The Demand for the Inviolability of Life: Radical Pacifism and the Politics of Subjectivity in World War I and Weimar Germany

For many of Germany’s pacifist writers, the First World War represented a moment that was similar in significance to the politicizing effect of the Dreyfus Affair in France two decades earlier.  But if French intellectuals had collectively entered the public sphere in order to protest a grave injustice, it was now a desire to fundamentally change the culture that had contributed to the war that motivated attempts to unite intellectuals in Germany.  This inseparably linked the apocalyptic landscape of the trenches to utopian visions of a world made anew, and in the case of the intellectual milieu associated with Kurt Hiller’s Aktivismus, this hope for cultural renewal was best expressed in the demand for the “inviolability of life.”  As Hiller later explained in the Weimar period, what distinguished this new ideal from the older pacifist tradition was its critique of capitalism, its rejection of evolutionary approaches, and its “social subjectivism.”  It stemmed from a fundamental belief in the right of individuals to be able to live, and their ability to assert control over their lives.  This made an opposition to military conscription—both ethically and as a political tactic—the central demand of this new pacifist tendency.  My paper will examine the origins of this worldview against the backdrop of war and revolution in Germany, focusing on three of the key individuals who advanced it: Hiller, Helene Stöcker, and Armin T. Wegner.  It will argue that this ideal was rooted in Hiller’s and Stöcker’s interpretation of the work of Friedrich Nietzsche as a philosophical project to defend “life” against all that was inimical to it, and it was what allowed them to connect individual forms of emancipation to the idea of remaking the social whole from the perspective of an anti-materialist form of socialism.