Conflict Veterans : Discourses and Living Contexts of an Emerging Social Group [1 ed.] 9781527522350

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Conflict Veterans

Conflict Veterans: Discourses and Living Contexts of an Emerging Social Group Edited by

Michael Daxner, Marion Näser-Lather and Silvia-Lucretia Nicola

Conflict Veterans: Discourses and Living Contexts of an Emerging Social Group Edited by Michael Daxner, Marion Näser-Lather and Silvia-Lucretia Nicola This book first published 2018 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2018 by Michael Daxner, Marion Näser-Lather, Silvia-Lucretia Nicola and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-0786-6 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0786-9

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ............................................................................................... vii Michael Daxner, Marion Näser-Lather and Silvia-Lucretia Nicola Part I: Experiences Chapter One ................................................................................................. 2 Off War: PTSD Treatment in the U.S. and German Armed Forces Tim Kucharzewski Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 23 From Warforce to Workforce: Danish Veterans’ Career Changes Birgitte Refslund Sørensen Part II: Recognition Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 52 They Have Returned and are Here to Stay: New Veteran Organisations in Germany and their Struggle for Recognition Eva Baumgärtner and Philipp Schultheiss Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 72 Getting-even with the State: Serbian War Veterans Suing a Country Officially Never at War Maria Vivod Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 91 Competing with the Dead Hero: The German Particular Way Michael Daxner

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Part III: Framing and Conceptualisation Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 110 Impeded Heroes: On the (Self-)perception of German Veterans Marion Näser-Lather Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 134 “We are Heroes”: The Homogenising Glorification of the Memories on the Soviet–Afghan War in Present Russia Michael Galbas Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 164 “I Don’t Belong Here Anymore”: Homeland as an Uncomfortable Space for War Veterans in Irwin Winkler’s Home of the Brave Tatiana Prorokova Contributors ............................................................................................. 174 Index ........................................................................................................ 178

INTRODUCTION MICHAEL DAXNER, MARION NÄSER-LATHER AND SILVIA-LUCRETIA NICOLA

Veterans—a social group with societal impact In many books or films, veterans play a central role. Returnees from war and combat are depicted as heroes, cowards, triumphant or broken personalities. Their families may be more than happy being reunited with their fathers, mothers, husbands or children; or they are helpless in their inability to communicate with their alienated returned members. Often, all this is not framed by a generally accepted concept of veterans. Even the term is not common in some societies, while it is used in everyday communication in others. Whether a person is perceived as a veteran depends on many aspects of a certain culture or a part of it. The personal and intimate access to the personality of a veteran is often detached from a sociological view on the group of veterans; such group may be a common and established element of a society, like in the United States, or it may be marginalised or neglected. Language is revealing some unexpected variations inherent to the use of the term “veteran”: one person may be a party veteran, a vintage car is called a veteran in Germany, and frequently the usage of the term is not limited to its military context. In all cases, the term veteran contains a notion of time. Etymology has it that “vetus” is the word for “old” or “ancient”, and veterans have been the Roman returnees from war. While veterans are an issue in inconspicuous cases of cultural expressions, they become important, when it comes to social policy—who is paying their insurance or their rehabilitation therapy?—or culture politics—are veterans the legitimate interpreters of the wars and battles they have survived? Such questions are challenging science and politics likewise. With large and growing numbers of returnees, frictions and irritations between veterans and other groups and strata in society increase. Whether armed forces are accepted or rejected by various groups may change due to a

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growing number of veterans. Larger numbers of veterans alter the supply and demand ratio of private security companies and, subsequently, affect national armed forces and the politicians’ stance towards privatisation of security. The study of veterans concerns several academic fields. For example, not only illnesses such as trauma and PTSD but also group dynamics are of interest to psychology; the specifics of the perception of veterans, their habitus and the relationship between veterans and armed forces are relevant topics for anthropologists and sociologists, as well as negotiation processes regarding the place of veterans in society. We can add more fields of scholarly interest in veterans, both in the humanities and the life sciences. Gender, sexuality, mind and body frictions, political convictions of veterans, shifts in religious and ideological views, and much more, indicate a need for interdisciplinary approaches and the quest for systematic research. This field of academic occupation must, of course, also include investigations of the diverse veteran discourses and the inter-discourses, where this subject/object of research will be situated. The seemingly simple aspect of PTSD is a good example of the necessary trans-disciplinary approach. This is a book written by scientists. However, it is also directed to the wide public who can discover new aspects linked to individual veterans and their organised appearance in society.

Veterans as a research topic Since the earliest times, war has been a driving force for rapid changes, coining, altering, and even ending lives. These changes leave marks on all levels from the macro-level of aggregate actors such as states, international organisation or non-state actors, to the meso-level of social groups of different sizes with their distinguishable life-contexts, and finally to the micro-level of individual destinies. The forces unleashed by such events are therefore not only impacting armies, historical perceptions about winners and losers but especially about the involved individuals, whether rightful combatants, civilians or bystanders. Wars are temporary occurrences. Eventually, they will be transformed into other kinds of interaction. Also, for the soldiers as individuals, the physical involvement in war situations will be over one day. The experiences of soldiers during deployment, however, cast a long-lasting shadow. This volume sheds light on the specific time span after the termination of war or fighting; for some persons, war continues after the cessation of fights and violence. Soldiers returning from deployment are called

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deployment returnees or veterans. This overly simplified framing of our object of analysis constitutes at the same time the smallest denominator when addressing the topic. As our readers might expect and will discover on the following pages, dealing with deployment returnees opens a wide range of definitions, approaches, perspectives and new questions worthy of a follow-up research. The life contexts of veterans vary within the social group of returnees, and so do the discourses on this group. We are trying to contextualise the discourses. In most cases, we concentrate on veterans that have been serving in national armed forces of their country. Thus, both domestic and supra-national linkages must be considered. This volume describes and compares perspectives from different countries such as Denmark, Serbia, Russia, U.S. and Germany. A special emphasis will be laid on Germany given the novelty that this country is producing veterans for the first time since the end of the Second World War. Missions abroad of many armed forces worldwide, and recently of the Bundeswehr (the German armed forces) lead to the emergence of veterans who are expected to be integrated into professional and private life again. The contemporary returnees form a group significantly different from their predecessors (e.g. veterans from the Second World War) regarding their experiences (e.g. asymmetrical war situations), their social composition (gender, religion, ethnicity), and regarding cultural factors and discourses. Despite these diverse contexts and dispositives, comparable institutional problems and subjective challenges suggest that a common reflection of historical as well as current situations of returnees might be necessary as well as highly productive. The focus of the present volume was coined by the international conference “Deployment Returnees. Discourses and life worlds of an emerging social group”. It was staged at the Centre for Conflict Studies of the University of Marburg, Germany, 7 - 9 July, 2016. This Congress has been the first contemporary academic gathering on veterans in Germany. We continue our pioneering work, by keeping alive the awareness for the topic. The resonance of the conference encouraged the editors to seek contributions that will make clear, how relevant the topic is; and how important it is for the formation of a new social class in Germany. There is a host of different contexts, i.e. academic, military, political and cultural. The conference was international and interdisciplinary. The volume we are presenting tries to balance diverse aspects of the topic, but has, as a matter of fact, a strong section on Germany. For our country, veterans are novel.

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Deployment returnees—specifics of a social group From a sociological point of view, veterans are members of society whose experiences differ widely from that of the majority and who have developed accordant modes of perception and action as well as specific needs. In contrast to other groups, veterans not only experience extreme situations, violence, and death but also, one of their core tasks is the exertion of force. Thus, the discourses on veterans reflect, in their respective countries, and inside or outside the armed forces, different traditions, ascriptions and meanings regarding the concepts of the nation, war, gender, and the exertion of violence. If a specific role is defining soldiers (their job is to kill, their job is to defend their country, their job is to represent the glory of their fatherland etc.), are these specifics also to be attributed to veterans? This question cannot be unequivocally answered by yes or no. This ambiguity will be shown throughout the following chapters by particularly describing the interconnection and variety of positions and arguments raised regarding this question. Veterans stabilise their social group through a slowly adjusting set of traditions, rituals and by attracting legal, social, and cultural privileges. The societal modes of recognition, inclusion or marginalisation, hiding or openly present etc. refer to a group that—at least in Germany—is less known by the public. Also, an accepted or contested definition is subject to negotiations and discursive strategies. Veterans, as members of this group, are not alone in this process. Sociologically, veterans are a mix of groups of first and second order, i.e. they share a common past or experience, and they share widely the same interests (Coser and Merton 1983, 89). There are a few factors that deserve special attention when discussing veterans. It goes without saying that gender and sexual orientation play at least the same role that they play in active military contexts. Of overarching concern is the body, which comes into the open only in individual forms (suffering, recollection of torture, regret about killing or wounding other human beings, being mutilated etc.). The human bodies of veteran collectives are rarely mentioned or thematised. We hold that it is the body that makes us aware of demarcation lines between death and survival, between a hero and a disabled individual, between a role model and a designated outsider. From here, we can easily go further to the role of veterans in the arts, foremost literature and sculptures. Recently, a discussion about culture of memory and the role of discourses on veterans has increasingly gained in importance, for example, the role of veteran monuments in public places. The culture of memory has also played a major role in most countries over long periods of time. Philosophical questions,

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such as the vicinity to dying, death and remembrance of the dead, become practical at once, when they concern veterans’ families, ethical issues of appreciation or repulsion of veteran policies and the moral discourse on war and peace: are the veterans the natural successors of the subjects of warfare, violence or resistance? Or must they be perceived as another, a new species within societal order?

The life contexts of veterans The life contexts of veterans vary widely. We are using the term to describe their diverse aspects. Both veterans and their social environment are challenged by new interpretations of politics, culture, history, narratives, traditions, rituals. The life contexts represent spheres of unquestioned habitual behaviour and informal institutions as well as fluid social spaces characterised by continuous construction and negotiation processes through performative speech acts and interaction practices of the actors themselves. The situation of veterans depends on the societal environment into which the veteran returns; much depends also on the mode in which such return occurs, meaning a mutual acceptance or repulsion by the nearer and wider environment into which the veteran returns. The social coordinates of the veteran, such as gender, social status, peer groups, family etc., are highly important. The circumstances of return must also be observed to locate the societal position of the individual veteran and of possible collectives of returnees. Is the veteran returning to his military unit at home, ready or not for being deployed another time? Will the veteran become a peer or trainer for another generation of soldiers who shall be sent out of area in the future? Will the veteran leave the armed forces after his or her return? Is this a farewell for good or simply caused by the end of a contract? Will there be an engagement in the army reserve forces? Will the veteran join private security, and for what reasons? What kind of first steps into the civilian sphere will be “normal”1 or necessary for a veteran? These questions provoke research as well as answers from politics and the veterans themselves. Within the Bundeswehr, having completed a mission has become a rite of passage and a proof of being a real professional soldier (Näser-Lather 2011, 339; see also Tomforde 2009). The contributions of Näser-Lather, 1

Parting from Jürgen Link’s (1997) theory of normalism, two definitions of the “normal” can be distinguished: protonormalism, which presupposes certain fixed norms and orients the definition of what is normal thereon, and flexible normalism, which defines the “normal” based on the statistical average value of given facts. Regarding the question what appears as normal to them, veterans may follow either of those definitions implicitly dependent on their attitudes.

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Daxner, and Schultheiss and Baumgärtner also address the questions of how veterans are regarded by their comrades who have not been on a mission. Do they see themselves as an elite within a military sector or even the entire society? And are they seen as such by their comrades? Paying special attention to the term “hero” and its entry into discourses by the soldiers themselves, by the Bundeswehr as an institution, and by civil society, the contributions also ask whether the military hero exists within the discourse in the contemporary German society. These topics draw our attention to both the German “Sonderweg” (particular way) and its dwindling significance. Our volume also sheds light on the question whether there is a specific “habitus” of the veteran (Bourdieu 1982). There has not been paid sufficient attention to this issue in the political and military discourse. It is the specific social capitals, and furthermore the cultural capitals that count (Bourdieu 1983; Bourdieu 2001, 25; Putnam 2000; King 2005), while economic capital does not play such a role. But the variations of social capitals in rapidly changing warfare bring veterans to a crucial rift among themselves: who is a veteran, a true one? How do the contemporary veteran cultures relate to traditions of veterans, for example in Germany the traditions of post-First World War veterans and the veteran cult of National Socialism (Daxner and Mann 2016)? Also, the interior group culture of soldiers differs between services, and also units: the expected conduct and behaviour, traditions and folklore of a paratrooper unit are different from those within a unit specialised in intercultural communications and media work like Psychological Operations (Näser-Lather 2011, 162-168; see also the project on the integration of women in the Bundeswehr by Apelt and Dittmer 2007). Whether these aspects have an impact on emerging veteran cultures is a question for future research. Different national cultures and their experiences inscribed in collective memory are, as we assume, another determining factor for the composition of veteran cultures as well as for the narratives about veterans. Gerhard Kümmel has analysed the attitude of different populations regarding their armed forces. He shows that in the U.S. and in some European countries, the attitude towards the armed forces is far more favourable than in Germany. For example, the opinion that the armed forces are a normal part of the society is more common in the USA than in Germany (Germany: 58 percent; USA: 82 percent), which also applies to feelings of gratitude (Germany: 30 percent; UK: 80 percent, USA: 87 percent) or pride (Germany: 42 percent; UK 64 percent, USA 87 percent) towards the armed forces or the view that they are needed, which in Germany only 56 percent share, in contrast to 74 percent in the UK and 85 percent in the USA (Kümmel 2010, 172f.).

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Evidence for the impact of different historical experiences for the discourses on and the perception of veterans is shown by the contributions of Michael Galbas, Eva Baumgärtner and Philipp Schultheiss, Michael Daxner, and Marion Näser-Lather in this volume. The transition from the military service into civilian life for those who have returned from war, conflicts and peacekeeping missions is not a simple process of accommodation. The expectation is that there is a seamless integration into society and that former armed services personnel should “pick up where they left off”. At the same time, society is facing the social and cultural difficulties that stem from serving in areas of conflict. In turn, society must put in place support mechanisms to be able to deal with members of society whose experiences differ widely from that of the majority and who have developed accordingly other modes of perception and activities as well as specific needs. The chapters of Birgitte Sørensen, Tim Kucharzewski, and Maria Vivod deal with this issue. Veterans live in contexts that are beyond the norm of their civilian counterparts. The development of mission routines and a certain assimilation with or repulsion of different cultures has caused an imprint on a specific veteran culture, which has an impact on the integration into civil society and on the behaviour of the society towards veterans. Veterans have experienced a foreign or alien civilisation, in most cases connected with sensations of shock stemming from the confrontation with destroyed countries, poverty, and suffering (Ahrends and Werner 2010, Näser-Lather 2016). This is what we would call the mainstream context of veteran return. However, there are returnees from deployment who seem not to have been affected by their life in a foreign country under intervention or war. It would be too simple ascribing the first experience to those who were engaged in combat or risky activities, while the second group returns from a life inside safe barracks or camps, without any contact with dangerous counterparts. Certainly, both groups exist. But the experiences of neither justify a simple clustering. Many co-factors form the variance in habitus of veterans. We observe a gap in grounded research on these variables that form the veteran habitus, at least in Germany. This was one of the main motives to organise the returnees-conference in Marburg, Germany. It will be very interesting to learn whether the national veteran habitus is more dependent on the structure and organisation of the army or a part thereof, or on the degree of being accepted or rejected by the wider or nearer social environment upon return from deployment. The question to what extent a national habitus overarches the individual variance of habitus in specific circumstances must remain open. Since the theory of habitus is explicitly antagonistic towards single experiences, this is a relevant question for further research. Habitus

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changes much slower than the experiences and their dynamics (see Bourdieu 1980). The hysteresis2 effect with veterans may indeed represent a breach with the soldier’s habitus; that is to say that some experiences during deployment develop their effect on habitus only later, when there is a certain stability and continuity in a veteran’s life. This assumption has yet to be investigated, and it needs the collaboration with psychologists and therapists; it is likely that such changes in the habitus do not come and go without mental or physical troubles. It is also likely that the habitus of veterans and the lifestyle and routines of their families, friends, peers and wider social networks are interdependent. The narrations from deployment are essential to the stabilising of the habitus as a veteran. This does affect both emotional and cognitive elements of behaviour, collectively and within a certain variance with individuals. Veterans and their social environment also reflect their previous lives as soldiers. During the period(s) of deployment, families and friends adopt certain ways of organising their relationship with veterans and among themselves on behalf of returnees. It does not abruptly appear when the veteran arrives at home. This link with the preceding period of being a soldier is also a bridge to another field of research that should be further explored. Also, the experiences of the soldiers are not compatible with the daily life in Germany, and soldiers often have difficulties to communicate with their family and friends about them. During deployment, the daily lives of the soldiers abroad and their families at home are both far from daily routine under normal circumstances. In a mission, a soldier’s habitus is being reinforced through the experiences of commanding or being ordered, of thinking in ways of problem-solving under duress and danger, but also under the spell of justifying what is difficult to justify. Back home, soldiers tend to apply this extraordinary behaviour to the relationship in their families, an attempt which is doomed to fail, because the families have established their routines during the absence of the soldiers. Moreover, some soldiers miss the thrill of the mission and feel insufficiently challenged by the daily life at home (Näser-Lather 2011, 348; see also Ahrends and Werner 2010, 31f.). According to Zimmermann et al., the most frequent diagnosis after returning from Afghanistan is PTSD, adaptation disorders (relationship 2

Hysteresis is a central term in Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and field. Hysteresis is the effect of habitus and field as mutually generating and generated (Hardy 2008). Hysteresis means that dispositions of habitus remain constant over long periods of time, even when the environment of the actor (i.e. the veteran) or the field that is responsible for the habitus have changed (Czech 2009).

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problems, conflicts with comrades), acute stress reactions, depressive and fear disorders and somatoform disorders (Zimmermann et al. 2012,144f). The paper of Tim Kucharzewski deals with some of these problems. Most of them are annotated negatively. But, of course, there are some effects from being a soldier or being deployed that are perceived positively in retrospect. According to a study by Seiffert and Heß, more than half of the respondents tell of positive effects of their missions: 68 percent mention that their self-confidence has risen, 56 percent value their lives more, and 41 percent think that they are more resilient. About two-thirds report that the reintegration into the daily life in Germany has been fast (Seiffert and Heß 2014, 5-8). Self-descriptions of veterans suggest that many perceive themselves as being more able, more mature and having a higher self-esteem than before (Ahrends and Werner 2010, 48), and living more intensively (Krahmann 2010, 202). Thus, empowerment seems to be one of the positive results of having been on a mission, strengthening soldier’s personalities and leading to a higher resilience. These were some pieces of a rather complex puzzle that makes up for the life contexts of veterans. But there is also another side of the medal, the assignment of veterans to the world of military as opposed to the civilian sphere. This is no longer maintained as rigidly as in the past, but certain distinctions belong to the military sphere only. We are not going to unfold this problem further than necessary for clarifying the context of veterans. But the imaginations of and the fantasies about soldiers, heroes, and the world of fighting, victory and defeat give strong impulses to all related discourses and shape discursive strategies. The formal institutions that frame military and soldiers are still a barrier between the armed forces—in Germany conceptualised by the leadership principles of the Bundeswehr as “citizens in uniform”—and the citizens. This is reflected in the veterans’ perception of their environment and in their self-perception. And it makes a lot of differences for recognition and appreciation of soldiers and veterans beyond the moral contexts of combat and the ethical justification of warfare. All this is reflected in discourses where veterans play an active part.

Veterans in different countries There are many countries with a distinguished policy on veterans and returnees from wars and combat. There are veteran administrations, even ministries for veterans; there is a broad and diversified discourse on ancient warriors; they are those who tell and retell the stories from previous glorious battles and undeserved defeats, of heroism and treachery. Veterans

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are a constant in the national discourse on war and peace; they are important actors in producing and modifying the cultural memory of a society. Their sovereignty of interpretation is strong, and often a highly effective impact factor for decision-making about new wars and interventions. The dark side of this ideal-typical light shed on veterans is that the public often forgets returnees from wars; they are not well taken care of if they suffer from the mental and physical damage fighting has done to them; often, they become socially deranged, their families break apart, their ability to communicate is narrowed. Even in societies where there is a high awareness for the needs of veterans, and where their service for their country is appreciated, such problems arise. For example, in the USA, according to a long-term study (2001-2014) by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the risk for suicide was 22 percent higher among Veterans when compared to U.S. non-Veteran adults (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs 2016). These peculiarities make veterans an interesting and very particular social group, not only an object of study and research. Among the best-investigated veterans rank those of countries like the United States of America or the United Kingdom, which did not have to rely on compulsory military service to select and deploy their professional military personnel during out of area missions for more than half a century. The academic discourse in these two particular cases is also coupled with societal awareness and active policy through—in the American case—a ministry: the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and—in the British case—a governmental agency in the subordination of the defence ministry: Veterans UK. In Germany, on the other hand, there is not even an officially recognised definition of this newly emerging social group, let alone a coherent and comprehensive implemented policy. Even the establishment of veteran associations is still in its infancy as of now. However, this has not always been the case. Throughout the 19th century and up until 1914, there has been a vivid scene for different war and veteran clubs, societies and associations, which advocated for the rights of war returnees (Kirn 2007, Vogel 2001). This tradition was continued in West-Germany also after the First World War, but has been initially forbidden during the period following the second one. In spite of this, smaller, local clubs were formed across the country. Their number is estimated to have risen to 2,000 until the 1970s (Veteranenverband 2017). Nevertheless, public awareness, as well as a remembrance of and recognition for veterans has faded away in West-Germany throughout the 1970s and 1980s. This has been most certainly influenced by both the Peace Movement and the fact that no

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German soldier had been deployed outside of the borders of his or her country until the dawn of the 1990s. While the ancient history of German veterans has been terminated by the defeat in the Second World War in 1945, the new tradition of creating veterans did not begin with the rearmament and the establishment of the national armed forces, the Bundeswehr, in 1955. In fact, the re-emergence of veterans happened only decades later, when in 1990, the Bundeswehr began to take part in missions abroad, followed by a restructuration and reorientation process transforming the Bundeswehr, which beforehand was centred around the defence of Germany, to a flexible army with deployments as one of its central fields of action. In this context, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the reunification of Germany in 1990 has been of undeniable relevance internationally and for our topic. The reason for staging a conference, the first of its kind indeed, in Marburg in July 2016 was to answer some of the questions stemming from the very particular position of Germany in the wider context of veterans, veteran policies and veteran studies. When we prepared for the conference, we realised that we did not even have a common definition of veterans that would be acknowledged across academic disciplines and political factions. To give a striking example: has the army of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) produced veterans? Can we compare the army of the Federal Republic (FRG), the Bundeswehr, to the NVA, the Nationale Volksarmee, in East Germany, and thus, can we compare their veterans? What happens after unification in 1989, when there was only one army left; an army that was soon to become engaged in out of area deployments and would, thus, begin to produce veterans? While German soldiers have been deployed on international peacekeeping or peace-enforcing missions for almost three decades now, the awareness of these facts seems to remain low among both German society and politicians. About the political level, the lack of both short-term and long-term solutions or strategies might be explained from two perspectives. On the one hand, there has been a need of breaking with the burdened and troublesome part of the German role played in the two World Wars and building a “new” military in demarcation to the traditions of the Wehrmacht. To this process of building up a modern military from scratch was added a new need, influenced by current global security challenges: transforming the comparatively novel Bundeswehr from a conscription army into professional armed forces, which have deployed out of area until today up to 300,000 soldiers by parliamentary mandate. These soldiers have returned to a society which largely fails to acknowledge their existence.

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By now, more than 300,000 veterans build a steadily growing new social group in a society that must still learn how Germany has changed after the end of the Cold War. Afghanistan, with many dead and wounded German soldiers, is the real beginning of a new chapter in German veteran’s history. We assume that the emergence of the new social group of veterans in Germany will distinguish them from those in other countries with different traditions of war and peace discourses, and with a perpetual production of returnees from wars for diverse grounds, inter alia colonial and expeditionary traditions and routines.

“The veteran”—a contested term Who shall be called a veteran? As Daxner and Mann point out, the use of the term “veteran” depends pretty much on the discursive tactics of those who are using the term (Daxner and Mann 2016). The definitions are by no means at the deliberation of singular power groups or distinguished actors, e.g. a ministry of defence or a veterans’ organisation. This may be true for all societies with veterans. However, there are differences, often on subtle levels. In a survey among soldiers of the Bundeswehr, 57 percent of respondents stated that all former soldiers should be called veterans, while 20 percent wanted this designation only for those soldiers who have participated in a mission (Bulmahn 2012, 39-41), i.e. who were “deployed”. The question of who shall be called a veteran in Germany is also not inviting an answer from an authority or a formal institution. The public discourse strategies are competing, and acceptable definitions are still out of reach. They will be shaped by many arguments that we shall analyse in the articles of this book dealing with the German case. The question remains open. The self-image of veterans is not really investigated in Germany; a few studies have just started without solid results3.Will the social group consist of soldiers who have been on a mission at least once, can veterans then be also soldiers who are still active and on duty? Does private security produce veterans? How much exposure to fighting is necessary in order to become a veteran? These questions are of general interest for all countries, and they will be answered differently. The 3

Heike Bühring, a psychologist at the Bundeswehr Academy, is currently conducting representative interviews with officers regarding their experiences in the field. Her doctoral dissertation—Returnees from Deployment (working title)—is likely to be completed in 2018.

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German answers will take more attention in this book for obvious reasons. It is not every day that a new social group is emerging. We understand that these fights over definitions resemble a bit the old battle of “nominalism” against the “realism” of definitions that have gained recognition with most of the people. This is the case in many of the nations with a long tradition of veteran policies and cultures. While soldiers returning from war do not represent a new phenomenon, but rather one as old as war itself, German society seems to have been caught off guard by the fact that the country is producing once again a social group that fits the term, whether you call them veterans or not. A first timid step conducted by the political leadership of thematising this growing issue has been made in a speech in September of 2011 by the Minister of Defence, Thomas de Maizière, who said in parliament that he acknowledges the veterans of the Bundeswehr, and made a stark statement: “It belongs to the reality of deployment that there are veterans in Germany in recent years. These are veterans of the Bundeswehr. I admit to this term today”. The last word, today, indicates that the minister has changed his mind on the issue (Veteranenverband 2017). In a discussion paper from 2012, de Maizière addresses the necessity of defining German veterans, as well as the stringent need of having a conclusive, reliable, long-term veterans policy. The discussion paper portrays two possible definitions: a Scandinavian one, defining a veteran as a soldier, who has been deployed outside of the borders of his or her country, and an Anglo-American one, defining the term veteran very broadly, as every former member of the armed forces honourably discharged 4 . However, some countries using the latter model also recognise international deployment, through the specification of a combat veteran. This implies that out of area deployment includes “combat”, and other military missions, such as monitoring or surveillance. The term combat is not innocent at all, e.g., when considering the drone-dilemmas. In January 2013, German Federal Minister of Defence de Maizière defined, during a military ceremony, a veteran to be “someone, who has been honourably discharged from the active service of the Bundeswehr and has taken part in at least one deployment for humanitarian, peace-keeping or peace-making measures” (quoted from Wiegold 2013).

4

A chronology of the debate is presented by the veteran organisation “Bund Deutscher Einsatzveteranen” (http://veteranenverband.de/chronologie-der-aussagen-wesentlicher-akteure-im-the menfeld-veteranenpolitik/ Last Accessed January 2, 2018.) Federal Minister of Defence, Thomas de Maizière, presented this definition on 16 January 2013.

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Since these noticeable moments, however, this meaningful and necessary debate has come to a halt. At least on the official, i.e. political level. The discourse is being currently nurtured by the established German veteran associations (see also Baumgärtner and Schultheiss, Chapter Three in this volume). The Bund DeutscherEinsatzVeteranen e.V. has published a veteran concept in July 2017, containing diverse but coherent theses that the association could agree upon (Veteranenverband 2017). This action has fuelled the discussion among active and former soldiers and among the different associations lobbying for their veterans but has been widely ignored by policy makers. It has not had any effect outside the circles of experts or affected parties. Such concepts, quasi-introducing a new social group, need resonance by the public; in this respect, active soldiers and veterans likewise have their difficulties in Germany. Besides the problem of definition, veterans are becoming increasingly visible through documentaries, journal articles and quite a few reports and memoirs from the field. There is a new genre emerging (see also Daxner in Chapter 5 in this volume). Veterans have begun to struggle for the sovereignty of interpretation regarding the discourses on their place in society. They will participate in the future in discourses on interventions, homeland, war and peace (Daxner and Mann 2014, 5). The German exceptional position might be a transitory one, as the country undergoes a rapid “normalisation” through its engagement in many more military missions out of area.

The contributions in this volume At the end of the returnees-conference in Marburg, many participants asked for documentation of the results. It was clear from the beginning that the book should also be read outside German national borders. That is one of the reasons why the contributions are in English, as was the conference language. Future research should have an easier access to stock-taking on a subject that is regarded as serious, but not of much interest to both the scientific community and the public. It goes without saying that we do not share this indifference. Vehemently, we try to create awareness about a problem that will certainly grow, and not only in our country but worldwide. The problem will be mainly a confrontation on several frontiers of societal cohesion, i.e. insecurity, social policy, cultural dynamics etc. It will be controversial, that is for sure. The German post-war history has been too ambiguous and unclear as to manage a transition into an age of higher importance of the nation on a global level. Thus, the reflection of matters of war and peace gain new structures and dimensions. They will also provoke

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a refaced discourse on military and security matters, and veterans accordingly. There is a wide and diverse of scientific and popular literature about veterans, sometimes, by veterans. It would be pretentious to present an overview on the variance in references and texts. One of the fascinating aspects is that veterans become thematic in some national literature, in particular in the USA. Prominent writers and authors of more trivial books make veterans the explicit or indirect key persons in their plots. After the Second World War, this was true for Germany also but dried out in the course of decreasing interest in this war and its aftermath. The new German army, the Bundeswehr, of course did not produce any veterans by the time of its founding, and accounts to the past were hidden by taboos and very special sensitivities. Some of our contributions on the German case will pay attention to this. The newly emerging debate about traditions and correctness in accounting to the past add to this aspect. In these articles, the available scientific references should be mentioned in a rather complete listing. Most existing publications on veterans worldwide focus on trauma and other medical aspects and negative mental experiences (e.g., Wadsworth et al. 2016, Ruzek 2011, Werner 2010, Barris 2009, Bieber 2007); the majority of the publications address the situation of U.S.-veterans (exceptions are McMullin 2013, and Duclos 2012, with papers on veterans in post-war-countries). In contrast, the present volume also addresses the mindsets and competences of veterans and their possibilities after returning from mission experiences; this book sheds light on the specific cultures of returnees with their own rituals, habitus, structures and codices in different European Countries and the U.S. Drawing on the comparative perspective of current cases and on approaches involving sociology, anthropology and peace and conflict studies. As we have shown, Germany provides a special case, and this is reflected in many contributions. However, there are many commonalities among all other veteran groups worldwide, and only a few characteristics belong to the German “Sonderweg” (particular way) only. The volume is divided into three sections. The first deals with the lives of soldiers after return and their experiences “at home”. Tim Kucharzewski compares in the first chapter “Off War. PTSD Treatment in the U.S. and German Armed Forces” the forms of therapy of the US-army and the Bundeswehr dealing with PTSD. Kucharzewski describes the long road from recognising PTSD as a problem towards developing treatment from psychotherapy to bodywork and VR-based methods.

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Birgitte Refslund Sørensen addresses in the second chapter “From Warforce to Workforce. Danish veterans’ Career Changes” the strategies of veterans to cope with the discontinuity of life contexts after leaving the Danish Forces, reflected in the choice of jobs and their working practices. Sørensen describes the reactions of employers with a wide range of prejudices, from discrimination to a privileged treatment of veterans. She shows, furthermore, how, in some cases, competences gained during deployment help former soldiers not only to become experts in security and organisational issues, but even to make processes and relationships work better due to their capacities and certain approaches. The second part of the volume sheds light on the social and juridical aspects of the recognition of veterans by governmental and societal institutions and the positioning of veterans through the formation of advocacy groups and associations. Eva Baumgärtner and Philipp Schultheiss deal in the third chapter “They Have Returned and are here to Stay. New Veteran Organisations in Germany and their Struggle for Recognition” with the new veteran associations in Germany. Based on Axel Honneth’s (2014) theory of reciprocal recognition as the basis of the social fabric of society, Baumgärtner and Schultheiss, interpret the lines of argument and activities of the veteran associations as a struggle for visibility and awareness. The lack of these two elements, hindered by the collective memory of the Second World War, had previously tended to marginalise the German veterans. In the fourth chapter “Getting even with the State: Serbian War Veterans Suing a Country Officially Never at War”, Maria Vivod addresses the case of Serbian veterans who had fought during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia from 1991 to 1999. Vivod analyses the background for the veterans’ lack of official status and support—they having been originally framed as losers of the war. This interpretation is relating to Serbian narratives about nationalism and values, such as honour. Nevertheless, Vivod describes the interconnectedness of the national and international levels, as the veterans register partial successes during their fight for recognition by founding veteran associations, organising strikes and bringing their case before the European Court of Human Rights. Michael Daxner analyses in the fifth chapter the beginnings of the processes of perceiving and recognising veterans in Germany as they form a newly emerging social group. In his article “Competing with the Dead Hero. The German Particular Way” he further describes the cultural and ideological subtexts forming the recent discourse on veterans in Germany. The coordinates and habitus of this new group is being contrasted with

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other segments of society, especially in their distinct accounts to the German past. The third focus of the volume is the analysis of different societal and medial conceptualisations and narratives concerning deployment returnees. In the sixth chapter, “Impeded heroes. On the (self-)perception of German Veterans”, Marion Näser-Lather asks whether today’s returnees from missions are regarded as heroes by the German society and the Bundeswehr and whether German veterans use the concept of heroism for describing themselves or their comrades. Näser-Lather shows the historical discontinuities as well as the current ambivalences and contradictions of the concept “military hero” connected with pacifist, patriotic and (post-)heroic discourses (see for example Münkler 2007) and the norms of the Bundeswehr. Michael Galbas analyses in the seventh chapter, “‘We are Heroes’: The Homogenising Glorification of the Memories on the Soviet–Afghan War in Present Russia”, how the narratives regarding the returnees from the war in Afghanistan have changed over time. Drawing on Aleida Assmann’s (2006) concept of collective memory, Galbas concludes, furthermore, that there are three different patterns of narratives being employed by veterans to cope with their experiences during the Afghan War: heroism, victimhood, and justification. Important comparative parallels can be drawn between Galbas contribution and Näser-Lather’s and Daxner’s chapters. Tatiana Prorokova’s eighth chapter “‘I Don’t Belong Here Anymore’: Homeland as an Uncomfortable Space for War Veterans in Irwin Winkler’s Home of the Brave” sheds light on the pop cultural conceptualisation of war and veterans. The movie “Home of the brave” not only offers an example of a critical re-evaluation of the warrior-as-hero-image promoted by the US-American cinema, but also underscores the hardships that soldiers have to face once they are back home. As Prorokova carves out, home is no longer the familiar safe place of previous time. Home rather presents itself, after deployment, as a place of struggles confronting the life-worlds of the past. To sum up, the different contributions show the framing of veterans and the reactions of the public towards them. There is a broad variance in the conceptualisation of historical events through collective memory, in discourses on war and military force, traditions and cultural values. Veterans’ concepts of the state and the nation become visible. The German case tends to stand out for several reasons. But on the other hand, there is, as our volume shows, much that all veterans have in common, such as a specific habitus and experiences separating them from the rest of society.

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The emergent group of veterans deserves and is continuing to deserve academic and societal attention.

