“OUR LIVES ARE THREATENED BY IMAGINARY SOURCES, FROM IMAGES THAT HAUNT US—WHETHER WE’RE IN THE SUBWAY, GETTING ONTO A PLANE, OR LIVING IN A SKYSCRAPER. SUCH PICTURES ACCOMPANY US DAY AND NIGHT, AND WE BECOME AS SOFT AS BUTTER.”
By JOACHIM BESSING

Pynchon’s “Entropy” ends as Aubade breaks through the bedroom window with her bare hands, letting in the 37-degree Fahrenheit coldness from the outside, attempting to create a climatic – and climactic – atmospheric equilibrium. With the attacks of September 11^th, the cold front of war symbolically burst into the civilian sphere, diluting its relative warmth. The enemy that the West claims to be facing – an enemy manifest in seemingly random bombings of holiday resorts in Bali, Egypt, and North Africa, in terrorist targeting on the London Underground and on commuter trains in Madrid and Cologne – is as invisible as a cold front. Meanwhile the effects of the current conflict – a conflict that for its interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and, perhaps soon, Iran and North Korea continues to fail to articulate the blurred, imperceptible face of the enemy – are as irreversible as the process of entropy itself. I spoke with German war theorist Herfried Münkler about this and other issues at Humboldt University in Berlin. His office there is small; his secretary avoids speaking to visitors. Münkler’s concept of the post-heroic society, is a state in which we in the West have been living for over a century, and to which we have come by a process that would seem to be as hard to escape as that of the second law of thermodynamics.

JOACHIM BESSING: Would it not be better for our post-heroic society, which according to your theory is no longer able to make sacrifices, to take a cooler stance towards Islamism rather than wearing ourselves out in a War on Terror?
HERFRIED MÜNKLER: Post-heroic societies have a natural disposition to retreat, but the problem is that the other side notices this after a time. Then they raise the pressure to force further retreat, and so on. At some point, the post-heroic society is standing with its back against the wall and has no other options. In this respect, one should not confuse a short-term habitual form of reaction – “cooling off” – with a long-term strategy. With this, I explicitly don’t want to say that we should seek out confrontation with Islamism, or rather Jihadism, in every situation. But it is also dangerous to make every thinkable concession merely for the sake of peace. The French and the British pursued such a politics of appeasement against Hitler, ultra-conscious of the fact that they were not in the position to suffer the losses of WWI a second time. As we know, Hitler was neither satisfied nor pacified. I don’t want to overemphasize the comparison between Hitler and Jihadism, and I don’t want to support the idea of “Islamo-fascism.” But that one can make things worse in the long term through appeasement and retreat – that can be easily learned from European history.

During the Cold War, our attention was focused on the threat to the North, to the Soviet Union, and battles took place in an icy, metaphysical space. Can we talk about the phantom territory in which the War on Terror is being waged in these same terms?
The confrontation with the Soviet Union was of a symmetrical art. Both sides had the same sort of threatening instruments at their disposal, and each could therefore deter the other, or, as the case may be, keep in each other in check. That is not true for this new war. Here the conflict is essentially asymmetrical, which means that it doesn’t have anything to do with a nuclear stalemate but rather with mostly open spaces, which the West, as in the case of Iraq, is able to invade. Yet this comes down to a war of exhaustion, and correspondingly there is a different set of rules here. Incidentally, our problem is also that we are being attacked from these areas – on September 11^th, for example. In brief: the constellations of the East-West conflict are completely alien to those of the new geopolitical asymmetry. We must unlearn and relearn.

How exactly has the fact that public spaces have become the showplaces of war changed our perception of political conflicts?
Political conflicts that actually reside very, very far away from us have now come close in this way. In Goethe’s Faust, during the Easter walk, it is mentioned that one can drink a glass of wine while weapons assault each other, “far away in Turkey.” That can no longer be said today, because the weapons are not limited to the battlefield. For that reason, even Germany cannot, in view of the Afghan challenge, lean back and insist that Afghanistan is even a bit farther away than Turkey.

The US remains the role model for such heated and rhetorically limitless, far-from-home defense strategies. Francis Fukuyama claims that America has modeled itself according to the principle of the superlative – does that not lead to torpor and uniformity? And are we moving ourselves with this towards a condition of political entropy, to which the heroic society alone presents an alternative?
Yeah okay, that is Fukuyama’s famous thesis on the end of history, which comes out of the view that there is no fundamental alternative to liberal-democratic politics and the capitalistic social order. But such a thing, if you allow me to formulate it pointedly, is nothing other than the self-reassurance of a post-heroic society that imagines itself to be secure through the idea that it is surrounded by things like itself. One looks in the mirror and believes to be looking in the distance. But the Islamic jihad breakthroughs show that the end of history has not come yet, nor has entropy in the sense of an equalization of energy differences. Rather, fundamental social and political alternatives are in conflict, and this conflict can hardly be decided through the means of dialogue. We should nurse dialogue as long as it leads to our goals, but we should be prepared that this might not always be the case, and that we might have to resort to more than words to defend our form of life.

