Merkur
2012-05-25
Summary Merkur 6/2012
The point of departure of Thomas Hettche's essay "Enemy Contact", which opens the June issue (Number 757), is a visit to the new memorial in Berlin to the German Armed Forces. Hettche finds it strangely inappropriate how fallen German soldiers are honored here -- above all in an era in which Germany again finds itself at war. He continues by drawing a line to Ernst Jünger and concludes that those who speak of Stahlgewitter should better not forget to also mention the insect collection in Wilfingen.
Rudolf Helmstetter discusses dying and the afterlife of the dead. He considers -- not least with the help of Monty Python -- a possible "improvement of the beyond." Valentin Groebner explains in a historical sketch the continuity between great Renaissance portraits and advertising and passport pictures today, while Patrick Eiden-Offe observes in his readings of new books by Frank Ruda, Axel Honneth, and others that Hegel, that old dead dog, is suddenly live and well again.
In his aesthetics column, Wolfgang Kemp would have preferred to have kept silent on the extraordinarily successful painter Alfons Walde, and in his economics column debut, Werner Plumpe takes a closer look at the "economic cycles of criticism of capitalism." Remigius Bunia considers the anthropological work Debts by Occupy-movement leader David Graeber extraordinarily provocative. In response to two books by Joan Didion, American studies scholar Frank Kelleter pursues the question to what extent writing about death and mourning can be serialized. And last but not least, two empirical studies: on suicide as self-help (by Alois Hahn and Matthias Hoffmann) and on the construct of long-term unemployment (by Matthias Bohlender).
Thomas Hettche
Enemy Contact
On the forgotten art of soldiership
"Germany has dead soldiers again" -- and the German Federal Republic has erected a memorial in their honor in Berlin, a gesture more complicated than just the inscription's comma placement. Writer Thomas Hettche explores the question of what soldiership was and why Germany in the present era knows no appropriate way of dealing with war and violence. Addressing Carl Schmitt's theory of enmity and Ernst Jünger, who wrote of Stahlgewitter while imagining the garden as refugium, is unavoidable. An essay, a montage of text forms, searching for a suitable way of thinking about violence in a seemingly pacified society.
Thomas Hettche (1964), writer. His novel Die Liebe der Väter was published in 2010. In fall 2012 he will release the collection of essays Totenberg, in which the original of this piece appears.