War rhetoric: If they come tomorrow…

What’s going on in this country? What drives people crazy? What makes them crave war and murder and manslaughter? The greatest danger to peace is a long period of peace, said a peace researcher. “Would you go to war for Germany?” asked an editor in the “Tagesspiegel” last weekend – and readers are actually debating wildly. Only a few people commented: “What mental nonsense.”

Is it time again to pick up Karl Kraus and browse through “The Last Days of Mankind”? In order to recognize parallels to the current war euphoria. And to say no loudly and clearly, like Wolfgang Borchert after the Second World War? “You. Man in the village and man in the city. If they come tomorrow and bring you the surrender order, then there’s only one thing to do: say NO.”

Pre-war? Yes, it’s kind of simmering. And everyone joins in. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius speaks of “war-ready”, Economics Minister Robert Habeck of “land war”. And the “Bild” triumphs: “Weapons summit near Habeck!” The SPD’s top candidate for the European elections, Katharina Barley, raves in the “Tagesspiegel”: “European atomic bombs can become an issue.” Her party colleague Karl Lauterbach wants the health care system for wars equip. Federal Education Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger is promoting a “relaxed relationship with the Bundeswehr” in schools. And chief diplomat Annalena Baerbock says in all seriousness that “our weapons help save human lives.” This borders on Orwell’s “Newspeak” from his dystopian novel “1984.”

The general manager of the Association of Cities and Municipalities is calling for bunkers and sirens. Toni Hofreiter, the sad figure of a Green Party who has lost his job, demands like a talking machine: weapons, weapons, weapons. And always omnipresent in the pre-war noise was the liberal Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann. What’s wrong with Germany? Why this creeping poisoning in the minds? We miss the voices of the old people who were still indignant against cries of war: Heinrich Böll, Egon Bahr, Erhard Eppler, Helmut Gollwitzer, Günter Grass… And Hans-Christian Ströbele, the good conscience of the Greens. Not to mention Petra Kelly.

Pope Francis was recently insulted because he used outrageous words, called for an end to the war in Ukraine and called for negotiations. He was greeted with mockery, ridicule and scorn. The East German journalist Eugen Ruge rightly complained indignantly in the “SZ” that he was attacked “as if he had advocated murder and manslaughter.” And added: “In view of tens of thousands of deaths, I find it depressing the outrage that the suggestion alone triggers, especially among those who don’t have to go into the trenches themselves.” An exceptional voice in the loud, shrill screams for tanks, bombs and grenades.

“The war is getting closer,” writes the editor of the “Tagesspiegel”. Then she cheerfully takes off to lofty heights to play the flute: “Is it too early to ask what a Germany in war might look like?” In the end she ends up with a spontaneous saying from the 80s: “Imagine , it’s war, and no one is going there.” The editor points out that fatherland and national pride are still “under suspicion of chauvinism for a part of society” and that this would hardly be able to be pressed into a uniform. Others are skeptical about democracy and would probably not be warm to military service, the editor speculates. This all sounds unfortunate.

Apparently to heat up the debate, the editors had the graphics department put a martial montage at the center of the text: four soldiers shooting, two more helmet-wearing people rappelling down from a helicopter, the finger of one hand on the trigger of a pistol with the other Hand forming a victory sign. It works. The readership races to say something thoughtless like in a frenzy: “When you have no choice, you fight.” And: “The soldier who knows what he’s fighting for.”

How crazy is that? The debate in this country is not about achieving and maintaining peace, but rather about preparing for war.

In 1991, two years after an actual turning point, Rio Reiser warned: “The war, it is not dead, the war/ The war, it is not dead, it is just sleeping/ It has hidden itself well and is waiting, waiting/ In me, in you – the war is not dead.”