Bibliography Ahrends, Martin, and Ute Susanne Werner (eds.). 2010. Ich krieg mich nicht mehr unter Kontrolle. Kriegsheimkehrer der Bundeswehr. Köln: Fackelträger Verlag. Apelt, Maja, and Cordula Dittmer. 2007. “‘Underpressure’—Militärische Männlichkeiten im Zeichen neuer Kriege und veränderter Geschlechterverhältnisse.” In Dimensionen der Kategorie Geschlecht: Der Fall Männlichkeit, edited by Mechthild Bereswill, Michael Meuser and Sylka Scholz. 68-83. Münster: westfälisches Dampfboot. Assmann, Aleida. 2006. Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik. München: C.H. Beck. Barris, Theodore. 2009. Breaking the silence: veterans' untold stories from the Great War to Afghanistan. Toronto: Allen. Bereswill, Mechthild, Meuser, Michael and Sylka Scholz (eds.). 2007. Dimensionen der Kategorie Geschlecht: Der Fall Männlichkeit. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot. Bieber, Benjamin. 2007. Die Hypothek des Krieges: eine soziologische Studie zu den sozialen Effekten von Kriegen und zur Reintegration von Veteranen, Kriegsinvaliden und Hinterbliebenen in Bosnien-Herzegowina. Hamburg: Kovac. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1980. Le sens pratique. Paris: Édition de Minuit. —. 1982. Die feinen Unterschiede. Kritik der gesellschaftlichen Urteilskraft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —. 1983. “Ökonomisches Kapitel, kulturelles Kapital, soziales Kapital.” In Soziale Ungleichheiten, edited by Kreckel, Reinhard. 183-198. Göttingen. —. 2001. Masculine Domination. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bühring, Heike. 2017. Dissertation on the Psychology of Veterans, Oldenburg (work in progress). Bulmahn, Thomas. 2012. Wahrnehmung und Bewertung des Claims “Wir.Dienen.Deutschland”: Image der Bundeswehr sowie Haltungen zum Umgang mit Veteranen; Ergebnisse der Bevölkerungsumfrage 2012; Kurzbericht. Strausberg: Sozialwissenschaftliches Inst. d. Bundeswehr. Coser, Lewis A. and Robert K. Merton. 1983. Introduction to Sociology. New York: Harcourt Brace Javonovich.

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Czech, Gerald. 2009. Konzeptpapier. Habitus. Accessed December 27, 2017. blog.roteskreuz.at/sociologist/2009/01/01/konzeptpapier-habitus/. Daxner, Michael, and Clifford Mann. 2016. “Veteranen—eine neue soziale Gruppe.” In Österreichische Militärische Zeitschrift 54 (5). Accessed December 27, 2017. https://www.oemz-online.at/display/ZLIintranet/Veteranen+-+eine+ne ue+soziale+Gruppe. Duclos, Nathalie. 2012. War veterans in postwar situations: Chechnya, Serbia, Turkey, Peru, and Cote D'Ivoire. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hardy, Cheryl. 2008. “Hysteresis.” In Pierre Bourdieu—Key Concepts, edited by Michael Grenfell. 131-148. Durham: Acumen Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1017/UPO9781844654031.012. Honneth, Axel. 2014. Vivisektionen eines Zeitalters: Porträts zur Ideengeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Kirn, Daniel. 2007. “‘Krieg ist es nicht, was wir wollen.’ Veteranen- und Kriegervereine in Württemberg im 19. Jahrhundert.” In Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 66(2), 281-308. Krahmann, Elke. 2010. States, citizens and the privatization of security. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kümmel, Gerhard. 2010. “Das soldatische Subjekt zwischen Weltrisikogesellschaft, Politik, Gesellschaft und Streitkräften. Oder: Vom Schlagen einer Schneise durch den IdentitätsSelbstverständnis-Berufsbild-Dschungel.” In Identität, Selbstverständnis, Berufsbild: Implikationen der neuen Einsatzrealität für die Bundeswehr, edited by Angelika Dörfler-Dierken, and Gerhard Kümmel, 161-184. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Link, Jürgen. 1997. Versuch über den Normalismus. Wie Normalität produziert wird. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. McMullin, Jaremey Robert. 2013. Ex-combatants and the post-conflict state: challenges of reintegration. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Münkler, Herfried. 2007. “Heroische und postheroische Gesellschaften.” In Merkur 61, 742-752. Näser-Lather, Marion. 2011. Bundeswehrfamilien. Die Perzeption von Elternschaft und die Vereinbarkeit von Familie und Soldatenberuf. Baden Baden: Nomos. —. 2016. “Experiencing war. The reconfiguration of the senses among German soldiers deployed to Afghanistan.” In Critical Military Studies. Accessed December 27, 2017. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23337486.2016.1261759.

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Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling Alone. New York. Ruzek, Josef I. 2011. Caring for veterans with deployment-related stress disorders: Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association. Seiffert, Anja and Julius Heß. 2014. Afghanistanrückkehrer. Der Einsatz, die Liebe, der Dienst und die Familie: Ausgewählte Ergebnisse der sozialwissenschaftlichen Langzeitbegleitung des 22. Kontingents ISAF. Forschungsbericht. Potsdam: Zentrum für Militärgeschichte und Sozialwissenschaften der Bundeswehr. Tomforde, Maren. 2009. “Neue Militärkultur(en): Wie verändert sich die Bundeswehr durch die Auslandseinsätze?” In Forschungsthema: Militär. Militärische Organisationen im Spannungsfeld von Krieg, Gesellschaft und soldatischen Subjekten, edited by Maja Apelt,193-219. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. 2016. Suicide Among Veterans and Other Americans 2001–2014. https://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/docs/2016suicidedatareport.pdf. Veteranenverband. 2017. BDV Thesen zu einem Veteranenkonzept der Bundeswehr (Einziges Dokument in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland). Accessed December 12, 2017. http://veteranenverband.de/thesen-zur-veteranenpolitik-in-der-bundesre publik-deutschland/. Vogel, Jakob. 2001. “Der Undank der Nation: Die Veteranen der Einigungskriege und die Debatte um ihren ‘Ehrensold’ im Kaiserreich.” In Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 60 (2), 343-366. Wadsworth, Shelley MacDermid and David S. Riggs. 2016. War and Family Life. Berlin: Springer. Werner, Ute Susanne (ed.). 2010. “Ich krieg mich nicht mehr unter Kontrolle”: Kriegsheimkehrer der Bundeswehr. Köln: Fackelträger. Wiegold, Thomas. 2013. Veteran auch ohne Einsatzmedaille. Accessed December 27, 2017. http://augengeradeaus.net/2013/01/veteran-auch-ohne-einsatzmedaille/. Zimmermann, Peter, Herbert Jacobs, and Jens Kowalski. 2012. “ISAF und die Seele—Zwischen Schädigung und Wachstum.” In Der Einsatz der Bundeswehr in Afghanistan, edited by Anja Seiffert, Phil Langer, and Christian Pietsch, 143-152. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.

PART I: EXPERIENCES

CHAPTER ONE OFF WAR: THE U.S. AND GERMAN ARMED FORCES AND PTSD TREATMENT TIM KUCHARZEWSKI

Introduction War is a topic that has spilled almost as much ink as it has blood. Countless words have been written on this phenomenon before and after Clausewitz wrote his influential magnum opus On War. Less has been written about what happens beyond war, when the war is over and/or soldiers return home; what happens Off War. For a long time soldiers have been mostly left to fend for themselves once their war was over, their personal Troy and Odyssey behind them, home again. Until just a few decades ago, militaries offered mainly disregard for the trauma sustained by their veterans' infernal experience. Indeed, “War is hell”. (Sherman 1974, iv.) This old adage, coined by William T. Sherman in the context of the American Civil War, might be a generic catchphrase but it still rings true throughout history. War, organised murder, must always feel like Dante's “suffering city” to its participants, be they soldiers, civilians, bystanders, victims or perpetrators (with the notable exception of the likes of Ernst Jünger, Winston Churchill and the most recent generation of “deployment junkies” who go beyond considering war as a necessary evil and find that the experience grants some kind of sublime fulfilment, as “a force that gives us meaning” (Hedges 2003)). From this hell veterans often bring their personal, psychological demons with them, when they return home. Leaving the ground of theological metaphor, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) (American Psychiatric Association 2013) applies the more scientific name post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to these “demons”. Depending on the definition, symptoms of this psychological illness range from night sweats to flashbacks, from obsessive

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compulsive disorder to drug addiction, severe depression and everything in between. Tragically, some of the affected people consider suicide the only available way out. Commendably, many armed forces around the world are aware of the problem and try to offer ways to curtail and maybe even cure PTSD, often by using experimental ways of therapy. Of course, there is no “silver bullet”, no guaranteed way to remedy the disorder. The American military, often a driving force of innovation in revolutions in military affairs, attempts to address the issue by using advanced technology. Virtual reality and what can be referred to as video game technology play an essential role in the confrontational therapy used by U.S. Forces. The German military, on the other hand, is often a conservative institution. While militaries in general (including the U.S. military, except for its often ground-breaking technological leaps) are often resistant to any change, even judged against its peers, the Bundeswehr is not famous for its progressive or cutting edge digital high-tech ideas and solutions. Alternative innovations and additions to more traditional ways of PTSD related therapy include animal therapy or sports in this case. This article offers an overview of the methods used by the German and U.S. armed forces or the respective civilian medical counterparts to address PTSD, focusing mainly on the difference between the approaches. Based on personal interviews with civil and military medical/psychological practitioners, active and former soldiers, and academics working in relevant fields, open source documents, scientific publications, newspaper articles, etc. the various forms of treatment will be outlined and analysed. The comparative approach embeds the two cases in their respective national context and offers new perspectives. Comparing the different medical and military policies of these two countries regarding to PTSD treatment will offer an insight which will be more than just the sum of its parts. Enough similarities can be cited to justify a reasonable basis for comparison: e.g., the NATO membership of both countries, veterans returning from the same theatre of war (namely Afghanistan), a similar level of economic development, democratic institutions. On the other hand, the cultural and traditional differences between the two cases, especially in the realms of war and the military, ensure a significant, meaningful value emanating from a comparison. A “culture of military restraint”, rooted in the negative historical memory of militarism and dictatorship in Germany stands contrasted against a long history of international military interventions and a narrative of several “just wars” ended in victory on the U.S. side (a narrative that often ignores the non-victorious wars after 1945, which have taken place in the rice paddies of Korea and Vietnam or the

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mountains of Afghanistan). Advantages and disadvantages of the respective national assumptions and forms of therapy will be discussed and a potential synergy of the most promising elements might present itself to the reader, resulting from the findings. This case selection contrasts a very technologically progressive with a fundamentally conservative example in order to cover as broad a spectrum as possible. PTSD—being one of the most dramatic and severe psychological and even societal challenges resulting from war—and its possible cure are beyond doubt an essential aspect within the discourse regarding veterans. Judging by the scope of publications about PTSD, the topic generated intensive academic and even popular attention in the wake of the recent wars with U.S. and/or NATO engagement. Some publications, like Winning the War Within. PTSD and the Long Road Home (MacKinnon 2010), boast with the term PTSD on their covers and in their titles but have little to offer on the concept in terms of content. On the other hand, there are also several well-researched and authoritative texts and voices that have enhanced the discourse on this important issue, ranging from former soldiers, who are themselves afflicted by the problem (Sedlatzek-Müller 2012), over journalists (some with experience in combat zones, like Sebastian Junger) (Junger 2016) to medical doctors and psychologists (Paulson and Krippner 2007). An integral part of the publishing sector in the U.S. has been dedicated to the memoirs of veterans, embedded journalists, and soldiers for a long time. In Germany this market has only emerged in recent years but already produced a considerable number of publications by (former) members of the Bundeswehr, deployed abroad. Johannes Clair, Heike Groos, Thomas Rathsack, Achim Wohlgetan are some of the names that can be cited here, and the list continues to expand. More often than not these authors address topics like posttraumatic stress and the after effects of the psychological strain of conflict and combat. Last but not least, in the tradition of Michael Herr or Tim O'Brien (for the Vietnam War) and Robert Graves or Erich Maria Remarque (for the First World War), a lot of the (PTSD-related) reporting of the most recent wars is cloaked under the cover of semi-fictionalized accounts. The National Book Award winning short story collection Redeployment by Phil Klay (2014) can be cited as one acclaimed and successful example here. Dirk Kurbjuweit’s (2011) Kriegsbraut is a German variation of this.

Of shell shock and combat fatigue: History of terminology War is an ancient scourge of mankind and its existence can be traced back to prehistoric hunter-gatherers. 10,000-year-old evidence proves that war has

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always been a most violent and terrible experience (Handwerk 2016). While a scientific definition of PTSD is but a modern occurrence, the concept seems to be a primal one. A lot of observers agree that the evolutionary reasons that humans can get afflicted by this variation of trauma dates back to our primeval instincts. After a stressful traumatic event, it was useful to have constant reminders of the trigger incident to be on edge and alert. Flashbacks and nightmares were tools to keep up the guard. On the other side of the medal, depression and apathy were necessary to keep one from moving over the edge and heading into arbitrary dangerous situations or picking useless fights. In this way, both the fight and flight instinct were tendered to (Junger 2016, 74-75). References to something that might be a PTSD can be found in sources as diverse as ancient Egyptian and Greek texts (Meineck and Konstan 2014) and Shakespeare (Bennet 2011). Yet a more scientific way of approaching this issue, especially in regard to traumatised soldiers, may have begun only during and in the aftermath of the First World War. Terms like shell shock or Zitterkrankheit (trembling disease) first found their place in medical journals and diagnosis files as consequences of the so-called Great War (Wilson 2013, 100). In 1922 a Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into “Shell-Shock” was presented to the UK Parliament by Command of His Majesty. Named as the desired aim of the report was to: consider the different types of hysteria and traumatic neurosis, commonly called 'shell shock', […] with a view to recording for future use the ascertained facts as to its origin, nature, and remedial treatment, and to advise whether by military training or education, some scientific method of guarding against its occurrence can be devised (Army, 2014, 3).

Mostly though, the research done at the time at best revolved around getting soldiers ready for active duty again and less about reintegrating them into civil society. Interestingly, the Second World War spawned very different symptoms of psychological and/or psychosomatic disorders. Battle or combat fatigue was the keyword of that time, when soldiers got lost to apathy and depression (Brown 2001, 55). It might be the case that the forms of warfare play a role in the traumatic effects that wars leave behind. While the First World War involved a lot of static and trench warfare where little if any territory was gained or lost, the Second World War has been a war of movement and mobility in contrast. The first case resulted in involuntary, uncontrollable body spasms, while the latter resulted in victims refusing to make any distinct movement at all. The so-called “Post-Vietnam Syndrome” brought a paradigm shift and added the P to the more modern and more inclusive acronym PTSD. Before

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that, mental trauma sustained during combat operations was mostly thought to be the result of a weak mind, cowardice or even a hoax. Now this way of thinking slowly but steadily began to get challenged. Objective observation could not merge this outdated view with the reality of 35.8% of men and 17.5% of women deployed in Vietnam with war-zone exposure returning with mental issues meeting criteria for current PTSD definitions (Price 1988). The former historical prevalent reluctance to acknowledge this challenge to society and face it head on is probably responsible for an immense number of unreported cases. To many families and relatives of soldiers who fought in the last global conflict, this fact has to be more than an abstract academic observation. Of course, the affected soldiers themselves, who make up this as of yet unfathomable dark figure, are not to be forgotten here. My own grandfather, who fought and was wounded on the “Eastern Front”, talked about having nightmares, “memories” coming to him at night (that sound a lot like flashbacks), refused to watch anything other than football and tennis on the television, and tended to have arbitrary crying fits when even alluding to the events he had lived through during that war. Even to a layman, these occurrences seem conspicuous, to say the least. An official diagnosis of PTSD, of course, was never conducted in his case. On the one hand, because it was never offered to him, and on the other, because he has been socialised in a society that considered these symptoms as either weak and shameful, or fake, and thus any kind of psychological treatment would be unnecessary. While it might be debatable if this single example is representative, even though I personally know many families, who can share similar experiences, the problem of unreported war-related PTSD cases is obvious. Yet it is exceedingly difficult to grasp empirically and to describe in its full variance. In an interview, a medical practitioner, from North Rhine-Westphalia, who had specialised on psychiatry and psychotherapy told me that she still encountered many civilians traumatised by the Second World War, when she recently worked in the area of geriatric psychiatry with patients over 65 years. Despite these obvious problems, there remains a lack of discourse in relation to the traumatised people of the Second World War in Germany (Maercker 2013, 8). The important work of dealing with the past and coming to terms with the fact that the German nation was a perpetrator of the most extensive industrialised Crime against Humanity, the Holocaust and a war of annihilation in Eastern Europe, overshadowed the idea that the war traumatised Germans too. Even if a discourse on the matter would emerge today, veterans of the affected generation passed away or their

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advanced age brought other, more biological worries. After S.L.A. Marshall's famous studies allegedly found out that 75% of the U.S. troops who were engaged in combat during the Second World War never attempted to shoot to kill an enemy, the focus of military psychology in the armed forces of the USA lay on training soldiers to become willing to actually fire on other human beings with the intention of wounding or killing them (Marshall 2000, 50). Only after the Vietnam War did this focus—maybe not shift but—broaden to include the mental well-being of the soldiers who suffered traumatic experiences. The idea that wounds do not have to be visible damage but can also appear in form of psychological injuries began to slowly take hold and gain actual acceptance from the authorities and the broader society alike. In Germany it took a considerable while longer for this concept to gain importance, among other factors also because of a lack of combat operations before 1999 and a semi-pacifist culture of military restraint after 1945 (de facto in both German states of that time, if war-mongering propaganda and rhetoric is left aside). It was only with the return of the first actual (even if not clearly named) combat deployment returnees and coffins from out-of-area operations in foreign countries, long after the misdeeds and crimes against humanity of the Second World War, that war-related PTSD gained relevance in Germany. For a long time most Germans, especially politicians, shied away from calling any operation with Bundeswehr participation “war”, regardless of the fact that some of these operations, conducted by KFOR and ISAF, wounded, traumatised and killed German soldiers. The intentionally misleading terminology of “policing operation”, “well digging”, “protective mission”, and many other words that referred to anything but “war”, added insult to injury for those soldiers deployed in what they clearly perceived as war. If there was no real war going on, according to a lot of German politicians and other authorities, there was no pressing need to address things like PTSD. “For that which must not, cannot be”, in the words of the German poet Christian Morgenstern. Over the course of the past decade all this changed however. Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the former German minister of defence (whose career ended in a scandal on the borderline between tragedy and comedy when it became known that he did not write his own Ph.D. thesis) is favourably remembered by many people for being the first politician to officially and publicly use the word “war” when referring to the Bundeswehr contribution to the ISAF operation (Spiegel Online 2010). The distorting terminology that had been in use before, is said to have been responsible for major blunders on the strategic level and an incorrect societal perception of soldiers and the typical topics related to this

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profession, like PTSD, in Germany (Bollmann 2016, 174-175). After this watershed moment, when the taboo on the term “war” has been lifted, the entire discourse on Afghanistan, the Bundeswehr, war and also PTSD gained new momentum. Another factor that is not negligible for this change in public perception and interest is the indefatigable and often voluntary work of grassroots initiatives, associations, unions and clubs of deployment returnees and their relatives and friends (Baumgärtner and Schultheiss wrote detailed analysis of the phenomenon in this book, Chapter Three). These associations are evident indications of a new emerging social group in Germany, the new (combat) deployment returnees. This group currently still attempts to find its own voice and place in society (Daxner 2016, 107). The challenge of overcoming the dark historical legacy of German militarism that this emerging group is faced with, can be a rugged road, beginning with the choice of words: one new deployment returnee of the Federal Republic of Germany wrote an honest and thought-provoking account of his ordeal and his PTSD but awkwardly gave it the title “My Struggle [Mein Kampf] with the Trauma” (Storch 2016), a choice of words that involuntarily raises connotations of another text by another former German soldier with a similar title, that had nothing to do with the parliamentary, democratic armed forces of today. Finding a proper language is a main exigency for any social group and particularly complicated in this case. In post-Vietnam Hollywood, there was also a certain observable fascination with the topic PTSD. The figure Colonel Kurtz, and the protagonist in Apocalypse Now, all based on the Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad), as well as John Rambo in First Blood or several characters in The Deer Hunter all seem to show distinguishable symptoms of a (post-)Vietnam syndrome. Those symptoms were mostly limited to lurid, spectacular boosts of violence and incalculable erratic behaviour though. A cure seemed a far-fetched idea for these fictional men who appeared to have totally lost their minds to the war. The tough but mentally deranged war veteran became a cliché topos of U.S. fiction. A more differentiated handling of the subject matter is only approached tentatively today, like in certain episodes of the shows House of Cards or Homeland for example. High budget productions are sometimes as much political as they are entertainment and can often be a measuring instrument for general public interest, sentiment and attitudes, because they react to the rules of the market. Complementary, sometimes they are also able to help shape these attributes of a society. German attempts to produce films revolving around issues related to war, veterans and their related traumata

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like Til Schweiger's Schutzengel (Guardian Angel), gain far less acclaim and attention; but this holds true for all more often than not ill-conceived productions of the German film industry in general. Nevertheless, documentary and fictional films, just like autobiographical texts, are among the media releases of the new Bundeswehr “Generation Einsatz” [deployment] (Bohrmann 2016, 156) and often depict deployment related challenges like PTSD.

The U.S. Armed Forces and PTSD treatment Due to an extensive track record of foreign engagements and a huge number of military personnel stationed overseas, sometimes in combat situations, the U.S. armed forces might be facing the most extensive and severe challenge of PTSD of any NATO member state and certainly faces an even more drastic challenge than the Bundeswehr. Looking at the numbers of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) in Afghanistan, the U.S. forces statistically exhibit 11% of PTSD affected personnel (Sloat 2014) and the German forces only about 2% (Bundespsychotherapeutenkammer 2011), but the latter number exhibits rising tendencies and a high dark figure of an estimated almost 40% of unreported cases. The most comprehensive German study yet, conducted by the TU Dresden, puts the percentage more precisely even lower, with 1,95 % (Wittchen and Schönfeld 2013). On top of that, the Iraq war has been responsible for an even higher percentage of traumatised U.S. military personnel stationed overseas, with estimates going up to the Vietnam War combat exposure mark of 35% (Kilgore 2017). Even though there was and remains a public interest in combat related PTSD in the U.S., the term itself seems to be a quite diffuse one. Social and political groups like families, the military and the mental-health-care system all possess a more or less unique understanding of the matter, all focusing on the respective own context with different working definitions (Finley 2012, 3). An official booklet published by the National Center for PTSD, offers the following laconic and straightforward definition of the phenomenon: PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder) is a mental health problem that some people develop after experiencing or witnessing a life-threatening event, like combat, a natural disaster, a car accident, or sexual assault (National Center for PTSD 2017, 3).

After referring to an online questionnaire, where users can test if they may have PTSD and providing other basic information, further pages in the booklet name the four common “talk therapy” treatments:

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Chapter One 1. Prolonged Exposure Therapy (PE) 2. Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) 3. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) 4. Stress Inoculation Training (SIT)

According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs these treatments are recommended because they have the “most research support” (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs 2017). So, these are the commonly used mainstream methods of treating PTS1. Yet there are several methods that can be added to supposedly upgrade this by now classic procedures. As presented in the History of Terminology section of this paper, the Vietnam War was a game changer for the handling and acknowledging of mental complications resulting from the experience of combat. It is little wonder, although it is impressive, that the first attempts to counteract PTBS by applying Virtual Reality (VR) technology to enhance more conventional therapy methods date back to the late 1990s and addressed Veterans of the Vietnam War. The roots of VR technology development in general reach even further into the past, into the 1980s (Rizzo and Shilling 2017). As early as 1997 the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta released a Virtual Vietnam VR scenario as a high-tech tool for systematic desensitisation (Rizzo 2005). Also known as graduated exposure therapy, systematic desensitization basically attempts to mitigate or even cure phobias and traumata in patients by making them confront their issues and/or relive their trigger moments in a controlled environment attended by a professional psychiatrist or psychologist. Over the following two decades, not least due to the developments of the commercial video game sector and the growing request of this market, technologies, graphics, hardware and user interfaces improved drastically and exponentially. After the outbreak of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) took up the torch and created an immersive virtual Iraq environment, based on elements of the military training software Full Spectrum Command, which gained more publicity as the commercial video game Full Spectrum Warrior (Rizzo 2005)2. 1

Post-traumatic stress (PTS) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) share similarities beyond the lexical level but are not identical. PTS is common after a traumatic event and usually does not require treatment. PTSD, on the other hand, is a medically-diagnosed condition. PTSD can be developed without having PTS, and does require treatment. 2 Commercial and free-to-play video games, especially war related productions, have long developed a political and societal relevance. Not least because state militaries and terrorist organisations have produced several of these works. For more on this: Kucharzewski, 2017.

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One of the latest instalments of VR exposure therapy systems developed by the ICT bears the title Bravemind (ICT 2017). A promotional booklet for the product claims that it is “Currently distributed to over 50 sites, including VA hospitals, military bases and university centers” and goes on to state that “the Bravemind system has been shown to produce a meaningful reduction in PTS symptoms”. The software is provided as open source, free of charge for documented clinicians and researchers. A newer version “Virtual Iraq/Afghanistan” has been developed during 2005-2007 and funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research. Dr Albert “Skip” Rizzo, Director of Medical Virtual Reality at the ICT and Professor at the Department of Psychiatry and School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California, gained considerable publicity as a main advocate, pioneer and mastermind of the VR method. Several documentaries, newspaper articles, podcasts and books draw on his expertise and ambition. Surprisingly, despite the presumable workload connected to this and the related amount of (academic) fame, he still proofed able to respond to e-mail requests personally within a few hours. Even Dr Rizzo, who can look back on several years of working with VR technology designed for therapy use, refers to it as an “emerging area of research” (for a detailed history of the concept see: Rizzo and Shilling 2017). Fundamentally there are two main forms of VR: Non-Immersive VR and Immersive VR. Anyone who has ever played a modern video game has experience with the first variation. Non-Immersive VR describes the interaction of a human user with a computer-generated 3D environment on a generic screen which is not using occlusion of the external world, by using conventional interfaces like keyboard, mouse, joystick or gamepad. Training real therapists or letting real patients interact with virtual therapists by using animated Virtual Human (VH) agents is one of the ways in which this slightly more conventional dimension of VR is applied. By adding head-mounted displays (HMDs), body-tracking sensors and specialised interface devices to the VR concept, Immersive VR appears to be the more complex type by far. This elaborate technology aims at making its users feel like they are inside the virtual world of the given simulation (Rizzo and Shilling 2017). This concept is also familiar to most people who are interested in video games. A range from expensive Oculus Rift HMDs to cheap cardboard VR glasses for smartphones is available on the market. In terms of visualisation the therapy simulations look quite a lot like (a bit outdated) war video games. While war themes are a standard feature of commercial video games, sexual topics are mainly still a taboo. Likewise, a confrontational VR therapy for patients traumatised by rape would seem

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Chapter One

absurd (nevertheless there have been proposals along those lines, at least to simulate rape related PTS via VR (Joho 2015)). The symbiosis of actual war related trauma treatment with video game technology that is often inherently based on war themes, on the other hand, appears almost to be an obvious natural match. Displays and joysticks play a central role in yet another modern element of warfare too: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or Remotely Piloted Aircraft, commonly nicknamed drones. Contrary to some assumptions that by using UAVs war deteriorates to a kind of lethal video game were killing is done with the push of a button, this rather new kind of weapon system might produce new kinds of operational stress and trauma for the pilots pushing these buttons (Chatterjee 2015). A study by the U.S. Defence Department claimed to have found out that the rates of depression, anxiety and PTS levels are the same for UAV pilots and those of manned aircraft with a bodily presence in the combat zone (Dao 2013). Unrelated to high-tech topics, another minor, non-official, but noticeable experimental study in the U.S. involves PTSD treatment including the use of 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), more commonly known as ecstasy. Conducted by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, this project consumed ten million dollars (Anderson 2012). An introductory text on the website mdmaptsd.org purports that: “Research is showing that MDMA-assisted psychotherapy can be an effective treatment for people who do not respond to traditional therapies for PTSD.” (MDMAPTSD 2017) The unique selling proposition of Ecstasy enhanced treatment is described as follows: “In a recently completed pilot study, MDMA-assisted psychotherapy was shown to reduce PTSD symptoms below the diagnostic cutoff for 3.5 years or more.” Whether it is a good idea to treat people suffering from traumatic combat experiences with a normally illegal drug, is a debatable matter, since substance abuse can be a generic symptom or at least indicator for PTSD outside of therapy. Many undiagnosed affected people are said to apply alcohol and “recreational drugs” as a kind of self-administered ersatz-medication; a habit that in many cases leads to addiction. “Telehealth” which means using telecommunication like the internet, telephone or video conferencing for therapy sessions, Internet-based Imagery Rehearsal Treatment and, as also in Germany, Yoga and Acupuncture (Tull 2017), round up the most popular alternative PTSD therapy methods in the U.S. While these lastly mentioned variations might gain a foothold in the Germany of the future, VR-supported treatment, which seems to be one of the most promising avenues from the point of view of many U.S. observers, is mostly considered as to be negligible in the FRG.

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The German Bundeswehr and PTSD treatment Dr Jan Philipp Krüger, a member of the Bund Deutscher EinsatzVeteranen e.V., a deployment returnee himself and a German expert on PTSD and its treatment related issues, judges that including Virtual Reality in a therapy offers “neither more nor less effectiveness” than other prevalent methods. The medical practitioner from NRW, mentioned earlier, went several steps further and dismissed VR treatment for PTSD as: “a great hype and nothing in it”. An official from the Bundeswehr Hospital in Berlin also brought up increased monetary costs and manpower as inhibitory issues. This seems to be the prevalent assessment in Germany, or at least in German circles of experts, when it comes to VR treatment. The spectrum of responses to the question about the avail of VR is located between benign indifference and outright renunciation. However, there are other methods, beyond the traditional talking therapy sessions, which enjoy more popularity in Germany than the high tech immersive VR variation promoted by U.S. actors like the ICT. According to their official 61 pages brochure, in addition to the conventional single therapy talking sessions, Bundeswehr hospitals offer group talking sessions, movement therapy, sports, occupational therapy (creative procedures), relaxing techniques (like breath relaxation and progressive muscle relaxation), as well as alternative techniques like Yoga, aroma therapy, acupuncture, meditation, etc. [to stationary patients] (Zimmermann et al. 2014, 31).

In addition to these official offers by the Bundeswehr, there are also several non-governmental contact points for deployment returnees seeking PTSD treatment. The work of these organisations has been so important that in an absurd moment, a member of the German parliament publicly referred to a private website (Angriff auf die Seele) while he thought that it would be an official Bundeswehr platform, launched by the government. Another example of these organisations is Eisblume. On their website ptbs-eisblume .de, several civilian therapists offer yet more alternative treatments addressed especially to deployment returnees with traumatic experiences. One of the alternatives most often referred to is a form of equine-assisted therapy, involving, as the name suggests, horses. Eva Maria Rapp, one therapist offering this method, writes: “The horse is a very sensitive animal, which takes on our worries and fears and can convert them in a wonderful, honest, as also loving way into something positive.”, (Eisblume 2017). While there are many offers of animal-supported therapy on the civil side (one Bundeswehr official half-jokingly described the situation by claiming

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that therapy providers eagerly say things along the lines of “here I have one more dog, another cat over there”), only the Bundeswehr Hospital in Koblenz offers PTSD treatment supported by dolphins (SHWBw 2017). In theory, according to the interviewed Bundeswehr medic, basically any animal species could be used in this form of therapy, and the choice lies mostly with the preferences of the patient. Besides working with animals, dancing therapy is another method that has been named repeatedly in the context of coping with PTSD in Germany (Schedlich and Sander 2008, 169). Professor Dr. med. Günter H. Seidler compared dancing and rhythmic movements to the basic mechanism on which EMDR treatment is based (Seidler n.d.). Romana Tripolt wrote an extensive article about this approach, including its alleged neurobiological foundation. Dancing is another element that can be added to conventional EMDR therapy (Gomez 2013, 20). Internet-supported treatment might become a bit more established in Germany in the near future but is not a major phenomenon as of yet (and with the current state of laws cannot be). In an interview with a medic from the Bundeswehr Hospital in Berlin I learned that a research test phase for online (written) therapy has also been conducted. Beyond research purposes this does not seem to have any future, since online therapy for actual therapy purposes is illegal in Germany. On the digital side in Germany, there is not much, or at least nothing of high profile, comparable to the work the ICT does in the VR realm. However, the Bundeswehr is using a training system called CHARLY (Chaos Driven Situations Management Retrieval System). CHARLY is a computer program which is used to prepare soldiers for deployment by simulating specific scenarios and training self-calming capacities (Bundespsychotherapeutenkammer, 2014). Developed in 2007/2008, the first prototype was initially envisioned as a training tool for the Bundeswehr explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) personnel. The Bundeswehr Explosive Ordnance Disposal Centre first put the system to use in 2008/2009. A study came to the result that allegedly “PTSD-specific scales showed significant differences at the end of deployment” and this “substantiates the validity of a specifically preventive effect of CHARLY” (Wesemann et al 2016, 863). What CHARLY actually looks like can again be compared to a commercial video game. Although, compared to the already out-dated 3D animations used in the U.S., the software looks more like a point-and-click adventure game from the 1990s. Even though Bundeswehr officials by no means would agree with this definition, the system appears to be a gamification of stress management training, complete with a high score feature. A concrete example of its applications is strikingly reminiscent of jump-scare memes

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that used to be popular on the internet: users have to track a butterfly flying above a green meadow, until suddenly a loudly barking dog appears on the screen. Variations of this with ghosts, zombies, M.C. Esher's The Scream and many others instead of the barking dog can still be found online. Psychological preparation before a deployment and follow-up care after returning home in general has been established and improved over the past years for members of the Bundeswehr. It has been certified by most of my interview partners that a lot has been done in this area. After-action post-processing activities include classic group talking therapy sessions and social events. However, one former Bundeswehr soldier and deployment returnee from Afghanistan, described the after-care period to me as “a couple of days boozing with comrades”. Although these after-action activities are mandatory, many persons, especially those who often return to the theatre like medics and surgeons, are said to often opt out by requesting sick leave, because they consider deployment as business as usual and feel they do not need these wrap-up sessions.

Monkey business After an intense war during the beginning of the 1990s the conflict emanating from a dispute over the Abkhaz region in the Caucasus turned into a frozen one. Signs of the war can still be seen at every other corner of the biggest cities in the region, be they war memorials, posters or bullet holes and burned out shells that used to be buildings. In this way, even the architecture is reminiscent of the war which must have been exceedingly traumatic. According to NGO officials, working in the contested Abkhaz region, to whom I have spoken, there has been and still is a lack of research of and treatment for PTSD. At least when it comes to humans. The Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy, also known as “Monkey Colony”, used to be a top-notch facility for research involving primates. During the war some of the test subject monkeys were set free, adopted by fighters and/or killed in the crossfire. In the aftermath, the worldwide first research regarding if and how PTSD manifests itself in monkeys had been conducted. That monkeys gained more attention than humans is a drastic but common example of the chaos emanating from war and the public and political disinterest in the mundane aftermath with its human costs and wounds, physical and mental. Although in the U.S., Germany and many other nations, PTSD (on people) today is mostly recognised and accepted as a problem, there are still many challenges to overcome, before all persons who might be afflicted by it are willing to seek help and able to receive this help without obstacles of

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Chapter One

bureaucracy and social stigmata. On the other hand, today, voices can be heard, which worry about the abuse of social benefits connected to PTSD.

Medals of Honour and mental disorders The Canadian retired Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire is one of the best known and most outspoken advocates of improving the situation of deployment returnees suffering from PTSD. Having been affected by the problem personally after he had been notoriously forced to ineffectively stand-by in Rwanda as commander of the UN forces while the genocide, arguably the most large-scale crime against humanity after the end of the Second World War, raged on and 800,000 Tutsi were slaughtered. Dallaire survived several suicide attempts which were rooted in the PTSD he sustained during the middle of the 1990s (Dallaire 2003, 5). As a Canadian senator and retired General he later became an important driving force for the inclusion of injuries to the mental health of a soldier, sustained during a combat deployment, in the list of eligible cases for the Sacrifice Medal (SM). The SM is the Canadian badge of the wounded, equivalent to a Purple Heart in the U.S. This recent addition of eligibility is defined in point 5 and 5 a. of the list on the official government website under National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces: 5. Mental disorder diagnosed by qualified mental health practitioner and directly attributable to hostile action (a review of the medical file is necessary to confirm the link between the disorder and hostile action): 5a. Operational Stress Injury (OSI) resulting from enemy action or suicide caused by such mental disorders related to hostile action (National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces 2017).