Which will be increasingly difficult, according to your thesis of the post-heroic society. At which point in recent history does it become clear that a post-heroic society has emerged out of a heroic society?
One of the first indications of the post-heroic society was the abolition of the active draft in the US at the end of the Vietnam War. The political leadership understood that you are no longer able to persevere militarily if you have to make voters expect the loss of their relatives. During the Vietnam War, the US for the first time experienced an important and politically influential part of the population turning against the war-politics of the administration. The voluntary army that has taken the place of the draft army is no longer the “armed nation”. Rather, it is a select group chosen according to particular criteria, often picked out of segments of the population that have no other chance of social advancement. They were and today remain drilled into a heroic community. But that’s something different from a heroic society. With the term “post-heroic society,” I’m relating to concepts that arise in war theory – namely, the post-heroic waging of war as a form of systematic avoidance of victims through the use of equipment. Now society’s relationship to the post-heroic interests me as well, as does the problem of what society is willing to sacrifice in order to assert itself and its values. After thinking over this problem for a long time, I’ve concluded that Europe has undergone a development, beginning with the French Revolution, through which it has made itself into its own hero. This was accomplished by taking the demands that were previously the exclusive domain of warriors, a professionally distinguished group, and giving them over to every male citizen of a certain age. Every European society went through this process, because those experiencing it initially were making incredible progress in comparison to those who were not. In a way, this heroicizing ended between 1914 and 1918, when European societies attempted to win the war by trumping each other in their willingness to endure losses.

Were the societies under Mussolini and Hitler already post-heroic, then?
Those were no longer heroic societies. They were attempts to found heroic communities. There, one could no longer trust that this energy, this willingness to make sacrifices, would come out of the society itself. One was instead forced to generate this in the form of honorary distinctions – the SS for instance – or through high-grade professionalization, such as turning the Reichswehr into the Wehrmacht.

The members of the Einheitspartei (Party of Unity) helped to that end.
After the outburst of WWI totalitarian regimes were only organizable as large heroic communities. That holds for Italy, imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and especially the Soviet Union. From that point on, the western democracies had to back up their assertiveness with a lot of equipment. Or they capitulated early, like France. We now all find ourselves in this phase – in the North, in any case – and there are multiple reasons for this, such as birth rates. That’s the material side. On the ideological side, there is a certain variability: the more polarized the society, the less religion plays a role, and hence the less genuine willingness there is to make sacrifices. That defines the difference between Germany and the US. But by and large we’re post-heroic societies, which means notions of victims and honor play a small role in our self-understanding. There are certainly rituals to honor victims, but they hardly play a role in comparison to those that defined the old heroic societies of Europe between the French Revolution and the end of WWI.

Where has the wish to be a hero disappeared to? Or is it merely pent up?
I believe that we no longer have it.

Honestly?
Yes. Naturally, one would like to be a hero – but no longer in the actual sense of sacrificing oneself. Except for a few cases, usually considered pathological by society, they can’t be found. “Hero” has quasi-devolved into “Star.” Standing in the public eye has changed in view of the gender question and is now attractive for both men and women in the same way. I believe that is the way in which the post-heroic society organizes its economy of attention.

Then does the one star represent the many?
“One for all,” in the sense of Arnold von Winkelried, who took a spear to the chest on a bridge in order to enable Swiss foot soldiers to succeed against the Habsburger knighthood – one can still recognize a heroic ideal there. Central to the heroic way of thinking is the idea that one as an individual or small group pushes through or enables the continuation of the will of the greater community through personal sacrifice. The victim is always in some sense a representative. That is the sacral root of the principle. But that has shown itself to be untenable under the conditions of nuclear strategy. It was not thinkable during the Cold War, for instance, that one could sacrifice oneself and thereby protect and save the lives of many. Technologically that was no longer possible or logical. A nuclear confrontation in Europe would have actually led to civilians dying before the military, because after all the military possessed certain equipment and resources. Additionally, there was the memory of what the heroic society had cost Europeans over the centuries – that there were few families after the WWII who hadn’t sacrificed one of their members. There were societies in which the families still had many boys, so that the emotional capital of the parents would not be exclusively invested in one son. But the heroic society is no longer possible where that was once the case. If we think of families from the Gaza Strip, in which the parents produce videotapes in which they explain why they are proud that one of their children – but always one of very many children – has gone the way of the suicide bomber. Out of that comes the hard material core of the difference between heroic and post-heroic societies. I don’t believe that the theory of democratic peace in this form is right if it says that democracies don’t wage war against each other – because they are democracies.

