ISMAIL LAGARDIEN: Germany’s return to militarism and war against history and memory

Europe and the world received a powerful message, perhaps not the one intended, when Germany announced earlier this month that it was returning to militarism.

Re-introducing a form of military service — having scrapped conscription 13 years ago — defence minister Boris Pistorius said last week that “everyone must ask themselves what they’d be prepared to do if we were attacked [and] how do we secure our civilian life if war breaks out?” 

With this expressed return to militarism, making the country “war ready”, the German government explained, also in June, that it was sending “equipment and weapons” to Ukraine as part of “security capacity building”. Two or three months earlier a UN court ruled that “German military aid to Israel can continue”. 

Here is probably the most important of 21st-century indicators of the continuity of militarism and war, and of particular European wars, over at least two centuries, which drew significantly on German nationalism and pride.

When Pistorius spoke about securing civilian life it evoked images, described by Hagen Schulze in The Course of German Nationalism: From Frederick the Great to Bismarck: 1763-1867 as zealous people preparing for war.  

In the 18th century young men, Schulze wrote, “undertook night marches and military manoeuvres and practised fencing and crossbow-shooting so as to be ready for the uprising against the forces of occupation”. 

In the 19th century German militarism continued aggressively, marked by Otto von Bismarck’s address to the Prussian Diet in 1862. “Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided,” he said, “but by iron and blood.” 

If, as many a thinker and scholar has imagined, the turn of each century marked a discontinuity, the Germany in the 20th century militarised and in effect led the world into war from 1914 to 1945. It was after World War 2 that Germany demilitarised and became almost pacifistic; that was until the ghosts of Russian (Red Army) victory and the Nazi Holocaust — the original Greek definition properly describes the wide destruction of societies and mass killings wrought over the three decades of war — returned.  

We can pick at any strand dangling from current German militarisation, any one of which may be incomplete and fail to tell the whole story. It is not beyond reach, intellectually, that in Ukraine and Israel Germany is seeking some kind of redemption or trying to heal the wounds of German defeat in Berlin in 1945. Put differently, by supporting Israel, Germany is trying to make up for the Nazi Holocaust, and by supporting Ukraine it wants to get a measure of redemption — restoring some of the pride it lost in Berlin. 

In To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949 historian Ian Kershaw explained that about 20% of German women were raped by Soviet soldiers along their path to Berlin, and at least 10,000 German soldiers were “being killed on average every day in the last months of the war”. That was the point at which Germans “saw themselves as victims of the conflict”.  

Germany’s remilitarisation is therefore far more than Walter Benjamin’s “mythic violence”, which feeds “bloody power over mere life for its own sake”. It is Germany’s war against memory, conscience and meaning.

For differing reasons, Germany and Russia are looking back; Russia to early “civilisational” glory, and Germany to defeat, contrived victimhood and the cruelty of the long war of 1914-45. Berlin now wants to claim what Austro-Hungarian political economist Karl Polanyi described in 1944 as “a greater share in the record” of history of the Western “race”.  

When the Israeli state was created in the aftermath of the war, so began its history. The Nazi Holocaust was a major contributor to the history of Israel (the biblical account is difficult to verify, beyond faith), and Germany now wants to remain part of that history. This is a fundamental flaw in the history of history.  

Taking a cue from British historian Eric Hobsbawm, and without indulging postmodernist relativism (inspired by identity politics), responses to historical movements cannot insist on separation of epochs on from the other, as if each period is set in stone.

Understanding the interactions between epochs and identifying continuities are important for understanding any era. History is about asking the most difficult “why” questions, and letting the answers register and fall where they will. The writer of history, much like the politician, is not autonomous from history. 

I will place here a passage by the Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941): “There are always innumerable stories about every great figure or event, innumerable hearsays gain currency in different ways with Time. Individual poets work on these hearsays in different ways to pick and choose materials for their literary works.

“Some construct Srikrishna as a godman. Some others foreground the shrewd literary figure in him. While neither of these pictures is complete in itself, they definitely complement each other as elements of Truth. It is therefore wrong to mark one as more historic than the other.”  

I conclude with the statement that current German militarism and “preparation for war” cannot proceed as if it were not tied to history, memory, “the past” or any “non-historical” issues. 

• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.