Pop Culture Warfare: More than sixty years after the end of World War II, war has re-entered German pop culture.
“War is as frightful as heaven’s pestilence,
Yet it is good, is it heaven’s will as that is.”
(Friedrich Schiller, “The Death of Wallenstein”)
Television, in its own way, tells the truth. The fact that the war in Afghanistan isn’t merely a humanitarian intervention, or the containment of a regional conflict with military means, or any other of the euphemisms that have been used in the past, is evident in a TV production that recently aired in Germany. On a Wednesday night, the TV guide recommended: “‘Foreign Deployment’. War Movie. Germany, 2012”. The “war-like” mission in Afghanistan (another euphemism!) had surely been molded into entertainment before, but at least in Germany many of those attempts had focused on traumatized soldiers or on the difficult relationship between the home front and the country’s heroes (a relationship that was marked by, and usually described as, a lack of understanding). Of all countries who had sent their sons and daughter to Afghanistan, none struggled harder than Germany to come to terms with the unsightly fact that they were at war.
Now German soldiers (including one female soldier) were allowed ninety minutes of on-duty action, and that fact alone speaks volumes to the discursive tightrope that the country find itself on, where live ammunition is fired - and kills, too - but where German soldiers remain just as reflective and burdened by their own conscience as one would wish; soldiers who don’t really know (and passionately debate with their peers) how “sensible” this mission really is, and who gasp for air after the first enemy bullets fizz past their heads.