Richard Bessel - Violence: A Modern Obsession

Violence

Also by Richard Bessel

Germany 1945: From War to Peace (2009)

(ed., with Claudia Haake), Forced Removal in the Modern World (2009)

Nazism and War (2004)

(ed., with Dirk Schumann), Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (2003)

Germany after the First World War (1993)

Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism. The Storm Troopers in Eastern Germany 1925-1934 (1984)

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015

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Copyright 2015 by Richard Bessel

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Violence, it seems, is on everyones mind. It is constantly in the news. It is ever present in popular entertainment. The subject of violence has given rise to an enormous historical, sociological, and philosophical literature; it is regarded as a fundamental problem affecting social, political and interpersonal relations. Human history, so it seems, is often understood as a history of violence. The violence may be planned and deliberate or it may be an eruption of uncontrolled passion; it may be lauded or it may be condemned; it may be overt or it may consist largely in the threat. But it appears never to be out of the frame. Violence, Michael Geyer has written, has a lot in common with dirt:

Much as the latter is misplaced matter, the former is misdirected energy. [...] Both are basic facts of human life. They seem random and arbitrary, yet they are by-products of ingenuity and end results of great ambition. Much effort is expended to clean them up. Indeed, such efforts are considered essential to the well-being of individuals and communities. Pollution, to use the technical term for dirt, is just as intolerable as violence. Both threaten the very existence of society or community. Nevertheless, violence much like pollution comes back time and again, because society and community, in generating bonds of belonging and the security of social conditions that maintains them, are unimaginable without them. Like dirt, violence may not be what you want, but it is what you get.

Yet violence, like dirt and pollution, is a matter of perception as well as of fact. The exploration of the history of violence therefore should not be limited to describing various manifestations of what some might assume to be an unchanging feature of the human character and condition. Attempts to measure violence are as frequent as they are problematical. Violence is not a constant, nor are perceptions of violence. If violence is misdirected energy, it follows that we have a sense of what properly directed energy is.

This book is about perceptions of violence in the modern, western world. It does not aim to measure violence an undertaking so complicated and subjective that it is probably destined to fail but rather to discuss a remarkable shift in attitudes towards violence, a shift that has affected politics, warfare, legal codes, social life, culture and private interpersonal relations. This shift has occurred against the background, on the one hand, of a conviction that we have lived through a period of quite extraordinary violence and, on the other, of a heightened sensitivity towards violence to the point of obsession. This shift, how it came about and what its effects may be, provides the subject of this book.

The heightened sensitivity towards violence in recent decades has rested on the widespread belief that our world is more violent than ever a belief that seems more to reflect how people perceive their world than it is based on what actually may have been seen. Expressions of the belief that the contemporary world is uniquely violent are legion. In his foreword to the 2002 World Health Organizations World Report on Violence and Health , Nelson Mandela began by observing: The twentieth century will be remembered as a century marked by violence. It burdens us with its legacy of mass destruction, of violence inflicted on a scale never seen and never possible before in human history. it was a century whose most enduring images are the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and the gates of Auschwitz. In a public lecture presented at Columbia University on 12 March 2002 and published in the Boston Review a few months later, Charles Tilly began with the assertion:

More collective violence was visited on the world (in absolute terms, and probably per capita as well) in the twentieth century than in any century of the previous ten thousand years. Chinas Warring States period, Sargon of Akkads conquests, the Mongol expansion, and Europes Thirty Years War were times of terrible destruction. But earlier wars deployed nothing comparable to the death-dealing armaments and state-backed exterminations of civilians characteristic of twentieth-century conflicts.

Tilly, who died in 2008, had spent much of his career as a historical sociologist charting patterns of collective violence through the centuries. In his lecture, delivered in the shadow of the attack on New Yorks World Trade Center (just a few miles from where Tilly spoke), he articulated the widely held view that, in terms of violence, we have lived in the worst of times, that the twentieth century was the century of violence.

Even more explicit about the violent character of the twentieth century is the American psychologist David G. Winter, who in 2000 looked back on the century just ended:

The twentieth century turned out to be not so much the American Century (as Henry Luce claimed in a 1941 magazine essay)

Similar assessments emerged in western Europe, not least in Germany (which contributed more than its share of the violence of twentieth-century European history). There the left-wing academic and public intellectual (and former doctor) Till Bastian introduced his book, The Century of Death (published in 2000), with the declaration: In view of the facts, we know this [...] only too well, this twentieth century [...] was hardly the best but certainly the most bloody era of human history. For Bastian, as for so many people, the key question is: How could it possibly have come to that? This is a question that has concerned many people, and not only in Germany.

Niall Ferguson, whose approach is rather different than that of Till Bastian, based his book and television series The War of the World on a similar premise: The hundred years after 1900 were without question the bloodiest century in modern history, far more violent in relative as well as absolute terms than any previous era. Nevertheless, the question is important, and reflects a need to understand the outbursts of deadly violence that occurred in so many regions of the world during the twentieth century.