Who says that?
That derives from Kant’s writings on peace and has become a major theory particularly within American political science. This theory has led to the idea that when all countries are democratically governed, war will disappear.

That assumes first of the all that humans are naturally good to one another, and that merely domination drives them to war.
So it is. So argued Kant as well.

Then in what are most wars grounded, from a historical point of view?
Kant’s thought is: for most people, the costs of war are higher than the benefits. First, the state treasury must be filled through taxes, and the debt is pushed onto the people after the war. On top of that, the citizens still have to fight, so if they are able to describe whether or not to wage war, “they would carefully consider starting such a dangerous game,” says Kant. This idea contains the fundamental assumption that there are rational interest-maximizers who carefully weigh costs against benefits and afterwards come to a decision: the war is more expensive than its benefits – so lets keep our hands off! Kant believed that. Then came the long 19^th century of “outbursts.” What Kant never thought of, was, for example, collective vanity like honor. Victorious Western powers would have been forced to realize after WWI that this war had cost more than it brought – Great Britain had more capital than any other nation before the WWI. The biggest believer. After the war, they were in debt to the US, and the US could take on the role of big capital. Today it is clear: whoever wages such a war loses. It doesn’t matter whether the country wins or loses militarily. From Kant’s thought comes the idea that if the population that has to bear the costs could decide, war would disappear. In principle, I believe that this could be right. But I also believe that this way of seeing things has been able to spread since demographic developments have taken a turn. Namely, since one can no longer afford the need for honor – for material reasons. The cost/benefit calculation comes from limited resources – too few boys, in this case. But that isn’t valid for societies that, for whatever reason, have rapid demographic growth. They can afford to make the sacrifice, and in a major way. And possibly because of their economic inferiority.

Do you mean concretely the Gaza Strip?
Or Bangladesh, for instance. When the UN Secretary General needs troops for some crisis area, Bangladesh is always the first at the door, yelling, “Here, please!” because they can’t finance their military with their own budget. And they let themselves be financed by the world community. That’s why there is always a handful of Bangladeshis around. For us, as a post-heroic society, that would be a problem. Above all, it becomes problematic when we feel threatened by death virtuosos, by suicide bombers. Also because the recent forms of terrorism are no longer of the form that Clausewitz succinctly formulated: for him, war was still “a measure of moral and physical strength – with the help of the latter.” Terrorism today is exclusively directed towards morals, the only thing that a frozen post-heroic society still holds on to.

Is this “frozenness” seen by heroic societies as a weakness?
A strong attack on their morality taps most strongly into the fears of post-heroic societies. Post-heroic societies become terrified in a particular way. Whereby the central imperative for others is formulated in terms of honor and sacrifice, for us it’s about the elongation of life at any price. Let it cost what it will. Literally. Our lives are threatened by imaginary sources, from images that haunt us – whether we’re in the subway, getting into a plane, or living in a skyscraper. Such pictures accompany us day and night, and we become as soft as butter. Then we suddenly consider whether it would not be better for us to patrol the Lebanese coast so that they don’t come to us. Then we cancel an opera, before it provokes a misunderstanding. We would rather retreat. We like to talk about our values, but when it becomes serious, we’re ready to slip something into the values so that they leave us alone. That is the weakness of the post-heroic society!

What are its strengths?
That it no longer destroys itself in terrible conflicts like the First World War. The weakness of the heroic society is that it has entered into a process of self-destruction. Without the First World War, the catastrophe of the 20th century, the Second would be unthinkable. Historically there’s nothing new in that. I believe that one can describe the world of the Greek polis of the fifth century BC until the fall of Athens in the fourth in a similar fashion. The heroic ideal of the heroic Hellenic aristocratic society that is described in the Iliad had made itself into a citizens’ society, and in the city-states of classical Greece, each citizen had to be such a hero. That was eroded in the Peloponnesian War.

But in antiquity it was clear that war served as the point of transition from youth to adulthood. Today, this idea has been mostly lost. Only a small part of the population takes part in military service; the rest perform civil service. If the post-heroic society constantly shrinks back, it will end up at some point with its back to the wall. Are we still able to attack?
Yes, but we need a bunch of expensive equipment to do so. The intervention in the Kosovo War provides the best example of this: we make ourselves unreachable and unwoundable by staying out of the range of enemy weapon systems and coordinate the battle from above. In other words, if we don’t engage in symmetrical constellations but rather bring in our technical potential asymmetrically, then we manage to attack. The Americans are specialists in this. The Gulf War in 1991 was a brilliant example: the losses of the Iraqis and the American-led coalition stood in a relation that occasionally came to pass in the colonial wars. In 1898, in the battle of Om Dur Nan, the British suffered a few losses, while the troops of Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad of Kartum, the Sudanese Units, died by the tens of thousands, because they ran into the fire of machineguns and were mowed down. Yes, demonstrate technical superiority – that we can do. But anyone who has been beaten up at school can tell you: one’s own assertiveness depends on that of the others.

