With Russian President Vladimir Putin’s cruel war on Ukraine in its eighth month, film director Edward Berger came out with the first German adaptation of the 1928 novel ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’. It depicts the guilt and pain felt by Germans over being an aggressor country in war. He explains this German perspective: “For us (war) … is nothing but guilt, horror, terror and destruction, despair, death, fear … I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently, slay one another.”

Countries like Britain, France, USA and Russia commemorate the heroism and sacrifice of their fallen in the country’s service and celebrate their victories. Germany commemorates its victims through The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe at the heart of Berlin.

Generations of Germans have been educated in pacifism through ‘All quiet on the Western Front’ written by Erich Maria Remarque and narrated by 19-year-old Paul Bäumer, who fights in the German army on the French front in World War I.

He wants to be a war hero, but his idealism collides with the brutal reality of war. He spends some time at a training camp near a group of Russian prisoners-of-war. Paul becomes aware that the Russians are people just like him, not subhuman enemies, and wonders how war can make enemies of people who have no grudge against one another.

In a battle, Paul is forced to hide in a shell hole. A French soldier jumps into the shell hole with him, and Paul instinctively stabs him. The man dies a slow, painful death, Paul is overcome with remorse. He feels again that this enemy soldier is no enemy at all but rather a victim of war just like himself: “I see you are a man like me.” In Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ a killed soldier in a similar episode in World War 1 tells his killer: “I am the enemy you killed, my friend.”  Paul’s friends urge him to grow a thick skin, telling him that war is about killing enemies: “After all, war is war.”

One of the unintended consequences of the colonial war waged by President Putin against Ukraine has been the epochal tectonic shift in Germany’s foreign and security policy. In the light of the Russian invasion, Germany announced a €100 billion defence spending package and has been sending weapons, at first very reluctantly to help Ukraine defend itself. Putin’s war has made Germany abandon its opening towards Russia since 1969 through its Ostpolitik.

Towards a wider war

A fortnight ago, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres told the UN General Assembly that “if every country fulfilled its obligations under the UN Charter, the right to peace would be guaranteed”. The UN Charter obliges its member states to maintain international peace and security, uphold international law, achieve "higher standards of living" for their citizens, address "economic, social, health, and related problems", and promote "universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion."

Guterres denounced the Russian invasion of Ukraine, saying the war was “inflicting untold suffering on the Ukrainian people with profound global implications … I fear the world is not sleepwalking into a wider war. I fear it is doing so with its eyes wide open …. The prospects for peace keep diminishing … The chances of further escalation and bloodshed keep growing.” Russia has argued that the West has caused this war by posing an existential threat to it by expanding NATO to its borders and by getting Ukraine to join NATO. Russian officials insist that the US and NATO/EU are prolonging and intensifying the conflict by sending arms to Ukraine.

Germany’s traditional pacifism since World War II and a belief that mutual economic benefits help prevent conflicts have been thrown into a crisis by Putin’s determination to absorb Ukraine into a Great Russia. Germany has had to abandon its foreign policy based mainly on soft power and rearm itself and send weapons to Ukraine. These steps have led to a fierce debate in Germany with open letters to Chancellor Olaf Scholz: one saying ‘no’ to weapons for Ukraine and the other saying ‘yes’. Those who signed the ‘no’ letter see “the Russian aggression as a breach of the basic norm of international law. We also share the conviction that there is a principled political and moral duty not to retreat from aggressive force without a fight back.”

But they urge Chancellor Scholz “to help bring about a ceasefire as soon as possible; a compromise that both sides can accept.” They want to avoid further escalation into a nuclear conflict and a third world war. Agreed. But how?

Might is right is not peace

Pacifists faced a similar moral dilemma during World War II. George Orwell, no war-monger, supported the war against Hitler. In 1941 he criticised Alex Comfort’s novel ‘No Such Liberty’ as pacifist and weakening the necessary resolve to defeat Hitler. Orwell wrote: “You can let the Nazis rule the world; that is evil; or you can overthrow them by war, which is also evil. There is no other choice before you…. We only have the chance of choosing the lesser evil and of working for the establishment of a new kind of society in which common decency will again be possible.”

But in 1945 after the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Orwell wrote (‘You and the atom bomb’): “So we have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them.

“More and more obviously the surface of the earth is being parcelled off into three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact with the outer world, and each ruled, under one disguise or another, by a self-elected oligarchy.

“… looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.

“(The atomic bomb) is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a “peace that is no peace”.

On 24 January 2023 the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds before midnight, This clock was set up 76 years ago to symbolise how close we are to extinction. This is the closest we have ever been to global suicide. The Bulletin said: “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has increased the risk of nuclear weapons use, raised the spectre of biological and chemical weapons use, hamstrung the world’s response to climate change, and hampered international efforts to deal with other global concerns.”

Do we have no other choice before us: ‘extinction or peace that is no peace’?