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FALLEN ELITES

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.........................................................................................................................xiPrologue: The Anthropologist Who Came In from the Cold.................................................................................xiiiAbbreviations and terms.................................................................................................................xviiPART ONE BECOMING MILITARIZED My Brother, My Enemy.....................................................................................11 The Military Imaginary: Soldiers, Myths, and States...................................................................................32 Emotions, Generations, and Death Cults: Militarization and the Creation of socialist Military Personalities...........................373 Coming of Age in the NVA: the Master narratives of Militarization.....................................................................714 The Writing on the Wall: The NVA Surrenders...........................................................................................995 A War of Signs, Images, and Memories: German Militaries in the Cold War and Unification...............................................1046 "Unification Has Ruined My Life": The Political Economy of the Military Other.........................................................1347 As Germans Among Germans: Life in the Kameradschaft...................................................................................1628 "We're the Jews of the New Germany": Heroic Victimhood, Fallen Elites, and the Slipperiness of History and Memory.....................1939 Death and Allegiance: Toward an Anthropology of Soldiering............................................................................215Notes...................................................................................................................................229Works Cited.............................................................................................................................247Index...................................................................................................................................261

Chapter One

SOLDIERS, MYTHS, AND STATES

I WANT TO OPEN THIS BOOK with a bold proposition: the soldier is the state. The soldier is the personification, the sign, the representation of the state; its arm, its agent of violence, the tip of the spear, the means by which the state comes into being, is maintained, and continues to be. Soldiers represent the imagined community of the state in living, active form; they are homogenized into a single identity of the state, and represent this imagined ideal of homogenization. States write the mythology of soldiers, turning soldiers into mythic creatures. This kind of myth-work elevates soldiers above "mere" civilians, removing them from the quotidian and placing them into the unquestionable. According to the state, the soldier is the ideal citizen, the best kind of person the state can produce. Soldiers in uniform are living memorials to the state and its history, walking monuments to memory-they just are not made of stone, like other war memorials, though they may appear as cold, hard, lifeless, and unfeeling. Soldiers are monuments to previous wars and the preformed memories of as-yet unfought wars to come. The soldier represents the congealed historical memory of the violence of the state, and is the state in its most concrete, literal, purest human form. This image is, of course, drilled into the soldier.

And into civilians.

* * *

At least, this is how states would like soldiers to be and be perceived. Because they would like this, states go to great lengths to insure that soldiers—and representations and imaginings of them—approach these ideals. States can be seen as vast experiments in social construction, and militarization plays a key role in this; states make soldiers both to "be" the state and to defend the state. But how are soldiers "made" into this ideal, and how are they "unmade" when the desired image changes? What happens when men, made into the soldierly ideal of one state, find themselves absorbed into another state, a state with a very different idea of what it means to be a soldier? What does it mean to live as a sign of the state, and what happens when meanings and signification shift? What are the material ramifications of shifts in the symbolics of militarized identities? These were the sorts of issues involved in the experiences of former East German army officers in the context of German unification in 1990; the sorts of problems and processes they faced resulted from these issues.

In Fallen Elites, I examine the cultural politics of what it means to be a soldier in Germany by focusing on the lives of a group of East German Army and Border Guard officers, both before and after unification, and on the ways in which memories and representations of the World War II German military and soldiers—the Wehrmacht and SS—continue to shape ideas of what it means to be a good and proper soldier and man in post-unification Germany. By focusing on East German army officers who had power and then lost it, this book studies up, and then down again, providing an ethnographic perspective on elites and power in the modern state. I examine the idea of "soldiers" in political life, the construction of citizenship and national identity, and the legitimation of the state and military. I look at how states use soldiers—who counts, how, why, and when—in the political life of the state, and how the deployment of ideas about soldiers affects the symbolic and material lives of men identified—positively and negatively—as soldiers. This is an examination of German unification as seen through what I call the "military imaginary" of the state: the ways in which the necessity, implementation, and desired outcomes of (compulsory) military service and training are imagined and envisioned by the state, and the ways in which these tropes are linked to normative ideas of the "proper" soldier and man, legitimate violence, morality, and military tradition.

There are multiple military imaginaries in a state: those of the state, of the military, of soldiers themselves, and of civilians. The military imaginary of a state is linked to the past, to memories and representations of soldiers and their actions, their heroism, deeds, and defense of the state. In a sense, these imaginings of the proper soldier function along the lines of myth, achieving a mythic status, and occurring in a mythologized time. They are also linked to the economic system of the state: soldiers are expected to fight and die for the state's political and economic viability.

Fallen Elites is about the Cold War contest between the capitalist West and the communist East, and the lingering effects of competing military and economic blocks. As Germany works through complications brought about by unification, ideas, prejudices, and mindsets formed and lived during the Cold War continue to effect it. Lingering on in corners of the state are contentious notions of what it means to be a good and proper "German...