What about their fighting spirit?
When the other says, “We have no F16s or F18s, also no aircraft carriers or cruise missiles, but we have a whole bunch of young men that are ready to blow themselves up,” that becomes a big problem for us.

A symbol for this heroism was the inexhaustible bubbling blood fountain in Tehran during the war between Iran and Iraq.
These children in Iran that held their little golden keys to paradise around their necks, as they marched into the minefields of the Iraqis to make trenches that Iranian troops could dive into – for our post-heroic society, that is morally unimaginable. But all the same, if that were not the case, we couldn’t afford that – we just don’t have the children for it anymore.

And if we did, could children commandos in post-heroic Europe or the US actually be established?
No.

Who would protest? The church?
Well, everyone. There would be a huge outcry.

Why?
Of course, there were children crusaders. But that was in the 12^th century. And even then there was a strong idea of its inefficiency. We’re schooled in a completely different way, to evaluate war measures with criteria of efficiency. That is the result of what Max Weber called the Process of Rationalization. Additionally, there is our idea of the intrinsic worth of human beings. Which had religious roots perhaps, but which extracted itself from the religious idea of sacrifice long ago. Our idea of human worth is, so to speak, a moral insurance against the religious demand of self-sacrifice. But that’s not so long ago for us: at Langemarck, back in November 1914, Germany had badly educated reserve regiments made up of volunteers and students fighting against British career soldiers. They were supposed to compensate with their fighting spirit, which Ernst Jünger called “the game of the machine gun.” After the war’s end, the Germans transfigured the battle at Langemarck into a sacrificial mythos all the same. The French had Verdun, the British the Somme. Those were all battles with heavy losses, which demanded many victims without any thought to their efficiency. The excessiveness of the losses deeply changed our, up to that point, heroic society. Now there are intelligent observers who say: we want to take a look at Iranian society and see how it is twenty years after this child-sacrifice. How frequently are the martyr graveyards visited? And those who are somewhat more optimistic – also in view of Iran’s ability to hold out in the current issue of the nuclear option – they say, this sacrificing has certainly left its traces in Iran. As the religious fires have cooled, families now don’t why their children were sacrificed. For that reason, one suspects that there is a certain inevitability with which outbursts of heroism and readiness for sacrifice produce societies that stay frozen – that are, so to speak, stingy with sacrifice. There is a thesis in the economic theory of long cycles that societies concentrate of general welfare for a long time but then the advantageous effects of human selflessness don’t readily appear.

The rewards are missing?
Disappointment spreads widely. Perhaps it is observed that an orientation towards the public good is dysfunctional. Because there are too many who use it to their benefit. And with that, the opposite emerges: the society steers towards a phase of leaning towards self-interest. When we apply that to the post-heroic society and its fear of sacrifice, it could mean that after a certain point we will again be in a situation to return to a heroic society. We’ll have been in the valley of sacrificelessness long enough, so then someone hoists the flag, “Let it cost what it will.” Admittedly, I don’t believe this. Because its precondition is a different demographic reproduction rate. As long as that doesn’t change in Europe and the US, there is no end to the post-heroic society in sight.

But the French for example are proliferating spiritedly!
Yes, the gaps between the French and Germans are remarkable in view of the system of social safeguards. But they are irrelevant in view of the competition of heroic societies. In the Gaza Strip, also with the Arab Israelis and particularly the Bedouins in inner Israel, the reproduction rate is seven or eight children per family.

Then is the reproduction rate the key to everything?
It is a factor, in any case, that we have underestimated for a long time. We need not have done that. We could have known, for example, that the reproduction rate in Germany was higher than that in France at the end of the 19^th century. That’s why the French were afraid of another German attack and therefore extended the period of required military service to three years. And the German Reich interpreted this as an act of aggression as well: people assumed in Germany that they would soon have to deal with a French preventive strike. This all came out of observing the German rate of reproduction. In France, it had already started to go down under society’s modernization. Cities were actually not able to reproduce their populations. The cities of the middle ages always needed continual immigration. Now Europe has become one big city over the course of the 12^th century. We can’t reproduce ourselves anymore. The question today is: are we receiving enough immigration of the appropriate kind? Of course, people from the farming milieu in earlier eras were not immediately ready for top positions in the city. It took more than a few generations for them to become educated and urbanized enough to make a dent in petit bourgeois society. Things were probably similar in the huge oriental empires – Babylon, Ninive. These cities could not reproduce themselves, for which reason they were considered so sinful – there, the dominant sexual practices were not directed towards reproduction but rather towards sodomy. In this respect, I hold the reproduction rate to be a decisive factor. And significantly, as a post-heroic society, we only talk about it in relation to social and health policy and retirement security for the elderly. But it plays a role in our ability to intervene in conflicts. And the cooler Americans occasionally charge us with this: that because of our sinking reproduction rate, we are no longer going to be in a position geopolitically to fill out the role of moral communicator that we believe to have within ourselves.

