Germany Does Not Kill Anymore – Or Does It? A Situation Report

Last Updated (Tuesday, 30 November 1999 00:00) Written by Anis Hamadeh Tuesday, 20 October 2009 21:23

Is killing a problem in Germany? In a poll among some dozens of German students, journalists, sales people, teachers, neighbors, and acquaintances (excluding explicit peace activists) I found the following: most of the questioned people had to think for quite a while, for many the question came unexpected and surprising. The answers were individual and not homogeneous, yet there were trends: the rejection of killing on the one hand, and the conclusion that the killing of people poses a much greater problem in other countries than in liberal Germany, on the other. Especially because of its history Germany would be somehow refined, integrated into the West and into Europe, and especially sensitive now. Only the war in Afghanistan was regarded as a concrete problem by more than half of the people that were questioned, mostly because of the incident on September 4, when in a military operation more than a hundred Afghanis were killed after a German order.

Nonkilling Questions
The questions, which I asked on this occasion, came out of the realm of the Nonkilling Center, an international organization based in Hawaii, of which I am one of the active contributors (1). Our concern is the realization of killing-free societies worldwide and we ask: is a nonkilling societies possible? If so, why, if not, why not? What does a transition from killing to nonkilling (and vice versa) look like and what are the characteristics of killing-free societies? Belonging to the indices are the abolition of the death penalty, the issue of conscientious objection as well as psychological-biological, political, economical, and other factors. (2)
Indeed, the killing of humans is a much bigger problem in other countries than in Germany. This became rather clear to me during the two-weeks “Global Nonkilling Leadership Academy” (3) in Honolulu from October 4-16, 2009 – the first seminar of its kind – which was attended by participants from twelve countries: Liberia, Thailand, the Philippines, Kenya, Hawaii (USA), Palestine, Western Sahara, Bangladesh, India, Italy, Lebanon and Germany. In the organzational team there was, apart from US-Americans, a participant from Colombia and one from Galicia. In most of these countries, the problem of killing is more pressing, be it because of high rates of homicides (Colombia, Liberia), the fact of a deadly occupation (Palestine, Western Sahara) or other factors.

Export of Lethal Weapons
Despite of these facts it can be stated that Germany at a closer look plays a significant role in worldwide killing. Firstly: Germany is the number four exporter of weapons in the world! Secondly: this simple truth is completely unknown to most of the citizens, which is all the more alarming when considering German history from Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer against Witches) up to the holocaust. The ignorance of the population concerning the export of lethal weapons entails a lack of grounded discussion on this issue. There could be such a discussion, if journalists and politicians took up  the issue, i.e. people of whom it is to be expected that they are familiar with the respective data.
Generally, we will find two major arguments to justify the production and proliferation of lethal weapons in Germany: the first one is of economical nature, for we all want to earn money and a blooming economy is regarded as a high value. The second one is: if we don't do it, there is others who will. Both arguments are at least problematic, if not even unvalid. Let us carry them to extremes to illustrate this: hardly anybody would hold the argument of earning money to be legitimate for a professional killer. And nobody would justify the gas chambers by pointing to others, who would do the job, if one did not do it oneself.
In our country there are some traceable individuals who earn more than a million euros annually with selling weapons abroad, weapons that kill other people. I want to share the following thought with these men: if you knew how satisfying it is to support the life of human beings instead of supporting their death, you would change your lives! If you knew about the liberation of the self, about the mechanisms of creativity and the secret of happiness, if you knew what it means that a quiet conscience gives wings – indeed, you would not do what you are doing. This says someone who no longer thinks in terms of violence and who has been awarded for this with abundant inspiration, manifest in about ten books, 110 songs and dozens of paintings. Someone who really experienced what he is talking about, and who does neither believe in didacticism nor in abstractions, but – with reason – believes in catharsis and creativity.