Since several references claim that acceptance and understanding from peers and at least an acknowledgement from the broader society are positive factors when it comes to dealing with a PTSD, the decision to make this distinction available for mentally wounded soldiers as well might be an essential one. In the U.S. there currently is a debate about whether PTSD cases earn to get awarded a Purple Heart as well, but yet it is not the case (AOL News, 2017). Today, in Germany there is no badge for the wounded at all, not even for physical wounds. The reason for this lack of military ornamentation and medals is, like so many others, a historical one. Since 2010 there is, however, a medal for combat action, the Einsatzmedaille Gefecht, which is also controversial, as it has even been criticised by the former head of the German Army Social Sciences Studies Center (which is now part of the Center for Military History and Social Sciences of the

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Bundeswehr, ZMSBw), Detlef Bald (Münder 2010), but endorsed by others, like the legal practitioner and Major (res.) Christian Richter (Richter 2016, 203-204). In 2008, after a long lasting public debate, the currently highest tier Bundeswehr award, Ehrenkreuz für Tapferkeit, was introduced as a less historically tainted substitute for the Iron Cross, especially as a distinguishing medal for soldiers who took part in foreign deployments. Since the formerly highest award, the Ehrenkreuz (Honour Cross), can also awarded to military personnel who never left Germany's borders on duty throughout their career. Old German badges of the wounded and the original Iron Crosses, mainly artefacts from the two World Wars, are still favourite collector's items, often for persons with a right-wing-extremist mind set. After some controversy the fallen soldiers of the Bundeswehr were dignified with a memorial on the grounds of the Federal Ministry of Defence (BMVg), yet the wounded, both physically and psychologically, do not receive this kind of symbolic honour. In a country where, for understandable historical reasons, even basic national symbols like flags and anthems, have often been regarded with scepticism for a long time, this hardly comes as a surprise. Adding another medal to the chest of German soldiers might even provoke negative reactions in the broader society, even though many studies do not tire to claim that the standing of the Bundeswehr in German society is mainly positive. Among many other scandals, during the presidential campaign of 2016, candidate Donald Trump, sparked a controversial debate about PTSD by stating: When you talk about the mental health problems, when people come back from war and combat and they see things that maybe a lot of folks in this room have seen many times over and you're strong and you can handle it but a lot of people can't handle it (Cummings 2016).

A lot of people interpreted this comment to mean that people suffering from mental problems like PTSD are weak or at least not strong enough and a public and political outcry followed. It seemed like a throwback to the days of the aftermath of First World War, where people suffering from PTSD where often branded as weaklings and failures. However, on June 27, on the occasion of Veterans Day, now as POTUS, Donald Trump offered a statement which showed him as what the media regularly referred to as the “more presidential Trump”. Here he acknowledged and dignified PTSD as a major problem (Office of the Press Secretary 2017). Regardless of political, military, public and societal acceptance and handling of PTSD, exorcising the demons of war is usually a long and tiresome process that includes the application of several different methods.

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Chapter One

Unfortunately, for a matter so complex, as stated initially, there very seldom is a silver bullet to simply fix it and the exceedingly complicated matter of PTSD is not an exception to this general rule. There is no off-the-rack, one-size-fits-all treatment and there probably never can be. Which treatment works best is a question that each patient has to answer for her or himself, often after many a trial and error. Some of the treatment methods introduced in this text might seem far-fetched or on the verge of being bizarre on the first glance but it has to be kept in mind that these experimental methods seem to reduce PTSD for some patients and indeed have shown positive effects, although more medical studies need to be conducted in order to effectively judge the impact of any of the mentioned approaches. Due to its limitation this text could only offer a cursory glimpse of any given method. Please consult the referred sources for a more in-depth explanation. One requirement that might prove indispensable for an improvement of the situation of deployment returnees suffering from PTSD is a broader societal debate and awareness of this issue.

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sechs bis zehnfach erhöht.” Bundespsychotherapeutenkammer, April 08, 2011. http://www.bptk.de/aktuell/einzelseite/artikel/ptbs-risiko.html. —. 2014. “Psychotherapeutische Versorgung von Soldaten. Erste Fortbildungsveranstaltung in Berlin.” Bundespsychotherapeutenkammer, March 21, 2014. http://www.bptk.de/aktuell/einzelseite/artikel/psychotherap-79.html. Brown, Jerold E. ed. 2001. Historical Dictionary of the U.S. Army. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. Chatterjee, Pratap. 2015. “A chilling new post-traumatic stress disorder: Why drone pilots are quitting in record numbers.” Salon, June 03, 2015. http://www.salon.com/2015/03/06/a_chilling_new_post_traumatic_stre ss_disorder_why_drone_pilots_are_quitting_in_ record_numbers_partner/. Cummings, William. 2016. “Trump PTSD comments spark emotional debate.” USA Today, October 04, 2016. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/10/03/tr ump-ptsd-comments/91509626/. Dao, James. 2013. “Drone Pilots Are Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do.” The New York Times, February 22, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/drone-pilots-found-to-get-stres s-disorders-much-as-those-in-combat-do.html. Dallaire, Roméo. 2003. Shake Hands with Devil. Toronto: Random House Canada. Daxner, Michael. 2016. “Afghanistan hat Veteranen produziert—was nun?” In Die unsichtbaren Veteranen, edited by Marcel Bohnert, and Björn Schreiber, 107-118. Berlin: Miles-Verlag. Eisblume, 2017. “Therapieangebote für Soldaten mit PTBS und Angehörige.” Eisblume. Accessed September 28, 2017. http://ptbs-eisblume.de/therapeuten-fuer-ptbs.html. Finley, Erin P. 2012. Fields of Combat: Understanding PTSD among Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. New York: Cornell University Press. Gomez, Ana M. 2013. EMDR Therapy and Adjunct Approaches with Children: Complex Trauma. New York: Springer. Great Britain. War Office. Committee of Enquiry into “Shell-shock”. 2014. Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into “Shell-Shock”. East Sussex: The Naval & Military Press Ltd; The Imperial War Museum. Handwerk, Brian. 2016. “An Ancient, Brutal Massacre May Be theEarliest Evidence of War.” Smithsonian.com, January 20, 2016. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ancient-brutal-massac re-may-be-earliest-evidence-war-180957884/.

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Hedges, Chris. 2003. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. New York: Anchor Books. ICT. 2017. “Bravemind Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy.” USC Institute for Creative Technologies. Accessed September 28, 2017. http://ict.usc.edu/wp-content/uploads/overviews/Post%20Traumatic%2 0Stress%20Disorder_Overview.pdf. Joho, Jess. 2015. “This Virtual Reality Game Tackles The Post-Traumatic Stress Of Surviving Rape.” readwrite, January 9, 2015. https://readwrite.com/2015/01/09/autumn-ptsd-rape-survivor-virtual-re ality-oculus-rift-killscreen/. Junger, Sebastian. 2016. Tribe. London: HarperCollinsPublishers. Kilgore, Ashley. 2017. “Iraq Troops’ PTSD Rate as High as 35%, Says Management Insights Study.” Informs. Accessed September28, 2017. https://www.informs.org/About-INFORMS/News-Room/Press-Release s/Iraq-Troops-PTSD-Rate-as-High-as-35. Kucharzewski, Tim. 2017. “I, Terrorist.” In Responding to Call of Duty. Critical Essays on the Game Franchise, edited by Nate Garrelts, 107-118. North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc., Publishers. MacKinnon, Brenton. 2010. Winning the War Within. PTSD and the Long Road Home. Morgan Hill: Bookstand Publishing. Maercker, Andreas. 2013. Posttraumatische Belastungsstörungen. Berlin: Springer. Marshall, S.L.A. 2000. Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command. Oklahoma: Univesity of Oklahoma Press. MDMAPTSD, “Treating PTSD with MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy.” Accessed September 28, 2017. http://www.mdmaptsd.org/. Meineck, Peter, and David Konstan, eds. 2014. Combat Trauma and the Ancient Greeks. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Münder, Regine. 2010. “Interview zur neuen Gefechtsmedaille. “Ein Zeichen für zunehmende Militarisierung.” November 29, 2010. Accessed October 27, 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20101202025749/http://www.tagesschau.d e/inland/gefechtsordeninterview100.html. National Center for PTSD. 2017. “Understanding PTSD and PTSD Treatment.” Accessed September 28, 2017. https://www.ptsd.va.gov/public/understanding_TX/booklet.pdf. National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces. 2017. “EXAMPLES FOR THE SACRIFICE MEDAL- ELIGIBLE CASES.” Government of Canada. Accessed September 28, 2017. http://www.forces.gc.ca/en/honours-history-awards/elig-sm.page.

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Office of the Press Secretary. 2017. “Statement from President Donald J. Trump on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Awareness Day.” The White House, June 27, 2017. https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/06/27/statement-pre sident-donald-j-trump-post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd. Paulson, Daryl S., and Stanley Krippner. 2007. Haunted by Combat: Understanding PTSD in War Veterans Including Women, Reservists, and Those Coming Back From Iraq. Westport Connecticut: Praeger Security International. Price, Jennifer L. 1988. “Findings from the National Vietnam Veterans' Readjustment Study.” U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/research-bio/research/vietnam-ve ts-study.asp. Richter, Christian. 2016. “Laeso Militi—Dem verwundeten Soldaten: Plädoyer für ein Verwundentenabzeichen für die Soldaten der Bundeswehr.” In Die unsichtbaren Veteranen, edited by Marcel Bohnert, and Björn Schreiber, 195-204. Berlin: Miles-Verlag. Rizzo, Albert. 2005. “Development of a VR Therapy Application for Iraq War Veterans with PTSD.” Stud Health Technol Inform 2005 no. (111):407-13. Rizzo, Albert, and Russell Shilling. 2017. “Clinical Virtual Reality Tools to Advance the Prevention, Assessment, and Treatment of PTSD.” European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 2017: 1-30 (in press). Sedlatzek-Müller, Robert. 2012. Soldatenglück-Mein Leben nach dem Überleben. Berlin: Edel. Sloat, Sarah. 2014. “The U.K. Understands How To Treat PTSD. Why Does The U.S. Lag Behind?” New Republic, February 28, 2014. https://newrepublic.com/article/116803/us-soldiers-are-more-likely-suf fer-ptsd-uk-soldiers. Schedlich, Claudia, and Erika Sander 2008. “Stabilisierung in der Traumaadaptierten Tanz- und Ausdruckstherapie—TATT.” In Psychodynamische Psycho- und Traumatherapie: Konzepte—Praxis— Perspektiven, edited by Gottfried Fischer, and Peter Schay, 169-178. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Seidler, Günter H. n.d. “Prof. Seidler erklärt.” Interview by Christiane Fux, PTBS-Hilfe. https://ptbs-hilfe.de/kopf-und-seele/prof-seidler-erklaert.html. Sherman, William Tecumseh. 1974. “War is hell!”: William T. Sherman's personal narrative of his march through Georgia. Michigan: Beehive Press. SHWBw. 2017. “Beitrag des Soldatenhilfswerk der Bundeswehr (SHWBw),

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zu Tiertherapien für PTBS-geschädigte Soldaten.” Accessed September 28, 2017. Soldatenhilfswerk der Bundeswehr (SHWBw). http://soldatenhilfswerk.org/Kameradschaftshilfen/SHWBw%20Beitra g_Tiertherapien_110215.pdf. Spiegel Online. 2010. “Tabu-Bruch. Guttenberg spricht von Krieg in Afghanistan.” Spiegel Online, April 04, 2010. http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/tabu-bruch-guttenberg-spricht-v on-krieg-in-afghanistan-a-687235.html. Storch, Bernhard. 2016. “Mein Kampf mit dem Trauma.” In Die unsichtbaren Veteranen, edited by Marcel Bohnert, and Björn Schreiber, 239-254. Berlin: Miles-Verlag. Tull, Matthew. 2017. “New and Innovative Treatments for PTSD. Beyond Traditional Treatments.” verywell, Accessed September 28, 2017. https://www.verywell.com/new-and-innovative-treatments-for-ptsd-27 97689. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. 2017. “Treatment of PTSD.” Accessed September 28, 2017. https://www.ptsd.va.gov/public/treatment/therapy-med/treatment-ptsd.asp. Wesemann, Ulrich, Jens T. Kowalski, Thomas Jacobsen, Susan Beudt, Herbert Jacobs, Julia Fehr, Jana Büchler, Peter L. Zimmermann. 2016. “Evaluation of a Technology-Based Adaptive Learning and Prevention Program for Stress Response-A Randomized Controlled Trial.” Military Medicine 181, no. 8 (August):863-71. Wilson, Ross J. 2013. Cultural Heritage of the Great War in Britain, Psychiatrie im Grundriss. London: Routledge, 2013. Wittchen, Hans-Ulrich, and Sabine Schönfeld. PTBS-Studiengruppe. 2012. “Traumatische Ereignisse, PTBS und psychische Störungen bei Soldaten mit und ohne Auslandseinsatz: Erste Ergebnisse,” TU Dresden. Accessed September 28, 2017. https://tu-dresden.de/ressourcen/dateien/aktuelles/news/pdf/Wittchen?l ang=de. Zimmermann, Peter, Silke Jensen, and Christina Alliger-Horn. 2014. Wenn der Einsatz noch nachwirkt. Berlin: Psychotraumazentrum der Bundeswehr am Bundeswehrkrankenhaus Berlin.

CHAPTER TWO FROM WARFORCE TO WORKFORCE: DANISH VETERANS’ CAREER CHANGES BIRGITTE REFSLUND SØRENSEN

Introduction Since the early 1990s, more than 45,000 Danish soldiers have been deployed to one or more international military operations and have experienced the predicaments of readjusting to everyday civilian life on their return. For some veterans, 1 readjustment has implied a forced or voluntary shift from a military to a civilian career. In this chapter, I explore veterans’ career changes from military to civilian life as one particular and so far, largely overlooked ramification of Denmark’s recent international military engagement. In the first part of the chapter, I briefly discuss how this issue has been framed and how the veteran has been imagined within the wider context of Denmark’s national veterans’ policy. Against this backdrop, I proceed to examine, through a number of case studies, how individual veterans approached and experienced the transition. Taking as my point of departure Cheryl Mattingly’s work on “narrative experiments” (2000, 2013) and Paul Higate’s understanding of “embodied continuities” (1998, 2001, 2003), I show how veterans experimented with and rearticulated aspects of their military past— security, execution, motivation and expertise work—in their new work contexts in order to prove their relevance to the civilian world and regain a sense of ontological security through a new work identity. The present study of veterans’ post-deployment and post-military careers constitutes one part of my larger project to document and

 1

In Denmark a veteran is defined as “a person, who—as an individual or as part of a unit—has been deployed in at least one international operation. The person may still be employed in the military, but may also have left the military for a civilian life, job and/or education” (Danish Government 2010, 5).

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understand how Denmark has been affected by going to war in recent years, and how veterans as a newly reinvented social category have figured in this process (Sørensen 2013, 2015, 2016; Sørensen and Pedersen 2012). The present analysis of the emergence of the career transition from military to civilian life as a specific policy issue builds on media articles and parliamentary documents, as well as participant observation at several conferences on Denmark’s veterans’ policy. Semistructured interviews and informal conversations with a total of fifteen veteran mentors from private companies, managers of veterans’ projects and professional industrial coaches conducted in connection with my ongoing research, together with a commissioned consultancy, have generated supplementary data on how civilian stakeholders perceive these militaryto-civilian transitions (Djursø, Kehr and Sørensen 2017; Sørensen and Weisdorf 2017). However, the main body of data on which this analysis of how veterans approach and experience the transition comes from semistructured interviews with sixteen veterans about their experiences of leaving the army to “go civilian”. Research has shown that veterans’ specific service and military functions and the particular circumstances of their demobilisation from the armed forces have significant effects on their post-military lives (De Bere 1999; Higate 2003; Jolly 1996; Petersen 2010). To incorporate this dimension, the interviewees were asked to give brief accounts of their military careers and the circumstances of their transition into a civilian career. Moreover, existing research has demonstrated that veterans often search for jobs in fields resembling the military and rely on their military networks to find new employment (Jolly 1996; Petersen 2010). As a result, interviews included questions regarding veterans’ job search strategies. The main focus in my interviews with the veterans, however, was on their current work, of which they were encouraged to provide thick descriptions. In addition to descriptions of the work culture and the veteran’s new tasks and responsibilities, I invited the veterans to elaborate on concrete examples of work situations in which they had used their military experience, knowledge and skills to handle a situation or solve a task. In fact, most of my interlocutors were quite conscious about how and when they “acted as soldiers”. As one of the more seasoned veterans pointed out, knowledge is accumulated from many sources and skills acquired in many contexts, saying: “I do not distinguish between a military and another part of me; I am a whole person”. In addition to the interviews, several veterans also shared their CVs and LinkedIn profiles. Originally, I had intended to follow several veterans on the job over a period of time to do participant observation of

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their work, interaction and collaboration with colleagues. This proved difficult, either because the nature of their job did not allow any “fly on the wall” situation, or because my presence would risk jeopardising the veterans’ attempts to blend in and perform well. I managed to visit four veterans and have a tour of their current workplace and to follow four other veterans in their regular work for brief periods of time. The veterans who participated in this study were recruited from the network I had built up earlier, through contacts with relevant organisations and projects, and finally through snowballing.2 As a result of these methods, my interlocutors constituted a heterogeneous group aged between 25-55, from privates to high-ranking army officers, with from four to thirty years of active service, and all with several deployments in which they had functioned as gunners or medics, or in CIMIC (Civil Military Cooperation), EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) and much more. Their new jobs were just as varied and included positions in global production companies, shipping, marketing, the security and emergency sectors, the artisan industry and social work. A few veterans were in between jobs at the time of the interview. Some had experienced a sudden unexpected release, while others had had years to prepare for their lives and careers outside the military. To protect the veterans’ identity, I have anonymised them, their past military units and current civilian work places.

Veterans and the labour market: an emergent policy issue Experiences of unemployment and career changes are not unique to veterans; in fact these are experiences that most people share today. Nevertheless, veterans’ career changes have typically been regarded and addressed as a special case due to soldiers’ inherent symbolic power as protectors of the nation, and Denmark is no exception (De Bere 1999; Jolly 1996; Redmond et al. 2015; Schulker 2017). While the main focus of this article is on how veterans themselves handled their career transition out of the military into civilian life and reinvented themselves as civilian workers, it is relevant to take a closer look at the wider discourses and structures that have framed and shaped their experiences. This story begins when the Danish parliament decided to depart from its past policy and began using the armed forces as a foreign and security policy tool in the struggle against terrorism and for global stability, with the ultimate goal of enhancing Denmark’s international position by

 2

There is no central register of veterans who have left the armed forces. They can only be identified from their personal security numbers (CPR numbers).

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becoming a closer ally of the United States (Kristensen, ed. 2013; Rasmussen 2011). The first steps towards this so-called activist foreign policy were taken in the early 1990s, when the government deployed a corvette to the Gulf to help enforce international sanctions against Iraq and subsequently deployed troops to the Balkans on what were expected to be peacekeeping operations. A decade later, a united parliament decided to deploy Danish combat troops to insurgent hotspots in Afghanistan and Iraq, and today more than 45,000 soldiers have been on nearly 70,500 tours of duty.3 These new military operations carried with them a heightened risk of injuries and fatalities that could not be ignored, and in 2010, almost twenty years after the first Danish troops had been in combat, the government eventually adopted the first national veterans policy, called “Recognition and Support” (Danish Government 2010). The policy provided an official definition of the Danish veteran, but more importantly it outlined a new moral contract between government, soldiers and citizens that manifested itself in an abundance of initiatives directed at veterans and made these more visible to society (Rasmussen and Poulsen 2017; Sørensen 2015). Activities aimed at demonstrating social recognition of the veterans dominated the early implementation of the veterans policy. The new traditions included public homecoming events with medal award ceremonies and parades, and an annual flag-flying day for deployed personnel celebrated nationwide with wreath-laying ceremonies, parades, memorial services and receptions hosted by the authorities (Sørensen and Pedersen 2012). Recognition was not only inscribed in the nation’s ceremonial calendar, it also resulted in the creation of a new memorial landscape, including a national monument in Copenhagen, and well over twenty smaller monuments and memorials erected by local political authorities, soldiers’ associations and private citizens throughout the country (Sørensen 2017). At these events and sites the new generation of soldiers were displayed to the public and offered opportunities for people to celebrate the returned veterans as warriors and heroes and Denmark as a war-fighting nation (Daugbjerg and Sørensen 2017). The veterans I interviewed at the time generally appreciated these initiatives, which they felt helped break the silence and raise awareness in the population about Denmark’s new military engagements. However, the veterans who struggled with complex post-deployment socio-psychological issues every

 3

Missions have included the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, the Gulf of Aden, Mali and Syria. For an overview of Danish international deployments, see http://forpers.dk/hr/Pages/Udsendte.aspx.

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single day needed more than just occasional ritual recognition. They demanded better treatment and compensation for their war-related injuries, and gradually, as more and more evidence of veterans’ psychological traumas surfaced, PTSD became a major political concern (Sørensen 2015). In response, more resources were allocated to psychological research to improve screening and treatment methods, and new rehabilitation facilities were established. The veterans’ physical and psychosocial injuries also entered the mass media and became a frequent topic of films, theatre plays and fiction about Denmark’s recent wars (Gade 2016; Rothstein 2014). The presence of veterans’ post-deployment sufferings in the public discourse was so pervasive that the veterans became increasingly associated with victimhood, a point confirmed in my interviews with both veterans and civilians (Sørensen 2015).4 The disproportionate victimisation of veterans provoked a new shift in discourse. In a deliberate counter-narrative, politicians and the military repeatedly asserted in speeches and documents that most veterans return from their tour of duty without symptoms, and maybe even with a sense of being enriched and stronger, a point that resonated well with many veterans’ own narrations of the effects of deployment (Pedersen 2017b; Sørensen 2015; Veterancentret n.d. (b)). While the discourses of social recognition and trauma remained significant, the veteran was now also frequently framed as “resourceful” and “a valuable asset to companies and society”. Just as earlier policy-invented conceptions of Danish veterans had spawned particular interventions, the emerging image of the veteran as a potential asset mobilised new actors and produced new initiatives directly addressing veterans’ career changes on leaving the military.

Interventions and assistance to veterans undergoing career transitions If social recognition was regarded as a natural expression of gratitude for the veterans’ service, and therapeutic interventions considered an indisputable and responsible response to those who had sacrificed limbs or their mental health, legitimising special support to veterans in search of civilian employment was in many ways more ambiguous and subject to different justifications. Importantly in this regard no concerted effort had

 4

The national Veterans Centre (Karstoft, Sternhagen and Andersen 2017) measured PTSD symptom levels before deployment to Afghanistan and 3 months, 7 months, 2.5 and 6.5 years afterwards. The highest level (13.7 percent) was found 6.5 years after deployment.

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so far been made to gauge the scale of the problem. According to the Veterans Centre, 25,024 veterans were no longer employed with the Danish armed forces in 2017, but its mapping did not provide any information about the unemployment rate among veterans. In 2012, a survey estimated this at 5 percent, slightly lower than for the general population (Lyk-Jensen et al. 2012, 77). The study, however, did not reveal whether Danish veterans were “quick in and quick out”, as research has shown to be the case elsewhere (Wolfe 2012). How many of the veterans still under contract to the armed forces wish to leave is difficult to determine, but a survey of young officers revealed that more than 40 percent did not expect a lifelong career in the military (Hovedorganisationen af Officerer i Danmark 2017). In any case, contrary to general debates about unemployment, statistics and numbers rarely entered debates about veterans’ post-military careers or shaped individual initiatives. In the following, I introduce some key actors and briefly describe their motivations and efforts to assist veterans who leave the armed forces. Official steps in support of veterans’ career transitions included Parliament’s unanimous adoption of Act 1714 in 2016 (Forsvarsministeriet 2016b), which enabled public employers to give preference to veterans with physical or psychological injuries in recruiting to employment, thereby circumventing the law against discrimination in hiring. The same Act entitled private employers to a bonus of approximately 7,000 Euro after employing a veteran for a minimum of 26 weeks. This law was the outcome of recommendations from ministerial evaluations (servicetjek) of the veterans’ policy involving key stakeholders (Forsvarsministeriet 2016a).5 In the media, the scheme was presented in terms of an obligation and a debt to the veterans who had served the nation, and it appeared that the scheme applied to all veterans (Jyllands-Posten, 4 May 2015).6 With its inauguration in 2011, the Veterans’ Centre became the national venue for developing initiatives in support of the entire population of veterans. The centre’s “Job and Education Section”, with its mentors, employment consultants, social workers and psychologists, targeted those veterans who had left the armed forces (Veterancentret n.d. (b)). They offered veterans advice on how to benefit from the existing civil education program, which entitled all servicemen who had served for more than 33 months to one week of salaried civil education per month of service. They

 5

See http://ft.dk/samling/20161/lovforslag/L80/index.htm. The fact that the prime minister announced the new scheme on the 70th anniversary of Denmark’s liberation in 1945 only accentuated its symbolic value. 6

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also supported brief courses in writing CVs and job applications and career counselling as part of a new three-month acclimatisation and reintegration program offered to veterans returning from deployment (Danish Government 2010, 16). They also contributed to the development of a new competency card that listed the veterans’ military skills and experience with so-called civilian-oriented learning outcomes using the national section of the European Qualifications Framework (Veterancentret 2016). Finally, they published information pamphlets and advised job consultants at the municipal employment offices (Jobcentre) who lacked knowledge of veterans’ special challenges and competences (Veterancentret n.d. (a, b, c). Being part of the armed forces, activities at the Veterans’ Centre were inevitably constrained by military interests, political agendas and the amount of resources allocated for specific purposes. Over the course of a few years, a number of private initiatives emerged with a focus on veterans’ career changes. One of them was Interforce, established by top executives and military leaders from the Danish branch of the European Mars and Mercurius network in 1999 before veterans became a policy issue. Anticipating the growing need for soldiers who could deploy, its main objective was to ensure that the more than 10,000 employees who were on an availability contract with the armed forces would receive backing from their employers (www.interforce.dk). Interforce later tried to include veterans in its portfolio, but even though many companies were willing to support the veterans and offer them jobs and education, no one made use of it (Skive Folkeblad, 21 May 2011).7 In fact, very few veterans I have interviewed knew of Interforce. In 2014, on several occasions newspapers and TV featured Veteran CrossOver (VCO), a new initiative to retrain veterans for the offshore industry. Curious to learn more, I contacted the director, a retired naval officer, and over an entire day he shared his visions, ideas and experiences with me. 8 From former colleagues and veterans, he had heard how ignorance and prejudices made it difficult for veterans to find employment. VCO began lobbying and establishing contacts within the burgeoning offshore industry to create new opportunities for veterans, and it also helped them fight the welfare bureaucracy when its many rules and requirements presented obstacles to employment in a sector with high standards. With its exclusive focus on one specific sector in which

 7

Interview, 9 July 2014. In 2011, Interforce had sixty member companies. Today more than 1,900 companies have signed a declaration of support according to Interforce’s webpage. 8 Interview, 5 February 2015.

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veterans were perceived to have a comparative advantage, VCO was an innovative initiative, but it was also vulnerable to changing times. When opportunities dwindled in the offshore and windmill energy sector, VCO’s director tried to expand into anti-piracy operations, prisoner transport and the drone industry. Another private initiative that also received media attention was HaveKompagniet (the Garden Company), which hired veterans to do gardening work for private and public clients. It was established in 2012 by a Balkan veteran who had himself experienced how difficult it was to adjust to a civilian workplace. 9 Military virtues and skills figured prominently in the owner’s description of his business, that was run with a focus on being independent of the welfare system, taking responsibility for oneself, being useful and not a burden to society, and “green clothes, machines and nature”. And to potential clients, he promised “to maintain green areas with military precision and due diligence” (LandbrugFyn, 12 June 2012). Bureaucratic obstacles eventually resulted in the closing down of the project, and the owner went into politics and created an umbrella organisation, Veteranalliancen. Velkommen Hjem (Welcome Home) was likewise the initiative of one person, a female career counsellor with rich experience of outplacement in wake of the financial crisis. When she learned that veterans were having difficulties in finding employment, she mobilised her network to find a solution under the conviction that society and Danish companies could not afford to waste the veterans’ many and unique competences. The outcome was a program in which industrial psychologists, coaches and business mentors helped individual veterans acquire a better understanding of their professional and personal competences and of how to match them with civilian jobs (Sørensen and Matti 2017). By working closely with several large companies, the project also aimed at educating civilian employers and society more generally about military culture and veterans’ skills and competences. “Together we are changing Denmark’s perception of veterans”, as one of its mottos stated (see Djursø, Kehr and Sørensen 2017). Having briefly outlined the broader political context of how veterans emerged as a social category and how their post-deployment shifts from their military to civilian careers became a matter of concern and an arena for intervention, the remaining part of this chapter will be devoted to a discussion of how different veterans handled and experienced their new careers and their transitions to them, beginning with an outline of the analytical approach.

 9

Interview, 16 August 2013.

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Conceptualising veterans’ career changes Veterans’ changes of career have commonly been articulated as a transition between two different cultural worlds in both research and policy interventions (Higate 2001; Schulker 2017; Wolfe 2012). This perspective resonates well with a long tradition of thinking about civil-military relations in military sociology and its perception of the military and society being rigidly dichotomised. However, pertinent to the present discussion, this model has been criticised for overlooking the internal heterogeneity of both the military and society (Redmond et al. 2015), and disregarding the permeable boundaries that permit frequent interaction and exchanges (Lomsky-Feder et al. 2007) and that entangle “things civilian” and “things military” in multiple ways (Sørensen and Ben-Ari forthcoming). From a transition perspective, the veterans’ main challenge has been perceived to be how to translate acquired military functions, skills and competences into civilian or corporate language in order to brand themselves (Clemens and Milsom 2008; Schulker 2017). Indeed, learning the native’s language may be a first step to being granted access, beginning to understand the other and start reinventing oneself. However, from the individual veteran’s perspective, much more is at stake than switching code. In this chapter I argue that their search for jobs can be understood as a striving for ontological security (Giddens 1991, 36), a quest for a sense of being at home in the civilian world into which they have been thrown (Jackson 2000, 123). The veterans I interviewed often expressed a lack of knowledge about what kinds of civilian jobs existed and uncertainty over which ones they would be qualified for, as well as enjoy and find personally rewarding (Djursø, Kehr and Sørensen 2017). As I show later, uncertainty occasionally resulted in random job searches and several periods of shortterm employment. In my exploration of veterans’ practices towards professional becoming, I draw on Cheryl Mattingly’s metaphor of the “moral laboratory”, a realm where one can explore possibilities, create new experiences, reinvent oneself and produce new beginnings (2013, 309). Mattingly’s (2013) study concerns existential uncertainties in the face of major illnesses, and her empirical setting bears little resemblance to the one under scrutiny here, but her theoretical understanding of how people strive to become the person they wish to be, “moral selves”, is useful. Mattingly introduces three different analytical perspectives, which are conceptualised as “inaugural scenes for moral becoming” (2013, 302). The first scene is “the trial”, where moral selves are produced through a series of interrogations that urge people to defend their actions or face

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sanctions and punishment (Mattingly 2013, 302-3). An experience shared by several veterans is the job interview questions of whether the veteran has killed or, more typically, if he is suffering from PTSD (Djursø, Kehr and Sørensen 2017). Following Mattingly, it can be argued that the question turns the job interview into a trial at which the veteran has to defend himself, engage in secrecy work and make decisions about what to reveal and what to conceal (Sørensen 2015). If one admits to having killed or having symptoms, the verdict is likely to be “not suitable”, and if pleading “not guilty”, the stigmatising suspicion nevertheless hinders the veteran’s possibility of becoming a moral self in this particular civilian context. “The artisan’s workshop” constitutes Mattingly’s second moral scene (2013, 303-5). In the realm of the workshop, people voluntarily engage in a self-disciplining self-creation of body and mind in accordance with the prevailing codes of conduct. Activities that preach “flexibility”, “adaptability” and other buzzwords in vogue within the new doctrines of public management and teach veterans how to turn past experiences and skills into a “personal brand”, exemplify self-creation within the artisan’s workshop. Promises of successful transitions from the spheres of the military into civilian life are here premised on the veterans’ own transformational self-governing in accordance with labour market ideologies. As an analytical alternative to “the trial” and “the artisan’s workshop”, Mattingly introduces “the moral laboratory”. In the laboratory, selfcreation is less a product of power than an on-going process of reflective everyday experiments undertaken in response to new challenges and dilemmas. The laboratory is a scene in which experience and experiments co-exist and people continuously create themselves through their multiple actions. In doing so, they work with but also against the odds and with the “possibility of mistakes, unintended consequences, moral failure or moral tragedy”, as well as with the chances of a “miracle” (2013, 309). The moral laboratory as a realm for the creation of the new and for selfcreation, I argue, captures well veterans’ individual experiments with their post-military becoming and their search for not only a regular income, but also a new identity. Mattingly’s approach to personal transformation is forward-oriented, and in that light the past is conceptualised as “not only what happened, but its unfulfilled possibilities” and potentialities (Baracchi in Mattingly 2013, 307). However, more attention needs to be paid to the past and its role in transitions. Notwithstanding national differences and on-going adjustments to society, the military has been seen as an example of the “total institution” (Goffman 1961), since, through intense military training,

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operations and everyday routines, it produces particularly institutionalised identities. As a consequence, the military often remains an important part of the veteran’s post-military life that may, for instance, shape the choice of a post-military career (De Bere 1999; Higate 2001; Jolly 1996; Petersen 2010; Sørensen 2015). Emphasising the bodily aspect of soldiering (McSorley 2013; Pedersen 2017a; Sylvester 2013; Woodward and Jenkings 2013), Paul Higate (1998, 2001, 2003) has suggested that the lives of exservicemen are marked by embodied continuities. “Military bodies”, Higate contends, are defined by a particular gendered masculine ideology that shapes the physical and emotional lives of servicemen and veterans (1998, 180). “Military socialization has elaborated and entrenched masculine views resistant to change” (Higate 2003, 34), which is why ex-servicemen tend to “move into professions characterized by high degrees of continuity with the armed forces not only in terms of the transferability of skill capital, but crucially as masculinized institutions” (Higate 2001,455; see also De Bere 1999; Jolly 1996; Petersen 2010). There is a long and useful tradition of studying the military through the lens of gender and masculinity in particular, but in the following I suggest that, while embodied continuities are pivotal to the veterans’ professional self-creations, it may be useful to look beyond gender and masculinity. This is not to deny that masculinity may be a factor, even an important one, but rather than reducing the veterans’ choices and experiences to questions of masculinity, I wish to demonstrate how the veterans in my study sought inspiration from what they had personally enjoyed, knew they were good at or had found meaningful and tried to project this and make it relevant in a civilian context. The “laboratory experiments” and “embodied continuities” that the veterans in my study practiced in their post-military professional lives and to which I turn in the following concentrated on security, execution, motivation and expertise. These categories were extrapolated from the way the veterans narrated their experiences of transition in words and actions, and they reflect how the individual veterans created a link between the military past and the civilian present in which they were investing their hopes of a satisfying postmilitary life.

Post-military careers: soldiering on In the following I introduce Frank and Henry, who each in their own way established continuity between the military past and the civilian present by working with security, using their acquired ability to exercise authority through their bodily postures and movements and to endure stress and

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bodily pain. I shall then introduce Robert and Mathias, who relied on their well-rehearsed skills in planning and execution in extreme situations to cover new ground. This is followed by the stories of Flemming and Jens, who kept returning to their experiences of creating units out of diversity by using their motivational skills. Finally, Niels and Karl share their stories and passion for developing and maintaining specialised equipment, which ultimately may translate into the difference between life and death.

