After more than eighty years of more or less peaceful coexistence in Europe, the word war first seems unimaginable, then threatening.
Those five letters have crept into other words that have nothing to do with war. We use expressions like “kleinkriegen” — literally “to small-war someone” — when somebody wants to flex a little power. Or the question “hast du das mitgekriegt?” — literally “did you war it along with you?,” meaning simply “did you catch that?” — when heated discussions are steaming through people’s heads.
And today it’s not just the word but the images and videos that bombard us daily in the media. Especially in the social media. Again and again I try to imagine how parents and children feel, having to live right in the middle of a war. When ordinary life is nothing but a memory. When the sirens warn of the next attack. What it’s like to wake up every single day that might be your last.
Do I even get this, with my power of imagination?
No, hardly. Because my life so far has had nothing directly to do with the brutal, deadly war going on right now. And that’s only because I happened to be born on the safe side of the map. No merit of mine. Just luck.
Do I get this packed into words?
Kurt Tucholsky, whose sentences cut like razor blades, brought the horrors of war closer to me. Not with sound and image, but with words. With mockery, poems, and reportage, Kurt Tucholsky described war. And in doing so, he opened the door for me to one of the darkest chapters of human history. Ever since I devoured his books, I’ve been repulsed by any kind of fascism or appetite for war. That’s why I refused to enter the Swiss Army as a recruit. Not because of the fabric, the colour of the uniform, or the levelling of everyone to the same mould. But simply because I did not want to aim at something that breathes. I still remember clearly having to report to the barracks to be “assessed.” I prepared well for that assessment, because under no circumstances did I want to become a member of an army. Six months in detention for refusing service? Sure, bring it on. My small stomach ulcer at the time spared me a stint in a cell. Yes, my stomach is perfectly fine again now.
What remains of all that?
Shooting at a person or an animal still strikes me as hideous. Yes, yes, I know the story about self-defence.
Do they get that pulled off?
And today, in the 21st century? War is once again an everyday word, one that barely contains the hideousness of the practice.
Sometimes the question nags at me: how might the history of war have unfolded if women had shaped political power over the last tens of thousands of years?
What might a matriarchy have made war look like, as an instrument of political power?
When I look at the design of weapons, one shape forces itself on you, impossible to overlook. Bombs, rifles, revolvers, spears and cannons all seem to have borrowed from the same blueprint for their layout.
Would women have developed the same arsenal for waging war?
Oh yes, what certain politicians to the south are spouting these days robs me of my sleep. The idea of solving some problem in the global political situation by means of war strikes me as far too simple. Treating destruction and death as a means to an end feels pretty inhumane and unimaginative.
Now, there are of course examples where the armed violence of war did remove a problem from the world. Perhaps other political solutions, with less bloodshed, might have been possible. But throughout human history, conflicts and wars have repeatedly been offered up as the only possible solution.
The Second World War, when the Nazi regime was stopped by military force. Or the American Civil War, which ended slavery in the US, but not its consequences. Oh, and then there’s Switzerland in 1847, with the so-called Sonderbund War. A short war that led to the Federal Constitution of 1848.
And still — despite the Sonderbund, despite the Civil War, despite everything war has supposedly solved — I still prefer an old line: Make Love Not War!
That line is still lodged in my ears and my memory.
And as long as it stays there, not everything is lost.
