Thoughts on war: Otl Aicher, “the contaminated thinking” (Published on 07/03/2025)
Very readable and instructive are – not least because of their increasingly topical relevance – reports by those who were forced into military service and participation in the war despite being as opponents of the regime and war as such are.
Standing out insofar is the book “innenseiten des kriegs” (“insides of war”) by Otto “Otl” Aicher from 1985. Otl Aicher, born on 13/05/1922 in Ulm and deceased on 01/09/1991 in Günzburg, was an important German graphic designer. He was married to Inge Aicher-Scholl, the eldest sister of Hans and Sophie Scholl, members of the “White Rose” group who called for resistance against the National Socialist dictatorship and were executed for this on 22/02/1943.
Otl Aicher grew up in a home critical of the Nazis and came into contact with the Scholl siblings through a school friendship. As a convinced Catholic, he refused to join the Hitler Youth and was therefore imprisoned in 1937 and barred from taking his school-leaving exams in 1941. In the same year, Aicher was conscripted into the Wehrmacht and turned down an offer to become an officer. Due to a self-inflicted injury to his hand, he was able to avoid military service for a while, but was nevertheless drafted and sent to the Eastern Front. He deserted at the beginning of 1945 and successfully hid until the end of the war.
In 1985, he published his book “innenseiten des kriegs”, written entirely in small letters, in which he describes his experiences with the military, the war and the social zeitgeist of the time with unsparing candor.
Some excerpts from it are reproduced here as a reminder and as food for thought.
In the chapter “das verseuchte denken” (“contaminated thinking”), Otl Aicher reflects on the significance of the belief in natural science and the transfer of the rules of nature to human civilization and culture as causes of fascist thinking in the 1930s and 1940s (source: Otl Aicher, “innenseiten des kriegs” [1985], p. 21 ff. [translation from German language]):
“the contaminated thinking
fascism was a popular-radical consequence of the scientific age. fascism was the overcoming of metaphysics in favor of a scientific explanation of the world. as modern biology had explained life, as spencer and darwin had described it as a world principle, as the motor of evolutionary history, it should also be among humans: the struggle for existence, the right of the strongest, the victory of selection should be realized in society just as they are effective in nature. fascism is neither animalistic nor a devilry, it is a social darwinism made up with german thoroughness.
it is simply not true that the nazis were a sudden outbreak of something unpredictable, something totally anomalous. they are in tune with the times. they translate science, the state of the art of science, into politics. they are technicians of the zeitgeist.
it is simply not true that breeding selection and extermination as a principle of the development of all living things descended from a clear german sky into a party program. the biologism that had twisted the brains had twisted them everywhere.
for me, i will not allow hitler to be portrayed as a remote criminal whose actions cannot be rationally explained. hitler is as normal as all the villains who defended power and profit in the name of progress and thus the destruction of life not worth living. it is too cheap to blame the nazis for all the crimes oneself has committed, just because they never made a fuss about it and made their methods audible and visible to everyone.
in the nineteenth century, in the name of scientific thinking, out of conviction, lives were trampled on as fundamentally as in the third reich. and i will not allow, at least not for myself, the treatment of the jews to be portrayed as a delusion of hell, when all americans, englishmen, frenchmen, spanishmen, portuguesemen and russians have treated black, red and yellow peoples cruelly enough.
the difference is that the nazis did not commit their crimes behind closed doors, not hidden under the cloak of victorian morality, but as a proclaimed proof of a new, scientific worldview. according to this, the poor and weak must fall as a necessary selection of the higher and better. every dollar millionaire today still believes in the same philosophers of progress and higher development, of struggle and victory over the weaker. he would never admit this and does not need to, because it is beyond his personal view. he leaves it to the self-effectiveness of money to create clarity, no matter how tolerant and compassionate he may be in his inner circle.
it may be that fewer indians were killed than jews, but what is certain is that the call to kill was not the order of a state machine, it was based on a conviction that was disseminated as scientific knowledge. does it become legitimate by leaving it to private incentive and private use? the new thing about hitler is that he had this problem solved by social engineers using social engineering and created new kinds of killing machines that could almost save the expense of wars.
even to an american who may consider himself enlightened, even today the rich are considered successful by their achievements, the poor miserable by their failures. welfare for the poor is an interference with the laws of nature, equal opportunities in education, in employment is a disruption of the social struggle for the survival of the better, inhibiting progress, selection. the power of the white man rests not on bullets and capital, but on the distinction of history, which was and is nothing other than a struggle for existence.
peace? peace does not occur in nature. only weaklings, cowards who cannot fight, whimper for peace.
those at the top can see themselves as the product of the selection of the capable.
i would like to know what a fascist is? and that’s why i don’t like to have my path to rational insight blocked by demonizing the whole thing, possibly out of my own protective interests.
i don’t want to react morally and emotionally to the nazis. and i also don’t want to have my urge for knowledge blocked or diverted by allowing myself to be turned onto emotions. i want to know. and for this i need the insight that there are certainly differences in the methods of extermination, suppression and gagging, but possibly not in the demand for domination.
there is more in the dock here than the idiocy and crimes of the nazis. there is the faith of a new age in the dock, the faith in natural science and the transfer of the rules of nature to the laws and behavioral norms of human civilization and culture.
the belief that nature and culture are identical is in the dock here.