Security Frank had long wanted to join the army, and after a deployment with the Danish Home Guards he eventually succeeded. In the meantime, he had had miscellaneous short-term contracts as an unskilled labourer. Today he is still under contract to the armed forces but works part-time for a medium-size private company that provides security at major public and private events such as music festivals, parties and exhibitions. The company deliberately employs and teams up veterans and civilians, typically university students, to optimise the team’s total competences. As the veteran-director explained “the veterans always stay calm and keep their cool when there is trouble, whereas the civilians are very good at talking to people”.10 I first met and joined Frank and some of his veteran colleagues on job at an electronic music festival.11 The moment I met up with Frank near the entrance to the festival site, he was contacted over the radio by one of the festival organisers. From his facial expression I could see that the conversation upset him, and as soon as the conversation had ended, he shouted, “He should not call me a doorman!” When I later got an opportunity I asked him to elaborate on the incident, and in a few minutes he had laid out a typology and hierarchy of security workers. Frank explained that he loathed being labelled as doorman, because doormen are “all muscles”, a point his director had also mentioned when describing the company’s unique profile. Frank then admitted that he also disliked being based in the parking lot, because people then took him for a “simple car-park attendant”, who is not respected and who is repeatedly scolded and called names. Finally, Frank distinguished himself from security workers working for companies like GS4 who perform “boring routine work” for businesses and private people. Frank was trying to establish himself as a particular kind of security worker, one who was more intelligent, could be trusted with

 10 11

Interview, 9 July 2014. Participant observation, 26 July 2014.

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difficult tasks and therefore deserved respect. “In the military, you learn basic skills and how to be adaptable,” Frank explained, “and that is what distinguishes us from other types of security guards. We can think for ourselves, and we act professionally.” Back at the festival, I had the chance to observe how Frank and some of his colleagues performed security work at the entrance, where they checked tickets and body-searched people for alcohol, drugs and weapons. I noticed how they repeatedly moved the mobile iron fences to avoid large crowds assembling and to generate more orderly queues, and how they skilfully combined and dosed their polite small-talk with bodily postures of authority, taking a step forward to meet the next guest and thus staying in control of the situation without using force. Inside the gates, the guards did rounds amidst the more than a thousand partying people, alternately walking through the crowds and circling around them in the periphery, only to stop for a second to survey the area, people’s movements and actions. In an interview with Frank and his veteran colleague, Ian, I asked them about this practice. “It’s like patrols,” Ian stated. Frank concurred and elaborated, “Yes, it’s about knowing when to be visible and when to be invisible. Depending on the occasion and situation, you employ visibility and invisibility as a way to alternately create safety, respect, authority or being service-minded.” To illustrate, Frank went on and elaborated on how he would practice visibility and invisibility differently at push parties, high-school binges and crowded exhibitions. Henry presents a different story of self-creation with security practices as the basis of continuity.12 He was deployed several times to the Balkans in the 1990s but left the army when his brother accidently died so he could support his mother. He jumped between small jobs as an unskilled mason, a carpenter, a chauffeur, etc., but after a blackout he was eventually diagnosed with PTSD. When feeling down, he puts on his uniform and retreats into the woods for a few days to find calm. Today, Henry has no regular work. He was promised a job as an armed guard for a shipping company sailing in piracy waters, but the municipality did not allow him on to the necessary courses. When I interviewed Henry, he was registered with an employment agency that contracts workers for the Danish and international offshore industry. To qualify for jobs on the rigs, he has taken specialised courses in scaffolding, wiring, hoisting, helicopter evacuation, etc. Recently, Henry had been contracted to a rig with responsibilities for security and safety on board. Henry considered himself well qualified to take care of security and safety. His years in the military,

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Interview, 19 May 2015.

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he disclosed, had taught him better than any how to reconnoitre, to identify potential risks, to read and learn a map, recognise points of risk and exit, prepare and double-check equipment, and not least to read people’s body language and anticipate their reactions in emergency situations. Henry’s job also included scaffolding tasks, a new experience that he enthusiastically embraced and that put his own security and safety at stake. “It’s really exciting and a very special feeling to construct scaffolding out over the water, hanging 70-100 meters above the surface,” Henry said. “I always go first. I seek experience,” he added, telling how he had asked permission to try how it would feel to let go of the rope and let himself fall – of course with all the security in place! He was denied the experience, as the risk of serious physical injury could not be eliminated. Clearly disappointed, Henry pointed out a difference between the military and the civilian world. “The military is also all about security, but it is also about solving a task with whatever means you have at your disposal, even if you have to do something that is not entirely by the book. Offshore it is different, because on the rigs you have to follow the rules to the letter, or else you are sent back.” Employment in the offshore industry was attractive to Henry because it offered well-known structures of timelimited high-intensity work away from home and longer periods of time off duty, but also because it had the potential to create conditions where he could recreate himself through familiar ways of testing the limits of his equipment and body as part of his security practice.

Execution After more than fifteen years in the Danish armed forces and five international deployments with responsibility for providing security to military and civilian VIPs, Robert resigned slightly disillusioned after some disagreements with a superior. Although confident his decision had been right, Robert considered his time in the military “the best time of my life” and couldn’t help finding it odd that his new-born boy would never know him as a soldier. Despite his affection for the military, Robert took no interest in veterans’ activities and had put away his medals in a drawer. After a temporary job in a kindergarten to earn an income and a disappointing experience as private security guard for an affluent and eccentric businessman, Robert had found employment as team leader of a small night-shift in the stock department of a large furniture manufacturer.13

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Interviews, 18 March 2016, 23 September 2017.

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Robert’s position as a private security guard had implied odd and long hours that affected his family life, so he welcomed the prospect of more regular work in the stock department. As team leader, Robert instantly made use of his leadership and planning skills to optimise working processes, but he soon realised that his approach did not match local ways, where union interests and regard to personal relationships often came first. The clash between the different understandings of leadership became crystal clear one day when the compressors in the production section caught fire and more than a hundred employees were sent home. One of the managers, Robert said, inspected the scene, but left as soon as the fire had been extinguished and everything appeared to be under control. Robert read the situation differently: in his eyes, “the task was not completed” and the manager’s “lack of will to act” surprised him, but it also incited him to take things into his own hands. In situations of crisis a leader has to “take the lead and be in front, demonstrate that he is prepared to go the extra mile, and show the employees that you’re in the mud together,” Robert summarised his view. Accordingly, he had stayed on scene all night, helping with the evacuation, but also thinking ahead and making plans for how to re-establish electricity supplies and replace the compressors as quickly as possible so as to continue production while also taking into account the company’s insurance policies. The following day, Robert did his own evaluation to identify lessons learned and complete the task as he was accustomed to in the military. To Robert, the whole incident demonstrated a distinction between “leaders by education” and “leaders by utility”, and he clearly saw himself as representing the latter, one who was capable of planning and executing. From Robert’s account, it was clear that he had become increasingly confident that he had much to offer the company. On several occasions he had noticed the management’s concerns but also lack of security precautions, especially in relation to its global engagement, and in a well-prepared presentation based on his military experiences with VIP protection, he managed to pave the way for a new position as security coordinator. Mathias joined the armed forces in the early 1990s and has been seasoned by several deployments and positions of military leadership.14 His deployments and frequent stays away from home took a heavy toll on him and his family, and he began toying with the idea of a civilian job. Mathias was privileged to be able to make a prolonged exit from the armed forces, giving him time to adjust to the idea, so “the day I handed in my military uniform, I was already somewhere else mentally,” he

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Interview, 11 September 2017.

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explained. That, however, did not imply that he had a clear idea of his future civilian career. “I had no idea. I searched for all kinds of jobs on job portals, Google, etc., with no aim and no focus. I was open to everything,” he recalled. After many unsuccessful job applications, Mathias joined a project for veterans in transition. The coach’s feedback was an eye-opener: “It was not surprising that I was not called for interviews,” Mathias reflected. “My CV was too long and incomprehensible, listing all my prior military units, positions and functions,” he continued, and he told how he had received help to translate his military competences and write a CV that emphasised what he had achieved and what he had to offer. This, Mathias explained, “completely changed my self-perception.” It also secured Mathias a job as a management consultant in a professional recruitment company. At my invitation, Mathias elaborated on his current job and how it related to his military past. Mathias described his job as a kind of sales person. “My job is to help companies find the best candidates for vacant positions,” he clarified. Mathias reasoned that his military leadership skills, his ability to plan carefully a process in every detail and his good understanding of people and their behaviour were useful when he had to identify, examine and select candidates, and he had been thrilled when several of his customers had recommended him for his “professional approach.” However, being new to the job, Mathias was still struggling to adjust and become an insider, something that implied everything from changing his clothes, body language and facial expressions to adopting new performance goals. Although Mathias had been used to high performance expectations in the military, the company’s extreme focus on money, revenue, key figures and the financial bottom line in every aspect of its practice was a new experience, one I sensed he was still feeling difficult to adopt as his own. Mathias went out of his way to perform well and was excited and happy to experience that his skills were indeed transferable to the civilian world, which gave him hope for the future, but somehow he seemed to be lacking the purpose and meaningfulness that had guided him on his military career path.

Motivation After many years in high-level positions, Flemming was forced to leave the army only a few years before retirement due to ill health. Having contemplated a quiet life as a senior citizen for a while, Flemming changed his mind. As an officer he had acquired a rich experience working with young people from all kinds of backgrounds and training them to

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become good soldiers, and he imagined that he might be able to translate these skills into a civilian job working with young people and sports, which was another passion of his. With input from an industrial psychologist, Flemming developed his first civilian-oriented CV and started looking for openings in sports colleges, fitness clubs, refugee asylum centres, etc. Then a friend alerted him to a vacancy as the manager of a newly established facility for veterans not far from his residence. At this point, Flemming had not taken much interest in veterans’ issues, but he visited the place, and soon the job was his. When I met Flemming at his workplace to learn more about his new job, 15 I was already familiar with his story and had also visited the veterans’ home before. I had met some of the veteran users and volunteers and been introduced to their everyday routines and different activities. When I visited Flemming on this occasion, only a short time after the summer break, there were no veterans around, and maybe this explains why he hardly mentioned them when I asked him to tell me about his work. Instead he described the numerous meetings he had had to attend with the many other stakeholders involved in veterans’ affairs and the many practical tasks that the maintenance of an old house required. I then asked him what he enjoyed most, but also what he found most challenging in his new job. This prompted a long conversation about how to manage social relations and motivate people. As Flemming explained, the house depended on the many volunteers who do the daily chores and organise most of the activities for the veterans. He said that he got along with them well, but “sometimes there is too much bickering over nothing,” he revealed. Flemming’s body language disclosed that this annoyed him, and I asked him how he handled it. “I try to stay out of these squabbles, which all boil down to personal preferences and prevent problems being solved.” In the military, he explained, he had learned that “you do not choose your own team members and you don’t always like them, but regardless, you have to create good social relationships that help you get the work done.” So Flemming did not intervene, but he clearly signalled that he found all the bickering a waste of time. For reasons that were not entirely clear to me, the veterans’ home had also opened its doors to young people who had been sentenced to shortterm community service for minor offences or who needed a brief industrial internship as part of their education. Maybe it was a result of Flemming’s personal wish to reach out to young people. In any case, they

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Interview, 22 September 2017.

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constituted a group he felt confident dealing with. “I don’t ask them why they are here. It doesn’t matter to me. I ask them what they would like to do while they spend their few weeks here. If someone wants to weed the garden, fine, that also needs to be done,” he explained. Many veterans complain that civilians fail to understand that today commanders use “motivation” and not “military discipline” (kæft, trit og retning) to create efficient and well-functioning units. Indeed, Flemming tried to motivate the young people as he had so often done with military recruits in order to get the most out of the situation. Jens, whom I met for an interview in his home, had been a soldier for almost twenty years and had gone on six tours of duty to the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan.16 Jens loved soldiering and did not envision any other career than combat soldier, but after a minor injury and being operated on several times, he realised that the armed forces would probably not deploy him again. He began to show symptoms of PTSD and to experience depression, but he continued to look for a job in order to provide for his family. Jens said that, with no formal education, he had to work at endless unskilled jobs, which made him feel “totally stripped and a misfit in the civilian world.” So when Jens learned about an opportunity to join antipiracy operations, he was immediately fired up. “Being an armed guard on a ship was the coolest transition from being a soldier. It was almost the same kind of task—one had loaded weapons and had to be on alert”, Jens stated. However, before Jens managed to sign a contract, global piracy patterns changed, and so did the Danish anti-piracy effort. Jens’ different civilian jobs had included a short stay at a shelter for maladjusted youths. Somewhat to his own surprise, he had found that he was really good at talking with them and establishing a good relationship with them, and he enjoyed it too, so when a friend drew his attention to a vacancy on a program for psychologically vulnerable youths, he applied and got the job. “I’m really keen on working with people and finding a way to help each individual”, Jens told me, and he continued to explain that, even though he had never liked books, he would study the rules and regulations to find a good way out for the kids. He even contributed to developing new guidelines for how to do social work with this particular target group. Jens repeatedly declared that “I want to work with people”, and admitted that it would do both him and his family good, but with no formal education the chances of a career in the social sector were slim. A few months after our first interview, Jens signed a short-term contract as

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Interview, 24 June 2015.

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an armed guard on a ship, and today he does volunteer work for veterans while looking for a regular job.

Expertise Niels was a locksmith and Karl an auto mechanic by training. Both worked in the same depot in a company that develops, manufactures and markets high-tech earth-moving equipment. Niels was in the army for ten years and did four tours of duty, while Karl had deployed once during his five years in service. Before I met Niels and Karl over lunch in the kitchen at their workplace, the management had explained the company’s employment of veterans and the division between the “yellow civilian section” and the smaller “green military section” dealing with specialist equipment, where Niels and Karl worked together with a few veterans with PTSD and also some civilians.17 Niels and Karl explained that they had resigned from the armed forces because they were “fed up with it all”. According to Niels his working conditions as a mechanic had been deteriorating, resulting in several personal controversies, and Karl had similarly found the military structure and decision-making processes a problem and difficult to deal with. “I often lacked the spare parts I needed to do my job properly, and it was frustrating having to compromise over quality,” he explained. Luckily for them, the head of the “green military section”, who himself had a military background, had become aware of their frustrations and had headhunted them for the company. Because the green section works on military equipment that is used in international operations it is closed to the outside world, and Niels and Karl jokingly referred to it as “a closed ward” with its own peculiar toughlove “brown jargon” involving the frequent use of anal swearwords. When the lunch packages and the coffee had been finished, I asked the two of them to show me around the garage and depot and describe their work. “This, in many regards, is a dream job, only right now it is a bit too quiet,” Karl said, and Niels remarked, “Yes, there is not much to see today, only two armoured personnel carriers that need repairing and upgrading.” With nostalgic enthusiasm, they related of the many huge orders in the past that had implied frequent journeys to Danish garrisons, as well as abroad to other national militaries and to international army bases to attend specialised courses, instruct others or fix equipment. They both wished that on-going negotiations to renew the Danish fleet of armoured vehicles would bring similarly exciting future opportunities.

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Participant observation and interviews, 25 March 2014.

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Niels decided to show me their stock of spare parts, which were stored in innumerable wooden and cardboard boxes, large and small, with labels indicating their precise contents and meticulously stacked on tall iron shelves. Niels randomly pulled some of them out, but as if he realised that I would not be familiar with the contents or understand their use, he quickly put them back on the shelves. “Can you believe that all this is worth several million kroner?” he asked, and continued, “Take this small computer, that alone costs more than 70,000 kroner—not that it can do anything special, but it’s the only one that works in these armoured personnel carriers.” Back in the garage, Karl first showed me the vehicle that had been damaged in an Afghan wadi and needed repairing and then walked to the second vehicle, which required some alterations and upgrading for new tasks. The two mechanics now began pulling out photos, drawings and manuals for some of the more highly specialised and customised equipment they had designed or constructed over the years. “It is fun to think of it when you see it later on being used for real,” Karl said. Although it was a quiet day at the office, Karl and Niels were proud to be working in the “green section”, where the quality of their work was “a matter of life and death”, as one of them put it. And they found it highly rewarding to be “probably the only two in the country” with their particular skills and this kind of job. From presenting the empirical cases, experiences and voices of the individual veterans in this section, I proceed with some reflections on how to interpret their experiences in light of both the surrounding political and public discourse and the analytical framework introduced in the first part of the chapter.

Military–civilian trajectories: concluding discussion In this chapter, I have suggested that veterans’ returns and changes of career can be conceptualised as processes of experimental self-creation shaped by their past experiences and imaginings of possible futures that are brought together in new experiences (Mattingly 2013). Self-creation is a highly individualised process, a fact that many veterans realised when they found they could no longer rely on their institutionalised identities and military systems of promotion, but had to produce a CV to brand themselves to potential civilian employers. However, this does not imply that self-creation takes place in a vacuum beyond the influence of external factors. Jolly (1996) demonstrated how soldiers’ close relatives had considerable influence over whether servicemen left the armed forces and

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also on what alternative careers they pursued, and responsibility for the family, regard for the mental health of their children, partners and parents, and more time with the family were important factors to most veterans I interviewed. Moreover, the veterans’ attempts at post-military self-creation were embedded in and influenced by the national veterans’ policy and its shifting derivative public images. For many veterans, including those included in this study, a major concern was the general victimisation and stigmatisation that had resulted from the growing attention to PTSD and other psychosocial issues. For them, self-creation entailed both a struggle to escape this stereotype and a desire to contribute to the production of an alternative narrative that emphasised veterans’ resourcefulness, and to achieve this they needed opportunities to demonstrate their own value and become “good stories”. As I have shown, key stakeholders in veterans’ affairs generally concurred with the importance of developing a less victimising and more nuanced discourse and pursued this goal through laws, projects and campaigns. However, sometimes their good intentions created new dilemmas for the veterans. As I have argued, private actors and especially politicians were keen to express their gratitude and typically inscribed initiatives in support of veterans in a war-rhetoric of society’s eternal indebtedness: “We owe you”. Some veterans felt the same way, yet if they were given privileged access to education and jobs due to their past merits, or if employers were rewarded for hiring them, it removed their opportunities to demonstrate their worth and to get satisfaction from having obtained a job in fair competition. This may go some way to explain why veterans often stressed that, “We do not want special treatment.” However, as I have argued elsewhere their rejection of special projects also pointed to their understanding of the basic social grammar of the Danish egalitarian welfare model (Sørensen 2015), in which “special schemes” always carry the risk of signalling “vulnerability”. In fact, some veterans responded harshly to the bonus the government gave to private employers because it resembled schemes to bring the most vulnerable citizens into the labour market. Veterans’ strategies to enter and become successful in the civilian labour market, in other words, are never only about their own lives and those of their families, but are contingent on and feed into the emergent social imaginaries of the veteran. When veterans leave the armed forces to find a civilian job, they thus have to navigate existing images, prejudices, opportunities, etc., and as Mathias said to me, “you want to tail after a good story, not a bad one.” At the same time, the veterans also embark on an individual existential journey, where they struggle to make past skills and experiences and future possibilities and tasks combine in a position, where they can

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experience a sense of being at home in the world again (Jackson 2000), a sense of regained integrity and identity and of being whole persons. Understandings of veterans’ change of career as a “transition” capture well the acute sense of uncertainty and liminality that many veterans express, when they leave the military, but it fails to fully acknowledge the importance of continuities in veterans’ lives, a point that Higate has convincingly argued (1998, 2001, 2003). In Higate’s work, embodied continuities were mainly constituted through institutionalised military masculinities. The veterans in my study rarely considered military masculinity essential for their choice of a civilian career, but its continued presence and relevance for post-military self-creation was visible among the veterans working on rigs, in security, in depots and in their preoccupation with risk, gear and urgency. Some instead performed military masculinity in their private life, when they went camping, hiking, parachuting, etc. Nevertheless, when listening carefully to the veterans’ emergent narratives (Mattingly 2000) and in some cases, witnessing how they performed their new jobs, I found that competences rather than masculinity constituted the thickest narrative thread. It was these— security, execution, motivation and expertise—that they experimented with in order to assess their relevance in a civilian context and their potential as a basis for a future civilian work identity. In the transition approach, the question of veterans’ competences is typically reduced to a matter of translation, and while it may be useful for a veteran to know what terms specific military functions translate into in the civilian world in order to identify relevant jobs, tailor CV and job applications, etc., selfcreation is an embodied practice that is always situated in a particular localized context. The individual stories in this study illustrated the subjective creative process of self-creation. My grouping of the veterans’ self-creation experiments into four categories and my inclusion of two cases under each competence heading demonstrated how differently similar military competences were interpreted, practiced and made meaningful by veterans in different work environments. To further illustrate how the veterans also narrated their competences in multiple ways, foregrounding and backgrounding different elements depending on purpose, I could have elaborated even more on each veteran’s story. For instance, Henry made an effort to explain how his scaffolding and security work was dependent on his detailed knowledge of and expertise in handling all sorts of equipment and gear, from rescue helicopters and fire extinguishers to ropes, straps and carabiners, making “expertise” another integral dimension of his attempted self-creation.

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Mattingly reminds that self-creation holds the risk of mistakes, unintended consequences, failures, but also the potential of a miracle (2013, 308-310). In a context, where both the dominant political discourse and veterans’ own expectations demand immediate success, this is important to hold on to. When Robert accidently found himself in charge of a crisis situation at his new job, and was able to benefit from this to create and define a new position as security coordinator based on his unique military experiences and expertise, this was a miracle. For the first time he thought that he was not just leaving the “best job ever” behind, but might in fact be heading towards a new “best job ever” that suited him better in this stage of his life. When Jens went off on a ship to help ward off piracy attacks it satisfied his personal desires for action and a larger purpose, but it obstructed his ambition to create himself as a veteran who used his social skills to help youths in need and took care of his vulnerable family. Mathias’ new job enabled him to utilise his skills in planning and execution, which in itself was a vital and rewarding experience, but his lack of basic business skills in a highly competitive environment and his lack of conviction regarding the larger purpose, made him uncertain about his future prospects in this business and open to alternatives. In order to capture the complexity and contingency of the post-military working lives of veterans like Frank, Henry, Robert, Mathias, Flemming, Jens, Niels and Karl, I suggest “military-civilian trajectories” to be a better option than the conventional “military-to-civilian transition” in that it acknowledges that what constitutes military and civilian knowledge, skills and competences is in itself complex, but they co-exist and get entangled in most veterans’ lives and projects of self-creation. By attending to trajectories rather than a transition, we might also get a better understanding of the multiplicity of veterans’ post-military self-creations beyond existing stereotypes.

Acknowledgements I am indebted to the Danish Research Council for Independent Research for making the research on which this article is based possible with a generous grant (Grant No. 0602-02345B). I also thank Thomas Randrup Pedersen, Maj Hedegaard Heiselberg, Matti Weisdorf, Sebastian Mohr, Thomas Vladimir Brønd and Rikke Haugegaard for their useful comments and inputs into an earlier draft of this manuscript.

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Woodward, Rachel/Jenkings, Neil K. (2013): “Soldiers’ bodies and the contemporary British military.” In War and the body: militarisation, practice and experience, edited by Kevin McSorley, 152-164. London: Routledge.

PART II: RECOGNITION

CHAPTER THREE THEY HAVE RETURNED AND ARE HERE TO STAY: NEW VETERAN ORGANISATIONS IN GERMANY AND THEIR STRUGGLE FOR RECOGNITION EVA BAUMGÄRTNER AND PHILIPP SCHULTHEISS

“The dimension of appreciation, respect, recognition—that is, for me, central—because politicians will only have the courage to decide on something if it is supported”1, says André Wüstner. It is the 15th of May 2015 and the chairman of the Deutscher Bundeswehrverband2 sits on a panel with other associations and political representatives and debates the topic: The Veteran: A Term from Outdated Times or More Topical than Ever? The Definition of a Concept. It is a discussion that goes beyond merely proposing a definition. The words appreciation and recognition were stated in the panel debates nearly two dozen times. These words were made in reference to a new social group of deployment returnees that originates from the international Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces) deployments in Kosovo and Afghanistan. There are, by now, between around 120,000 and 200,000 deployment returnees in Germany. This group increasingly makes “demands in a social, cultural, and symbolic form” (Daxner 2016a, 1). New veteran organisations3 play an essential role in implementing and publicising these demands directed at the media and politicians that hereby play the role of an intermediary between the 1

This quote derives from a personal transcript taken by the authors during the public panel discussion on the May 15, 2015. 2 For further information see: https://www.dbwv.de/. 3 This term refers to veterans’ organisations which have been founded since the establishment of the German Bundeswehr in 1956 and are not related in their activities to the Second World War.

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organisations and the public. In spite of its size, this social group has not yet experienced much scientific attention in Germany. While, especially for the United States, a considerable number of studies have analysed the organised demands of veterans’ groups returning from deployment, (Camacho/Sutton 2007; Cooper et al. 2016; Danish/Antonides 2013; Hunt/Robbins 2001; Schütz 1945; Saxe 2004) there is a notable research gap regarding the German case. Here, the research landscape on deployment returnees is dominated by studies on traumatisation (Biesold 2010; Kleinheinrich 2016, Koch 2016), identity and self-images of the returnees, (Dörfler-Dierken and Kümmel 2010; Mannitz 2007; Seiffert 2005 & 2012) the deployment in Afghanistan (Daxner 2014; Ebeling 2010; Seiffert, Langer and Pietsch 2012) and army reform (Bohn, Bohrmann and Küenzlen 2011; Ebeling 2006; Seiffert, Langer and Pietsch 2011; Wiesendahl 2005). Only Müller, Fey, Mannitz and Schörnig 2010, Daxner and Neumann 2012 and Seiffert and Heß 2012 present studies that deal with the new social group of deployment returnees in Germany and its perceptions, problems, and demands. Hence, it seems important to look further at these German organisations as a voice for deployment returnees by asking: What strategies do new veteran organisations adopt to generate public recognition? Which channels do they use? And how do the associations’ structural differences shape the measures they take? These research questions are based upon the assumption that generating recognition is crucial for implementing the organisations’ objectives. Here, the article draws on the theoretical assumption of Axel Honneth, that social recognition is a psychological necessity and that it is the social environment that shapes the selfconception towards good or bad. In pursuit of this research focus semi-structured interviews with representatives of four of the new veteran organisations have been conducted between September and November 2015. The later transcribed interviews have been analysed by the grounded theory coding technique following Katy Charmaz’ constructivist version. The interviewed associations include organisations, which were newly founded since the international deployments of the Bundeswehr, as well as those, which already existed at the time of the Cold War. The associations discussed are, on the one hand, the Deutscher Bundeswehrverband (founded in 1956) that represents approximately 200,000 active as well as former soldiers and the Reservistenverband4 (founded in 1960) whose 115,000 members are 4

The association’s official full name is Verband der Reservisten der Deutschen Bundeswehr. For reasons of readability it will be referred to as Reservistenverband in this article. For further information see https://www.reservistenverband.de.

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mainly former soldiers. These associations are traditionally linked to the political circles and the Bundeswehr. The Deutscher Bundeswehrverband acts as a form of labour union for soldiers. As one of its services, it guarantees initial attorney consultation. In addition, the association uses the size of its membership as a powerful tool in negotiations with parliamentarians and other actors. The other well-established association, the Reservistenverband, focuses on welfare issues of reservists. Moreover, it organises military training for its client base and coordinates military assistance for the Bundeswehr. On the other hand, there are the Bund Deutscher Veteranen (existing since 2010)5 and the Combat Veteranen (existing since 2015)6. The latter encompasses approximately 300 members, while the Bund Deutscher Veteranen, in turn, represents around 1,000 people. Both organisations were founded by soldiers who are part of the new social group of returnees themselves. The Combat Veteranen strongly focuses on generating a sense of community through regular meetings, support in establishing personal contacts between returnees and individuals, and organising club meetings. The Bund Deutscher Veteranen, in turn, acts as a human-oriented aid organisation that offers services according to a three-tier-model for deployment returnees in need. This model includes so-called case managers who are returnees themselves and are trained in psychological assistance techniques. Moreover, it organises regular get-togethers for the members and their families. These services and their meaning in the context of recognition will be addressed in the next chapter. Moreover, Axel Honneth’s concept of recognition will be introduced. Based upon the theoretical underpinning the article subsequently shows to which extent the associations follow this concept and how this affects their relationship with the political sphere, the media and their societal expectations.

Reciprocal Recognition as the Basis of Society— Theoretical Foundation The empirical data clearly points to the frequent use by the veteran associations of the terms recognition, as well as appreciation. Their representatives repeatedly stress the significance of social relations of 5 In November 2015, the association changed its name to Bund Deutscher EinsatzVeteranen. For further information see http://veteranenverband.de. 6 At the time of the fieldwork the association was structured as a club. Since then, it has restructured into an association. Furthermore, it changed its name into Combat Veteran e.V. For further information see: https://www.combat-veteran.com.

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recognition in the sense that they perceive a gap between reality and how they wish it to be. Thus, their statements show large overlaps with the theory of recognition as propagated by its leading theorist Axel Honneth. What lays the groundwork for Honneth’s theory of recognition is the finding that reciprocal recognition forms the basis of the social fabric of society (Honneth 2014, 149). In this reciprocity he sees the foundation of the formation of one’s own self-image, which develops through reactions originating from one’s social environment. Recognition through an “Alter” is therefore a prerequisite for the recognition of the “Ego” (Ludwig 2013, 269). Thus, development of a positive or negative self-image is dependent on social reactions. In general, individuals strive to receive recognition and appreciation as members of society. According to Honneth, processes of social distinction can also take place within social groups. When an individual experiences appreciation in relation to the collective identity of a group, recognition for this individual emerges from this positive experience (Ludwig 2013, 279). A relation of interaction crystallises, “within which subjects show mutual interest in their different lives because they value each other in a symmetric manner” (Honneth 2014, 208). Therefore, it is assumed that the services offered by the new veteran organisations serve as a platform to experience a sense of community and personal appreciation. Following this, it is the desire for comradeship that draws many deployment returnees to the associations. The representative of the Reservistenverband explains this desire by saying: I return my military identity card. Next I [...] drive out of this barracks gate for the last time. And then I leave everything behind [...] and think, where are my comrades, where is my support? [...] And that is why so many have the need to be part of an organisation [...] where one can keep that feeling [of comradeship] alive (RV 2015)7.

The experience of comradeship fosters mutual appreciation in the social group. The individual can gain recognition through this positive experience. Here, the interviewee of the Combat Veteranen gives the following account of comradeship: [My property had water damage and then] there were 15 people. One of them drove 1,000 kilometers [...] Then we dug for three days at full speed. Somehow nobody wanted money. They do it for the sake of comradeship. (CV 2015)8 7

The interview was conducted with the Reservistenverband on November 30, 2015. RV stands in the following for Reservistenverband. 8 The interview was conducted with the Combat Veteranen on September 24, 2015.

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Here, comradeship can also be seen as a set of values practised in the associations that is deemed insignificant in society. This principle plays a crucial role within the Reservistenverband, the Bund Deutscher Veteranen, and the Combat Veteranen. The latter strongly focuses on generating this sense of community through regular meetings, support in establishing personal contacts between returnees and individuals, and organising club meetings. In addition, an intranet is used for discussions and to collectively organise recreational activities. The association transfers internal Bundeswehr structures onto its own structures: “There is the company commander, then there is the CSM, the orderly room, [and] the company”. This structure is used due to the memory that the veterans have in common: The time they worked at the Bundeswehr. This is intended to create a feeling of solidarity “since every soldier and veteran […] knows his way around these structures, chooses a division and tags along, has fun and can get involved” (CV 2015). Another mode of providing mutual appreciation in the social group becomes visible within the Bund Deutscher Veteranen. It offers psychological training to members to become so-called case managers supporting their comrades in need. This structure provides a feeling of recognition in a twofold way. The case-manager can draw a positive feeling from this task while the comrades who receive help are embedded in a social net. Moreover, all associations attach particular importance to include the members’ relatives into the activities. The interviewee of the Reservistenverband, for instance, stresses that “it is an important aspect of veteran politics to not look at veterans in isolation but to also include the family who may have suffered secondary traumas” (RV 2015). The Bund Deutscher Veteranen offers specific family and partner seminars, while the Combat Veteranen hosts parties for the whole family on a regular basis. In fact, all associations stress the point that they are decentralised, offering services nationwide by means of regular get-togethers and federal state representatives, who act as direct contact persons. The Reservistenverband’s interviewee describes it as a key task to enable “[our] members to stay on top of military skills” (RV 2015). These include target practice, athletic competitions, and first aid courses, which run on weekends and are carried out by paid employees. For this, wearing a uniform is a key component, “which many people are glad to do and do with pride as they associate it with pleasant memories” (ibid.). Contrarily, the topic of comradeship is hardly mentioned in the interview with the Deutscher Bundeswehrverband. This association sees CV stands in the following for Combat Veteranen.

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itself primarily as a lobbying organisation with its respective tasks. It provides legal advice, ‘with a network of contract lawyers with whom everyone receives at least one initial consultation [...] (DBWV 2015)9. Notwithstanding, the organisation also offers regular get-togethers in different regions. The interviews with the representatives of the associations show that each association attempts to promote itself through its portfolio and meet the specific needs of its client base. As a primary need, the returnees desire activities and exchanges that foster mutual appreciation in the social group. In this way, recognition for the individual returnee emerges from positive experiences in the association.

Struggle for Recognition Honneth’s theory of recognition becomes social theory when it relates itself to the empiricism of moral battles fought by social groups. He sees here “an attempt to help ensure institutional and cultural implementation of extended forms of reciprocal recognition by means of which normativefocused change of societies takes place” (2014, 149). These moral battles are based on the expansion of civil rights and rights for social groups in the 20th century. Through their establishment, the rights are largely assumed to be valid. Hence, there exists a certain sensitivity for when they are assumed to be violated. Thus, when social groups feel themselves deprived of their supposed legal recognition, it can lead to a struggle for recognition (Ludwig 2013, 277). Honneth does not regard it as a necessary causality but makes it also dependent on the nature of the “politicocultural environment of the subjects concerned” (Honneth 2014, 224). Only when the social group or initiative perceives itself as political and plans to engage in politics, a struggle for recognition can start (ibid.). Drawing on Honneth’s concept, one can assume that the new veteran organisations engage in struggles for recognition. This is the case when these organisations strongly express a feeling of deprivation of their supposed legal recognition. Simultaneously, they must be driven by a politico-cultural will to engage in politics.

9

The interview was conducted with the Deutscher Bundeswehrverband on September 21, 2015. DBWV stands in the following for Deutscher Bundeswehrverband.

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“Getting on their Wick”—Addressing the Political System In the interviews, the associations’ demands for deployment returnees were outlined at the same time as they expressed how they established contact to politicians, political parties, and legislative bodies. This suggests that exerting influence on these actors is seen as a central strategy to implement demands. One of these demands is to formalise a definition of the term veteran. Here, the associations stress their efforts to “define for themselves, as well as for the general public, who and what veterans are” (Daxner 2016a, 4). To this day, a definition of the term veteran has not been agreed upon. After a long hiatus, the term veteran was brought back into the public arena in 2011 by Thomas de Maizière in his role as defence minister.10 Six years later, the term is still not part of everyday life for the German people. It is neither associated with the Bundeswehr nor with its international deployments. Instead, it evokes images of past wars, such as the Second World War or the Vietnam War. Therefore, the term elicits, above all, negative connotations and only few associate the term with “valued soldiers” or “war heroes” (Buhlmann 2012, 34). This creates the central motivation for the new veteran groups to advocate for an official definition of the term. All, indeed, have their own definition of veteran. The Deutscher Bundeswehrverband is concerned with finding a definition that is as inclusive as possible. According to this association, veterans are “all who have left the Bundeswehr honourably [...] and all who have done more than a draftee does” (DBWV 2015). The Bund Deutscher Veteranen goes a step further by stating: “A veteran is, for us, every soldier that has been deployed abroad with the Bundeswehr” (BDV 2015)11. The Combat Veteranen shares a similar view. It considers a veteran to be: a soldier who has experienced a deployment abroad, with a mandate, from day one. If he comes back after even just one day because he has been injured or because the deployment ended, that is, for us, a veteran. He can 10

A statement the minister made in 2013 remains the main point of reference: “[a veteran is somebody] who has honourably retired from active duty in the Bundeswehr and who, as a member of the Bundeswehr, participated in at least one deployment abroad or in a specific way in the context of humanitarian, peacekeeping, or peacebuilding interventions” (De Maizière in Daxner 2016b). 11 The interview was conducted with the Bund Deutscher Veteranen on November 27, 2015. BVD stands in the following for Bund Deutscher Veteranen.

