story “Leviathan or The Best of All Worlds”, the first to be published by the then penniless young writer. It was published in book form in 1949. The first-person narrator in “Leviathan”, a character who is clearly modeled after Schmidt himself, finally comments on the two’s dialogue as follows: “And so on. And her eyes shone like the windows of burning madhouses.”

Arno Schmidt (1914–1979) was a soldier in the Wehrmacht and stationed in occupied Norway from 1942 to 1945, working in the office. After the end of the war he was briefly taken prisoner by the British. He then devoted himself to writing full-time.

The now published reading book “So there is war somewhere” brings together for the first time numerous narrative passages from Schmidt’s prose work that are about war. The writer, who hated everything military throughout his life, repeatedly made its side effects and consequences, including escape, expulsion and East-West conflict, the subject of his novels and stories in the 1950s and early 1960s. These include some dystopias in which the main characters are survivors of a nuclear war or World War III. Schmidt himself also wanted his dystopian stories to be understood “as a warning about the next war,” as it says in the anthology’s insightful foreword.

Schmidt’s experimental, avant-garde style of writing, with which he is more concerned with reflecting ways of thinking and conditions than with telling a traditional “plot”, may have prevented his works from being noticed by a larger audience at the time , but in addition to its idiosyncratic style, which is based on literary modernism, another difference is noticeable in comparison to other works from the post-war period that were supposedly critical of the war and have long been canonized in this country, such as Wolfgang Borchert’s Drama “Outside the Door”: Schmidt’s narrator and oddball heroes do not fall into self-pity, do not lament their own fate suffered in the war in a loud tone, do not stylize the events of war into a one-sided victim narrative, but remain unsentimental throughout, retaining the causes, political context, and guilt and responsibility always in view. For them, the war is not a natural disaster-like event that comes out of the blue, but rather the result of wrong thinking and actions. They question values ​​such as “love of homeland” or “loyalty to the fatherland” and rail against political and religious authorities as well as against old and new Nazis.

“Before you want to die for your fatherland, take a closer look at it!” warns the narrator in Schmidt’s short novel “From the Life of a Faun,” published in 1953, and at the same time announces: “I won’t touch my ass for a politician !!« In the same novel, the first-person narrator explains his antimilitaristic worldview: »SA, SS, military, HJ and so on: people are never more annoying than when they play soldiers. (It probably occurs to them periodically every 20 years, roughly like malaria, but recently even faster).”

The pacifist, pessimist and atheist Schmidt, who often generously includes anti-religious polemics in his novels (“blind followers always seem to wear black uniforms”), may never have seen himself as a leftist in the classic sense, even if he was initially leftist It was published in many pages and read mainly in scattered left-wing circles. In the 1950s, the writer, who was then living below subsistence level, campaigned against the Federal Republic of Germany’s ties to the West and against rearmament. He viewed both political projects as mistakes and implicit preparations for a possible coming war.

Schmidt never fell for the “zero hour” myth, which is still in effect today and was intended to conceal the fact that in Adenauer and Erhard’s Germany the functional elites from the National Socialist era were still in charge. Rather, he feared that not the slightest change had taken place in the mentality of the majority of the population.

In a letter to a friend, the painter and graphic artist Eberhard Schlotter, in 1959, he wrote: “‘Our people’ is now going around exactly the same curve again (and closed; they are, after all, ‘Germans’) as in 1933. This proves it to us in every election, that it not only does not share our views, but does not want to hear these views at all.” In fact, at the height of the so-called economic miracle, most Germans were in denial preoccupied with their National Socialist past, while their political leanings had apparently hardly changed since 1933. They were not happy about the “liberation” but rather insulted that Hitler had lost the war, and the military defeat and the resulting suffering were basically the only thing they had to blame him for. The only difference from before was that, in order to stop “Bolshevism,” they now voted for the CDU, FDP and SPD instead of the Nazis.

Schmidt, on the other hand, is different, who has no interest in repression, but rather explicitly addresses the smooth transition from German fascism to a democracy populated by former fascists in his work. And who uses every opportunity to draw attention to the recent past in his prose: “Don’t tell me that Hitler’s 98 percent electoral success was falsified: he didn’t need that! How they all took pleasure in armpits and finely devised ranks, in the booming marching step and quick obedience. (Leader orders: we follow!: Is there anything more disgusting than this request for an order?! Ugh, German: Nope!! -),” says a passage in the story “Brand’s Haide,” published in 1951.

If you consider what Schmidt was accused of by contemporary critics here, in addition to his antimilitarism: “There is talk of nihilism, desecration of language, a lack of intellectual discipline, pathological scribbling, sexual impropriety,” writes literary scholar Jürgen Doll about Schmidt’s reception Works in the 1950s and 1960s. And negative reviews also came from the GDR, where there was talk of “anti-people effort, anti-humanism, even incomprehensible babbling and stammering.”

No wonder, then, that the writer, who was commercially unsuccessful throughout his life, is often referred to as the “great outsider of German post-war literature” not only then but also today.

Arno Schmidt: “So there’s war somewhere.” A reading book. Edited by Susanne Fischer and Michaela Nowotnick. Suhrkamp, ​​264 p., hardcover, €18.