and this belief, the belief that man is a talking animal, is the common property of all those who claim to be in tune with the times.
who dares to question the age of reason, of enlightenment, of natural science? who dares to explain society on the basis of cultural goal projections instead of vital drives? who dares to regard value systems as equally strong drivers of human behavior as biologically explainable drives and instincts?
the age of reason was indisputably one of the most important cultural epochs of mankind. but isn’t the age of enlightenment over as soon as biology is placed above sociology and cultural studies? has no one ever doubted that there is a connection between bolshevik show trials, german gas chambers and american blackmail competition, indeed that there is a connection between the greatest wars in world history and the recognition of the laws of nature as the ultimate truth?
and in passing: why is it that carnegie, rockefeller and hitler had such a great interest in culture? Isn’t the public demonstration of the will to culture, which extends as far as the subway in moscow, an indication of the will to repress?
the accused is an intellectual plague. hitler is its most developed manifestation.
but who is its accuser?
it won’t be found any time soon. actually, it should be the poor, the weak, the miserable, the outcasts themselves who pull down the curtain. but what church is not so steeped in blood that it could refer to the teachings of its founder?
christianity should think the story the other way around, namely from the bottom up: man reveals himself in the weak, but where has this christianity gone?
man continues to live at the expense of man. those who rise up stand on the bodies of the slain. this is not just a bitter experience, it is not just to be understood as a lesson of history, it is not just a reality to be accepted. it is a belief, a doctrine of salvation, it is the gospel of the modern age.
the modern age has uncovered the realization that every natural phenomenon must have a natural cause, indeed that every phenomenon is triggered by a cause, which was an important step. the law of cause and effect not only made the success of modern natural science possible and the success of the technology based on it, which allows us to penetrate from the elementary particles of the elementary particles into the vastness of the cosmos. this law also removed the devils, the ideas, the forms, entities and metaphysical causes and the dear god from the explanation of nature. the real arises through realities.
that was an epochal progress. unfortunately, it was also a fallacy. it is not true that the real is created by the real. that certainly applies to the explanation of nature. but man, human society, human culture?
there are causal causes, but there are also final causes, objectives. and in the area of human culture, objectives have the same value as causality in nature. if nothing happens in nature without causality, almost nothing happens in human life without projection. human life is not an inevitable process of development, but a design. no matter how much of human life is predetermined in the sense of biological data, it still remains a highly self-directed process for which there is a plan, a goal projection, an expectation. man is not a biological being, but a cultural being, which means that his drives are not causal, but final.
nobody should want to diminish the importance of the natural sciences even a little. the disaster does not lie in their revolution of causal thinking. the disaster is the application of scientific thinking on culture, up to the murder of millions of people. the critical-analytical tracing of causal chains has led to the disastrous success of understanding the world only as a scientific object, as a developmental process in the sense of a causal chain.
in reality, man is an extra-natural being in the sense of causality through his self-determination, through his own achievement, through his own will, through his own control. he seeks something in his life that does not exist in natural beings, he seeks a meaning. man lives according to the projection he creates of himself.
that is the reason why ideas, forms, entities and god play such an important role in his thinking. but they were believed to be dead, together with metaphysics finally removed from correct thinking. only in mathematics and logic did one have to stick to the fact that causalities can also be designed. only here is there the aspect of freedom in thinking, of play, of free positing. for the rest, the world is determined, mechanistic, causal, only in the succession of the laws of nature, only through breeding and the success of the stronger is freedom possible. those who thought that freedom would be lost through this integration of man into natural processes were soon to be surprised. it is true that those supposedly outcast by nature, those damaged by nature, the biologically inferior soon lost all freedom, they became slaves of the stronger and pure objects of exploitation. in return, however, the new masters, the racially pure, the stronger, the victors in the struggle for existence received all conceivable freedoms, first and foremost the freedom proclaimed by nature itself, the freedom to exterminate the weaker. the new masters were given the unprecedented freedom to invent new methods of extermination, to be masters of war, murder and impoverishment. and as the germans are, they do everything on principle.
the nazis did not fall from the sky, they did not rise from hell. they were the consistent normal citizens of the new era. they differed from the others in that they said what they thought and that they systematically tackled what others did on occasion. it did not break their tongues when they spoke of wanting to exterminate others. extermination was the most natural thing in nature.
also marxism, which at its core was committed to an ideal projection of a class-free society, borrowed from the scientific mechanics of necessity. history had its inevitability and took place in class struggles. this was not too far removed from arbitrarily disposing of people’s lives in the name of the laws of history. even when it comes to a fraternal future for all people, no one, neither friend nor foe, is safe from the claws of the struggle for existence. in case of doubt, the secret police know better what is necessary for development than any party member, no matter how high up. but at least marxism contains a view of history that would have been expected of christianity: the future of history belongs to the small, the exploited, the impoverished, the exhausted. the lords, the rich, the strong, the powerful, the victors in the struggle of nature will fall, not the strong will win the struggle for existence, but whoever works. and work is not a principle of nature.
but if it should be so that the strongest will be the survivor, then the bestiality of the blond beast surpassed all, had to surpass all, as a matter of principle. the second best of the beasts is already the loser.”
The most powerful means against the repetition of history are remembrance and commemoration.
(Head picture:
Bird between grave crosses on the
US military cemetery Hamm/Luxembourg,
September 2024)
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