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still be an active soldier, i.e. a regular soldier or a professional soldier. He can also be a dismissed soldier, an honourably dismissed soldier. (CV 2015)

For the Reservistenverband as an organisation with a mixed age structure and different deployment experiences, defining the term veteran has sparked internal debates. This resulted in a compromise attaching the concept of the veteran to an experience of deployment if the continuum of soldier, reservist, and veteran remains unchanged. As well as not being able to agree on a specific definition, the associations are also unable to agree on the usefulness of having such a definition. The Deutscher Bundeswehrverband stresses that a definition always involves including and excluding and that any exclusion should be justified. The decision to define a deployment returnee as a veteran should therefore provide special benefits for this status group. However, the Deutscher Bundeswehrverband assumes that there is no political will to do so. In contrast, the Reservistenverband criticises the continuing failure to reach agreement on a definition and points out that this impedes political advocacy in a clearly identified policy area. According to the Bund Deutscher Veteranen, however, it is the associations themselves that create division, for instance, by limiting their criteria for membership. They take the view that the discussion surrounding the veteran definition may be an opportunity to demand assistance services for deployment returnees. Hence: it is actually essential that we have created a status group through this definition with this left and right boundary because, for starters, this is the foundation on which one can discuss the matter further [...] with regard to a support concept, special care for the severely traumatised, or maybe someday even a law on welfare or a social status for us. This is not possible without a definition. Whether it refers to veteran, deployment veteran, or Miss Piggy, is irrelevant here. (BDV 2015)

And, indeed, all of the associations voice demands connected to the improvement in the welfare of deployment returnees. The Combat Veteranen, for example, advocates for a “provisional recognition of military service injuries” (CV 2015). The Bund Deutscher Veteranen underlines its commitment “to improve the recognition procedures” (BDV 2015). However, all associations agree that these topics were more pressing in the past because, as the Deutscher Bundeswehrverband stresses, “a lot has been done over the years with the adoption of the three

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laws”12 (DBWV 2015) on deployment welfare. Accordingly, all interviewees also strengthen their demands related to the symbolic, such as the introduction of a Veteran’s Day to recognise past services and the opening of memorial sites. The associations already maintain rituals of remembrance themselves, such as the commemoration day “Gegen das Vergessen” (“Against forgetting”) in the “Wald der Erinnerung”13 (“Forest of remembrance”). Furthermore, the Combat Veteranen requests a commissioner who will represent the veterans’ interests and make the topic “widely visible in society” (CV 2015). The other associations also welcome this demand as social recognition of soldiers and deployment returnees are too, their central concern. To achieve their goals, the associations establish contact to politicians, political parties, and legislative bodies, which they do accordingly depending on their specific involvement in the political system. The Reservistenverband is the closest association to political decision makers. It has direct contact to the defence committee and to the defence policy experts as, usually, members of the Bundestag are appointed as the association’s president and as the president’s two deputies. The association emphasises that it is possible to speak openly and critically despite this proximity to the Bundestag. At the same time, it notes that it is necessary to communicate diplomatically due to its financial dependence. The Deutscher Bundeswehrverband is comparably close to the political circles, especially because of its high degree of professionalisation. Its paid employees approach political representatives with partially prepared legislative proposals. It is thus necessary: to provide possible solutions if one wants to be effective in association politics. That’s why it is good to have many lawyers in our association— we even have a unit specialised in social welfare so that we [are] in the position to preformulate laws, which many lobbyists do—which we are, technically speaking. (DBWV 2015)

12 This refers to the Einsatzversorgungsgesetz from 2004 and its succeeding law, the Einsatzversorgungs-Verbesserungsgesetz. These laws regulate healthcare provided to soldiers in case of an accident during deployment. The EinsatzWeiterverwendungsgesetz entered into force in 2007. The aim of the law is to ensure that those injured during deployment are given the opportunity of employment at the Bundeswehr or the Federal Ministry of Defence if they cannot return to a civilian profession due to illness. 13 “The Wald der Erinnerung” was opened in 2014. It is a memorial site for members of the Bundeswehr who have lost their lives during deployment or during their regular service.

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The Deutscher Bundeswehrverband uses its many employees to convince MPs of the feasibility of reforms by issuing expert reports, which are different to those of the ministries. In this context, the association considers its participation in the formulation of the three deployment welfare laws14 as its greatest success. It states that the decisive factor in its success was that it managed to add MPs to its list, as proponents of and advocates for its cause. It is, according to one interviewee, “truly awesome that one manages to motivate MPs to become active and is able to pushstart the government” (DBWV 2015). The Bund Deutscher Veteranen and the Combat Veteranen also contact individual MPs, primarily from the defence committee, to get them onside. The Combat Veteranen’s interviewee does this in a very forward manner: I also use the MPs by forcing them to take up on their promises. ‘You have voted in favour of the military operation abroad, you now, also, need to support us. That is simply your responsibility nowadays with an operational army’ (CV 2015).

To have the leverage to act in this way, he relies on a large network built up through his presence in the media: “here I use my network. I get them every day—well not every day—but basically, I get on their wick” (CV 2015). The Bund Deutscher Veteranen, however, has learned that it is crucial to bring forward a well thought out subject matter. MPs are then more likely to accept an appointment. The Bund Deutscher Veteranen also emphasises the importance of controlling already adopted laws and criticising them if necessary. In its opinion, it is not only the act of maintaining contact that is effective in promoting association interests but also participation in events. The Deutscher Bundeswehrverband has therefore offered workshops for members of the Bundestag to express the necessity of a law which improves deployment welfare. The same association also organises an annual parliamentary evening that aims at establishing communication between injured deployment returnees and MPs. The intention is to generate understanding and emotional involvement: five hundred people come to it. How then are we supposed to generate emotional involvement? It depends on every single one—to what extent he has spoken to MPs. And I will never forget—John Doe [real name withheld] was in a wheelchair—he had lost both legs—he said: ‘Today, I will drive over their feet with the wheelchair until they understand what I mean’ (DBWV 2015). 14

For further information see footnote 12.

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As the Combat Veteranen lacks in resources, it uses public events such as panel discussions or open days, organised by the ministries, to enhance its visibility and to network. Another feature of the newly founded associations is their expressed determination not to meddle in other policy areas. This applies, for instance, to deployments abroad, to which the Combat Veteranen emphasises, “We would not presume to say that we need to go to Syria now. That’s a political decision. That’s simply how it is” (CV 2015). Similarly, the Bund Deutscher Veteranen considers those who make statements about security policy topics to be walking a “fine line” (BDV 2015). This shows that all resources are pooled to the topic of post-deployment welfare, and recognition. Although the two well-established associations give more recognition to political reforms and the defence ministry’s offer to engage in dialogue, they also openly voice criticism. They criticise, for instance, that for a long time jurisdictional issues regarding veteran policy remained unclear. The newly founded associations find considerable fault with the fact that neither the defence ministry nor the Bundeswehr wish to publish reliable figures on the total number of deployment returnees. The associations suspect political motives behind this, as does the Bund Deutscher Veteranen: “And now this point is taking effect. The figures have always been used to keep us small” (BDV 2015). The association Combat Veteranen also points out that the lack of operational contingent lists can cause difficulties with soldiers proving that they participated in the operation. The association takes it further by saying that it would like to receive statistics on social problems that occur after returning from deployments abroad. Moreover, the interviewee of the Bund Deutscher Veteranen sees the army’s lack of support for the deployment returnees as a reason for the German society’s lack of appreciation for the Bundeswehr. For me, appreciation is mutual—founded on giving and taking. So, if the Bundeswehr complains about a lack of appreciation or wants to enhance the appreciation of the army, then it should also include that the army and parliament [should] take good care of their active and former soldiers. (BDV 2015)

As a consequence of this lack of appreciation, the associations see the maximising of social recognition as the political elite’s obligation. They underline that it should be the politician’s task to communicate international deployments understandably to the people. The interviewee of the Deutscher Bundeswehrverband condemns the fact that this is not the case:

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Even when [MPs] raise a hand for the deployment, these MPs are largely unwilling to explain it to their constituency. Why? [...] [It happens to the extent] that when it comes to appreciation and recognition we really have a problem. (DBWV 2015)

The associations express disappointment that the political sphere does not identify the lack of interest exhibited by society and insufficient recognition as a problem that needs to be tackled. As deployments abroad are approved by parliament, they see it to be the politicians’ responsibility and duty to support deployment returnees. In this context, the interviewee of the Deutscher Bundeswehrverband directs his criticism particularly towards the young MPs who “have no connection to the Bundeswehr and then say with little thought: Let’s send soldiers there” (DBWV 2015). He states that these MPs, who may not have performed military service, do not think about the possible consequences of their decisions. They seemingly do not concern themselves with the responsibility of considering and solving these decisions politically. At the same time, the Bund Deutscher Veteranen reveals again its desire for recognition by criticising the ministry of defence. It emphasises that the accomplishments that come with being a “citizen in uniform”15 are not sufficiently realised: Citizens in uniform [...]—this term is familiar to everyone and everyone knows what is meant by it. But it is a temporary position. For the ministry it is a temporary position. Take your uniform off, and you are no longer a citizen in uniform. (BDV 2015)

The association wishes, instead, for “a small thank you” (BDV 2015) to the deployment returnees, with a music concert for instance. This suggests that specific acts of reciprocal recognition are also on the list of the associations’ requests for the government. The idea of a Veteran’s Day welcomed by the associations is to be put in the same category. For the Bund Deutscher Veteranen, the introduction of such a day is of great importance. The interviewee underlines its necessity by saying that it is important to “simply officially recognise the fact that there is a part of the generation that has achieved something extraordinary for this country” (BDV 2015). It is expressed that, for as long as there is no such day, the association’s alternative day of remembrance “Gegen das Vergessen” will 15 “Staatsbürger in Uniform” (“citizen in uniform”) is a key feature of the Bundeswehr’s inner philosophy which was conceptualised after the Second World War. The concept obliges every soldier to abide by the central norms and laws of the Federal Republic of Germany and to protect them. This includes the refusal of commands if they contradict these norms and laws.

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serve as compensation for those whose desire it is to be recognised. Through the implementation of this day, the Bund Deutscher Veteranen uses a political form of action to satisfy its members’ desire for such a day and, at the same time, exerts pressure on politicians. The empirical results show that establishing contact to politicians, political parties, and legislative bodies is seen as an effective channel and a suitable strategy for the implementation of the associations’ demands. Particularly the associations that are traditionally linked to political circles work intensively at the political level and less at the grassroot level. They use their position in the political system as a strategy to articulate their interests, as this quote by the Deutscher Bundeswehrverband shows: Which opportunities do we have to help this group and what needs to be tackled or done? It is also necessary to evaluate—where do we not stand a chance and where do we stand a chance? And as we continue towards our goal, who do we need to take along, to trigger? (DBWV 2015)

Although both the Combat Veteranen and the Bund Deutscher Veteranen want to patch the holes in veteran welfare through their activities, they consider a long-term solution to not be possible without political reforms. They emphasise that due to their limited resources it is difficult to directly reach politicians, political parties, and legislative bodies. Therefore, they stress media work and its power to exert pressure on political circles as another important factor in the enforcement of political demands. The Combat Veteranen’s representative highlights that the essential laws for improving deployment welfare could be implemented “only through media work” (CV 2015). The presented data suggest that the small associations in particular, attempt to generate understanding and emotional involvement for their political demands through the media.

“Waking Them Up”—The Desire for Recognition All interviewed associations express that they see a necessity in media presence. This seems to be the right choice considering the fact that the German people are primarily informed about matters concerning the Bundeswehr through the media (Buhlmann 2012, 11).16 The associations’ different internal structures are reflected in their respective ways to do media and press work. The interviewee of the Deutscher Bundeswehrverband refers to a structured and strategic approach: 16 Television is the main source of military information (72%) followed by print media (newspapers and magazines 64%) (Buhlmann 2012, 11).

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“I tell my spokesperson that we need to deliver a message on the situation. At which date can we do this and how can we plan it so we do not speak just for the sake of speaking?” (DBWV 2015). In addition, the association approaches MPs itself with the aim of “waking them up” so that they stand up publicly for specific demands. The Reservistenverband also has a press department that contacts media representatives. The Combat Veteranen and the Bund Deutscher Veteranen, by contrast, both recruit people who are not professionally trained in this area to do public relations work. Both associations mention that they use the high level of media interest in personal stories to their advantage. The interviewee of the Bund Deutscher Veteranen says that media representatives request a “human touch” (BDV 2015) while the Combat Veteranen wish to tell their stories “as authentically and emotionally as possible” (CV 2015). Their accounts correspond to the impression that media interest in this new social group of deployment returnees has increased and that their biographical experience is often the focus (Daxner 2016a, 2). The Bund Deutscher Veteranen notes that it is, however, difficult to find deployment returnees that are willing to disclose personal information for these stories. In the case of the Combat Veteranen a famous member attracts strong media attention due to his post-traumatic stress disorder and his deployment experience. According to a statement he made during the interview, his stories have been picked up by media outlets ranging “from the Men’s Health magazine [...] to a dog magazine” (CV 2015). The media is seen to have assumed the position of a mediator which spreads the associations’ topics and demands. The representatives agree that the media managed to create an awareness of individual realities and possible traumas by conveying images and biographical background information to the public. For the newly founded organisations this channel of advocacy is especially important because, here, a good story is more important than a big public relations division.

Becoming Visible in Society As the new veteran organisations still identify a fundamental lack of social recognition, they adopt a third channel in their work for more appreciation. This very straightforward strategy stems from the wish to be recognisable to the public as veterans and association members. But it is also a performative strategy to provoke reactions and appreciation in society. This topic is discussed intensively, particularly, with the Bund Deutscher Veteranen, Combat Veteranen, and Reservistenverband. For the interviewee of the Bund Deutscher Veteranen, for instance, it is of particular

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importance “to become visible in society” (BDV 2015). This desire, however, may lead to conflicts with the Bundeswehr. An example of this is the Reservistenverband’s voluntary engagement in refugee aid where its members have appeared in the uniform of the Bundeswehr. As the domestic deployment of the Bundeswehr is subject to stringent legal restrictions, the Bundeswehr banned the wearing of uniform on that particular occasion. The reservists were left with the feeling that their voluntary engagement had not been sufficiently valued. As a compensatory gesture, a t-shirt was produced for them with the label “Wir sind die Reserve” (“We are the reserve”) (RV 2015). The other associations have provided similar products while the Bund Deutscher Veteranen and the Combat Veteranen encourage their members to wear these garments also in everyday life rather than only on associational occasions. In these instances, the desire to emphasise the collective identity as veterans through uniform clothing becomes clear. The striving for visibility and for thereby created positive experiences—i.e. the desire for recognition—is shown through the members wearing their association specific clothing in public. The interviewee of the Combat Veteranen, however, reports that he has only received this kind of feedback during a visit to the USA. With the German people, he “does not yet have a presence” (CV 2015).

A Struggle for Recognition? Coming back to the initial assumption of the existence of a struggle for recognition, it can be stated that all the interviewed organisations are driven by the politico-cultural will to engage in politics and do so. Although their resources for professional public relations and their channels to the political system differ a lot, all associations aim to achieve the implementation of concrete measures of welfare, as well as support of public remembrance. When it comes to the second condition of a strong expression of a deprivation of a supposed legal recognition, the picture is slightly different. Here only the newly founded associations clearly show their disappointment with the political legislation and voice feelings of deprivation. Hence, in order to draw attention to their feeling of neglect, they seek conflict. Therefore, the Combat Veteranen and the Bund Deutscher Veteranen, in particular, join the battle for recognition as conceptualised by Axel Honneth. The Deutscher Bundeswehrverband and the Reservistenverband, by contrast, express a rather positive picture of the status quo by highlighting their own contributions to the improvements in deployment welfare during the last years. These two well established organisations attempt to initiate political reforms through their close

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relationship to political circles and their professional press and public relations work. Here they avoid open conflict to prevent misunderstandings that might affect their good relations to politicians negatively. Theoretically speaking, the type of contact they have with political circles can be conceived as lobbying. The term “lobbying” proves not to be satisfactorily defined in scientific debates (Köppl 2003, 86). However, in the following discussion, it will be used to mean “activities by social groups, trade associations, [and] company representatives in the front yard of politics and bureaucracy” (Köppl 2001, 218). More specifically, the associations’ activities could be regarded as legislative lobbying due to their attempt to “influence the creation of legal frameworks” (Wehrmann 2007, 38). Therefore, contact to the political arena is established with the aim that the demands will eventually become law. As often emphasised in scientific research, it is essential to be aware of the differences between associations in relation to resources available to them. Therefore, it is only the Deutscher Bundeswehrverband and the Reservistenverband who are capable of engaging in professional lobbying. Hence, only these two associations would fall under the narrow definition of lobbying, “as a transaction of information and political support in exchange for the consideration of specific interests in governmental decision making” (Sebaldt in Wehrmann 2007, 39).

Conclusion A new social group has emerged in Germany—they are soldiers whose deployment experience started at the end of the 20th century. This group will continue to grow through further deployments. Thus, the number of demands being made will increase. The deployment returnees are becoming a visible reality in society—they have returned and are here to stay. Whether their expectations and demands will be fulfilled primarily depends on the recognition that is bestowed upon them and their work. And this, summarises the representative of the Deutscher Bundeswehrverband, is “a big problem. Why? Because [German] society, in comparison to other countries, is only partially open to [...] appreciating soldiers in a certain way and form” (DBWV 2015). Therefore, it is the new veteran associations that fill in this gap. Through their services—ranging from regular meetings and psychological assistance to military training—the associations become entities where the deployment returnees experience a sense of community and personal appreciation. Thereby, comradeship plays a crucial role especially within the Bund Deutscher Veteranen, the Combat Veteranen and the Reservistenverband. Moreover, the associations

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serve as a public voice for this new social group and formulate demands in the fields of: social welfare of traumatised and/or injured returnees; symbolic recognition through, for instance, the Veteran’s Day; and the remembrance of those killed in action. Used as channels to generate public recognition and advocate for their demands, they address the triangle of politics—media—population. Here, for the newly founded associations the media is even more essential for their lobbying activities than the political arena is. As it is often emphasised, it is the personal story that serve to generate emotional involvement in the political circles, as well as in society. This is intended to draw society’s attention to the concerns of the veterans in order to then exert social pressure on politicians for further reforms. To be seen and recognised is the desire of the members, as well as a strategy of the association representatives who wish to make their concerns and achievements publicly visible—particularly in the case of the Combat Veteranen and the Bund Deutscher Veteranen. That is why they wear their association t-shirts with great pleasure and pride, which enables their identification with their association and with their status as deployment returnees. Whether this will create appreciation amongst the German people remains inconclusive. Regarding the contact with the political arena, the associations count on personal contact with MPs and committees. This contact is either deepened through personal networks or actively created through events. At the same time, the well-established associations, in particular, need to refrain from voicing criticism publicly due to their partial dependence on the political arena. The newly founded associations, however, are far more independent. Therefore, they engage in struggles for recognition as conceptualised by Axel Honneth. Consequently, they express their feeling of deprivation directly in the political arena. In contrary to that, the Deutscher Bundeswehrverband and the Reservistenverband act as lobbying organisations that use their close relations to the political circle to raise awareness for their demands. It is their professional structure, as shown through the amount of staff members that enables them to exert influence by providing legal drafts, for example. Yet, the representatives of the associations will not be able to get past one thing—the collective memory of German history and the crimes of the Wehrmacht in the Second World War. History marks the boundary between implementable demands and desires that are met with social scepticism. The associations are aware of this. Both newly founded associations make requests, such as supermarkets providing veterans with special parking spaces or the German singer Helene Fischer performing in

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the Olympic stadium exclusively for this group. These appear to be desires that lie beyond the boundary of what is considered socially acceptable. However, these boundaries are not static. If and how they will shift will largely depend on the further process of international deployments, as well as on the reaction of society to the associations’ constant struggle for public recognition. There is a reason why the Combat Veteranen emphasises that the fight also continues at home—this time they fight for recognition and appreciation.

Bibliography Biesold, Karl-Heinz. 2010. “Seelisches Trauma und soldatisches Selbstverständnis: Klinische Erfahrungen aus psychiatrischer Sicht.” In Identität, Selbstverständnis, Berufsbild. Implikationen der neuen Einsatzrealität für die Bundeswehr, edited by Angelika DörflerDierken and Gerhard Kümmel, 101–120. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Bohn, Jochen, Bohrmann, Thomas, and Gottfried Küenzlen, (eds.). 2011. Die Bundeswehr heute. Berufsethische Perspektiven für eine Armee im Einsatz. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Buhlmann, Thomas. 2012. Wahrnehmung und Bewertung des Claims “Wir. Dienen. Deutschland.”, Image der Bundeswehr sowie Haltungen zum Umgang mit Veteranen. Ergebnisse der Bevölkerungsumfrage 2012. Potsdam: Sozialwissenschaftliches Institut der Bundeswehr. Camacho, Paul R., and Paul Sutton. 2017. “A Sociological View of the Vietnam Veterans' Lobby”, Armed Forces & Society 33(3): 316–336. Cooper, Linda, Caddick, Nick, Godier, Lauren, Cooper, Alex, and Matt Fossey. 2016. “Transition From the Military Into Civilian Life”, Armed Forces & Society 44(1): 156-177. Danish, Steven J., and Bradley J. Antonides. 2013. “The challenges of reintegration for service members and their families”, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 83(4): 550-558. Daxner, Michael. 2014. “Veteranen”, Wissenschaft und Frieden 32(4): 2427. —. 2016a. Der Kampf um die Deutung von Krieg und Frieden. Eine neue Rolle für Einsatzrückkehrer und Veteranen. Unpublished paper. Berlin: FU Berlin. —. 2016b. Einsatzrückkehrer und Veteranen. Berlin: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, accessed May 5, 2016, http://www.bpb.de/politik/grundfragen/deutscheverteidigungspolitik/220648/veteranen.

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Dörfler-Dierken, Angelika, and Gerhard Kümmel (eds.). 2010. Identität, Selbstverständnis, Berufsbild. Implikationen der neuen Einsatzrealität für die Bundeswehr. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Ebeling, Klaus. 2006. Militär und Ethik. Moral und militärkritische Reflexionen zum Selbstverständnis der Bundeswehr. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Ebeling, Klaus. 2010. “Afghanistan in der Falle der Kriegslogik?”, Paper Series of Bundeswehr Institute of Social Sciences (SOWI), 51-54. Potsdam: Sozialwissenschaftliches Institut der Bundeswehr. Honneth, Axel. 2014. Kampf um Anerkennung. Zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Konflikte. Volume 8. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hunt, N., and I. Robbins. 2001. “World war II veterans, social support, and veterans’ associations”, Aging & mental health 5(2), 175-182. Kleinheinrich, Thomas. 2016. “Das Trauma geht weiter: Schlaglichter aus der Arbeit mit Veteranen und ihren Angehörigen”. In Die unsichtbaren Veteranen. Kriegsheimkehrer in der deutschen Gesellschaft, edited by Marcel Bohnert and Björn Schreiber, 255–260. Berlin: Carola Hartmann Miles-Verlag. Koch, Mauel. 2016. “Psychische Erkrankungen in der Bundeswehr.” In Die unsichtbaren Veteranen. Kriegsheimkehrer in der deutschen Gesellschaft, edited by Marcel Bohnert and Björn Schreiber, 261–268. Berlin: Carola Hartmann Miles-Verlag. Köppl, Peter. 2001. “Die Macht der Argumente. Lobbying als strategisches Interessenmanagement.” In Kampagne!: Neue Strategien für Wahlkampf, PR und Lobbying, edited by Marco Althaus, 215-225. Münster: Lit Verlag. —. 2003. Power Lobbying das Praxishandbuch der Public Affairs. Wie professionelles Lobbying die Unternehmenserfolge absichert und steigert. Wien: Linde. Ludwig, Christian. 2013. Kritische Theorie und Kapitalismus. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Mannitz, Sabine. 2007. “Weltbürger in Uniform oder dienstbarer Kämpfer? Konsequenzen des Auftragswandels für das Soldatenbild der Bundeswehr.” In Friedensgutachten, edited by Bruno Schoch, Andreas Heinemann-Grüder, Jochen Hippler, Markus Weingardt and Reinhard Mutz, 98-109. Münster: LIT Verlag. Müller, Harald, Fey, Marco, Mannitz, Sabine, and Niklas Schörnig. 2010. Demokratie, Streitkräfte und militärische Einsätze: Der “zweite Gesellschaftsvertrag” steht auf dem Spiel. Frankfurt a. M.: HSFK. Philipps, Anne. 2003. “Recognition and the Struggle for Political Voice.”

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In Recognition struggles and social movements: Contested identities, agency and power, edited by Barbara Hobson, 263-273. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Saxe, Robert Francis. 2004. “‘Citizens First, Veterans Second’: The American Veterans Committee and the Challenge of Postwar ‘Independent Progressives’”, War & Society 22(2): 75-94. Schütz, Alfred. 1945. “The homecomer”, American Journal of Sociology 50(5): 369-376. Sebaldt, Martin. 1997. Organisierter Pluralismus. Kräftefeld, Selbstverständnis und politische Arbeit deutscher Interessengruppen. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag. Seiffert, Anja. 2005. Soldat der Zukunft. Wirkungen und Folgen von Auslandseinsätzen der Bundeswehr auf das soldatische Selbstverständnis. Berlin: Verlag Dr. Köster. —. 2012. “‘Generation Einsatz’—Einsatzrealitäten, Selbstverständnis und Organisation.” In Der Einsatz der Bundeswehr in Afghanistan, edited by Anja Seiffert, Phil C. Langer and Carsten Pietsch, 79–99. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Seiffert, Anja, Langer, Phil C., and Carsten Pietsch (eds.). 2012. Der Einsatz der Bundeswehr in Afghanistan. Sozialund politikwissenschaftliche Perspektiven. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Wehrmann, Iris. 2007. “Lobbying in Deutschland.—Begriff und Trends.” In Lobbying. Strukturen. Akteure. Strategien, edited by Ulrich Willems, Annette Zimmer and Ralf Kleinfeld, 36-64. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Wiesendahl, Elmar. 2012. Neue Bundeswehr – neue Innere Führung? Perspektiven und Rahmenbedingungen für die Weiterentwicklung eines Leitbildes. Baden-Baden: Nomos.

CHAPTER FOUR GETTING-EVEN WITH THE STATE: SERBIAN WAR VETERANS SUING A COUNTRY OFFICIALLY NEVER AT WAR MARIA VIVOD

Introduction While doing research in Novi Sad in 2008, I had a conversation with a war-veteran (born in 1972) from the Hungarian ethnic minority in Vojvodina, a region in northern Serbia. He told me a story he found amusing about an Australian who was already drunk when he entered a bar, and then proceeded to pick a fight. His end-comment was: “Imagine the idiot, he wanted to pick a fight in a bar full of men most of who had a minimum of a year of combat-experience!” Indeed, it would be difficult to find any man in Serbia without combat experience. Most Serbian men fought at some point during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia from 1991 through 1999. All men over 18 and in good health were mandatory conscripts in the Yugoslav People’s Army (the JNA). If in good health, they remained obliged to the military reserve until reaching 55 years of age. When the Yugoslav wars started, young draftees were required to serve in either the military reserve or in one of the numerous paramilitary units. Along with professional servicemen, all were engaged to fight in some of the wars. In retrospect, therefore, the concept of the “veteran” in the Serbian case is complex and covers all these men, mostly Serbian citizens. In addition, refugees were also forced to fight 1 as volunteers. These were ethnic Serbians from other republics or living in the Serbian Diaspora2 who were 1

They were caught in Serbia by the Military Police and taken to the nearest JNA quarters. 2 First, second and third generation of ethnic Serbs living abroad.

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drafted to serve in the military reserve or in some paramilitary unit. They too, should be included in the concept of the “Serbian veteran”. How many veterans are there in Serbia at present? Nobody knows for sure. There are no official statistics, just estimations made by researchers and journalists. In what wars have these veterans fought? Officially: in none; since Serbia has never been officially at war. The Serbian newspapers only wrote about “volunteers” who fought to protect the Serbian people in Serbian territories in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. In which army did they fight? That is difficult to answer: the official state army, called the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) changed its name when the war-cycles started and became the “Yugoslav Army” (Vojska Jugoslavije 1992-2003). The above mentioned veterans were recruited as regular conscripts in 1990 and served in the regular army for one year and two months, fought in two wars—first in Croatia and then in Bosnia—and changed insignias on their uniform at least two times 3 . While the last war ended in the summer of 1999, it took eight years before the Serbian newspapers started reporting about the former “fighters” now called “veterans”.

A belated expression of grievances or something else? The veterans mobilised almost a decade after the last war in the Yugoslav war-cycles. They mounted numerous strikes to claim the money that was promised for their service in battle. The Serbian state ignored them until the European Human Rights Court (EHRC) ruled in their favour. This chapter is divided in two parts. The first part reviews the war conditions and a partial account of the revolt as drawn from the headlines of Serbian newspapers. Then, the narrative shifts to a description of the legal procedures at the local, national, and finally, the international level. The second part of the chapter contains the social and political conditions that encompass the setting in which the conflict developed. The fieldwork for this research was done in Serbia, in the period between 2010 and 2017, and it was based on interviews with two dozen of war-veterans and civilians, age between 25 and 57, living in Serbia or abroad. There are several theoretical pathways to analyse the on-going conflict between the Serbian state and the veterans. In a situation of contested politics of memory (David 2015), where official memory significantly 3

He remembers having changed insignias three times but thinks he might have been employed in some phantom-operation in Bosnia.

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differs from the individual, we witness a trial of strength between the main actors of a conflicted past. The state does not officially recognise that the fighting ever happened, but in a stunning twist of logic they demand that the events that they say never happened must be completely forgotten about. Parallels between linguistics and social constructions in order to discover hidden realities of mental structures but also of the human societies were proposed already by structuralist anthropologists (as for instance Lévi-Strauss, Josselin de Jong, Leach). Starting with a similar stance, in his bestseller Cultural intimacy Michael Herzfeld (2004) pointed out how the notion he coined can be used in the anthropological analysis of the nation state. He proposed the concept of dyssemia which would be similar to the term of diglossia as used in socio-linguistics. Dyssemia as a sociological term means a formal and coded tension between the official representation of the national “selfdom” and of that what happens in the privacy of collective introspection. According to his interpretation, the nation state is ideologically dedicated to the ontological self-eternalisation and in the process of the creation and catering of a national history it obliterates out retroactively generic time and expresses structural nostalgia—a longing toward non-existent times when social structures were simple. This effort of a nation state fosters dyssemia—a simultaneous attraction and repulsion—in the individual representation of the national “selfhood” and makes the citizens turn against the nation state (Herzfeld 2004). This theoretical structure promotes a standpoint that individuals necessarily use remains of the past to achieve their goals in the present. Herzfeld introduces the notion of social poetics of which ethnography is one of the acts of the poetics. He defines poetics as a technical analysis of the main features of symbolical expression and in that sense the task of anthropology is not only the study of the local fields of that expression but also the ethnography of the nation state. A gap created in the ideological efforts and performances of the state to create a conveyable historiography and to reduce former actors of the ontological self-eternalisation as pure statists, produces a conflict. Serbian veterans are the most visible and symbolically the most pertinent former actors in a weakening relation of power-reciprocity with a relatively fresh nationstate. In a clustered social system as a post-conflict society the complexity of communication is extremely reduced. The communication, as a form of social reproduction is defined by boundaries (Luhmann 1996). The selection of information, the choice of utterance/silence of the information and what is to be understood/misunderstood by whom defines the basics of the ontology of the nation state as a social system. When analysing legal

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procedures and how they came to be as forms of meta-communication (Bateson 1955), it becomes apparent that a situational schizophrenia is a strong element on the level of the state. It is a social condition in which there is a profound gulf between a situational context and the processes of official/individual communication. It is a clash of diverse and contested realities in which utterance/silence are important parts of communication (Luhmann 1996). The timing, frequency and nature of the strikes—exhibited sometimes in forms of altruistic self-harming practices—indicate a change in the selfperception of a relevant social group, which gives birth to the idea that one of the concealed realities behind the legal procedures may lie in the breaching of a social contract (Champeau 2002). However, the roots of the conflicts are deeper and are potentially found in the monopoly of “patriotism”, abundantly used by the nation state as a secular theology to mobilise actors. Ethnic nationalism—as political principle—played a crucial role in the articulation of the state in case of Serbia and was recycled in a public life as currency in the economy of nationalism. Social suffering, besides being a by-product to this ongoing conflict in the Serbian society, is also a form of economic and moral transaction between the state and grievances of the veterans (Das 2000).

The strikes and the legal conundrum It was in September 2007 that Serbian media first reported about veterans who were engaged in hunger strikes in the district of Kuršumlija (Central Serbia) (Glas Javnosti 2007). The veterans belonged to the military reserve employed during the war in Kosovo (1998-1999). They took over the township building as a part of their protests and several among them started a hunger strike. The strike was interrupted two weeks later, when the striker’s health worsened, but the occupation of the township building continued. The main cause of their strike was their daily wages left unpaid for 1998-1999. The Serbian government approved a disbursal of funds over the months to come for the veterans on the grounds of “assistance to underdeveloped” (Martinoviü 2013; Blic 2008). This strike was the first of many that followed in the years to come. In April 2008, another group of veterans, members of the military reserve went on strike in the region of Pþinj (in cities and areas of Vladiþin Han, Preševo, Bujanovac) (Blic 2008). In December 2008, yet another group of veterans blocked the roads, engaged in strike actions and clashed with the local police and forces of the Serbian Gendarmerie in the region of Toplice (cities of Žitoraÿa, Kuršumlija, Blace and Prokuplje) (Blic

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2008). In August 2009, a group of veterans demonstrated in the city of Valjevo and then blocked the railway between Serbia and Montenegro, the Belgrade-Bar line (Veþernje Novosti 2009). Just six months later, in January 2010, the same group again blocked the same city and railway line (B92 2010). Their demands were not met. In September 2011, a new group of veterans protested in the city of Leskovac (Južne Vesti 2011) . In January 2014, in the city of Valjevo, former members of the military reserve went on a hunger strike. One of them, Nebojša Milenkoviü (57) from the nearby village of Vlasotinci, cut off his own finger as a sign of protest. He was a veteran of the Croatian war while his son is a veteran of the Kosovo war (RTS 2014). Their strike ended after 7 days. In all the above cases, their demands were met only partially or not at all. Most of the veterans were part of the military reserve which was deployed in the Kosovo war. The notion of “veteran” in Serbia is a complex concept because of the recent history of the country. Serbia, while it still was a socialist republic belonging to the Yugoslav Federation, was first initiated in its war in and with Slovenia (1991). The war-cycle continued as the federation changed its name due to the secession of the original six republics: during the war with Croatia (1991-1995) the country was called Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, as the secession of the remaining republics continued. In 2002, “Yugoslavia” ceased to exist, having been reduced to only two former republics from the old federation: Serbia and Montenegro. The federation lasted only a couple of years (2003-2006) before Montenegro declared independence. Yugoslavia had a bloody end: the war in Bosnia went on almost in parallel with the war in Croatia (1992-1995) and armed clashes in Kosovo ensued (starting early on in 1996, reaching their apogee in the winter of 1998 and spring of 1999). Most of the male Serbian population born before 1983 participated in one or another war, either as a draftee of the regular army or as a member of the military reserve. There are no official statistics about how many veterans remain in Serbia by 2017. According to some estimations (Martinoviü 2013) 10-15% of the population of seven million (2011) were either drafted as conscripts or engaged as reserve in some of the warcycles between 1991 and 1999. This would mean that there are between 400,000 and 800,000 individuals who were deployed in at least one war during their lifetime. That implies that most of the men in Serbia could be considered à priori war veterans, with some degree of combat experience. According to the Serbian Law on the Rights of Veterans—which belongs under the jurisprudence of the Ministry of Defence—Military

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Disabled Persons and Members of Their Families (1991)4 war veterans are defined as “the Serbian and Montenegrin soldiers who participated in the wars between 1912 to 1918”5 (Yugoslav Ministry of Defence 1991, Art. 2, Par. 2). This part of the legislation covers those individuals who served in the army during the Balkan wars (the first being in 1912-1913 while the second was in 1913) and the First World War (Article 2). The law also refers to the “participants in the anti-fascist struggle in the Second World War in the allied troops and the participants of the army of the Yugoslav kingdom”6, who fought between 1941 and 1945. The war-cycles of the 1990s are elegantly included as veterans of conflicts associated with the breakup of the Yugoslav federation. Specifically, they are mentioned as “the participants at their army duty during the armed attacks after 17 August 1990”7 and “soldiers on duty that participated in any activity for purposes of defending sovereignty, territory and independence of the Federal Yugoslav Republic8” (Yugoslav Ministry of Defence 1998, Art. 2, Par. 5). As the strikes of diverse groups of veterans erupted in various districts in central Serbia, more than ten years after the end of the fighting, a new law for veterans was finally drafted (in December 2015). This time the jurisdiction, interestingly, was given to the Ministry of Labour, Employment, and Social Issues. The law was more restrictive regarding the denomination of “veteran”. According to the new law, this title would only apply to those Serbians who were engaged in some of the armed 4

The Law on the Rights of Veterans, Military Disabled Persons and Members of Their Families [Zakon o pravima boraca, vojnih invalida i þlanova njihovih porodica] has been firstly amended through changes in its original dispositions—in 2000 and 2005—and secondly through the introduction of a subsequent piece of legislature, the Law on the Basic Rights of Fighters, Military Disabled Persons and Families of Fallen Fighters [Zakon o osnovnim pravima boraca, vojnih invalida i porodica palih boraca], which has been as well amended five times. 5 “ucestvovao u oslobodilackim ratovima od 1912. do 1918. godine kao pripadnik srpske i crnogorske vojske” 6 “ucestvovao u antifašistickoj borbi u Drugom svetskom ratu:- kao pripadnik Vojske Kraljevine Jugoslavije u ratu od 6. do 17. aprila 1941. godine” 7 “vršio vojne dužnosti ili druge dužnosti za vojne ciljeve ili za ciljeve državne bezbednosti u oružanim akcijama posle 17. avgusta 1990. Godine za ocuvanje suverenosti, nezavisnosti i teritorijalne celokupnosti Socijalisticke Federativne Republike Jugoslavije.” 8 “Borac je i jugoslovenski državljanin koji je vršio vojne dužnosti ili druge dužnosti u vezi sa ucestvovanjem u oružanoj akciji preduzetoj za vreme mira radi odbrane suverenosti, teritorije, nezavisnosti i ustavnog poretka Savezne Republike Jugoslavije.”