Does one then inevitably lose one’s moral high ground when one can no longer intervene?
Clearly. After a while, taking the moral high ground becomes a compensation for not being able to – or not wanting to – do anything. As long as the idea still reigns that you intervene in a given situation, your moral role can be convincing. But the moment that you can no longer decide, moralizing becomes unconvincing. Then it looks like your “virtue” results from mere necessity. And those who recognize necessity behind virtue can only laugh. This occasionally becomes a European problem in discussions with American intellectuals and political advisors. In a discussion at Schloss Elmau about the US intervention in Iraq, Walter Russell Mead said to me, “Why should we allow ourselves to receive instructions about what we have to do from people who can’t do anything?” This is naturally the American view of the Europeans. The suspicion is that we advise against something because we ourselves have no ability to do it.

What are the effects of a post-heroic society on the young male psyche, given the fact that they are no longer required to be socialized in the military?
I am no fan at all of forced military service. First, it doesn’t work from the standpoint of justice – only a few accomplish it and a monstrous number are rejected. For interventions in foreign countries, you can’t use forced soldiers – for that you need volunteers. Yet on that point, we lack an understanding of the necessity of the military. Former Chancellor Helmut Kohl formulated it nicely at a security conference: “We are closed in by friends.” We don’t need the military for that purpose. Outside of that, one is engaged in crisis regions around the world. For that reason, I believe that the time for required military service, a typical institution of the heroic society, is over. The Americans realized in the end phase of Vietnam that an intervention of this kind could not be done with draftees. They realized that the white middle class was too post-heroic. The clever Brits had already abolished required military service after WWII. In the meantime, the inventor of the general draft, France, likewise abolished it. That had costs at the time! In Israel, for example, the army has the function of integrating a large number of disparate ethnicities and cultures into one society. Military service creates a common experience across various milieus. Russian or Ethiopian immigrants build their own communities there, not infrequently with their own political parties, and they have little additional contact with the rest of society. And since Israel’s military includes men and women, the society is integrated as a whole. One could think about how suburban developments in our society would make such integrative institutions necessary.

Also as a job market?
For young men in the northeast of Berlin, there are no other options than joining the army. And the phase of Fordism in the army, of a massive non-specialized work force, is over. The normal infantrymen, the cannon fodder, are no longer needed. Each soldier needs a certain skill, which means that many who beforehand would have been simply enlisted would today need to be re-socialized or even socialized for the first time so that they would be able to take part in operations – due to their relatively low level of education or lack of social skills. Those people are no longer taken into combat units, because the army no longer understands itself as an agent of socialization – they want well-educated, competent people. That is above all true, especially in the US, in the marine infantry. In America, young delinquents are often sent to “military school.” I don’t believe, however, that German society could go down this American path. We ironically don’t have enough Calvinism in us. We couldn’t produce a consensus that we should train potential criminals to be tank commanders, who can find their way back into society after they’ve been shipped to Afghanistan and proved themselves. That will unfortunately remain impossible for Germany. I say unfortunately because we have no functional equivalent in our society. A major problem is gradually arising from the lack of channels through which young people can be socialized. The military has not been able to carry out this function for a long time.

It seems obvious to me that the development of weapons technology has played midwife to recent outbursts.
If that observation is correct, it means, first, that we are arming ourselves and developing new weapon systems not because there is an observable enemy. Rather, we are arming ourselves against our own fear. There need not be an enemy. We must nevertheless possess sufficient military superiority in order to hold new barbarians at a distance and defeat them if necessary. Especially when we are not entirely in a position to make sacrifices. So new generations of vehicles must be made – not because some enemy has made them but because we alone need them. The new formula goes: we must be concerned about the security of our soldiers.

Weapon system are the crutches and prosthetics with which post-heroic societies equip themselves in order to go on at all. That has particular consequences, namely that we have a strong trust in such prosthetics. Donald Rumsfeld was, as opposed to Colin Powell, the prophet in this regard. He wanted to wage the second Gulf War with only a few soldiers, while emphasizing American military superiority. But at the end, he had too few “boots on the ground” to keep the process of reconstruction afloat. In this situation, we have enormous destructive but few constructive capabilities. We can destroy everything and everyone, but we can accomplish few positive goals. One could see that clearly in the last Iraq war. The first phase, when it was about defeating the Regime? Brilliant! But after? Bad. Building trust does not consist in leaving a vapor-trail of ice-crystals from a plane at 12,000 meters, while everyone below is extremely vulnerable to attack. You have to establish yourself on the ground. Create new structures. Which is monstrously troublesome. That’s where you’re vulnerable.

