Pacifism – war the war

Soldiers are murderers. » This famous quote from the writer Kurt Tucholsky (1890–1935) has more spread to Ukraine at the latest since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression. After Tucholsky is increasingly brought up by peace movements, it is worth taking a closer look at his pacifism and also the contradictions that hide behind the slogan. At first glance, it seems clear that Tucholsky meant the sentence exactly as it is reproduced. Its meaning results from the context of the famous “World Bühne” article ”the guarded theater of war” from 1931, which Tucholsky devoted to the field gods; In addition, the writer repeated this statement on various occasions.

A slight contextual difference between the importance of “soldiers are murderers” in our presence and in the Weimar Republic could be in the following fact: The fact of Murder was defined differently than today. Roughly speaking, there was no linguistic differentiation between murder and homicide and accordingly Tucholsky’s dictum comprised far more than in today’s criminal code. But this objection is rather pointed, legally, the pronouncement of the concrete acting person who is accused of murder is missing. This is how Tucholsky’s editor saw the “Weltbühne”, Carl von Ossietzky, who was made the process because of this quote: it was not the defamation of a stand, but the defamation of the war. The Berlin lay judge followed this view and freely said Ossietzky in 1932.

Later attempts to make the sentence punished also failed. CSU politician Franz Josef Strauß in particular pursued Pacific in his time as Minister of Defense with a grim furor; Of all things, that Franz Josef Strauß, who, as a Wehrmacht soldier in the Soviet Union, as he writes in his memoirs, was witness to several massacres of his comrades. But neither Strauß ‘nor all other charges were able to state until 1995 finally decided that the sentence did not meet the sentence.

Fighting love of peace

After the legal instrumentalizations were impossible, the more basic question arose how Tucholsky’s pacifism was actually defined – precisely because the sentence in Pacific contexts appears again and again and Tucholsky still one of the most effective pacifists in Germany. One thing is clear: his pacifism feeds himself from the experience from the First World War, which at least had a character on the western front that current wars no longer have. In other words, the reasonably clear separation between the front and hinterland, which always plays a role at Tucholsky, does not exist (anymore).

Tucholsky writes: “There were entire square miles for four years, on which the murder was mandatory, while it was just as strictly forbidden for half an hour away.” But today the limits of war through drone and air strikes, the use of hidden troops and systematically used terror have blurred against the civilian population; In many modern wars there is actually no front at all, only “conflict areas”. The abolition of this separation is also not an exclusive feature of modernity, as the political scientist Herfried Münkler has shown: the 30-year war (1618–1648), for example, did not know this separation. At the end, this war was not designed for decisive battles, but on the printout and devastation of entire regions.

Apparently paradoxically, Tucholsky is about carrying the external war inside, i.e. to society. Because Tucholsky’s pacifism is no more peaceful. He only considers the love of peace to be effective if it is combative: «The right to fight, the right to sabotage against the most infamous murder: the forced – that is beyond doubt. And, unfortunately, outside of the Pacifist propaganda necessary. You can’t get against the wolf with lamb patience and blocks. » Elsewhere, Tucholsky brought this attitude to the handy formula “War of War”. And he left no doubt that in this war he wanted to wage against the war of the states, every means is right, if it works: “But we have radical pacifists (…) the natural law, imperialist powers then play out against each other when peace of Europe, if our conscience demands this, and I speak here with the full consciousness of what I say, that there is no secret of the German defense power here Not if it seems necessary to preserve peace, delivered a stranger. »

What Tucholsky means by war is the gun gear for the nation states is the confrontation of the imperialist powers. The hybridity of current warfare, which not only tolerates terror against civil society, but also incorporates strategically, might not have been beyond Tucholsky’s imagination, but it lies across his reasoning. Because it is not only the peace at all costs that Tucholsky defends his own private war against war, but it is also an idea of a community beyond the nation state: «We consider the war of the nation states to be a crime, and we fight it where we can, when we can. We are traitors. But we reveal a state that we deny in favor of a country that we love, for peace and for our real fatherland: Europe. »

As Kurt Tucholsky would think about current wars, but ultimately has to remain speculation and is correspondingly idle. The fact that and how his intellectual successors have been done with the war, especially in Ukraine, now has Pascal Beucker in his book “Pacifism – a wrong way?” processed. The raid of Russia to Ukraine has just shaked the part of the peace movement that Russia considered a power of peace (and in some parts even still holds today). And this attribution alone is a departure from Pacific Tucholskyscher character that distrusts every state. The fatherland that Tucholsky is ready at any time is not only meant your own, but every fatherland.

Tucholsky often seemed somewhat perplexed when it came to which means to take up to preserve peace; Precisely because he wants peace at all costs, he sometimes doesn’t know the way there. He always considers a war of intervention in the correspondence with the Zurich doctor Hedwig Müller, a close friend, to be insanely; It would have been necessary that the German population underneath the war preparations on its own – through blockages, through sabotage, through a positive European idea that counteracts the rampant nationalisms.

But there was no all of this, which is why Tucholsky stated in 1935: «There is no mental position. Hence my silence. ” His pacifism is not a guise for other ideologies, he doesn’t hide anything. And it is precisely this perplexity that gives Tucholsky’s texts on peace a human dimension that lacks many current tracts and calls. She leads him to try to be as honest as possible. The fact that Tucholsky’s slogans are printed in today’s new edition “of his” newspaper, the “world stage”, but Russia is not named as an aggressor in the Ukraine War.

How does peace go?

By spoke out for a general strike and the fall of the government in the event of a war, for a fight inside, against the government, Kurt Tucholsky’s pacifism was also revolutionary. The fact that peace needs conditions and does not just be desirable made it seemed clear to him: «The stupid view of Ernst Jüngers, the struggle is the primary, the real thing that is alone to live, stands at a similar level as that of a false peace friend who loathes every fight and opted for chamomile tea. Neither eternal struggle is desirable nor eternal peace. Only war … this is one of the stupidest forms of struggle because it is managed by a rather imperfect institution and for them. »

In the end, Kurt Tucholsky no longer endured the tension between the war lust in the Weimar Republic and its radical pacifism. As a look at the fact that his attempts to write down a better world had failed, he gradually fell silent; Only his letters provide fragments about his inner shock. On May 16, 1935, nine months before his death, he wrote to Hedwig Müller: “Nothing but Pacifist – that’s about the way a dermatologist says: ‘I’m against pimples.’ You don’t heal with that.» He thought the arms race that he observed these days for a crazy reason: “But only because the governments, fully sucked by the nonsense idea of absolute sovereignty – want to live in anarchy and do not want to recognize a legal system.”

This legal system, which Tucholsky misses, is to form international law since the end of the Second World War. Not to recognize this not to take it as the basis for the evaluation of war and peace, automatically leads, so it can be concluded with Tucholsky, in turn to war: “So the peace interference, who is Germany, must indicate the tone, as the lowest always indicates the sound.” In 1945, the founding members of the UN said in their Charter to “keep future genders from the scourge of war”. This has not yet been succeeded; The Hamburg Arbeitsgemeinschaft War cause research (Akuf) counted 28 wars worldwide in 2023 and armed conflicts.