Gewalträume. Soziale Ordnungen im Ausnahmezustand. Hrsg. von Jörg Baberowski / Gabriele Metzler. Frankfurt a.M., New York: Campus, 2012. 308 S., 5 Abb. = Eigene und fremde Welten, 20. ISBN: 978-3-593-39231-8

Gewalträume. Soziale Ordnungen im Ausnahmezustand. Hrsg. von Jörg Baberowski / Gabriele Metzler. Frankfurt a.M., New York: Campus, 2012. 308 S., 5 Abb. = Eigene und fremde Welten, 20. ISBN: 978-3-593-39231-8.

Inhaltsverzeichnis:

http://d-nb.info/1003245897/04

“Gewalt” – violence – is currently a voguish word in German-speaking academia, not least due to the considerable impact of the “Neue Gewaltsoziologie” (new sociology of violence). The latter’s influence is certainly evident in the collection “Spaces of Violence. Social Orders in Exceptional Circumstances”. This brings together several articles that examine examples of violence spanning four centuries and includes research conducted in the framework of the collaborative research centre “Representations of Changing Social Orders” in Berlin.

Jörg Baberowski’s introduction to the collection presents many of the basic precepts of the new sociology of violence in a very accessible way. We fail to understand violence, he argues, because we prefer to view it as an exception to the norm. However, violence is ever present: all regimes are based on violence and hopes that processes of civilisation will rid the world of it are illusory. Appeals to ideas, ideologies or other motives to explain violence take place after the fact to legitimise the actions of the perpetrators and to provide victims with a means of understanding their suffering. They teach us little about the act itself: the “motive” does not steer the hand of the violent individual; if it did, all those sharing the same motive would be violent. Rather, to understand violence, one must describe in detail the situations in which it develops in order to reveal the logic of violence. Violence is a form of action and communication that individuals choose in particular situations to achieve an advantage. It emerges when the conditions allow individuals to transgress boundaries; it is infectious, reducing the options open to individuals and pushing them towards violent responses. This position is an evolution from that in his article Gewalt verstehen (in: Zeithistorische Forschungen, 2008, No. 5), where Baberowski did accept that the intentions of the perpetrator shaped the experience of the victim.

The first empirical contribution examines the theme of communication. Ramon Voges investigates the portrayals of Spanish massacres in the Netherlands between 1572 and 1576 by the engraver and etcher Franz Hogenberg. Depictions of Early Modern violence sought to interpret, justify or condemn violence and are therefore poor sources for the events themselves. Consequently, Voges examines Hogenberg’s images as contributions to the struggle for power. The artist created an image of the Spanish as cruel, despotic and godless which called upon the audience to defend themselves while also seeking to promote a Dutch identity that crossed political, social and confessional boundaries.

Michael Riekenberg discusses the market of violence created by caciques on the frontiers of the La Plata in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Caciques were local leaders whose political and military power was intertwined with violent economic activity. Economic practices shaped the practice of violence and vice versa. These determined the line between norm and exception. State-based understandings of war and peace fail to capture this dynamic. Indeed, the government in Buenos Aires sought to establish a monopoly of violence, but while the market of violence remained stable, the state was but one competitor among many on it.

The next article, though very interesting, does not directly address the collection’s theme of violent spaces. Dieter Langewiesche studies the transfer of information about the 1848 Revolutions through Europe via newspapers, looking in detail at one radical daily and five Jewish periodicals. He shows how both radicals and Jews filtered the information relevant to their particular concerns. These filters meant that the revolutionary events did not bring about a change in their view of the world; rather, both felt their expectations to have been confirmed.

Felix Schnell argues convincingly that the German occupation of Ukraine in 1918, far from bringing peace and order, created a space of violence. The occupiers’ need to live off the land and peasant resistance to this created a state of violent friction in which German soldiers and Ukrainian freebooters could enrich themselves. Using the memoirs of a Russian officer who sought refuge among Ukrainian peasants and became the leader of a peasant revolt in Zvenyhorodka, Schnell argues that the violence developed out of the logic of the situation rather than from ideas or ideologies.