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conflicts between the periods: 17 August 1990-27 April 1992 or 24 March-26 June 1999 and, who are in possession of a regular military service book (The Serbian Ministry of Labour, Employment, and Social Issues 2015). The draft of this legislation lingered in the corridors of the Serbian parliament. It was not supported by any veteran organisation nor the Serbian public. The draft completely excluded those ethnic Serbs from Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Montenegro who fought in the units of the Serbian military reserve. The proposed law also contained a legal catch: the military service books did not contain the concept of “war” at the time the authorities mobilised the reserve. According to the records, many veterans went on a “drill”. In the presidential election of spring 2017 a new law on veterans was among the favourite topics of the Serbian presidential candidates, but until today no such new law has been passed. Despite the high number of war-veterans in Serbia, there is no legal or other organisation embodied in one institution which could defend the rights of the veterans or speak up officially for all of them. There are a great number of different veterans’ unions: either 22 or 24 or 25 or 40 or 50 depending on how you define their membership, as Lea David calculates (2015, 107). They are often organised according to the fighters’ regional origin (as for instance those from the Krajina region, or Bosnia), the common battlefields (war in Kosovo, war in Croatia), to membership in a particular paramilitary or army unit (the regular army – draftees or reserves), or by their common legal status (invalids, families of deceased, missing, wounded). These factions organized on such diverse grounds, divide the massive membership thereby preventing the emergence of a unified representative body which could claim legitimacy (David 2015). When the daily-wages were paid to the first group of veterans of Kuršumlija, it presented a legal precedent for other veterans to claim their rights too. Until that moment there was no legal ground to ask the state to disburse wages. But from that moment on other groups could claim their wages, on the ground of “discrimination”. Veterans of the Kosovo-war— mainly organised locally—demanded their war-wages first in district courts and then at higher judicial levels. The Serbian courts backed up the government and in 2011 the veterans finally managed to bring their case to the European Court for Human Rights. This moment was a breakpoint in the legal part of the story. In a court application submitted to the ECHR, war veterans claimed to be discriminated because of place of residence and financial status, and argued that the Serbian state unreasonably represents the "right to war wages as a new right, not a property right" (Tonþiü 2013, 178). In October of the same year, the ECHR delivered an advisory opinion that Serbia was obliged to facilitate a peaceful settlement

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of the lawsuits relating to the payment of wartime wages by December 16, 2011. The court then concluded that the failure of the courts in Serbia to act upon a number of lawsuits, filed by war veterans claiming wages, constituted a violation of Article 6 Paragraph 1 of the Convention on Human Rights. In August 2012 the ECHR in Strasbourg ruled in favour of the war veterans and ordered Serbia to ensure the payment of war wages that were not paid to these reservists for their service during the NATO intervention in 1999. But the Serbian state appealed. In March 2014, the ECHR’s Grand Chamber ruled that Serbian veterans of the Kosovo war should pursue their cases in Belgrade rather than Strasbourg, arguing that not all legal remedies have been exhausted yet to win compensation for unpaid wartime allowances in their home country, what should be done before taking their case to Europe. As a result, more groups of veterans sued the Serbian state: in August 2015, for instance, veterans in the city of Kraljevo sued the state for discrimination. This time the tribunal of Kraljevo condemned the state: the Serbian state indeed paid the veterans of the region of Kuršumlija back in 2008 200,000 dinars on average (approx. 2,000€) to every reservist of the Kosovo-war. This was an incentive for similar groups to claim their wages on the same legal basis. The number of legal actions against the state started to rise in all major cities: in September 2015 a law firm in Niš submitted a complaint to the court in Subotica on behalf of its veteran clients claiming discrimination and called on all war veterans to join the lawsuit. In January 2015 a public debate was held in the city of Novi Sad for war veterans’ associations about legal procedures related to the return for retrial before the ECHR. The movement of veterans has meanwhile become so massive that even fraud appeared: suspicious legal-counsellors and law-firms appeared and promised legal representation for small amounts of money (usually 10-20€ per veteran). In some cases, the Serbian state, via the budget of the districts, has managed to pay off the requesters. But this was done only partially and it emptied the already poor local budgets. When the case reached the EHRC it became evident that Serbia would be mandated to pay sooner or later. It was also clear that the amount to be paid would be huge. How much money is in question? The usual amount to be paid for each day spent in a battlefield in Kosovo is 3,500 dinars (approx. 28€) per veteran. The conflict lasted for 78 days. There were 49,769 individuals members of the military reserve at the time of the war in Kosovo which would add up to 13,5 billion dinars (approx. 168 million €). Some 204,743 individuals from South Serbia were drafted to Kosovo (56 billion dinars or approx. 700 million €) and 250,000 individuals were drafted into the .

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regular army and deployed against NATO in all Serbia (84 billion dinars or approx. 1 billion €) (Brkiü 2008). However, the war in Kosovo is not the only one in which the military reserve was used. Even if—roughly calculated—only 10% of the total Serbian population was deployed from 1991 to 1999 that amount would still be staggering. A poor indebted country such as Serbia would be hard pressed to disburse this amount even with good intentions. And such intentions are the least that Serbia has for its veterans. Understanding that their demands will probably never be met, some groups suggested other forms of concessions for payback, which might be more feasible, such as veteran-discounts for public transport, electricity-bills and scholarships for their children. But their propositions did not receive any support from local or other government authorities.

The (not so) hidden realities and the retaliation Lea David who dealt with the topic of Serbian veterans argued that the clash that happened almost a decade after the last war of the Yugoslav war-cycles was due to the contested politics of memory between the elite that would like to move on and the remnants of the past events (David 2015, 56). In that sense the Serbian government did all it could to alienate and foster the fragmentation of the veteran population which—if organised—could represent a voting body (idem). By simply ignoring the incessant demands of the veteran population the Serbian state successfully mitigate[d] their political power and weaken[d] their struggle for their rights, but also to reduce[d] the financial burden which war veterans might impose on the state budgets (David 2015, 57).

The Serbian state answered—if only to some extent—to the claims of a group of veterans when the case reached an external, international authority: the EHRC. The post-Milosevic government had the same goals and strategies as the Milosevic-regime: it preferred to leave the problem to its scions and acted only when an external power, a higher authority intervened. The Milosevic regime’s opportunistic laissez-faire politics deployed the military in an offensively undeclared war. The regime was aware that the war-cycles of the 1990s left the Serbian treasury empty, but it left it to the successive governments to deal with the problem. In that sense it is imaginable that the Tadiü-government (2004-2012) too—which was the great winner of the Serbian revolution against Milosevic—acted according to the same tradition of inconsequence of the Serbian internal and external politics: it paid wages to a group of veterans under a false pretext right before the Serbian presidential elections (which the Tadiü-led

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democrats won). The democrat-led government at the time probably hoped to deal somewhere in the future with the rest of the veterans if the elections were won, if not, it was for their successors to deal with it. It should be pointed out that the majority of males drafted during the 1990s either as conscripts or as military reservists were drafted by force. Refugees who escaped to Serbia from one of the war-torn former republics were also drafted into military reserve or a paramilitary unit (Mitiü and Vukoviü 2006). Many draft-eligible young men escaped from Serbia in order to dodge the draft and could not return until the mandatory military service was suspended in 2011, and a partial amnesty for avoiding conscription was granted in the same year. However, suspending mandatory military service and granting amnesty were not enough reassurance for many men who escaped by going abroad: many still refuse to set a foot in Serbia because of the fear of facing trial. It also must be pointed out that the Serbian population consisted of 20% ethnic minorities, according to the 1991 census but then declined to 16% according to the census of 2011. Members of ethnic minorities were either forced to take part in the Yugoslav war-cycles—which were stricto sensu inter-ethnic wars—or choose exile to avoid conscription. It is not surprising that approximately 20% of Serbian war veterans suffer from PTSD (Vasiü 2011). Since 2007 when the first strikes reached the national media, veteran groups became louder and better organised. While I was doing fieldwork, several types of popular stances about the demands expressed by the veterans became evident. In some cases, the moral right to claim daily wages was questioned. However, many more people supported the demands of the veterans, especially of the disabled or injured, no matter in which war they had taken part. The opinion that wages should be paid to all war veterans except to those who took part in the Kosovo-war nevertheless prevailed. The reasoning was that claiming wages for a war which was defensive—because it was a “war against the NATO forces”— was not proper because “the country was under a foreign attack”. This would equal the military reserve with mercenaries who are, according to an extreme opinion, “the worst scum on earth”. Many accused the Milosevic regime of maintaining daily wages for the military reserve and accused the regime of unscrupulous abuses under Yugoslav law concerning military reservists in war situations. The justness of those wars was not elaborated on by the interviewees. Those who support the morality of veterans’ claims identify the past Tadiügovernment (2004-2012) and the present Vuþiü-government (2012- ) with the Milosevic regime, as being “all corrupt, opportunistic, irresponsible

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and predatory toward the citizens”. The only thing that individuals questioned about this topic supported almost totally was: “all veterans should have social benefits other than money in form of social concessions”. A current leitmotif of what is and what should not be paid by the state which prevails in the interviews9 was almost unequivocally expressed as a “defence war against foreign forces/foreign attack”. The notion of “defence against invaders” is a concept that indicates a moral nuance to the veterans’ claims. The causes why a war in Kosovo erupted in the first place are left out, disregarded from the discourse. The moment money came into play in the relation of veterans vs. the Serbian state, all notions relating to the obligation or the duty of the citizens to fight and die for their country immediately became linked to the morality of veterans demands and not of the state that engaged them primarily. The state rests its official historiography on the key concepts in which this duty and morality go only in one way. The identification of moral and ethnic categories logically leads to the institutionalisation of the moral authority that the nation state holds which is basically cultural (Herzfeld 2004). An important aspect of the strikes is the restoration of the balance of power which the veterans attempted to affect by engaging in strikes, road-closing and other strategies. For many of them, it was a way to recover their sense of dignity. Dignity is a common leitmotif in the discourses of veterans. To restore dignity in a distorted balance of power is to re-establish a temporary equality and create from it a sense of just order (Herzfeld 2004). Interestingly, the veterans who were the first to act in this manner were from Central Serbia and most of the strikes that ensued after the first group were limited to the so-called inner Serbia: regions and counties south of Belgrade. Not one strike was started by the veterans from the north of the country, as e.g., in Vojvodina or in other regions where ethnic minorities are more numerous in the general population and therefore among veterans as well. A rebellion by veterans with ethnic minority background “could have been interpreted by the authorities as “anti-Serb”, a dangerous accusation”10 in this recently established nation-state that was brought into

9

Main narrative elements that appear in the interviews are exposed here briefly and therefore resumed in quotation marks. 10 Interviews with veterans with an ethnic minority background (Slovak, Hungarian) from Vojvodina.

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being “in spite of itself”11. It must be kept in mind that Serbia is a recently created nation-state in its present democratic and republican form (Banjac 2009) 12 . Instead, the project was different at the end of the 1980s and particularly during the 1990s. Serbia was imagined and advertised by its political and intellectual elite and media as “Greater Serbia”—a country in which all Serbs (from Croatia, Bosnia, etc.) would live under one government and one state (Masson 1998). In this newly created nation-state, war veterans should have played a crucial role as forefathers and heroes on whose sacrifices the nation managed to defend and unite the country. In the former republics of Croatia and Bosnia war-veterans were in the mean-time socially recognised for their sacrifices. But this was not the case with Serbia. The sinister fact is that “Serbian territories” and all the wars from 1991 to 1999 were lost. The idea that is rudimentary in the design of the ethnic state is the pars pro toto principle. In the cosmology of ethnic nationalism, an individual is an organic part of the whole and his/her actions reflect on the identity and the image of the whole. Maybe one of the best and most unfortunate illustrations of this principle is the example of Milenkoviü from Vlasotinci who cut off one of his fingers as a sign of his and other veterans’ protests. He stated that he would not hesitate to chop off all his fingers with an axe, one by one, until his demands and those of his fellow veterans are met (Televizija Leskovac 2014). Mutilation in a sociological sense was aimed at exposing the harm done to him the by powerful opponent and the indifference by which he and his fellow veterans were now being treated. His act was a form of moral transaction and a “set-out” of the social suffering of the whole group (Das 2000). In a sinister pars pro toto-parallel, in which the nation and its territories are imagined as a human body (Verdery 1994, Weiss 2002), the “Serbian territories” were symbolically amputated from the Serbian “matrix”, such as Milenkoviü “parted” from his own finger(s). Veterans are aware that they were the main actors in the making of an ethnic state, but in exchange for their contribution they remain deprived of opportunities for public offices, education and even a steady job (Breton 1964). It has also become clear that positions once reserved for what was 11 There is a common saying when speaking about emigration and secession of the former republics, that “the last one who leaves [Serbia/from Serbia] should put out the light”. 12 As an independent country (1882-1918), Serbia was first a monarchy (also when it joined the Yugoslav Kingdom 1918-1939), until it became part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1945-1992). As a “nation-state” and a democratic republic, it is a relatively new state-creation.

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once perceived as an alien ruling elite (communists, members of other ethnic groups, etc.) are now occupied by fellow nationals, who often did not spend a day on the battlefield. More recently, new opportunities are opening up in new “nation-building” activities but these were going to apparatchiks and members of various ruling political parties and were therefore out of their reach (Gellner 2009). In this new Serbia there is no place for the remnants of a bloody war that officially never happened. Ethnic nationalism as an ideology which was used massively in the political and intellectual discourse in Serbia from the second half of the 1980s until very recently, was worn out by 2007. The general discontent of the population is therefore embodied in the strikes and claims of veterans, for these are popularly supported by the public. The moral economy of patriotism of the 1990s was easily convertible into economic, social and particularly political capital in the Bourdieuan sense, but has now been spent. The post-war decommissioning was only partial (Božiü 2016). Levels of family violence are extreme, and femicide—its unfortunate byproduct—is particularly high. 27 women were murdered in 2015 and 34 in 2016. The fact that so many Serbians, especially veterans, still own so many weapons only adds an additional dangerous factor. There are many dissatisfied citizens tired of the economic crisis which begun at the end of the 80s and has become a lasting reality and adds further fuel to the social dissatisfaction. The routine of family violence and femicide happening almost on a regular basis clearly indicates that Serbia is still burdened by long repudiated and anachronistic actions and has not overcome the practices of a chauvinistic “honour” code type of culture. This “honour” culture is guided by the notion that an individual’s “honour” depends on an evaluation made by others. Members of such a society are expected to retaliate against others, often violently, if their perceived “honour” is attacked or even questioned. An individual’s reputation is the most precious quality a person can have. Anyone who fails to protect their “honour”, even with the use of violence if necessary, will suffer a severe loss in social prestige. In that sense, vengeance is one of the tools to get even with the offender (Cooney 1998). The veterans’ strikes were firstly a means to act out grievances. Additionally, the legal procedures also contained an underlying meta-message in a schizophrenic situation in which realities remained unarticulated which created a gulf between the message and its context (Bateson 1960). In that sense the legal procedure could be interpreted as an act of retaliation because it ensued well after the wars were over.

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The break opened by the Serbian government paying only to one group of veterans while omitting the others was seized with both hands. The inconsistency and the opportunism of Serbian politics—proven in the past by making the reserves engage in war in the first place and by breaching the legislation about the military reserve—created a crack. Day-to-day decision-making, the usual modus operandi of the ruling political parties and their leaders steams from their inability to make long-term plans and put them into operation. By attacking the Serbian state in court, a “social contract” between the ethnic nation state and the veterans, a “tool” for this creation, was breached. The veterans “‘played a game’ within ‘the game’” (Herzfeld 2004): they dared to reclaim wages for a war in which they officially never were deployed and in which Serbia officially did not participate. Dealing with past events is something the official Serbian narrative was reluctant to do. There is a will from top down of tacitly shaping the collective memory about the events from the 1990s by leaving the events linked to the breakup of Yugoslavia in profound silence. In this shaping of a collective narrative those who took part most intensively were the members of the Serbian political and intellectual elite. One should not forget though, that all Serbian political parties which were in power after the fall of the Milosevic regime were in their kernel nationalist, and even extremely chauvinistic. The attitude of the present political and intellectual elite are mostly the same individuals who occupied key positions from the 1990s to today. In this dyssemic situation, nationalism as a leading motive of public discourse is far from the lived realities of the individual, citizenlevel. Serbia, already “clustered” as a social system (Luhmann 1996) in the Milosevic era, and reduced in its communicational complexity, provided limited means to establish a dialogue between the main actors of this affair. The state chose silence and uttering when referring to the past while at the same time proclaiming “nationalism” and “patriotism” as its main, ontological message. In this way the state could dictate the public discourse. A gulf between different lived realities and the official message propagated by the Milosevic and the subsequent Serbian governments created profound public distrust. This state-created schizophrenic situation in which the only issue was a continuation of the communication by pretending that the official narrative was real: there was no war, the veterans were in a military reserve for a drill and the daily-wages were due to be paid by the state. The social setting in which the veterans expressed their grievances is a schizophrenic situation in the sense as described by Bateson (1960): a gulf between the context and the message that is being transmitted, a setting in which understanding is impossible. The state

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“pretends” that there was no war. The veterans pretend too. In that sense, the legal procedures per se are a meta-message, demonstrated by the veterans, to the attention of the state. The veterans pretend that they participated in a drill: they want their wages as the law prescribes. Since the Human Rights Court’s decision, there is a deafening silence in the Serbian media about the veterans. Only sporadic news reaches the general public in form of warnings of false lawyers or occasional debates about their legal procedure against the state. The Leviathan-nature of the Serbian state can be seen in how news about the decision of the Human Rights Court on the right of the Serbian veterans to obtain their wages on grounds of discrimination was delivered. Media coverage was skimpy leaving doubts even about when or if the trial was settled. It was exactly this Leviathan-nature of the Serbian state that pushed the veterans to claim their dues above all. One has to keep in mind that strikes of veterans started in autumn 2007 and the most fervent strikes and road-blocks that followed happened in 2008 and in the following years. One question arises, why the veterans waited so many years before they acted out? Why did the affair become pertinent only from the autumn of 2007 onwards? In order to answer this question, one should remember that in February 2007 the UN proposed an independent Kosovo, which came about exactly a year later, in February 2008. By autumn 2007, when the first veterans strike erupted, all the former republics had seceded, and it became clear that one of the two Serbian provinces, “the cradle of Serbia”, Kosovo would soon become independent too. Ethnic nationalism bailed out. It was “an empty talk” of a Leviathan-state. It was exactly this impetus which triggered the grievances of the veterans. The efforts the veterans invested themselves in, the creation of a strong and united Serbia with “its territories”, went up in smoke. The Serbian Constitution of 2006 which stated that Kosovo is an integral part of the Serbian state, was breached soon afterwards when the Serbian officials established contact with counterparts from Kosovo. The Leviathan-nature of the Serbian governments created a wide gap between the official, nationalistic discourse and the realpolitik led by the political elite. As a political currency in the economy of nationalism, ethnic-nationalism was abundantly used in Serbian politics. It was believed (Oberschall 2000) that ethnic sentiments were manipulated by the elite to mobilise the citizens. The grievances that were expressed by the veterans almost a decade after the last war challenge this idea. The chronological order of the strikes and of the public exposure of veterans’ grievances challenges the hypothesis of “ethnic manipulation” by the elite (Oberschall 2000) and indicates that chauvinistic nationalism was not unidirectional from top down. The

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pressure that the Serbian veterans tried to put on the Serbian government indicates that in the arm-wrestling between the state and the veterans ethnic-nationalism and other ontological concepts on which a nation-state is based, can and will be used to settle the scores.

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CHAPTER FIVE COMPETING WITH THE DEAD HERO: THE GERMAN PARTICULAR WAY MICHAEL DAXNER

The German “Sonderweg” Some countries insist on their exceptionalism; other nations are branded by a very particular role that makes all the difference. The German “Sonderweg” (particular way) has been a rather pejorative though technical term to describe the difference between German political, cultural and social development throughout the late 19th and most of the 20th centuries. When, after the Second World War, West Germany became part of the Western world, many historians and politicians showed their relief that there was no German “Sonderweg” anymore. Without unfolding the whole complex history of this geopolitical construct “Sonderweg”, I want to point at one peculiarity that really makes Germany exceptional among the majority of important nations in the world after the Second World War: After 1945, Germany did not produce veterans. It would be more correct to say that both Germanies did not produce them, and only recently, unified Germany has veterans—and a problem. I shall explain very briefly why that has been so. West Germany became a part of the Western world after 1945. When it became a member of NATO, a new national army, the Bundeswehr, started a military concept from the scratch, trying to avoid too many or too effective ties to the Nazi armed forces (Wehrmacht). It can be easily understood that this ideal new beginning did not work perfectly well in reality, but the Bundeswehr has succeeded in not becoming the successor of the Wehrmacht; one reason for that has been that the country was never engaged in wars or military interventions. Therefore, it had no veterans; the old ones, from the Second World War, had their own history, but they slowly disappeared for biological reasons and did not deeply root in the traditions and habitus of

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the new army. The Nationale Volksarmee, East Germany’s army, was part of the Warsaw Pact, but did neither take part in military interventions or wars that were fought by the Soviet Union and its other allies. Only after the end of the Cold War the newly unified Germany began to play a different role in international security affairs. Ten years after the fall of the Wall, German troops took part in the first military operation after 1945: The role of the Bundeswehr in the intervention in Kosovo was significant and novel. Since 1999, Germany produces veterans. And it is a “Sonderweg” that these veterans do not ground on a century-long tradition, as the veterans represent in other big nations with a notable history of warfare. This essay will concentrate on Germany. However, this is not possible without looking at other nations and their veterans. A comparative approach must start from an opposite position: countries with a long tradition in warfare and an unbroken narrative of fighting wars have included veterans into their social texture, as a distinct social group, unified by a common fate. In all these countries, the history goes from soldier to veteran and/or hero, and veterans belong to the factual reality of a social structure, in which they play a variety of roles—in this respect, societies differ from each other. The German example may add one variety to the host of veteran policies, cultures, institutions. Its origins begin with the defeat of the Wehrmacht in 1945. Recently, the debate about “who is a veteran?” has revealed a deep uncertainty about the whole complex. If the military traditions, albeit those from the immediate past, play a dominant role, then many remainders from an incompletely coming to terms with the past will emerge; if the institutional history of the individual person, the transition from soldier to veteran, is linked with the honourable discharge from active service, then the links with fighting, surviving, being wounded, being close to become a hero etc., are excluded from the status of veteran and become shallow. The debate about who is a veteran is very significant for the German discourse on war and peace, and of a social regrouping of its society since the country has gained a new and stronger position among the big global players. Veteran associations increasingly play a role in the definition game (see also Chapter 3). However, for social science the definition of veterans as a new social group is not so easy, because we do not know enough about them. Therefore, I started describing what we know and, implicitly, what we do not know about veterans in Germany. Only then, it will be easier to define veterans and their status in society. A starting point can be Eva Baumgärtner’s thesis of 2017, where she anticipates some of

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the dimensions shown in Table 5-1 and deduces her results from very substantial interviews (Baumgärtner 2017, see also Chapter 3). My problem as a social scientist is that there are only very few serious empirical accounts of the new status of veterans, while older models or research are of little use for the present problems of the “Sonderweg”. One indirect approach is the critical analysis of the veteran discourse that is closely linked to a few other rather sensitive discursive fields, such as Germany’s new role in the global security system, or in the conflict between pacifist national frames and an increasingly globalised role of Germany also in military conflicts. I shall try to give a brief overview on the problems to allocate the German discourse on veterans and to describe the options for a scientific integration of research into the broader global veteran discourse. I pragmatically call them “veterans”, well knowing that there are many opinions that would prefer to call them “returnees”.

What we know Since 1999, the Kosovo engagement, there are more than 300,000 veterans in Germany, and the number is rising. Most of them have been deployed in several military interventions “out of area”, i.e. not on the territory of NATO-members. The main deployments have occurred in Kosovo (1999-today), Afghanistan (2002-2014) and Mali (since 2015), and some 30 more missions (Bundeswehr 2017). Many of the soldiers sent abroad served for six months; some of them returned to the field for one or more times; some of them joined private security, also out of area, after their service in the Bundeswehr. The majority returned to their units or changed into private occupations. One starting point of the discourse has been the rising death toll and many casualties during the Afghan intervention after 2002, while the topic of veterans from the Kosovo mission was only current among experts and insurance managers. Even today, the topic does not rank highly in public perception. And since after Afghanistan, German participation in out of area operations has become more normal, the rising numbers of veterans do not disturb the public. Given these facts, the first results of research and scholarly investigations allow the following statement: German veterans are a new social group without far-reaching narratives from the past and only little interfaces with older military traditions (Weber 2017). The group is “new” insofar, as its characteristics had never existed in this particular constellation before. We know about this group from various sources: research is being conducted mainly inside the military field, and only recently (Seiffert 2012, Seiffert and Hess 2014); the questions of gender-

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relations among veterans are becoming the more important as the number of female soldiers in the Bundeswehr is rising. A critical account of the past generations of veterans is given by Voß (2015) and Wilke (2015). The aspect of former military traditions, not explicitly focused on veterans, is resurfacing recently because of the neo-Nazi incidents at the Bundeswehr in 2017 (cf. Epkenhans 2012); the reputed historian Sönke Neitzel has a differentiated, if positive, view on the Wehrmacht-tradition (Neitzel 2017); the controversies on “being a soldier” do not easily let go the accounts to the Nazi-past (cf. the serious peace-movement journal “Wissenschaft und Frieden” 4/2014). In many controversies, the German past and contemporary attributions of warfare to global capitalism are connected. The social environment of returning veterans has been investigated by some experts (e.g., Näser-Lather 2011, Baumgärtner and Schultheiss, see Chapter 3 in this book). There are no “veteran studies” as a sub-discipline in German higher education, neither in political science nor in military studies, but a good and comprehensive overview could be gained at the conference that has been the basis for this book. My own studies (Daxner 2014a, Daxner 2014b, Daxner 2016) have been complemented by the summary in (Daxner and Mann 2016) and a recent update in (Daxner 2017). We can learn quite a lot from other sources that are not based on research, but on individual and collective memories, or stem from usage by popular media or education programs. An important source is the selfperception of veterans through the eyes of their lobbies and organisations. An important basis for distilling insights is the perception of soldiers and veterans in the Homeland Discourse. And finally, we can reason quite a few facts from other fields that are loosely connected with the veteran issue, such as military psychology and medical policies (e.g., PTSD, cf. Tim Kucharzewski in Chapter 1 in this book), social integration and deviation of veterans and their environment, and not least the changes in the narratives of national peace and conflict policies. We know something about German veterans, but by far not enough to give an objective account or overview on the situation in Germany. What we don’t know, will appear in the sections to follow. Before I go into details of particular areas of interest, I shall summarise a few hypotheses that allow a certain localisation of my topic: -

Veterans demand a certain sovereignty of interpretation about the German involvement in interventions and the military engagement of the Bundeswehr. This is mainly an externalisation of their experience and subjective perceptions of their history in deployment.

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-

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Their quest for gaining a relevant vote to be heard is being intensified through their lobbies and organisations. Experience is used as a validation of their authority; their “practice” of combat is stronger than the political practice of sending troops into military operations. This reflects also a rift between the activists and the commands at home. Veterans tend to define their role in deployment as either combatexperience or mission-experience (“contact” with an “enemy” versus being stationed simply out of area, e.g. as a cook in the basic camp). Veterans expect gratitude from their fatherland and/or professional recognition as (good) soldiers. Veterans take sides ex post rather than on site, either supporting the aims and politics of the German engagement in an intervention or criticising it. Veterans re-mythicise the profession of soldier. This is important insofar as it does not yet say, whether the myth is only applied to national, i.e. official, armies or also to the virtues and skills of private security.

This incomplete list gives an impression of how we tend to investigate the field; some of the aspects are less relevant to other national veteran sceneries. One that is common to most of them, will be given a special account later: the body of both the soldier and the veteran. For a research tableau on veterans, I have developed an overview on approaches towards particular dimensions of the veteran field of research: Rationale for the scientific interest “Field” Veterans as community of experience and destiny Social policy

Social structure or organisation (actors, topics and relations in the field) Bundeswehr, organisations, lobbies, clubs, reserve units Health insurance, social support, family

Dimensions of perception and observation Quantities, degree of organisation Numbers/costs, stability or changes in the social field

Relevance for reference groups and for the veterans themselves Influence, perceptibility, legitimacy Institutional burdens, perceptibility, precarious existences

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Stability of families and social environment, integration/ disintegration Sovereignty of interpretation on out of area deployments of the Bundeswehr, intrusion into other fields of politics Communication, individual diffusion and integration or exclusion Return to the Bundeswehr-unit, private security; retreat to private life

Interaction of veterans with other social groups

Veterans belong to “us” or to “themselves”

Counselling, public discourse, secrecy (classified information, self-restrictive communication) PTSD, trauma, behavioural anomalies, normalisation

Impact on school- and higher education curricula, collective and cultural memories

Culture

More pacifism vs. more bellicism in public discourses. Body politics

Transdisciplinary research

New disciplinary structures in military studies and social science curricula

Changes in habitus and tastes. Reaction schemes by veterans and towards them Contents and priorities in the syllabus

Policy of knowledge

Psychology of health and social welfare Security

Changes in the concept of securitisation

Table: 5-1: Dimensions of veteran research

Policies by MoD, insurance policies by competing authorities Influence on peace and conflict policies through increased veteran experience Politics and aesthetic and moral norms are likely to change Sustained impact on education and cultural development; militarisation?

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Veterans represent a rift in society The mere existence of veterans demonstrates a fragile delineation between the civilian world and the military. The ideal of a civil society is that there should not be any breach between the civilian public and the armed segment represented by a national army, or, worse, by militias and non-state forces. The new approach of the German Bundeswehr after 1954 was signified by the norm of “Internal Leadership” (Innere Führung), and an intensive restructuring of tradition in the minds of “citizens in uniform” (Staatsbürger in Uniform). This has had a remarkable impact on a process of civilising an army; however, this process has not come to an end and suffered recently quite a few backlashes. A ministry of defence or a general staff could have never managed to reach the high level of civil qualities in the Bundeswehr without a general pacifist mood in the postwar public. Without any doubt, this pacifist “war never again!”-mentality is decreasing since the end of the Cold War and, more important, since we have now a generation of citizens to whom the “again” does not mean anything real. This can be also seen with many veterans, although it is unlikely that their demand for more soldiering in their discourse will fall back into Wehrmacht-traditions. It is more plausible that the new, professional soldier is becoming the leading ideal. But as a caveat: we do not know enough to test this assumption on a broad level. Veterans represent the public perception of peace and war, of military and civil society, and they shape them. All veterans are defined by their retrospective. No veteran is born as such, all of them must have been soldiers before. Military service is a rite de passage that is being ended either by death or by discharge, rarely by desertion. A former soldier becomes a veteran forever. This makes an excursion inevitable. There is a tendency of international NGOs to call their returnees from the field also “veterans”, in order to ennoble those into the status of military veterans (cf. Hanisch 2013). As late as in February 2012, this debate reached the committees of the parliament. There are a few good arguments for the social dimension of this claim, but the main difference is the encounter with dying and killing on a “regular” base as in the soldierly practice. This is one reason, why I restrict my usage of veteran terminology to the military field. Another aspect comes from the fact that nobody is born as veteran either: therefore, young veterans associations, such as in the Austrian variety of veteran organisations (Kameradschaftsbund) do not make sense in a factual, but only in an ideological context (ÖKB n.d.).

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It is true for all veterans that the decisive formation of their habitus has begun much earlier than at the moment of discharge: The first decision for a young person, traditionally a man, is whether to follow the conscription or to become a draft resister. This varies in different countries and systems but was very clear in Germany: the strict rules of drafting and the growing number of both resisters and exceptions created a social imbalance that led, among other reasons, to a temporary suspension of conscription in 2011. The main reason was the conversion of the Bundeswehr into a professional army. It is too early to learn whether the discrimination of recruits from lower social strata has decreased since. But it is for sure that the new direction of the Bundeswehr has influenced the retrospective of new veterans since. It is unlikely that general conscription will come back, but the situation is still not beyond doubts and questions. The complexity of the situation is best deconstructed by analysing the push- and pullfactors for those who join a professional army. From the variance of motives and experiences we can learn how to understand the diversity of veterans’ habitus. For many of the new veterans, war is no longer the field of experience, because there are no or not enough memories available. War and its interpretation become an area of history lessons learned or assumed. This attitude now meets recent veterans with concrete memories of real fights, killings and injuries. This is a dangerous mixture of ingredients for a revisionist “militaristic” backlash into traditions that are obsolete. While most available studies affirm this assumption (Biehl 2012, Seiffert/Hess 2014, Näser-Lather 2011, Weber 2017), the most recent development has not been thoroughly investigated into. There a few reasons for that: -

-

-

Politics are not really interested in detail, because it is feared that too much information could disquiet the public. This leads to a segmented interest in particular aspects of the veteran question, as listed in table 5-1; The peace-movement and anti-military communities transfer their repulsion to the veterans. The theme itself has been tabooed even by serious journals. (I myself had to withdraw a reviewed article, because of the topic: it might have appalled the readers; another article caused a heavy controversy, because it did not fit into a pattern of critical peace-studies…). Simple ignorance competes with a very narrow representation in the collective memory of war and violence, this is being reproduced in the production of memories by veterans.

