The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

36 Everyone Loves War 2009

I peep over the end of the bed and see myself down there in life, as tiny as a freckle on a distant face and so weary of the bullying from those Danish kids, but also glowing with excitement for everything that was in the air.

Human beings have always had a need for disasters. If nature doesn’t provide them for us, we create them ourselves. And of course the war was fun. Of course I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. One lived so intensely that sometimes the moment simply vibrated like the black gear stick of an old tractor. There will obviously always be departments of the human soul that welcome events of this kind: heads of divisions will leap into the air, flex their braces over their chests, put their feet on their desks, and toast with their employees: ‘Well, dear colleagues, now we’ll see some action! The war is here!’

Here’s pretty much what a Hungarian told me right after the war, somewhere deep in an Argentinian train carriage. ‘I sometimes don’t understand how I was able to endure it, crawling through ice-cold mud for maybe days on end or trembling in graves of snow for weeks, weeks of hell without anything happening! That was worst of all. Or walking three hundred miles with holes in my shoes and sixty pounds on my back and… Yes, well, I wore the same underwear for four years! But somehow you just couldn’t complain, in some odd way you were happy. Now men wake up to birdsong and the smell of coffee and spend the whole day worrying about whether their bosses will like their reports or their wives are two-timing them. And miss having their hair grazed by bullets.’

War makes us all happy, because no one is given a choice. In peacetime, people become unhappy because they have to choose and reject. All wars therefore stem from man’s insatiable longing for happiness. There are few things that men fear more than peace on earth.

Man prefers to be a passenger on the great wheel of destiny, rather than determine its course. Least of all does he want to assume responsibility for that destiny, which is why he worships those who do.

And when it comes to destinies, wars provide the most radical of them all. That’s why we feel so good in war, we find our inner peace in war. And World War II was the ideal war because it was, as Goebbels put it, der totale Krieg – the total war that was everywhere: it spread across the entire continent and plagued every soul, leaving no one unscathed.