Weapon systems seem to be similar to language systems. If the other person doesn’t speak our language – and they articulate it, for example, by taking a commercial jet and flying it into one of our atomic reactors – we are helpless, powerless, and without any idea how to appropriately respond.
Probably we still could not have responded, even if we had secured this atomic reactor with anti-aircraft equipment – which they have done in Italy, by the way.

It’s society above all that is attacked here. It would be our atomic reactor under attack, not the military’s, and the attacker would not be able to be concretely traced back into a society. His marks would be those of a phantom, like Al-Qaeda. We could not fight back.
When all political and military actors were states, when the relationships were still symmetrical, or above all manageable – in so far as the state could be described as a body that consisted in a territory, population, and responsible sovereignty – it was clear that when a rocket was fired from a territory, then this territory would be the target of a counter-attack. Mutual hostage taking. That was called deterrence, which became a symbol of the cold war. Deterritorialized political actors intervene in the form of so-called networks – and that’s not just Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda is an armed NGO. Greenpeace is in principle a similar actor, which simply uses the attention of the public in a completely different way, producing events, saving the Brent Spar, naturally bringing in storms of donations, and there are functional similarities with Al-Qaeda here. These are actors who disappear into the public space, and for that reason, against whom deterrence is ineffective. With Al-Qaeda there was at least still this camp in Afghanistan …

You mean the “cave system” of Tora Bora – does that even exist?
Exactly! One doesn’t even know. Okay, there were training camps, and those weren’t located in the middle of our own society. But think of the Hamburg cell of Al-Qaeda, for example – it would be a bad idea to bomb the territory of Hamburg!

Hamburg’s citizens found it impossible to comprehend how a suburb of their own city was connected with September 11^th.
And what should the British do with the people who attacked the Underground? We have made ourselves strong with all our equipment, but we lack an object to use it on. That’s because this object takes on none of the forms we are familiar with.

On a map of Europe, we see post-heroic societies everywhere we see a state is burning out. They range from dark red to almost ash-black spots on the map. But in the middle there is Switzerland, glowing white – or frozen? In Switzerland, everything is different: there, every man has his gun in a drawer. And Swiss society seems both frozen and heroic at the same time.
One should not fall victim to the imagination of the Swiss. I am there occasionally and indeed deal with the high-ranked military officers and general staff of the Swiss military. Switzerland has had no active war experience for centuries. The heroism of the Swiss society consists in a touching play of the imagination, whereby for a long time, Switzerland had the largest army in Europe. Only for a moment, when the Bundeswehr and Nationale Volksarmee were combined and Germany had 800,000 soldiers, did we have more than the Swiss. Yet, no one can say how this army would do in battle. Above all, against who? It’s merely a daydream. Until 1989, the enemy would have been the Red Army, but they didn’t need to conquer Switzerland: had Switzerland been cut off from the capitalist environment, how could its society have continued to exist? The Swiss would have grabbed their weapons out of the closet – but I imagine in these circumstances it would have been useless. There’s also a problem in view of the new threat of extraterritorial terrorism: Swiss soldiers are not allowed to carry weapons once they have left Switzerland. When the Swiss army was stationed in the Balkans, they had to be watched over and protected by Austria. Pardon me for saying so, but that was a situation of operative humiliation. The weapons ban has since been lifted, but only moderately. Switzerland hides behind its neutral status in a way that makes one occasionally ask, “Boys, do you actually mean that, seriously?” If one considers oneself neutral, one never faces serious conflict. Because of European history and its geographical location, Switzerland has been able to couple its luxurious position as a place of capital accumulation with a warrior’s imagination.

That seems to keep this society lively; it creates a sense of community. The gun in the cabinet reminds you of what it is going to cost to be Swiss.
Yes, but the suicide rate in Switzerland is nevertheless astonishingly high. There are twice as many suicides in Zürich as in Berlin in a normal year. And Berlin is the capital of suicide in Germany. And Zürich is twenty times smaller than Berlin – not to mention that Berlin’s social problems are of a whole other league than Zürich’s. So perhaps people in Switzerland should seriously think over whether or not keeping a gun at home should be allowed. Especially since there is no thinkable threat in which a rapid mobilization of their forces would be necessary. It’s more about folklore and traditionalism than having something to do with effectiveness.