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One main assumption is that veterans gain their self-perception and form their military habitus from the subjectification of an objective experience. From this platform they interpret the soldierly profession. This is even truer when veterans do not return to their original unit, which would mean also a return to a professional military life in the barracks or military administration. The reality of veterans came closer to us as we studied the German engagement in military interventions, that is Afghanistan. The influence of the discourse on intervention politics was evident when the public realised that real German soldiers were fighting a war and did not only serve as development aides (Daxner and Neumann 2012, Herzog, Kobsda et al. 2012, Robotham and Roeder 2012, Daxner 2014). We found four functional differentiations for those deployed in the intervention: Development Aides, Victims, Fighters, and Perpetrators. These are ideal-typical roles with blurred interfaces against each other. Later in the process, Robert C. Mann and I added a fifth category that should become rather important: Chroniclers (Daxner and Mann 2016). We transferred those role-models to the veterans’ self-perception and their interpretation of experiences and status. As I said earlier, the broader public does not really perceive the veterans as a relevant social group, though awareness has been rising with every fatal incident and with the spreading of PTSD and other effects from fighting a real war. Communication between the veterans and the public increasingly occurs through the growing numbers of memoirs and selfpresentations by the veterans—there is a genre in the making that is clearly different from the previous one, representing the Second World War veterans. Here, comparison is absolutely necessary, in order to learn about the German “Sonderweg” and the commonalities among all veterans. For veterans it is important to understand that primarily the reflection of their experience as soldiers is the background of their perception, and of the perception by the public. The change into the status of veteran comes later, for both. And for both sides, there are a few questions about being soldiers out of area that are common: Why did you go there? Did the experience change your motivation to fight there? Has your perception of the policies that brought you there changed over time; have you become more critical about legitimacy and effectiveness of the mission? And lastly: how are the answers connected with my/our status as veteran(s)? These questions lie all on the interface between subjective experience and the reflection of the objective, i.e. political and cultural, frames of the deployment of soldiers and the legitimacy of the intervention. Thus, the discourse becomes political. And it is mirrored in the public discourse on out of area engagement of the Bundeswehr; this brings immediately other

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questions and answers, like the very popular one: has Germany agreed to go to Afghanistan only out of solidarity with United States, as a consequence from 9/11, or are there at least some genuine German interests? The discourse is much broader and more differentiated than the veterans’ part in it, but both regarding the Homeland Discourse and the creation of a collective memory by the new genre show that there are eminent political answers to the fundamental ethical and political questions in the subtexts, while on the surface veterans tend to celebrate a retrospective on their time as soldiers, i.e. as fighters, or perhaps, as victims of the circumstances, or even as perpetrators, and only rather seldom as development aides, which was their overwhelming perception in the early years of the Afghanistan intervention. The peacekeeping and peace-building discourses were strong at the beginning of the Kosovo intervention, but do not play a prominent role in the veterans’ memoirs. More important are dichotomous motives such as “serving my country/fatherland” versus “earning good money”; or “escaping a bad situation at home” versus the simple “joy of fighting”. Of course, these motives must be extracted carefully from texts and other utterings by veterans and their associations, they are very seldom on the surface of communication. Subtext analysis is needed.

Veterans and the Homeland Discourse Deployed troops and veterans are the protagonists of a collective memory of certain national policies on conflicts, interventions and engagement out of area. They have part in the formation of discourses on war and peace, even if their interpretation is controversial and contested. They belong to what we call Homeland Discourse. However, veterans are widely “invisible”, which is reflected in a well-chosen title of an anthology by (Bohnert and Schreiber 2016). Veterans play an important role in that discourse which combines quite a few other discourses, such as on war and peace, on national and ethnic rifts between “us” and the “other”, and between security and freedom. The Homeland Discourse comprises “all discursive practices and strategies that deal with legitimacy, recognition and legitimacy of policies and troop engagement out of area” (Daxner 2012, 29). The key issue is that the engagement is on foreign territory; and it does not need to be an exclusively military intervention. If the Bundeswehr acted in Germany, would it produce veterans? Our theory of Homeland Discourse is a contribution for allowing an analysis of the new role of Germany in the global architecture of security and its new role as an important political and military player, other than in the past, when it

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was reduced to being an economic power and paymaster only. This new role is indirectly though rarely explicitly referred at in most of the veterans’ reports as well as in analyses of the German role in military interventions. Inevitably, German past and present, the tradition of military and resistance, and the images of “here” and “there” enter the discourse— as does the concept of Homeland. We had difficulties to translate the term “Heimat”, which is as genuine German as “Sonderweg”. Fatherland or Motherland would be as inappropriate as Homeland, but I chose this term because of its popularity especially after 9/11 in the context of “Homeland Security”. It would be better to stick to German “Heimat”. The term has undergone many revivals, much critique and quite many re-interpretations in literature, theory, and in all public discourses; in any case, it draws attention and creates awareness. Veterans have their share in a new facet of this Homeland Discourse. The best example is the new genre of veteran literature.

Veteran memoirs: creating collective memory When a veteran realises that his or her status is no longer that of an active soldier, he or she has a few options to cope with the new situation: -

It is normal to return from the field. Life goes on, the sooner the better. It is not normal how I have returned: I have changed mentally and physically. My experiences need to be communicated to my family and to my immediate environment; or to a broader, undefined public. My opinion about the military mission and/or the collective fate of German troops should be generalised and communicated to a particular audience inside or outside the Bundeswehr.

These are four frequent options that are often combined in returnees’ literary production. What we find in these texts are very clear attributions to one of the five classes of veterans. Most books claim authenticity and authority. They want to externalise the subjective experiences and impressions by the author and are in search of an objective frame. There is a clear intention to explain things to oneself and a desire to share experience and opinions in order to be not alone. Very often trauma plays the role of catalyst. A rare exception within the genre is the account to German deployment by a former commander in the Kosovo and Afghanistan missions: Dietger

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Lather analyses the nature of such mission and directs his analysis to a broader public, including veterans, because people should know, before they start being opinionated (Lather 2015). This book is also a bridge to the highly acclaimed blog “Augen Geradeaus!” (2017) (The blog translates as “straight forward!”), which is a non-partisan communication forum; and Lather makes it easier to understand first comprehensive histories of German engagement out of area, such as Philipp Münch’s big scholarly narration on the Bundeswehr in Afghanistan (Münch 2015). Most of the memoirs did not reach a publisher of the best category, but some of the texts find wide distribution, in particular among veteran associations and the families of returnees. The new genre is competing with fiction that takes on the same topic, but on a different level. The difference is that fiction can speak out what in the veterans’ memoirs is often hidden or presented in disguise. The most striking examples lie in the field of body and sexuality on the one side, in coming to terms with traumatic experiences from combat and the vicinity to dying and killing on the other side. Instead of giving examples from books written in German I shall analyse these two aspects in the memoirs.

The body and the notion of sex: the challenge by the dead hero War and violence are areas in which the body plays a dominant role: the thin line between life and death has always been a preferred topic in recollections of the survival of oneself or the death of others. Veterans are survivors. This is as trivial as it is true. To survive competes with becoming a hero, meaning a dead hero. This is also a truism, however a complex one. Military tradition needs heroes who have sacrificed their lives for their fatherland (and only therefore for their families and their private happiness). Their sacrifice is often used to make sense in events and fights that normally would not be considered very meaningful. The dead body has become ethereal and is now beyond the reality of nasty and dirty fights; sometimes, it becomes saintly. The hero embodies the national or ideological beliefs that are so difficult to implant to the living. This has nothing to do with the German particularity; it is an element of all veteran discourses. But the German problem is that there is not an easy access to the heroes of the past, because they would belong to the taboo zone of illicit tradition. Some veterans try to shift this aspect from heroism to the soldierly virtues that are valid beyond all reasons or purposes of a concrete war. This is sort of heroism in the super-structure of memories. The notion of heroism is penetrating all debates on veteran monuments, on medals

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and distinctions, and on the public discourse, with the returnee as hero. But this is in sharp contrast to the recent notion of a post-heroic age (Münkler 2007, Münkler 2014). Münkler has very early pointed out that heroism is inseparably linked to the sacrifice of the person, i.e. of the body as well. Since the functional order of modern wars does not allow any value-based ideology of sacrifice, heroism seems to be outdated. I think that it comes back through the backdoor: veterans link their strong feeling of being victims to the superior level of sacrifice and re-introduce this pathetic frame. In our discussions one strange question appeared: is the dead soldier, hero or not, also a veteran? This is not only a philosophical or ideological question. If all soldiers who have been killed in war are destined to become veterans, there will be an ever-growing army of transcendent personae, not unlike martyrs, who become part of a cultural element that is embedded in the traditions and rituals of the lifeworld. In many popular beliefs of eternal life, the armies of the deceased form a strong imaginative element. This is not a far-fetched consideration, though. Germany has quite a few religious and state holidays in November of every year: All Saints, The Sunday in Commemoration of the Dead (Totensonntag), The Penance day, and, in our context, Remembrance Day (Poppy Day in England). Since 1922, every year the Remembrance Day is celebrated, organised and framed by an association dedicated to the care of war graves. The Nazis made it a “Hero Remembrance Day” in 1934, organised by the Nazi-party and the Wehrmacht. After 1950, the Federal Republic reintroduced the original format and turned the day more and more into a general commemoration event. “The Association for the care of war graves” is still active and dedicated to questions of peace, reconciliation and human rights (Volkstrauertag n.d). In a remarkable speech, a commander of the Bundeswehr delivered a local Remembrance Day address in 2005 (Lather 2005). He centred his arguments on the mission of the military to keep and build peace; only if necessary by force, but then fighting is not an aim and certainly no purpose. This was exactly the opposite of the tradition of heroic rhetoric in the past, and clearly showed how much the German post-war culture has changed. Another aspect was his account of the British traditions in celebrating Remembrance Day: An unbroken veteran tradition does not need more than the unquestioned ritual in order to solidify its meaning for the people. At least, on the surface. In a metaphoric shift, the hero whom we mourn is no longer a demigod of warring and violence, but also one of peace-making. Of course, not many officers of the Bundeswehr utter this opinion publicly, even today, when

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the public has become much more critical of German engagement out of area. The other level is fleshlier. War, solitude, fear and the vicinity of death are on the opposite side of taking pleasure in one’s body and enjoying sex. Many very personal and private aspects come to mind only under the circumstances of total alienation from the relationship at home and any kind of intimacy. Often, soldiers realise that they had not been “aware” of their body before they encountered the real threats to their lives. While this topic is common to English, French and American literatures and veteran discourses, it is buried under many repressions and deferments in German veteran accounts. Since no backward account to the old Wehrmacht literature is permitted, a new tradition has to be invented also in this field. The first relevant text in this context is Dirk Kurbjuweit’s “Bride of War” (Kurbjuweit 2011), where all these aspects are combined. The model of high class literature in this field is Paolo Giordano’s “Human Body” (Giordano 2014): this book could be the leading guide for the new genre. Most of the hundreds of new German texts are less insightful and try to translate a personal experience into an objective direction. Literary criticism and critical discourse theory can find many interesting aspects of the growing veteran culture in Germany (cf. Daxner 2017, 72f.). In this text, I shall draw a line between one special aspect of veteran literature (comradeship) and the new interest in organising the most recent social group in Germany.

Comradeship and lobbies for recognition Comrade: This term has a very special power on all veteran’s and active soldier’s discourses; being a good comrade is sometimes more than having a loving or friendly or sexual relationship, or simply being a buddy. Of course, it is neither a German property nor exceptional in veteran’s discourses. But there is one German particularity: without being embedded in the German tradition of comradeship, the new generation of German soldiers’ experience for (their) first time the attraction by becoming comrades, brothers in arms. The new culture that comes with the emerging new social group of veterans is still fluid. We can clearly distinguish between “real” companionship, rooted in reliable and responsible cooperation on duty, and “symbolic” comradeship that accounts very much to the idealised and pathetic traditions of brotherhood in arms from previous, heroic times. If this aspect is linked with patriotism and nationalistic components, it is likely to become dangerous; and it will fuel

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the anti-militaristic and peace-movement criticism against any privileging and honouring veterans. At this point, we should look at the veteran associations. There are two groups of such organisations: one is a kind of natural extension of service in the Bundeswehr: The Reserve Association and the Bundeswehr Alliance represent the national army and try to keep veterans and discharged officers loyally included. The other groups have emerged in the course of the out of area engagement of the Bundeswehr, such as the big Bund Deutscher EinsatzVeteranen (n.d.). Since 2010, this association plays a central role in defining and disseminating the self-image of veterans. The “Einsatz” (assignment) has been added to the name only recently, in order to make it clear that in the core of the association there are veterans returning from deployment on foreign territory. Another organisation is the Combat Veteran (also in German: Combat Veteran e.V. (n.d.)) This association is even more focused on combat experience; its organisation has clear affinities to some associations in the United States, such as the Combat Motorcycle Veterans. A rather bizarre multinational association are the Recondos (n.d.), a “Military Motorcycle Club” since 2007. Much of the inner life of all these associations can be read in Eva Baumgärtner’s thesis of 2017. All of these associations seek recognition by the people to whom they have served; they try to keep alive the social relations among each other as to preserve the structural qualities of a social group of 1st order, i.e. sharing the same experience and a comparable background. For many veterans, membership also means a compensation for flawed or lost private relationship, and for a few it is a way to reheat their desire to return to missions out of area for multiple reasons.

Conclusions Germany does not have a distinct veteran administration, like the VA in the United States, nor a ministry or other state-ruled management. Many of the diverse functional agenda is taken over by the Ministry of Defence and the Bundeswehr itself. Some areas, such as social and health insurance, post-deployment health care etc. are not yet unified. There is also no consistent advertisement by the armed forces, how the public is expected to meet veterans and their problems with dignity and gratitude. On the other hand, the peace-movement and other critics of the military have too little knowledge and empathy as to fairly deal with the veterans as persons, which is different from criticising the system. There is also little transparency on the political and military side regarding the future

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strategies to involve veterans in diverse issues, such as education, advertising service in the army and playing a role to transmit and criticise the operations and missions they had a part in. In other words: while the “Sonderweg” is slowly disappearing, there is no sustainable ground for building new traditions and habitus, appropriate to democratic parliamentary army with their well embedded veterans.

Bibliography Augen Geradeaus!. 2017. “Home.” Accessed December 12, 2017. http://augengeradeaus.net/. Baumgärtner, Eva. 2017. Die deutsche Politik und ihre VeteranInnen. M.A., Free University. Bohnert, Marcel, and Björn Schreiber, eds. 2016. Die unsichtbaren Veteranen. Berlin: Miles. Bundeswehr. 2017. “Aktuelle Einsätze der Bundeswehr.” Last modified December 8, 2017. http://www.einsatz.bundeswehr.de/portal/a/einsatzbw/start/aktuelle_ein saetze/!ut/p/z1/hY7BCsIwEES_xYPX7NpSrd6iFVEKClVsc5FUY6rE pKSx9fONeBIU97Yzj-EBgxyY5u1Fcncxmiv_F2x4mMbpNg3GQZB sdxSX8wjX2SwJFziC_T-A-Rp_HEXITgIKvzH6ubEYQAYM2JW3_ EFqY50SjvDjyxCKiuuTEhtzpO9gBUwqU77VqS7DWAKz4iyssORuf Vw5VzeTPvax6zoijZFKEG_xha9M4yD_xOpb3mEYqTalvSfDe4IF/d z/d5/L2dBISEvZ0FBIS9nQSEh/#Z7_B8LTL2922DTUA0IE50OSCD 3GG1. Combat Veteranen e.V. n.d. “Startseite.” Accessed December 11, 2017. https://www.combat-veteran.com. Daxner, Michael. 2014a. “Gefallene und Veteranen—die Wiederkehr.” In Deutschland in Afghanistan., edited by Michael Daxner, 249-259. Oldenburg: BIS. —. 2014b. “Veteranen.” In Wissenschaft und Frieden 32, no. 4: 24-26. —. 2016. “Einsatzrückkehrer und Veteranen.” In Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. —. 2017. “Veteranen—nicht mehr lange ein deutscher Sonderweg?” In Vorgänge 56, no. 2: 65-78. Daxner, Michael and Robert Clifford Mann. 2016. “Veteranen—eine neue soziale Gruppe.” In Österreichische Militärische Zeitschrift 54, no. 5: 624-633. Daxner, Michael and Hannah Neumann, eds. 2012. Heimatdiskurs. Wie die Auslandseinsätze der Bundeswehr Deutschland verändern. Edition Politik. Bielefeld: transcript.

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Epkenhans, Michael. 2012. “Das Ende der Geschichte? Der Wandel deutscher Politik und Gesellschaft im Hinblick auf die Anwendung militärischer Gewalt.” In Auftrag Auslandseinsatz. Neueste Militärgeschichte an der Schnittstelle von Geschichtswissenschaft, Politik, Öffentlichkeit und Streitkräften, edited by Bernhard Chiari, 5562. Im Auftrag des Militärgeschichtlichen Forschungsamtes. Freiburg: Rombach. Giordano, Paolo. 2014. The Human Body. New York: Viking. Hanisch, Anja. 2013. “Globale Einsatzerfahrung als Ressource.” In ZIF in Mission. http://www.zif-berlin.org/fileadmin/uploads/analyse/dokumente/veroef fentlichungen/ZIF_In_Mission_Globale_Einsatzerfahrung.pdf. Herzog, Laura Mae, Christian Kobsda, Hannah Neumann, and Anna Oehlaf. 2012. “Von friedlichen Aufbauhelfern und professionellen Kämpfern—Die Darstellung der deutschen SoldatInnen im Heimatdiskurs.” In Heimatdiskurs. Wie die Auslandseinsätze der Bundeswehr Deutschland verändern, edited by Michael Daxner and Hannah Neumann, 137-164. Bielefeld: transcript. Kurbjuweit, Dirk. 2011. Kriegsbraut. Berlin: Rowohlt. Lather, Dietger. 2015. Für Deutschland in den Krieg. Marburg: Tectum. Münch, Philipp. 2015. Die Bundeswehr in Afghanistan. Freiburg: Rombach. Münkler, Herfried. 2007. “Heroische und postheroische Gesellschaften.” In Merkur 61, no. 8/9: 742-752. —. 2014. “Helden, Sieger, Ordnungsstifter.” In Internationale Politik 69, no. 3: 118-127. Näser-Lather, Marion. 2011. Bundeswehrfamilien. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Neitzel, Sönke. 2017. “Entfernung von der Truppe.” Frankfurter Allgemeine, August 27, 2017. http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/warum-ursula-von-derleyen-die-bundeswehr-nicht-verstanden-hat-15167723.html. ÖKB [Österreichischer Kameradschaftsbund (Austrian Comradship Association)]. n.d. “Jugend.” Accessed December 12, 2017. http://www.okb.at/bv/aktuelles/jugend.html. Recondo. n.d. “Home.”, Accessed December 12, 2017. http://www.recondo-vets.de. Robotham, Chirstopher and Sascha Roeder. 2012. “Die Bundeswehr in Afghanistan—Analysen an den Grenzen des Heimatdiskurses.” In Heimatdiskurs. Wie die Auslandseinsätze der Bundeswehr Deutschland verändern, edited by Michael Daxner and Hannah Neumann, 201-242. Bielefeld: transcript.

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Seiffert, Anja. 2012. “Generation Einsatz—Einsatzrealitäten, Selbstverständnis und Organisation.” In Der Einsatz der Bundeswehr in Afghanistan. Sozial- und politikwissenschaftliche Perspektiven, edited by Anja Seiffert, Phil Langer, and Carsten Pietsch, 79-100. Wiesbaden: VS. Seiffert, Anja and Julius Hess. 2014. Afghanistanrückkehrer. Potsdam: ZMSbw. Veteranenverband. n.d. “Home.” Accessed December 12, 2017. www.veteranenverband.de. Volkstrauertag. n.d. “Volkstrauertag.” Accessed December 8, 2017. http://www.volkstrauertag.de/informationen/geschichte.html. Voß, Klaas. 2015. “Die Reintegration von Veteranen als Gesellschaftsgeschichte.” In Mittelweg 36 24, no. 5:3-31. Weber, Christian. 2017. Veteranenpolitik in Deutschland, Hamburg: HSU. Wilke, Karsten. 2015. “Renten für SS-Veteranen.” In Mittelweg 36 24, no. 5:59-71.

PART III: FRAMING AND CONCEPTUALISATION

CHAPTER SIX IMPEDED HEROES: ON THE (SELF-)PERCEPTION OF GERMAN VETERANS MARION NÄSER-LATHER

Introduction The last minutes of the Hollywood blockbuster “American Sniper” (Warner Bros. Entertainment 2015) show documentary footage of the funeral procession of Iraq-veteran and sniper Chris Kyle, a historical character who has been killed by another, mentally unstable, Iraq deployment returnee. Thousands of people line the streets with American flags showing patriotic support for this veteran. Although the manifold consequences of war are critically addressed in this film as well as in other movies, overall veterans are perceived by many Americans as heroes (President Obama in his Weekly Address on Memorial Day mentions “Our fallen heroes”; White House 2012; also see Nulton 2015). The same applies to Great Britain, where veterans of the Second World War are seen as saviours of the nation (e.g. the Guardian 2011) and also contemporary deployment returnees are recognised and supported (see for example the organisation “helpforheroes”). The U.S. and British Armed Forces even use the term hero for their soldiers themselves (U.S. Army 2017; British Army 2017). Discourses of military heroism also exist in other countries, as the contribution of Michael Galbas in this volume shows: the experiences of Russian soldiers in Afghanistan are glorified among the members of veterans’ organisations within narratives of heroism. Michael Daxner describes the discursive connection between soldier, warrior and hero as a longstanding motive of nationalism, patriotism and the legitimisation of hegemonic politics (Daxner 2012, 42). In this paper, I want to explore whether the concept of heroism is applied to soldiers of the German

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Armed Forces—the Bundeswehr—by the public, the institution and the soldiers themselves. My empirical material consists of newspaper articles published between 2011 and 2017, books written by Bundeswehr veterans, documents of the Bundeswehr, forum discussions on bundeswehrforum.de (a forum used by soldiers and people who are interested in the Bundeswehr, 2011-2015), Youtube-Videos and problem centred interviews (see Witzel 2000) with soldiers of the Bundeswehr conducted in 2017.1 I have analysed said data using discourse analysis (following Jaeger 2009).

Historical background: military heroism as a taboo in post-WWII-Germany As Ralf von den Hoff et al. (2015) state, the hero as a cultural construct means a phenomenon of external and self-ascription which, because of its culture-, group-, and time-specific manifestations, evades essentialist definitions. Therefore, heroization can be explained through the interactions of norms and attitudes of society and the properties of “heroes” who as such also mirror societal needs. So, to explore the connection of heroism and deployment returnees of the Bundeswehr, the first step of my investigation will be a discussion of the historical developments which prefigurate societal discourses on military heroism in Germany. Whereas soldiers of the Bundeswehr on missions have been perceived in the past above all as armed development workers by the German public, the involvement in the so-called War on Terror, the growing importance of combat and the connected realignment of the Bundeswehr have led to a revival of the image of the soldier as a warrior (see Kümmel 2004, Scholz 2012, 212). A turning point in this context has been the bombardment of tanker trucks near Kunduz (Afghanistan) ordered by Colonel Klein in 2009, who thought the drivers of the tankers had attempted a terrorist attack, and who accepted many civilian casualties which were bound to result from the bombings. Also, the archaic fighter is seen as necessary for the Bundeswehr by Major General Hans-Otto-Budde (cited after Winkel 2004). Is this discourse connected with a reification of the concept of military heroism? This would mean a shift of discourses because the notion of the 1

The following interviews have been conducted: Officer Klaus Behrend, staff officer Melanie Fiedes, staff officer Ernst Fröhlich, general Walter Gotthelf, staff officer Joachim Herzog, staff officer Nico Rassmann, staff officer Maximilian Schwirig and officer Ralf Wenger. All names have been changed.

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soldier as a potential hero has been problematised after the Second World War, whereas in the 19th and the early 20th century, war heroes have been part of a nationalist discourse (van den Hoff et al. 2013). Before the First World War, according to Karin Hausen (2013, 296) the ideal of soldierly masculinity formed the foundation of the patriarchal order of society. Also, during the Weimar Republic, after the traumatic experience of losing the First World War, a need for heroic orientation manifested itself in the worship of fallen soldiers (see for example Mosse 1980). In the Federal Republic of Germany, however, the experience of the two World Wars has led to a radical discursive rejection of the mystification of military successes, as Armin Wagner and Heiko Biehl (2013, 25) explain. Already in 1956, historian Herrmann Heimpel named grief and shame as the two hegemonic emotions regarding the German memory culture of the Second World War, connected to perceived failure. This contrasts with previous times when pride in soldier’s bravery prevailed. German soldiers appeared according to Heimpel at best as victims alongside the other victims of the war such as the millions murdered during the Holocaust; to die for the homeland was not sweet anymore but had become bitter against the background of the injustice of the Second World War. War has been de-romanticised by the atrocities committed and the inhuman goals of the Nazi regime (Heimpel 1956). The allied re-education program had framed militarism and the veneration of heroes as negative and caused, together with the trauma of defeat, an according change of attitude within a large part of the population (Tent 1982). Especially after the courageous exhibition of Hannes Heer about the Wehrmacht (1995-1999), the armed forces of the Third Reich, it became apparent to the public that not only the SS and the special forces had committed war crimes, but also “ordinary” soldiers of the Wehrmacht (see Heer 2014). Therefore, although the attitudes of the German population towards the Bundeswehr itself are mostly positive, according to a survey by Biehl et al. (2015) the majority rejects foreign deployments of German soldiers. The lethal application of violence by German soldiers abroad is being discussed controversially, as readers’ comments to newspaper articles show (see for example Greven 20142). Also, the bombing of the tankers by Colonel Klein at Kunduz has been described by Herzog et al. as “loss of innocence” (Herzog et al. 2012, 138). Thus, soldiers are potentially stepping outside the hegemonic normative order while going on missions. 2

Although it has to be taken into account that the newspaper in question, the ZEIT, is liberal-left oriented; its readers are mostly members of the educated middle classes.

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However, as Ralf von den Hoff et al. (2013, 9f.) state, apart from the exceptionality of their deeds, their potential transgressiveness is characteristic for heroes who thus move between irritation and stabilisation of social order. Bernhard Giesen (2010, 67-69) therefore describes heroes as “liminal figures”. Inhowfar are soldiers and especially veterans who may have killed as part of their mission regarded as heroes in German society and within the Bundeswehr? The attitudes towards veterans are ambivalent: parts of the population see them as morally questionable people who are responsible themselves for the consequential damages resulting from missions (Herzog et al. 2012, 145f.), rather than brave or heroic defenders of their homeland. Bundeswehr military missions abroad have not served to defend the country; rather, they have been interventions as Daxner and Mann (2016) have remarked. Some soldiers returning from deployment do not only report a “friendly disinterest” of the population—an expression by former Federal President Horst Köhler in 2005 which has become a dictum—but they also experience hostility directed against them as well as their families (see for example, Fröhlich 2010, Mingels and Würger 2012). Some of the interview partners of my dissertation project about soldier families (Näser-Lather 2011) have had similar experiences. This leads some veterans to adopt strategies to hide their identity; for example, some deployment returnees who are maimed invent stories about how they got injured. Private Tim Focken often narrated that he had a motorcycle accident to explain his wounded arm (Würich and Scheffer 2014, 64). On the other hand, soldiers told me within informal conversations that veterans experience, support and recognition after their deployments, in particular in regions of Germany where the Bundeswehr has been stationed for a long time. They also feel respected, for example within the more rural areas of Bavaria. However, a study by Thomas Bulmahn (2012) shows that veterans are associated especially with negative, pathological features and are called “sad” and “bitter”. In addition, they are pitied and seen as psychologically crippled, as “old men” or “wannabe war heroes”. So, the discourse of veterans of being victims, helpless and with psychological deficits dominates, and there is no notion of sacrifice as heroic action. Herfried Münkler has coined the term “post heroic society”: because of demographic change in Western societies young men would become scarce resources. Also, due to the two world wars, the willingness to make sacrifices and the accumulation of honour have according to Münkler been rejected as aberrations (Münkler 2007, 749f.; 2016, 10). At the same time, a transformation of the term hero takes place, leading away from military

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connotations and to a notion of “heroes of everyday-life” which are characterised by civic courage (Bohrer and Scheel 2009). On the other hand, the positive reception of the military hero within pop culture, e.g. in computer games, movies or TV shows still persists. However, within the current societal perception of Bundeswehr veterans, there is a line of discourse of heroization that exists, often connected to national conservative argumentation patterns. Some Youtubevideos heroize veterans of the Bundeswehr, e.g. the video “Helden der Bundeswehr—Ehrenkreuz der Bundeswehr für Tapferkeit” (“Heroes of the Bundeswehr—Cross of Honour of the Bundeswehr for bravery”) by user “SchutzUndHeimat” (2013) which names the bearers of the Cross of Honour and their exceptional performances. Bravery in front of great danger and lonely battles against a “superior enemy” are stressed as heroic features. The video “Gefallene Helden—Bundeswehr ISAF Tribut” (“fallen heroes—Bundeswehr ISAF tribute”) by “InFreiheitDienen” (2012) shows, accompanied by dramatic music, photographs with the names of the killed soldiers against the backdrop of an Afghan landscape. A quote by former defence minister Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg marks the sacrifice of the soldiers as positive by framing it as humanitarian aid. A second voice addresses the fallen soldiers: “You have fought bravely for your homeland“ and states “that such a connection as this can only be experienced through battle.“3 This is a fictive speech of a Wehrmacht General taken from the US-show “Band of brothers“.4 The author of the Youtube-video thus places the “heroism“ of soldiers of the Bundeswehr within the tradition of the Wehrmacht, illustrating the need for historical continuity which can be also found in the veneration of Wehrmachtartefacts by some German soldiers. The commentaries on the video are controversial. Some users mystify the dead via the identification with mythical heroic figures. For example, “Lexifer” states: “May they rest in peace and dine at the table of the heroes”. And user “Deutscher Schwur” explains: “All of these heroes are part of a long line of ancestors of German heroes”. “Faynox Schmidt” addresses nationalist topoi when stating that soldiers “fight until their last breath for freedom, nation and homeland […] for me, soldiers are heroes. They risk their lives for us. […] HONOUR AND RECOGNITION FOR THE GERMAN SOLDIER!”. On the other hand, there are also critical comments. The statement of “Ingo

3 4

All quotes have been translated from German to English by the author. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB2zujCJYYY.

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Bernhard” is part of the line of discourse of historically motivated critique: “A German soldier has no business abroad!” The same ambivalence and wide range of opinions about the potential hero-status of deployment returnees is shown by the answers to a thread on the online-advisor platform gutefrage.net with the topic “are soldiers murderers or heroes?” (gutefrage.net 2015). “Fussballqueen97” describes soldiers as “heroes in a certain way” who deserve respect, and laments the insufficient recognition of their deeds. Furthermore, she mentions the aspect of sacrifice for “our country”, configuring the soldier-hero as fighter for the national community. In contrast, “antontirol1” refers to the absence of a heroic deed in the case of soldiers: “Heroism comes from performance, which has to be earned. Therefore, a soldier is nowhere near a hero, especially not when he kills”. Heroism is only attributed by “antontirol1” to soldiers when their actions resemble that of civil heroes: “when it comes to saving lives while risking one’s own life, one can speak of a hero”. The protection of life is, thus, the constitutive element of the definition of the term hero by “antontirol1”, whereas “onur90” links the moral assessment of killing to situational factors, in a responsible-ethical approach: whereas killing might be reprehensible, soldiers “murder bad people and thereby become heroes”. Last but not least, “Entdeckung” formulates: “soldiers are human beings…and all human beings have the ability to do good and bad alike.” Most of the answers to the thread plead for a differentiated perspective. Regarding the medial construction of Bundeswehr veterans in Germany, Herzog et al. identify in the journal of the Bundeswehr, Y, and the regional newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung the following representations of veterans. These are actor, peaceful development worker, fighter, and victim. However, in this context death and being wounded are not seen as merits, but as risk of the profession (Herzog et al. 2012, 145f.). Nonfictional media formats such as news or documentaries mostly show the picture of the veteran as victim, focusing on the deficits of veterans and on the situation at so-called “hotspots” as Kunduz in northern Afghanistan, where soldiers were constantly under attack by insurgents. The media interpret the connection between the term “hero” and soldiers of the Bundeswehr in very different ways. The radio channel Deutschlandfunk puts the concept of heroism into question with the feature “Der Oberst betet. Die neuen Helden der Bundeswehr” (“The Colonel prays. The new heroes of the Bundeswehr“, feature by Marc Thörner 2011). The program addresses the incompetence and wrong decisions during the Afghanistan mission. Soldiers are depicted as helpless and guileless marionettes who have been sent by politicians to a country

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whose ethnicities and conflicts they don’t understand. The heroization of the staff-officer responsible for the bombing of the tankers near Kunduz, Colonel Klein (see above), which is taking place in parts of the forces, is severely criticised. Christian Fröhlich (2010) uses the term “hero” with respect to veterans in the newspaper-article “Helden ohne Status” (heroes without status) published in the Thüringer Allgemeine in a half ironic way. Only the essay of writer Thea Dorn (2014) in the journal DIE ZEIT uses the term affirmatively: “The soldier’s profession is deadly serious. Whoever decides to serve inside the Bundeswehr decides consciously to defend our values with his life. Only our politicians are not recognising this.” So, within German society a differentiated discursivation of the connection of the concepts of soldier and hero takes places. How does this look like within the military?

The application of the term “hero” and its reflection by soldiers of the Bundeswehr Similar as in civil society, soldiers apply the term hero ironically and respectively mockingly to people who have not acted heroically. Soldier5 “Norman94” states on bundeswehrforum.de (2013): “The hero fainted within the operations centre”. In some statements the ironizing implicates a reification of the hero concept. For example, when Lieutenant Colonel Andreas Timmermann-Levanas (2010: 38) writes in his mission-memoirs about a young officer who boasted to have experienced eight insurgent attacks—while being in the operations central: “wow, what a hero”. With the negative use of the word hero this concept is brought into the discursive space and could be applied to those soldiers who have experienced the attacks directly. Some soldiers explicitly reject the heroization of their profession. First sergeant Daniel Seibert who has been appointed the Cross of Honour of the Bundeswehr for his bravery within combat, thinks it is positive that there is no “hero culture” within the Bundeswehr. The soldiers’ families are, according to him, the true heroes (Von Alten 2016, 15). Heroism for Seibert is defined as the bearing of hardship and not through military deeds. Seibert’s statement—as well as others—seem to repeat discourse threads within the civil discourse about military heroes. 5

That “Norman94” really is a soldier can be concluded from some of his statements on the discussion forum. The same goes for the other cited members of this forum.

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Colonel Jared Sembritzki, also a veteran and bearer of the Cross of Honour, rejects the concept of heroism as an inappropriate mystification. He states: “The term hero is inflated. I don’t use this word.” (ibid.). One of my interviewees, commissioned officer Ralf Wenger, regards the term as being obsolete because of its connotation in the temporary German language: “Hero” sounds ridiculous in German. However, Wenger regrets this change of meaning and links it to the discourses about German history: “for my generation, all terms like ‘hero’ or ‘honour’ have been slagged off”. However, his statement suggests an affirmation of the concept of heroism and a connection of the concept to honour. In addition, some soldiers apply the term “hero” to their comrades within the Bundeswehr. Colonel Uwe Hartmann (2016, 17) considers that because of the participation of the Bundeswehr in wars and missions the soldier as a hero inevitably appears as a phenomenon. Without any doubt soldiers have acted heroically in the missions abroad.

My interview partner General Walter Gotthelf sees concrete examples of heroic actions of German soldiers in the combat mission in Afghanistan. […] Also, Lieutenant General Kneipp, who was wounded and nevertheless did not leave his command, poses an accordant example. But the special forces in Bosnia as well: when they were arresting a war criminal, he launched a hand grenade, and one of the soldiers of the Bundeswehr threw himself upon it as protection. Maybe those, too, who had to suffer death by suicide attackers or came home wounded badly.

The performance of one’s duty despite physical impairment, bearing pain and self-sacrifice are thus components of the hero-definition of General Gotthelf. Another interviewed soldier, staff officer Joachim Herzog, talks about examples of heroic acts as the willingness to help others while accepting one’s own exposure to danger, for example saving comrades and civilians from life threatening situations during humanitarian aid missions or saving them from aggressors who violate human rights and oppress people. Those statements ascribe to veterans of the Bundeswehr characteristics which resemble classic definitions of heroism. Philip Zimbardo names as criteria for heroism acting “in the face of danger or with potential sacrifice” and for the good of one or several human beings or society as a whole (Zimbardo 2008, 428).

