With the outbreak of World War I, it seemed at first that rumors of approaching internal disintegration had been greatly exaggerated, as all the aggressive potential of fear and anxiety and the dehumanizing and demonizing imagery of prewar domestic enemies were mobilized against the foreign enemy at the gate. The German Burgfrieden (civil peace) and the French union sacree (sacred union) were explicit attempts to create solidarity at home (declaring an end to parliamentry strife) by focusing attention on the danger from without. Moreover, those sectors of society which had remained to a greater or lesser degree excluded from the nation, such as the socialists, the Jews, and the Catholics (who carried the memory of the Kulturkampf in Germany and of the separation of Church and state in France), along with other regional and ethnic minorities still not wholly integrated into la Grande Nation or the Reich, rallied to the flag in a show of patriotism meant to legitimize them as full members of the national community. Similarly, disgruntled intellectuals, skeptical bohemians, disengaged artists, and detached scholars, some of whom had already undergone a “nationalist revival” in the years immediately preceding the war, now seized the opportunity of this uplifting event of cataclysmic military confrontation and took up the national cause. If the enemy was now clearly defined and easily identifiable, so, too, the victims of the war were obviously all those who fought for one’s own nation. For a moment, then, the fog and confusion of war was accompanied by a miraculous clarification of identities.
Yet as the casualties mounted at the front and deprivation and mourning increased in the rear, the classifications of foe and friend, victim and perpetrator began shifting once more. This was a fundamental transformation, occurring simultaneously with the unprecedented expansion of the state’s powers of mobilization and production, control and surveillance, propaganda and coercion. It has had far-reaching consequences for the rest of the twentieth century.
While propaganda and the brutalizing effects of the fighting enhanced a view of the world as divided between demonic foreign enemies and one’s own victimized nation, the peculiar conditions in the trenches of the Western Front created a sense of solidarity between the fighting troops on both sides of the line and a growing resentment of the rear. Moreover, the scope and relentlessness of this new type of industrial killing also created a sense of breathless, if often morbid, fascination and, for some, even an overpowering enchantment and intoxication with the horror being perpetrated on the battlefield. The soldiers could thus both hate the war and experience a sinister attraction to its desperate camaraderie and ruthless, indifferent, wholly unambiguous, outright destructiveness; they could both hate the men across no-man’s-land and appreciate that they alone could empathize with their own predicament, due to that bond of blood and suffering that had been sealed between them. The “real” enemy was therefore to be found in the rear, among the staff officers, the noncombatants, the politicians and industrialists, even the workers in the factories, all those who were perceived as having shirked the fighting and thus having excluded themselves from that community of battle increasingly celebrated by the fighting troops. This was a grim, probably inevitable glorification of one’s helplessness, of pain and death, just as much as of heroism and sacrifice; it was, that is, a glorification of victimhood.
The community of solidarity both crossed over the border and shrank into itself. Precisely by fighting the enemy across the line, combat soldiers shared a frontline solidarity and a sense of alienation from their respective civilian hinterlands. This imaginary battle community continued to exert a tremendous influence on postwar society long after the fighting had ceased. Made of embittered and at times silent, at other times rebellious and violent survivors of the front, this community was torn between a desire to be reintegrated into society and a sense of being separated from those who had not been “there.” This sense of separation was mythologized by certain extremist organizations as an insurmountable barrier, more difficult to traverse than even the no-man’s-land into which the soldiers had stared with horror from both sides of the front for four long years.
A sense of victimhood and alienation breeds an urge to look for culprits, for those who had perpetrated the slaughter and in the process both eschewed the suffering and profited from it. Hence the transformation of frontline solidarity into a quest for the “true” enemy, the “real” cause of evil. And because the evil was so keenly felt and of such vast dimensions, so, too, should be the punishment of the guilty. And yet the identity of that “true” enemy remained elusive, making for still greater rage and frustration, expressed in both passivity and listlessness, violence and brutality. If the foreign enemy had become one’s comrade in suffering, if the glorious war for which one had sacrificed so much had been in vain, and if patriotism had been whipped up by a lying propaganda machine run by gutless intellectuals safely closeted in the rear, then how was one to make sense of it all?
Disaster can be more easily confronted if traced to a cause, human culprits, superhuman agency, and natural forces. Destruction may not always be rooted in identifiable evil, but it often creates imaginary carriers of perdition. Scapegoats have the advantage of being readily accessible and defenseless, and if slaughtering them may not prevent future catastrophe, it can have a powerful psychological effect. For bewilderment and inaction in the face of catastrophe sap the will to hold out, while identifying a cause and acting against it helps cope with trauma, creating the illusion of fighting back and generating the energy and determination needed to ensure survival. Hence imagination and metaphor are crucial in liberating people from the perceived stranglehold of uncontrollable, invincible forces. In other words, the aftermath of disaster may have fewer devastating psychological and physical consequences for survivors if they can, in turn, victimize their real or imaginary enemies.