If Switzerland constitutes an imaginary heroic society, is America then not the very model of a heroic society? Since Vietnam, America has always managed to fight costly battles against enemies, on enemy terrain, at heavy cost to the society.
That’s right, but those were economic costs; no real sacrifices were made. The human losses that the Americans suffered in all wars since the Civil War, which was very bloody, are not so high, relatively. As many men died on the first day of the Battle of Somme in 1916 as America lost during the entire Vietnam War. For every 1,000 German men who were mobilized in WWI, 156 died, and the rate was only half that in Vietnam. One has to see this relation. On the other hand, it’s true that the Americans have two things available that enable them to act. First, a lower class that has few other career options as the military. There is a monstrously high number of blacks in the marine infantry – though naturally not the F16-pilots! – and then, religion has a different meaning in America, namely that of a sacrifice generator. The American’s weakness, his tendency of partitioning the world into good and evil, which is basically an intellectual blockade, also defines their strength. Namely, as a motivational resource to fight against evil. Obviously, we Europeans see everything in a more complex fashion and with far fewer intellectual blockades, because we’ve weaned ourselves away from the good/evil schema. But because of this, we lack motivational resources. In short, we are frozen in reflexivity, while the Americans are predominantly naïve. We usually see this only as our superiority – “Ah, how are they so dumb?” – but it’s not that simple. There are unequal costs and benefits. In this way, the Americans are more heroic. But they are and were at no point in time a heroic society in the way that Germany once was.

Why is that?
They have never cultivated such a form of symmetric nationalism. The intensity of the enmity in 1914 against the Russians, or against the French as a form of love-hate, has never been thinkable on the American continent since the success of the Federalists.

America’s position geographically isn’t particularly advantageous with regards to the heroic: it’s neither surrounded by friends nor by enemies.
They have also avoided that. The argument of the federalists was that the federation must be strengthened to avoid a development in which Maine could start a war against Connecticut – as witnessed in Europe. The sole incident was the Civil War, which was correspondingly bloody and costly. The confrontations with Canada and Mexico were carried out in a completely different form from what happened in Europe. The Americans led many small wars throughout the 19th and 20^th Centuries – against Spain, and the Philippines. First the Indians had to be exterminated. Then against the Mexicans in a border dispute. Those were wars that are comparable to those that Germany had in Southwest Africa and Southeast Africa. Recently there is talk of these again, of the Herero Uprising, and Lieutenant Lothar of Trotha. These were wars that didn’t occupy Germans so much at the time; there were losses, but they weren’t so terribly high. Our society could still afford one exotic war with few victims.

Which crisis areas are going to be the future battlefields of post-heroic societies?
The belt that goes around the zone of affluence begins in Colombia with the drug mafia conflicts and stretches over the whole continent of Africa. Earlier I would have said that it is essentially limited to sub-Saharan Africa. But in the meantime, the instability of the entire situation has become clear – Darfur is an example of this. The crisis area starts with Chad and then goes deep into the Sahara, reaching somewhere around the northern edge. It then goes on to central Asia, south Asia, then the big pacific is peaceful but beyond it lies again Colombia. In this large space, in which wealth and poverty are constantly colliding, in which immense wealth is possible due to the presence of natural resources but unequally distributed. These are also regions, which, despite terrible poverty, show enormous growth demographically, meaning that economic growth is eaten up by demographic growth. Saudi Arabia is an interesting case: they were still enormously rich in the ’70s. They are poorer today, not because the oil prices have fallen but because their population has increased so drastically. This is the zone, in which war has become endemic. In contrast to classical wars, which begin with a declaration and end with a treaty, the conflicts in this region are smoldering. No one knows exactly when they began. The war in Afghanistan didn’t begin with the invasion of the Glorious Red Army in 1970 – but then one doesn’t really know when. Or if the war is over for that matter. Angola is probably over. Or is there only a pause? Good, Savimbi is dead – but who will come after Savimbi? That the bloodiest war in post-War history happened in the Congo near the big lakes is only slowly starting to be known. 2.9 million dead in the Congo. Many don’t even know that today. That is the core of our future problems: the wars blend together, and the border between organized crime and waging a war is not always clear.

Wars have no fixed location now; they have temporary locations. In Black Hawk Down, I see an African city in which an American helicopter lands. And that leads to a war-like conflict. But it is no longer the war in which we move in order to attack a front. And the Americans could abruptly depart when it became too hot for them.
First, creating a front and a battlefield were dependent on symmetric actors, actors of a similar kind who meet each other to decide the thing. Asymmetry consists exactly in avoiding these direct conflicts. The Spanish invented this in their guerilla war against Napoleon, by never appearing on the battlefield. They announced, “We’re expanding the war over all of Spain. And we’re extending it in time as well.” Mao Tse Tung later named that “the long war of endurance.” So that Napoleon’s armies and marshals with all their skill didn’t have any opponents to fight. They were worn down. Asymmetric warfare always consists in avoiding confronting the opponent where he is most skilled and attacking him where he is weak. In the classical guerrilla war those are supply and communication lines. And with terrorism, it’s the notorious psychic instability of post-heroic societies. Secondly, the abrupt departure is naturally not completely unproblematic. Particularly, when the Americans saw the pictures of soldiers being dragged through the dirt in the streets with the failure of the arrest of Warlord Mohamed Aidid in Mogadishu, the subject of Black Hawk Down, it became clear to Clinton and company: we’ve gotta get out of here. And they were pretty abrupt about it. There is an important interview that a British correspondent from The Independent held with Osama bin Laden then, in which bin Laden said, “We would never had thought that the Americans were so cowardly.” The abrupt departure after only eighteen casualties was perceived as cowardliness. The conclusions to draw from that were, if we hit them even nearer to the skin, to produce a few more casualties, then they will retreat even more. Then the bombing strategy began. First in the embassies in east Africa, always with the idea, they’ll just run away. And with September 11^th, it became a decisive point in American politics to do something. We couldn’t retreat any further; the bombing had reached home. In this respect, Mogadishu was terribly costly. Because it showed the opposition that you can achieve enormous political effects with only a few men lost. That’s why the U-Bahn in Berlin tends to be a target of attack. Terrorists would probably not attack the military command central in Potsdam – to what end? That wouldn’t unsettle anyone. People would say in that case: “Well, that’s just a risk of the job!” But by targeting the U-Bahn, you really affect people.