Support of Lethal Ideologies
A second case to connect Germany immediately with killing are the wars of allied nations, on top of them the USA, Great Britain, and Israel. These countries have remained in permanent states of war for decades, because they have the military power to do so and because they have never experienced a devastating defeat like Germany. After Malleus Maleficarum and holocaust there is a responsibility in Germany to promote nonkilling, because Germans, like no other nation, know how wrong killing really is. The argument, according to which we Germans hardly have any influence on other societies, simply is untenable, for the German position in the world history of civilization is undeniable, as our colleagues from the Goethe Institutes and the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD will confirm at any time and to anybody. It is exactly because of its history that Germany can support and realize the humanist idea of nonkilling like no other country on this planet. So why does this discussion not take place in our mainstream? Weapon exports and blind loyalty are not the only German contributions to killing in the world, but they will suffice for the purpose of this essay at hand.

The Baader Meinhoff Komplex
One of the best topical examples to explain – or at least illustrate – the paradox mentioned above is the movie “Der Baader Meinhoff Komplex” by Bernd Eichinger, based on a book by Stefan Aust. The movie tells the story of RAF terrorism in the Germany of the 1970s, remaining closely at the surface of external events. In the film you can see a minutely reconstructed account of perpetrators and of victims – the actual scope of the situation remains hidden and hardly tackled. One single figure in this films  explores the core of things and that is the chief of the Federal Criminal  Police Office, played by world class actor Bruno Ganz. It is a role that does not even cover one percent of the movie and that still is the key to the whole case. The injust wars and conflicts in the world are a fact that cannot be omitted, says this man with all the power of this position, in a single, thundering sentence. There are two or three further parts in the movie where this motif is varied and repeated, but it is strongly overridden by the focus on perpetrators and victims.  A prime example for mainstream thinking in our country.
It may be due to the fact that the USA, despite all Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and so on and so forth has liberated the Germans from Hitler (together with other nations like Russia) and due to the fact that the ally Israel (erroneously) is equated with the victims of the holocaust. On the deepest level, however, we have to state a deeply rooted belief in violence and lethality, one that cannot even be relativized and limited by the (allegedly) predominant religion of Christianity (Thou shalt not kill!).
Stefan Aust, whose brain in the end is responsible for this film, is a splendid example of a German mainstream intellectual to epitomize this mentality. He gives the impression of a clever, reflecting, and successful man of action, but he always stays close to the surface of the situation and, due to his education, not his intelligence, is unable to elaborate on the important questions, which have remained virulent up to this day.

Poets and Thinkers
Yet the German potential is much bigger than dwarfs like Aust and Eichinger. Again and again I come across giants in my life, even if it is rare for them to reach a wider public, like the journalist Jürgen Todenhöfer. Detained in self-mutilation, we Germans have built up mighty dogmas, like the blind loyalty towards US policies and the unreflected solidarity with Israeli frenzy, the continuing destructive scratching of the Jewish trauma with deadly results for originally uninvolved third parties, namely Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims. 
For many decades we have languished without progress. We reject every kind of heroism, almost any kind of big action and eventually every responsibility, even though we carry this strong word on our lips all the time. We deprive our children of the unfolding of their abilities as we fear the breach with our violent dogmas and live a shadow life of which we think it is modesty. And yet, what do we have to fear if we actively and coherently commit ourselves to a nonkilling world? If we overcome the stereotype thinking in terms of perpetrators and victims and focus on the situation instead? If Hitler, in the end, has taught us to do without greatness and strength of character, well, what a bad teacher was he! Did we not have a Bertha von Suttner, no Petra Kelly, no Hermann Hesse, no role-models for the future? Yes, we had and we still have. They are burried in the catacombs of knowledge. Because we are not ready to believe in anything else than this thing that has determined our thinking for centuries: violence.
We have never attained happiness with this thinking. It has always been a culture pessimistic minority that guided us. Nobody says that it has to remain so. Of course we can stand together. We may, in fact, commit ourselves to nonkilling with all our strength and all our heart. Nobody will even attempt to prevent us from doing that. It may well be that the world wants to be cheated. But nobody can prevent you from refusing to comply with this wish.  

Footnotes:
(1) See www.nonkilling.org and www.nonkilling.de
(2) See the books “Nonkilling Global Political Science” (2002) by Glenn Paige, online at www.nonkilling.org/pdf/nkgps.pdf and “Toward a Nonkilling Paradigm”, ed. by Joam Evans Pim (2009) with essays on the subject from 14 desciplines of knowledge, online at www.nonkilling.org/pdf/volume_toward.pdf
(3) http://non-killing.net/academy