Pacifism | War on War

Soldiers are murderers." This famous quote by the writer Kurt Tucholsky (1890–1935) has – despite all the enthusiasm for war in politics and the media – become more widely used again since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. Now that Tucholsky is increasingly being targeted by peace activists, it is worth taking a closer look at his pacifism and the contradictions hidden behind the slogan. At first glance, it seems clear that Tucholsky meant the phrase exactly as it is rendered. Its meaning emerges from the context of the famous 1931 "Weltbühne" article "The Guarded Theater of War," which Tucholsky dedicated to the military police; moreover, the writer repeated this statement on various occasions.

A slight contextual difference between the meaning of "Soldiers are murderers" today and in the Weimar Republic could be due to the following circumstance: The crime of murder was defined differently then than it is today. Roughly speaking, there was no linguistic differentiation between murder and manslaughter, and accordingly, Tucholsky's dictum encompassed far more acts than would be covered by today's penal code. But this objection is rather subtle; from a legal perspective, the statement lacks the specific person accused of murder anyway. Tucholsky's editor at the "Weltbühne," Carl von Ossietzky, also saw it this way, and was put on trial for this quote: It was not a matter of defamation of a class, but of defamation of the war. The Berlin lay judges' court followed this view and acquitted Ossietzky in 1932.

Later attempts to criminalize the sentence also failed. In particular, CSU politician Franz Josef Strauß, during his time as Defense Minister, persecuted pacifists with fierce fury; Franz Josef Strauß, of all people, who, as a Wehrmacht soldier in the Soviet Union, as he writes in his memoirs, witnessed several massacres of Jewish people by his comrades. But neither Strauß's nor all the other charges held up until 1995, when the Federal Constitutional Court finally ruled that the sentence did not constitute a criminal offense.

Militant love of peace

Having thus rendered legal instrumentalization impossible, the more fundamental question arose as to how Tucholsky's pacifism was actually defined—precisely because the phrase appears repeatedly in pacifist contexts, and Tucholsky remains one of the most influential pacifists in Germany. One thing is clear: his pacifism draws on the experiences of the First World War, which, at least on the Western Front, had a character that current wars no longer exhibit. In other words, the relatively clear distinction between front and rear, which repeatedly plays a role in Tucholsky's work, no longer exists.

Tucholsky writes: "For four years, there were entire square miles of land where murder was obligatory, while half an hour away it was just as strictly forbidden." But today, the boundaries of war have been blurred by drone and air strikes, the use of covert troops, and systematic terror against the civilian population; in many modern wars, there are essentially no fronts at all anymore, only "conflict zones." The abolition of this separation is not, incidentally, an exclusive feature of modernity, as the political scientist Herfried Münkler has demonstrated: The Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), for example, did not have this separation either. This war, especially towards its end, was not designed for decisive battles, but rather for the exploitation and devastation of entire regions.

Seemingly paradoxically, Tucholsky is concerned with bringing the external war within, that is, into society. Tucholsky's pacifism is not a peaceful one. He considers the love of peace to be effective only if it is militant: "The right to fight, the right to sabotage against the most infamous murder: forced murder – that is beyond doubt. And, unfortunately, outside of the much-needed pacifist propaganda. You can't beat a wolf with the patience of a lamb and bleating." Elsewhere, Tucholsky summed up this attitude in the catchy phrase "war on war." And he left no doubt that in this war, which he wanted to wage against the war of states, any means is right, as long as it works: "But we radical pacifists retain (...) the natural right to play imperialist powers off against each other when the peace of Europe, when our conscience demands it, and I say here with the full awareness of what I am saying, that there is no secret of the German Wehrmacht that I would not hand over to a foreign power if it seemed necessary to preserve peace."

What Tucholsky understands by war is the armed conflict of nation-states, the confrontation of imperialist powers. The hybridity of contemporary warfare, which not only tolerates but strategically embraces terror against civil society, might not have been beyond Tucholsky's imagination, but it runs counter to his argument. For it is not only peace at any price that Tucholsky defends with his own, private war against war, but also an idea of a community beyond the nation-state: "We consider the war of nation-states a crime, and we fight it where we can, when we can, with whatever means we can. We are traitors. But we are betraying a state we deny, in favor of a country we love, for peace and for our true fatherland: Europe."

How Kurt Tucholsky would think about current wars, however, must ultimately remain speculation and is accordingly pointless. The fact that and how his intellectual successors handled the war, particularly in Ukraine, has now been addressed by Pascal Beucker in his book "Pacifism – an Erroneous Path?" Russia's invasion of Ukraine shook precisely that part of the peace movement that considered Russia a force for peace (and in some parts even still does today). And this attribution alone is a departure from Tucholsky's brand of pacifism, which distrusts every state. The fatherland that Tucholsky is always prepared to betray does not just mean his own, but every fatherland.

Tucholsky often seemed somewhat perplexed when it came to deciding what means to use to preserve peace; precisely because he wanted peace at any price, he sometimes didn't know the path to achieving it. He wrote in correspondence with the Zurich physician Hedwig Müller, a close friend, that he had always considered a war of intervention insane; what would have been necessary was for the German population to undermine the war preparations on its own initiative—through blockades, through sabotage, through a positive European idea that countered the rampant nationalisms.

But none of that existed, which is why Tucholsky stated in 1935: "There is no intellectual position. Hence my silence." His pacifism is not a cover for other ideologies; it conceals nothing. And it is precisely this perplexity that gives Tucholsky's texts on peace a human dimension that is lacking in many contemporary treatises and appeals. It 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 "Weltbühne," but Russia is not named as the aggressor in the Ukraine war, breaks with this legacy.

How does peace work?

By advocating a general strike and the overthrow of the government in the event of war, a struggle within, against the government, Kurt Tucholsky's pacifism was also revolutionary. That peace requires conditions and cannot simply be wished for seemed abundantly clear to him: "Ernst Jünger's stupid view that struggle is primary, the essential thing, the only thing worth living for, is on a similar level to that of a false friend of peace who detests all struggle and opts for chamomile tea. Neither eternal struggle nor eternal peacefulness is desirable. Only war... that is one of the stupidest forms of struggle because it is waged by and for a quite imperfect institution."

In the end, Kurt Tucholsky could no longer bear the tension between the warlike fervor prevalent in the Weimar Republic and his radical pacifism. When it became apparent that his attempts to create a better world had failed, he gradually fell silent; only his letters provide fragmentary information about his inner turmoil. On May 16, 1935, nine months before his death, he wrote to Hedwig Müller: "To be nothing but a pacifist – that's roughly like a dermatologist saying, 'I'm against pimples.' You can't cure anything with that." He considered the arms race he observed during these days to be madness, with a very specific reason: "But that's only because governments, saturated with the nonsensical idea of absolute sovereignty, live in anarchy and refuse to recognize any legal order above themselves."

This legal order, which Tucholsky misses, has been supposed to form international law since the end of the Second World War. Failure to recognize it, to use it as a basis for evaluating war and peace, automatically leads, as Tucholsky concludes, to war in turn: "Thus, the disturber of the peace, which is Germany, must set the tone, just as the lowest always sets the tone." In 1945, the founding members of the UN declared in their Charter that they would henceforth "protect future generations from the scourge of war." This has not been achieved so far; the Hamburg Working Group on Research into the Causes of War (AKUF) counted 28 wars and armed conflicts worldwide in 2023.