Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying Read Online Free PDF Page A

completed does a measure of freedom and a spectrum for possible behavior open up. This phenomenon is extreme even in peacetime, and it is the more so duringwar, when acts of battle are no longer simulation, but everyday reality, and one’s ownsurvival may well depend on the smooth functioning of one’s unit. At that point, the total institution becomes atotal group, allowing only specific spectrums of action precisely defined by rank and command structure. 19 In comparison with civilian roles of every sort, theframe of reference of soldiers at war is characterized by the lack of alternatives. One of the soldiers, whose conversations with a comrade were secretly recorded, put it so: “We’re like a machinegun. A weapon for waging war.” 20
    In decisions of what, when, and with whom, a soldier’s behavior is not subject to his ownperception,interpretation, anddecision making. The leeway with which a command can be interpreted accordingto one’s own estimation and abilities is extremely small. Depending on the circumstances, the significance ofroles within frames of reference varies considerably. Under the pluralistic conditions ofcivilian life, it can be quite negligible. Under the conditions of war or other extreme situations, though, the significance can be total.
    Parts of various civilian roles can also be transferred to the military context, where they become matters of life or death. A harmless action like transferring files can suddenly become murderous, if the context changes. As early as 1962, in his seminal work
TheDestruction of the European Jews,
Holocaust historianRaul Hilberg underscored the negative potential of people employing civilian skills for homicidal purposes:
    Everypoliceman charged with keeping order could become a guard in a ghetto or for a rail transport. Every lawyer at the Main Office for Imperial Security was a candidate for taking over a task force; every finance specialist at the Department of Economic Administration was seen as a natural choice for serving in aconcentration camp. In other words, all necessary operations were carried out using the personnel that was available at the time. Wherever one chooses to draw the border with active participation, the machinery of annihilation represented an impressivecross-section of the German populace. 21
    Applied to war, that would mean: every mechanic could repairbombers whose deadly payloads killed thousands of people; every butcher could, as a member of a procurement enterprise, be complicit in the plundering of occupied areas. During World War II,Lufthansapilots flew long-range sorties in theirFw 200s not to transport passengers, but tosink Britishmerchantships in theAtlantic. Yet because their activity in and of itself didn’t change, those who played these roles rarely saw reason to engage in moral reflection or to refuse to do their jobs. Their basic activity remained the same.
I NTERPRETIVE P ARADIGM : W AR I S W AR
    Specificinterpretiveparadigms are tightly connected with the sets of demands that accompany every role.Doctors see an illness differentlythan do patients, just as perpetrators view a crime differently than do victims. The paradigms that direct theseinterpretations are, in a sense, mini frames of reference. Everyinterpretive paradigm, of course, includes an entire universe of alternative interpretations and implies nonknowledge. That is disadvantageous in situations so new that previous experience does more to hinder than to help our ability to deal with them. 22 Paradigms are effective in familiar contexts since they remove the need to engage in complex considerations and calculations. One knows what one is dealing with and what the right recipe is for solving a problem. As predetermined, routinized frames for ordering what is happening at a given moment, interpretive paradigms structure our lives to an extraordinarily high degree. They range from stereotypes (“Jews are all …”) to entire cosmologies (“God will not