It was exactly the same with us when the Baader-Meinhoff-Bande/ RAF – fifteen people at the core – accomplished relatively little damage in the civilian areas but left the country frozen for many years. There as well, no one thought that the German state would behave so cowardly.
But it was the state. So in the middle of the ’70s it acted cowardly. After the Palestinian attack on the Israeli Olympic Team in Munich, a few of the perpetrators were arrested. But they were immediately let go after a plane was taken hostage – the government immediately agreed to an exchange. This behavior changed with the occupation of the embassy in Stockholm. And it reached its high point with Schleyer, with Helmut Schmidt’s decision during the Landshut hijacking crisis, where rather than negotiate they sent the Commando of the GSG9 to storm the plane and slug the thing out. That was a monstrously resolute way to react. I don’t believe that a Bundeskanzler Willy Brandt would have decided on a heroic basis. Hanns Martin Schleyer was literally sacrificed by Schmidt; one has to recognize that. Sacrificed for the state. Friedrich Zimmerman, who sat for the CSU on the crisis management team, admitted that they understood each other, because they had all been Wehrmacht lieutenants. In this situation, they put themselves back into their command posts, and under enemy fire, their heroic behavior was beneficial. But this generation is no longer in politics. And whether we could bring such a strength of nerves to bear today, I’m not too sure. For Schmidt and a few others at least the remembrance of WWII was a resource to calm their nerves, to cool down.

That seems to be an essential third factor for the future of the post-heroic society: the future generations live farther and farther from the heroic past. Is there any way back at all?
There is a form of adherence to the past in accumulated institutional intelligence here. What we Germans like to call Vergangenheitsbewältigung, “the processes of dealing with the past.” Nevertheless, every society has the chance to begin anew and to make new decisions. But the longer the generations live, and the higher the proportion of old people there are in a society, the less room there is for new beginnings. That is something that one shouldn’t underestimate, the experience of a society of meeting a large challenge. Those are the resources of collective remembrances that one can positively hold on to. In the form of memory, in founding myths. “The Day of Bern,” 1954, the day Germany won the World Cup, belongs to the old Bundesrepublik; it was felt as the true foundation of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland. The Wirtschaftswunder (“Economic wonder”) provided only a substructure and cohesiveness. But to be able to say, “Yes, okay, we can succeed when we compete against an equally-matched opponent under fair conditions. We are no longer the defeated from ’45 …” When one thinks that many from the World Cup of ’54 had worn the uniform of the Wehrmacht up until ’45, then one recognizes the form of psychic regeneration that came with this football victory. For a long time this victory had a meaning that later successes of the German team could never recover.

It was at least attempted to give the day of the Wall’s fall on November 9^th, 1989, a mythic character. But that didn’t work at all. The heroic in this historical moment was felt very cautiously.
Yes, but the 9^th of November wasn’t turned into a national holiday, since we switched it to October 3^rd, which, considered in retrospect, wasn’t a good decision. We also didn’t possess the ability to tell the story of November 9^th well enough, so that it could obtain the status of a foundation myth.

Instead it was explained that the wall would have fallen anyway …
Yes! And the GDR was completely bankrupt and the Russians would have had no desire to keep it – in this respect the movement didn’t play a big role. One should really keep that in view: it may all be true! The GDR was actually bankrupt, the Russians actually didn’t have any desire, but the storming of the Bastille was also not the thing it was explained to be. There were only a few sick soldiers, there hadn’t been real prisoners in the Bastille for a long time – and at the end, they massacred the poor guards after their capitulation. But what a story the French made of it! What a story! That, we neglected to do. But it was attempted: for the first time in German history, we had a successful revolution – 1830/32 was nothing, 1848/49 also nothing, 1918/19 nothing again – but 1989: finally and now! But what should I say? Skepticism and deconstructivism were too powerful. It would have required too much of a deeply post-heroic society to put such a heroic epic in the center. That’s why it didn’t work.