The second article by Baberowski applies the theoretical considerations discussed in his introduction to the violence during the Russian Civil War and in the Stalinist state. The outcome of the former was not determined by the ideologies of the participants. Rather, the Bolsheviks won because they were able to use violence more ruthlessly and effectively against their many opponents. The violence under Stalin was a product of the weakness of the regime. The state required a situation of permanent crisis to rule so that it could use violence against its opponents.

Marc Buggeln argues that the social spaces of the concentration subcamps had a greater impact on the level of violence used in them than the nature of their physical spaces. For example, where supervisors judged the forced labourers’ work on the basis of their subjective impression of the prisoners’ effort, the amount of violence experienced by the latter depended very much on the arbitrary whim of the former. Where the work was evaluated by its concrete results, the level of violence was much more predictable. However, the physical space could be important. For instance, some workplaces afforded more opportunities for inmates to rest beyond the sight of the guards.

According to Sebastian Klöß’s examination of the responses to the 1958 Notting Hill Riots, two interpretations emerged that stressed the disturbances’ challenge to the social order. The establishment viewed the riots as a threat to the British self-perception as liberal and tolerant. The discussions on the causes of the violence reveal a desire to return to an old social order where such self-images remained uncontested. The perpetrators saw the violence itself as an attempt to recreate the social order that had supposedly existed before the arrival of Afro-Caribbean immigrants. Both failed to see that the violence had irrevocably changed the social order.

Gabriele Metzler reconstructs the narratives of violence that developed around the case of Patricia Hearst: the narrative of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) who kidnapped her and the narratives created by the defence and prosecution in Hearst’s trial. The prosecutor’s narrative of a “rebel in search of a cause” won out because it corresponded closer to the narrative conventions familiar to the jury. It met society’s need for unambiguous narratives structured around race, class and gender that would have a stabilising effect on the social order.

The collection closes with a second theoretical article in which Riekenberg expounds the sociology of violence of the French writer George Bataille and explains why historians should take note of it. He concludes that Bataille teaches historians that it is impossible to translate word for word the language of violence into that of scholarly inquiry and thereby remove the interpretative tension between viewing the violence and categorising it under general concepts.

The individual articles are all thought-provoking and well argued. Taken together, however, only half (Baberowski, Riekenberg, Schnell and Buggeln) explicitly employ the concept in the book’s title – “spaces of violence” – as an interpretative tool. The rest (Voges, Langewiesche, Klöß and Metzler) concentrate more on interpretations of violence and questions of changing social orders. While this gives the feeling of a collection in two parts, it also leads to interesting variations in approaches. In contrast to the dismissal by Baberowski and Schnell of the role of ideas in violence, Klöß shows how racism intertwined with socio-economic conflicts gave rise to the disturbances in London, and Metzler incorporates the ideology of the SLA into her reconstruction of their narrative of violence.

The approach taken by Klöß and Metzler is, in my opinion, the more convincing. Baberowski, for instance, acknowledges that the dehumanisation of the victim precedes the violence, yet does not explain how this can take place without reference to ideas. He writes that the warlords of the Russian Civil War mobilised peasants by giving them license to carry out pogroms not out of antisemitism but because Jews were a defenceless target. However, the defencelessness of the Jews was, in part, a product of antisemitism: it was possible to abuse them without repercussions because belief in the canards of Jewish treachery and perfidy was so widespread. For this reason, the warlords employed these motifs in their declarations and leaflets. The perpetrators’ justifications are part of the context for violence: they helped identify victim groups and mobilise potential accomplices. Baberowksi is uninterested in mobilisation because he sees the space of violence as a closed system in which one only had the choice of being a victim or perpetrator. To support this, he argues that peasants in the armed bands that terrorised the country could not escape them for fear of execution as deserters. However, the bands’ fluctuating size, their tactic of dispersing when confronted and the case histories of former insurgents compiled by the Soviet punitive organs show that peasants could and did leave the bands.

For all these reservations, historians drawing on the new sociology of violence have helped increase the sophistication of the way we think about historical violence. The collection’s great service is to highlight different ways of writing about the topic. The variety of approaches presented in the book is therefore one of its strengths.

Christopher Gilley, Hamburg