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Importantly the term hero is also discussed by soldiers in the context of the consequences of its use. Andreas Lison, physician within the Bundeswehr, reports from his own experiences that for veterans, being celebrated as a hero might hinder their reintegration into civil life: “For us [the veterans], everything had changed, the distance to daily life in Germany was huge. When you are in addition subject to some ‘hero-myth’ in this situation, this feeling gets downright fixed” (Würich and Scheffer 2014, 82f.). From a pedagogic perspective the use of the term hero within the Forces is reflected critically. One of my interviewees, staff officer Maximilian Schwirig mentions: “The reader notices through thorough studies that nearly all heroes have a questionable character. […] Thus, through going back in history you don’t find heroes who could serve as role models of integrity.” Schwirig worries that problematic behaviour incentives could emerge from the concept of heroism, and therefore pleads for the use of this term to be “very cautious and restrained” within the Bundeswehr, because pronouncedly lived and memorised heroism creates the urge to also act heroically. As a rule, this results in a bigger number of fallen soldiers or dead civilians, because you want to be heroic in battle and for this, you accept more dangers than necessary.

In Schwirigs statement, the ideal of heroism which leads to the will to proving oneself in battle appears to be counterproductive for the fulfilment of missions and for minimising casualties and thus, this ideal would be detrimental for to the act of professional soldiering. In addition, some soldiers consider the term hero problematic in terms of the public perception of the Bundeswehr. General Gotthelf elaborates: “The Nazis have misused the term”, and as a result “the application of this terminology to soldiers of the Bundeswehr should be avoided. It would be better to speak about honourable, brave, sacrificial soldierly acting”. Using the same argument, my interview partner staff officer Melanie Fiedes explains the handling of the term by the forces with consideration to German discourses of coping with the past: “The Bundeswehr avoid the term hero. It reminds too much of dictatorships in the past, like the one in East Germany or the Third Reich.” Similarly, staff officer Joachim Herzog utters the fear that the use of the word hero would lead to associations of nationalism and right-wing radicalism by outsiders: I think it inappropriate in the current political climate of our republic, as well as globally, to dig out the ‘hero’ and to bring new shine to it. This

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would be an initiative which you would ascribe typically to the AfD or the CSU.6 The conservatives would thereby provide an open flank for Nazi comparisons by the political left and the Antifa.7 Nothing would be gained for the Bundeswehr.

Against the background of the mentioned discourses, a public recognition of veterans of the Bundeswehr as heroes does not take place, as Colonel Uwe Hartmann elaborates: “The recognition of soldierly, especially heroic action in missions would not be compatible with the self-image of civil society” because of the participation of the Wehrmacht, the Armed Forces of the Nazi Regime, in war crimes, the concept of heroism was seen very sceptically when the Innere Führung, the leadership principles of the Bundeswehr after the Second World War, was designed. The Bundeswehr should not become a “state within the state” (Hartmann 2016, 17-19). This explanation refers to the efforts of the Bundeswehr to avoid past phenomena from the German Empire and the Weimar republic where the military had a special role as powerful societal force. In addition, the misuse of the Bundeswehr by politics should be prevented, as it had been the case with the Wehrmacht during National Socialism. These historical interrelations are also referred to within section 2/202 of the central regulations of the Bundeswehr, the Zentrale Dienstvorschrift A-2600 “Innere Führung, Selbstverständnis und Führungskultur” (Internal leadership, self-image and leadership culture, Bundesministerium der Verteidigung 2008). In section 2/203, it deduces that from these historical experiences there is a necessity for a “new beginning in the Forces”. However, referring to the current situation, Hartmann pleads for a debate about the question “inhowfar ‘heroes in uniform’ require special forms of recognition” (Hartmann 2016, 20). How does the Bundeswehr treat the concept of heroism?

The Bundeswehr and their ambivalent relationship with heroism The Bundeswehr oscillates between warding off and the reification of the concept of heroism. On one hand, the institution tries to counteract the image of the (elite) warrior connected with the notion of military heroism. 6

The AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) is a new extreme right-wing party which emerged in 2013. The CSU (Christlich-Soziale Union) is a traditional right-wing party in the province of Bavaria. 7 Antifa is an umbrella term for radical left and autonomous movements and organisations against fascism.

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In the central regulations A-2600 it is emphasised that soldiers should understand themselves as “citizens in uniform” (Bundesministerium der Verteidigung 2008). An advertisement campaign for recruitment is using the slogan “We are not looking for gods in white. We are looking for heroes in green.” (Presseportal 2016). Physicians are sometimes dubbed “gods in white” in German. So, by attributing the term “hero” to physicians in this advertisement, the heroic deed refers to saving life, an intentional unproblematic, “civic” usage of the term. On the other hand, soldierly efforts which comply with the classical definition of the military hero are honoured. In 2008, defence minister Franz Joseph Jung established the already mentioned honour cross for bravery. It highlights exceptional bravery by soldiers. The official description of the honour cross on the homepage of the Bundeswehr states: “In complex battles, a level of bravery was demanded from them which surpasses the ‘conventional level’ which every soldier swears or vows. Those exceptional performances had and have to be honoured.” (Müller 2015). In addition, within the Bundeswehr, soldiers who behaved “heroically” are admired by their peers. Colonel Hartmann (2016, 19) explains “for [young soldiers], older comrades are more often than not heroes”, and my interview-partner, officer Klaus Behrend, narrates that soldiers look up to comrades who have acted heroically. Famous “war heroes” of the past like combat pilot Manfred von Richthofen are also today venerated within the German Airforce, as staff officer Schwirig points out. Beyond this, beginnings of hero worship manifest themselves in the distinctions placed upon veterans who have been on missions as compared to those who have not. Veterans who have been on missions have a higher internal status. Missions abroad have become rites de passages in recent years. Officer Hendrik Müller mentions: the perception of superiors, especially of officers, by their subordinates is significantly influenced by the fact whether the superior has already participated in a mission, and, even more important, whether he has proven himself under the pressures associated with missions (Müller 2014, 24).

So, to master hardships successfully—a feature of the classical hero—is seen as positive distinctive characteristic. Soldiers differentiate between those returnees from missions who have never left the camp (“Drinnies”, which could be translated with “insidees”), those who also have been outside the camp (“Draussies”—“outsidees”), and soldiers who have participated in battle (“combat veterans”). Combat veterans unofficially have the highest status (cf. Seiffert 2011, 85; Seiffert 2013, 14). Colonel

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Jared Sembritzki states: “It is interesting to note that one is perceived differently by other soldiers after having been in combat.” (Von Alten 2016, 15). In addition, the tabooing of topics like danger, fear and killing between veterans who have been on missions and those who have not, which Seiffert (2011, 95) describes could have led to a mystification and heroization. Furthermore, the search for heroes and their worship inside the Bundeswehr is according to officer Klaus Behrend connected to an identity crisis of the Bundeswehr which has emerged in the context of the medial and political reappraisal of the problematic relationships to traditions of the Wehrmacht, and of extreme right-wing tendencies and sexist rituals. This crisis has led to a discussion about values in the Bundeswehr. The measures of Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen to remove all symbols with references to the Wehrmacht (e.g. paintings which show soldiers of the Wehrmacht) from barracks and offices are perceived inside the Forces as “purge” and have led to many soldiers internally distancing themselves from the leadership at the ministry level, as soldiers of the paratroopers told me at a get-together in July 2017. In this context, soldiers who position themselves against the leadership of the Forces are revered, like retired General Christian Trull, whose farewell speech is shared many times on Facebook these days, as officer Behrend states. For example, Trull is venerated in the YouTube video “German Military—Kriegerethos—General Trull” by “German Military Power”. General Trull is seen by the soldiers as a champion of soldierly values—heroes are, according to von den Hoff et al. (2015), among other things characterised by non-conformism and passive or active resistance. Also wounded veterans are seen by other soldiers as heroes. In contrast to the views of Jan Philipp Reemtsma (2009) who states that one can become a hero only through deeds and not through suffering, Dietmar Voss (2011) points out that especially through the figure of the “broken hero” tensions between the longing for heroes, the disillusionment of heroism and the damnation of heroes are negotiated. Such tensions emerge according to van den Hoff et al. (2015) especially if traditional visions of heroism become fragile—as it is the case with the ambivalences of the German discourses about heroes. Soldier “Dani90” comments on bundeswehrforum.de (2011) a report that a badly wounded soldier has won a prize: “This comrade for me is a hero and an absolute role model! To cope so powerfully, so courageously and so optimistically with the experiences and the things he has suffered…for this I have utmost respect!”. The heroism of the wounded veteran lies in the eyes of

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“Dani90” not in the military performance, but in the bravery which manifests itself in the way of coping with being wounded. However, in compliance with post heroic discourses and mirroring “German Angst” (Bode 2006), the mentality of 100 percent security, which has become prominent in Germany in recent years concerning discourses about dangers in civil life, the Bundeswehr tries not to endanger the lives of their soldiers. Officer Jan-Philipp Birkhoff (2014, 108) mentions: “within German society, a demystification of the hero takes places which also implies a lack of acceptance of military losses.” Sociologist Ulrich Bröckling (2016, 25) sees the striving to avoid casualties as connected with turning away from the ideal of military heroism. This view is supported by the interviewed soldiers who criticise this way of thinking in the context of the fulfilment of the mission. Joachim Herzog states: Modern deployment scenarios demand from commanders above all that no own forces come to harm. Self-protection has priority, it even takes precedence over the fulfilment of the mission respectively the mandate. Soldiers change more and more into defence officials with a secure life planning and flexible working hours. […] That does not leave much space for heroes.

Similarly, Maximilian Schwirig explains: “Within the normal daily life of the Bundeswehr, and also during deployments, extensive security regulations prevent heroic acting […]. Only in battle respectively while fighting, heroic behaviour could emerge.”

The obligation to be a hero: military virtues as behavioural expectation On the other hand, in the central documents of the Bundeswehr, an obligation to military heroism seems to be inscribed. In the Soldatengesetz (Military Act), § 7 codifies the “obligation to serve the Federal Republic of Germany loyally and to defend the right and the freedom of the German people bravely.” (Bundesministerium der Justiz und für Verbraucherschutz 2017). This obligation also is part of the formal oath which every soldier has to swear.8 Loyalty and bravery are central behaviour norms for soldiers of the Bundeswehr. In § 12 of the Military Act it is stated that 8

See for example a video of the oath of German paratrooper recruits at Zweibrücken, February 22, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSwrmTHbQ04, minute 20:00-20:40.

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comradeship “obligates all soldiers to stand by [their comrades] in times of need and danger.” (Bundesministerium der Justiz und für Verbraucherschutz 2017). In addition, the Zentrale Dienstvorschrift (Central Regulation) A2600/1 refers to military virtues: section 1/106 states that soldiers should “actively stand up” “for human dignity, freedom, peace, justice, equality, solidarity and democracy as leading values of our state”. In 1/105 the core of the soldier profession is described: “Their military service implies the commitment of their own health and their own live and ultimately demands to kill in combat.” (Bundesministerium der Verteidigung 2008). The mentioned virtues and the willingness to sacrifice one’s own life for abstract values are central components of classic definitions of heroism. According to Jan Philipp Reemtsma (2009), heroes represent “virtues which claim general validity.” Philip Zimbardo names, as already cited, the criteria for a heroic act as happening “in front of a danger or a potential sacrifice” and it being done for the good of one or several human beings or society as a whole (Zimbardo 2008: 428). The appendix of the central regulation A-2600/1 mentions as “attitudes and behaviour” which should be “especially valued” among other things the “orientation not along success alone […] but also along the suffering of the persecuted and humiliated” (Bundesministerium der Verteidigung 2008). The protection of the weak by using violence is a classical topos of epics of heroism, from Robin Hood to the Magnificent Seven and Batman. Also, the behaviour and personality characteristics demanded of soldiers can be connected to heroism: Section 5/506 of the central regulation A2600/1 speaks of “honourable behaviour”. In 5/507, a “soldierly canon of values” is mentioned which demands from the soldiers, among other virtues, to be “brave, loyal and conscientious, comradely and caring […] truthful” and “just” (ibid.). Colonel Uwe Hartmann (2016, 20) draws a direct connection from bravery and courage to the components of the soldierly guiding principles and heroism: The inner leadership is no leading philosophy for the education of antiheroes. Its flagship is the guiding principle of a soldier who understands fighting and heroic action […] as part of his comprehensive responsibility.

he norm of “heroic” action is backed up by the dispositive of strength effective within the Bundeswehr. It manifests itself in the increase of physical power as a goal of training, as bellowed commands, as marching in unison, and by the use of military force. The semantic core of the soldierly, the “fighter”, is inseparably connected with the idea of strength

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(Näser-Lather 2011, 114). Strength is, at the same time, another feature of the definition of martial heroes. According to sociologist Ulrich vom Hagen (2013, 45f.) the organisational cultural norms also affect the behaviour of soldiers. The semantic connection of the virtues inscribed in the central documents of the Bundeswehr and the concept of heroism is shown by the statements of the interviewed soldiers. Melanie Fiedes believes that soldiers are always heroes because they “are willing to sacrifice their lives for others […]. Soldiers are heroes because they stand up for peace and leave their families behind, even if they could be killed on a mission.” Staff officers Ralf Wenger and Ernst Fröhlich and General Walter Gotthilf name as a characteristic of heroes as the standing by for others without consideration of danger to their own lives. Joachim Herzog defines as a hero a person who values higher virtues such as the common good, protecting the weak, faithful fulfilment of obligation, justice, the divine—more than their personal needs and who stands up for the implementation of said virtues within real life to the utmost. Personal shortcomings, like for example fear, the hero overcomes and doesn’t let them stop him.

Nico Rassmann names as necessary characteristics of heroes: “courage, ideals, the willingness to make sacrifices and integrity”.

Self-ascriptions: elite vs. equality The virtues demanded from soldiers are described in the central regulation A-2600/1 as characteristics through which soldiers stand out from the masses—in accordance with definitions of the hero that emphasise the extra-ordinary of is characteristics and deeds. Section 1/105 states: “The service within the Bundeswehr therefore makes high demands to on an individual’s personality.” Colonel Uwe Hartmann speaks of the context of the soldierly obligation to bravery in terms which “go far beyond the expectations towards citizens without uniform.” (Bundesministerium der Verteidigung 2008). The internalisation of organisational cultural behaviour expectations which can at the same time be regarded as characteristics of being a hero in some cases goes hand in hand with an elitist consciousness which is not only connected to borderline experiences but also stems, as Daxner and Mann (2016) argue, from their competences as connoisseurs of certain foreign countries as a kind of private ethnology. Officer Florian Otter (2014, 62) holds the soldierly virtues—trueness, faithfulness, bravery, sense of duty, modesty and suffering without complaining—to be in opposition to the civil societal environment, which

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according to him is characterised by egotism, consumerism and pacifism. Besides, Otter regards soldiers as “guardians of the sovereignty of the people”, thereby ascribing to them a special societal role. Similarly, officer Jan-Philipp Birkhoff (2014, 109) calls the Bundeswehr a “parallel society with its own values and norms” which he—like Otter—puts in a positive opposition to civil society: “It is defeatists, radical hedonists and arrogant self-exposers who belong to the post heroic society.” On the other hand, an external as well as an internal self-ascription as heroes on the basis of the matching of internal norms with definitions of heroism is hindered because the accordant behaviour poses an official duty for all soldiers. Therefore, those fulfilling their soldierly duty theoretically do not distinguish them from their comrades—although this might be de facto the case. In addition, according to Philip Zimbardo’s definition, heroism must take place voluntarily and not out of an obligation (Zimbardo 2008: 428). The perception that the fulfilment of soldierly duties and virtues is not a unique feature which deserves praise, is a discursive line contrary to an elitist consciousness also existing among soldiers. The Bundeswehr is, in addition to the dispositive of strength, also characterised by the dispositive of equality which implies that all soldiers have to attire themselves in uniforms, have to have the same equipment, the same rights and obligations and have to suffer the same circumstances (Näser-Lather 2011, 131f.). The dispositive of equality manifests itself when Ernst Fröhlich laments that inside the armed forces only those would be seen as heroes who have been in combat situations or who have been wounded; they would be regarded as being “better” and “more important” than the other soldiers and would be “showcased” internally. This, he thinks, is wrong: “all human beings are equal.” Also, officer Klaus Behrend utters in concordance with the concept of equality, no one would think about naming oneself a hero because of the organisational cultural requirements of not placing oneself into the foreground. The willingness to perceive oneself as being in an elevated position therefore exists in very different manners. In the description of a combat situation by Master Sergeant Daniel Seibert, the concept of equality manifests itself: “Every soldier has performed outstandingly in this battle and equally earned to receive this medal.” (Von Alten 2016, 14). Also, Master Sergeant Oliver Portzik who has been awarded the honour cross because of his brave behaviour during the so-called “Good Friday Battle” (2010, Kunduz), does not think of himself as a hero: “we were lucky” (Kormbaki 2015). Similarly, Lieutenant-Colonel Andreas TimmermannLevanas tells about a combat situation that their survival resulted from

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luck and the performance of his team, “because out there, everyone reacted appropriately.” (Timmermann-Levanas and Richter 2010, 36). In contrast, the biographical Afghanistan deployment report of Lance Sergeant Achim Wohlgethan presents itself as classical hero narration. Wohlgethan emphasises his self-efficacy and competence in many passages. For example, he hindered some armed people to enter a hotel until reinforcement arrived. In the meantime, he was beaten up by the aggressors. To deescalate the situation afterwards, he gave them cigarettes and suppressed his feelings of revenge. Wohlgethan also refers to the topos of the misunderstood hero: he describes several times that superiors—whom he portrays as being incompetent and unworldly— scolded him because of his courageous and thoughtful actions, which he endured stoically (Wohlgethan 2008). Nevertheless, many veterans do not want hero worship, but above all, recognition “for the work of every single soldier who after all, risks his life, too”, as Master Sergeant Daniel Seibert states (Von Alten 2016, 14). Similarly, physician Andreas Lison demands that the work of soldiers should be appreciated by society: “This is not about heroism, but about care.” (Würich and Scheffer 2014, 83). Many soldiers regret that society is not giving them sufficient recognition. General Gotthelf complains: “The German hedonistic society does rarely take note of such actions.” However, some soldiers lament explicitly the missing appreciation as heroes. Sergeant Major Roland Schröder states: “You have to accept this. Here, we are no heroes.” (Würich and Scheffer 2014, 70). Soldier marxxx6 remarks on bundeswehrforum.de: “And if you really want to be celebrated as a hero, you should rather try to save the HSV [a German football club] from relegation than becoming a soldier” (bundewehrforum.de 2015). Also, my interview-partner staff officer Melanie Fiedes demands the recognition of soldiers as heroes: Heroes should be visible. Heroes should be recognised, e.g. through benefits during their pension, while using railways, etc. You should be allowed to take heroes as a role model and it should be made public when someone has acted heroically. […] By living culture of memory…not only behind closed doors and by the political leaders standing up for the surviving relatives and by commemorating the dead.

Staff officer Joachim Herzog pleads for a recognition of civil as well as military heroes: “All people who have done something heroic should be recognised for it in public in an appropriate form. This also applies to soldiers.”

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Hindered heroes: discursive contradictions and their implications Whereas in civil society a huge bandwidth of statements concerning the connection of “soldiers” and “heroes” can be found, and a heroization of soldiers of the Bundeswehr exists, mostly by right-wing or conservative actors, the discursive line of a critical-distanced perception of the soldier profession and especially of the deployment of German soldiers abroad remains hegemonic. The discursive environment which contours the self-perception of soldiers, the handling of the term hero by the forces, and the striving for normalisation by the inner leadership of the Bundeswehr let the term hero appear problematic. This leads to a general attention of the forces to attempt advances concerning the societal acceptance and recognition of “heroic behaviour” of soldiers. However, attitudes of warding off are not only due to these discursive connections but also to the dispositive of equality which is effective inside the Bundeswehr. On the other hand, classical heroic virtues are inscribed into the behaviour codex of the soldiers, and the existence of heroic behaviour is assumed by some soldiers. Self-ascriptions as elitist “hero” arise out of behaviour expectations and the dispositive of strength as well as out of the experiences of the deployments and their framing—contrary to aggressions and war crimes during the two World Wars, military force can be interpreted in the context of the missions of the Bundeswehr positively as fight against oppression and terror. Based on the existence of accordant definitions and self-ascriptions, Herfried Münkler’s thesis can be refuted that with the nuclear age, the idea necessary for imaginations of heroism had become implausible: the idea “to save others by sacrificing oneself, to liberate them from great danger or to give them the opportunity to save themselves” (Münkler 2010, 313). Also, Alexa Gattinger’s (2008) vision of a modern, de-individualised and technological (world-)war which she sees as contrasting with tales of heroism, can be rebutted. The feeling of elitism resulting from internal behaviour norms on one hand and modesty, stemming from the dispositive of equality, form conflicting feeling rules which lead to an ambivalent relationship to heroizing self-ascriptions. The development of a parallel society within the Bundeswehr, which could result from experiences of marginalisation connected with the conviction of a prominent position with regard to the civil society has to

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be countered by the thematization of deployment-experiences in the society as a whole.

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neueren kulturhistorischen Forschung: Ein kritischer Bericht.” H-SozKult. Accessed August 16, 2017. www.hsozkult.de/literaturereview/id/forschungsberichte-2216. Voss, Dietmar. 2011. “Heldenkonstruktionen. Zur modernen Entwicklungstypologie des Heroischen.” KulturPoetik/Journal for Cultural Poetics 11: 181-202. Wagner, Armin, and Heiko Biehl. 2013. “Bundeswehr und Gesellschaft.” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 44: 23-30. Warner Bros. Entertainment. 2015. American sniper. Directed by Clint Eastwood. White House (ed.). 2012. Weekly Address: Honoring Our Fallen Heroes this Memorial Day. District of Columbia: United States. Winkel, Wolfgang. 2004. “Bundeswehr braucht archaische Kämpfer”, Welt am Sonntag. Accessed June 30, 2017, http://www.welt.de/print-wams/article107173/Bundeswehr-brauchtarchaische-Kaempfer.html. Witzel, Andreas. 2000. “Das Problemzentrierte Interview.” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung, 1. Accessed October 21, 2016. http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/1-00/1-00witzel-d.htm. Wohlgethan, Achim. 2008. Endstation Kabul. Berlin: Ullstein. Würich, Sabine, and Ulrike Scheffer. 2014. Operation Heimkehr: Bundeswehrsoldaten über ihr Leben nach dem Auslandseinsatz. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. Zimbardo, Philip. 2008. Der Luzifer-Effekt. Die Macht der Umstände und die Psychologie des Bösen. Heidelberg: Spektrum Akademie Verlag.

CHAPTER SEVEN “WE ARE HEROES”: THE HOMOGENISING GLORIFICATION OF THE MEMORIES ON THE SOVIET–AFGHAN WAR IN PRESENT RUSSIA MICHAEL GALBAS

In an in-depth interview conducted by the author with Nikita in 2014 in the Russian city of Ryazan, the interviewee stated: “During our presence, we have accomplished nothing. We have only destroyed everything. Villages, infrastructure. And then we left” (Nikita, interview 2014). Nikita was born in 1964, and in 1982 he started his military service in the Soviet army with the parachutists, where he was employed as a sniper. After half a year, he came to Afghanistan and stayed there until 1984. As a war veteran, in the interview, Nikita has reported on the lack of achievements of the Soviet deployment in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989. The Soviet operation at the Hindu Kush began on December 25, 1979. It was designed by the Soviet leadership as a defensive and time-limited support operation for the allied Kabul regime, which had lost its political power and influence in an inter-Afghan conflict (Kalinovsky 2011, 2009; Lyakhovskiy 2007; Gibbs 2006). Formally, Moscow presented the intervention as an act of internationalist brotherly help for a befriended society and of self-defence according to the UN Charter (see Allan and Kläy 1999; Allan et al. 1995). In practice, the Soviet troops were primarily in charge of training the Afghan army and protecting infrastructure (see Grau and Gress 2002). The Soviet support for the regime in Kabul, however, exacerbated an ongoing civil war and turned it into an international conflict. According to official data, the Soviet–Afghan War claimed the lives of almost 15,000 USSR citizens and over 1 million Afghans. On top of that, nearly 15 million people, approximately half of the entire Afghan popula-

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tion, were forced into exile, inside and outside the country (Krivosheev 2001, 611–619; Khalidi 1991, 101). Having failed at pacifying the country, the Soviet troops officially left Afghanistan on February 15, 1989.1 Despite these results, the Central Museum of Victory in the Great Patriotic War in Moscow showed another picture of the Soviet–Afghan War. In the museum, the state exhibition “The traditions of the faithful feat” was officially opened on February 15, 2014 (Novaya Gazeta 2014). It was dedicated to the Soviet intervention which ended on the very same day 25 years ago. The location and the title of the exhibition demonstrated its ambition: it aimed to honour the war effort of Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan, men who were placed in a genealogy with their predecessors of the Second World War. The discrepancy between Nikita’s statement and the official narrative leads to questions about the views of the former Soviet combatants, the Afgantsy,2 within the formation of collective narratives of the Soviet deployment in the present-day Russian Federation. Referring to this, this paper illustrates the interplay between current individual remembrance patterns of veterans and various collective perspectives on the Soviet– Afghan War in today’s Russia. On that basis, the intention of this paper is to show, firstly, how the veterans are remembered on the political, social, cultural and individual levels of the Soviet intervention. Secondly, it scrutinises how, despite the above-described different perspectives on the war, the several memory forms converge to create a homogenising glorification of the intervention in present day Russian memory. For this purpose, concerning the political and social level, the following examination takes a critical look at the narrative of the state and the organisations designed for the Afgantsy. Therefore, based on a discourse analysis approach (Sarasin 2003), predominantly the public statements about the intervention of the president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, and of representatives of the biggest association designed for Afgantsy, the “Russian Alliance of Veterans of Afghanistan” (RSVA) are examined. The RSVA was founded on November 20, 1990, in order to provide legal, political, and economic protection for the former combat-

1 An overview of the developments in Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal can be found in: Johnson 2011; Tomsen 2011; Maley 2009. 2 The term “Afgantsy” is the Russian word for “Afghans”. Towards the end of the 1980s and in the early 1990s, the term developed into a self and external designation for the Soviet Afghanistan fighters, see Petrone 2015, 353.

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ants of the Soviet-Afghan War (Kotenev 1994).3 By its own account, the organisation has approximately 500,000 members and is nowadays an important social player in the field of general veterans’ welfare (RSVA website 2015a). In addition to the RSVA, the paper also focuses on the current attitude of the Russian society towards the war in Afghanistan. A 2014 survey by the Russian sociological research organisation Levada Institute offers insights into this topic. It elaborates on the different perspectives on the intervention and compares them with former inquires (Levada 2014). The representations of the war on the cultural level will be analysed by the example of the Russian blockbuster film The Ninth Company (2005). The film attracted over 6,000,000 viewers to Russian cinemas and raised a far-reaching public interest concerning the underlying issue (Kino-Teatr 2005a). This is important because, as will be demonstrated, the individual memories and elements of the film blend in the veterans’ accounts of the war. At the core of the present investigation lie the individual memories of the Soviet Afghanistan war veterans. Their perspectives were carved out by thirty-three narrative interviews with former combatants which were carried out in Russia from 2011 to 2015 by the author (Schütze 2012).4 As a result of the analysis of the narrative interviews, three main remembrance patterns can be identified: Heroism, fascination and victimisation. They are derived from the observations made by the social psychologist Harald Welzer in his multigenerational analysis of the narrations about the Nazi-past (Welzer, Moller, and Tschuggnall 2012; Welzer, Montau, and Plaß 1997). In this study it was analysed how German contemporary witnesses reported to their children and grandchildren about their experiences during National Socialism. In this context, for this paper the three remem3

Around the year 1990 the Afgantsy united their various local veteran groups into union-wide organisations. The two main forces were the “mother” of the RSVA, the “Union of Veterans of Afghanistan” (SVA), and the “All-Union Association of Reserve Soldiers’ Councils, Soldiers-Internationalists and Military-Patriotic Unions” (All-Union). Over time, the latter lost influence while the SVA/RSVA gained political power (see Galeotti 1995, 103–119). Next to the RSVA, another large veteran-organisation designed for the Afgantsy in today’s Russia is the “Battle Brotherhood” (Boevoe Bratstvo), founded in December 1997. However, with approximately 100,000 members the organisation is much smaller than the RSVA (Boevoe Bratstvo official website 2017). 4 The present analysis is part of a PhD thesis on the memories of the Soviet Afghan–War in contemporary Russia at the Department of History/ Eastern European History, University of Constance, Germany. Regarding this paper, I would like to thank Felix Frey and Dimitri Krenz for their valuable suggestions and tremendous support.

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brance patterns of the multigenerational analysis were chosen because the memories of the Afgantsy show distinct parallels to them. The respective patterns of the former Soviet combatants will be exemplified by one veteran’s narration for each type. The analysis of the interplay between the various forms of memory presented in this paper rests upon the extension of the theoretical concept of individual and collective memory (Assmann 2013; Erll and Nünning 2008). Since the veterans participate in different social groups, various “memories” influence individual interpretations and the resulting selfperceptions. The literary and cultural theorist Aleida Assmann distinguishes four forms of memory: the individual, the social, the national and the cultural memory (Assmann 2006, 23-40; 205-210). In this paper, individual memory corresponds to the individual accounts of the interviewed veterans. Anchored in personal experiences, individual memory develops through social communication and cultural interaction based on an interplay of signs and media, such as texts, films, monuments or symbolic practices in the form of rituals. In contrast, social memory is primarily found within the narratives of veteran associations and the attitudes within the Russian population. The participation in this form of memory arises from the fact that individuals grow into a community by merging their individual memories with those of their respective social groups. Similarly, national memory, which includes the official state memories, is a form of memory where the individual participates in rituals, such as national holidays, accepting a certain role-play and prefabricated behaviour. While such celebrations are collectively oriented, the knowledge acquisition within cultural memory takes place mainly on the individual level. This is especially true with regard to the artistic representation of the war in Afghanistan (see Erll and Wodianka 2008). Cultural memory connects each individual to an enormous knowledge and experience base, and enables the individuals to gain not only their personal and social, but also their cultural identity (Assmann 2006, 34). While evaluating the interviews, it was important to focus on the distinction between the experienced and the narrated past as introduced by the sociologist Gabriele Rosenthal (Rosenthal 2015, 189–229). According to this reasoning, what must be stressed firstly is the biographical significance of the experienced and, secondly, the relevance of the selfauthorised presentation of this experience in present time. Doing this, the influence of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan on an individual’s personal history as well as the interplay between the individual and the collective memories will be demonstrated. This enables a multi-layered conclusion about the homogenisation of the memories concerning the

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Soviet-Afghan War in present day Russia. For which, at first, the remembrance on the political, social, and cultural level will be analysed.

Remembrance patterns on the political level Since the 2000s, on the political level a significant change from critical stance to a noticeable war-friendly attitude in Russia can be observed (Galbas 2017). In the course of Glasnost and Perestroika, the Second People’s Deputy Congress condemned the intervention as moral and political violation of international and national law on December 24, 1989.5 Due to this condemnation, many political representatives developed a distanced attitude to the intervention and kept away from commemoration ceremonies in the 1990s, because they did not want to be associated with an unpopular military endeavour (Danilova 2005, 374). However, most politicians who served in Afghanistan dealt with the war and joined commemoration ceremonies. At these meetings, they perpetuated the interpretation issued by the Congress and criticised the war as a political mistake on the one hand while stressing the bravery and the loyalty of the soldiers on the other hand (Krasnaya Zvezda 1999; 1994). Though, since the first presidency of Vladimir Putin state representatives have placed more emphasis on the Soviet–Afghan War. In 2004, ordered by Putin, a central monument was erected in Moscow at the Victory Park, the Poklonnaya Gora RIA (RIA Novosti 2004). Furthermore, high-ranking politicians participated in commemoration ceremonials concerning the war. In their addresses to the veterans, they particularly emphasised not only the soldiers’ fulfilment of duty, but also the heavy burden and the manifold hardships they had to endure during their deployment. In an official statement on the fifteenth anniversary of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Putin stated: During the war in Afghanistan, everything was required. Everything a person can endure. Our Afgantsy know and remember this: They had to sip a full cup of suffering, and grief, and despair, and difficulties (Prezident Rossii official website 2004).

In his statement, Putin also stressed the problems the veterans were facing after their return from Afghanistan. At home, the former combatants have been met “with incomprehension, indifference, and even with 5

For an analysis of the handling of the war in Afghanistan in the Soviet Union, see Mirschel 2017; Casula 2015.

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condemnation” by the state institutions and the people (Prezident Rossii official website 2004). Putin’s references to the phase of predominantly critical attitudes towards the war at the end of the 1980s, however, cannot be interpreted as a reasonable discussion of the intervention. On the contrary, the president uses his criticism as an instrument to glorify the Afgantsy. By focusing on their suffering, he accentuates the strength of the soldiers. According to Putin, present-day Russia needs people possessing such skills to overcome difficulties. In this way, the president of the Russian Federation transfigured the Soviet-Afghan War into a “school of life” and the Afgantsy into role models for the entire society (Galbas 2017, 236). A shift in perception regarding the intervention occurred also on the state level. Even though the official condemnation of the war is still valid, since the 2000s political representatives emphasise its relevance for the security of the country. For example, in his speech quoted above, Putin described the invasion as a necessary protection of “our southern borders”, because Afghanistan was an unstable neighbour (Prezident Rossii official website 2004). Considering NATO’s commitment in Afghanistan, Russian politicians also described the Soviet deployment as a fight against terrorism. In 2015, during a meeting with the Afgantsy, Putin underlined that, “there were real threats that the Soviet leadership tried to stop by the invasion in Afghanistan.” (Gazeta 2015). In this way, he ascribed a meaning to the Soviet-Afghan War and its veterans. According to this interpretation, Russia as a whole profited from the Soviet soldiers’ sacrifices. The reinterpretation of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan can be regarded as part of Putin’s militarisation of society and culture, which is an important element of his political agenda (see Mathers 2014). In this context, like the commemoration of the Second World War, the SovietAfghan War seems to be used to build national awareness (Danilova 2005, 383). In contrast to the official position during the 1990s, since the 2000s the Soviet-Afghan War is considered as an important historic event offering identification for the entire population like the victory in the Second World War (see Danilova 2015). Therefore, the national significance of the war and the selfless devotion of the Afgantsy to their duty and their homeland are highlighted (Galbas 2015, 119). Given the raised attention for the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the attitude towards the intervention and narratives of war on the social level underwent an alteration.

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Remembrance patterns on the social level In the 1990s, like the official reading the veteran organisations as well as the majority of the society showed critical views on the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Because of the privileges granted to the veterans of the Second World War, after the withdrawal the Afgantsy-organisations demanded special social benefits from the Soviet and the Russian governments (Petrone 2015, 352). The sense of entitlement among the Afghanistan veterans was based on the argument that since the state had sent them to the Hindu Kush, the state institutions also had to care for their soldiers after their return (Galbas 2015, 103). To strengthen their demands, the veteran associations emphasised, for example on commemoration ceremonials, the sacrifices made during the deployment. However, in the course of the economic downturn of the 1990s, the state was unable to provide sufficient welfare for the veterans (Danilova 2010, 906-907). In the course of the growing attention towards the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the glorification of the veterans by the state since Putin’s first presidency, the public perspectives of the veteran associations also underwent an alteration (Galbas 2015, 119–123). Instead of further condemning the war, the organisations nowadays also publicly stress the importance of the deployment for the security of the country. The chairperson of the RSVA, Frants Klintsevich, said in his address to the State Duma in 2009: “Thanks to the ten-year presence of the Limited Contingent of Soviet Forces, the fire of a new world war was prevented at the borders of our state.” (Gosudarstvennaya duma official website 2009). Similarly, since the 2000s, organisations’ representatives, also often in public, declare that the Soviet troops had fought at the Hindu Kush against terrorism and drug trafficking (Rossiiskaya Gazeta 2009). This jointly created heroic vision is the result of the cooperation between the veteran associations and the state during Putin’s presidency. In the course of the economic recovery since 1999, the state institutions have been providing financial support for the associations (RIA Novosti 2011). In order to ensure further funding by the state, the organisations have become important supporters of Putin’s views on national and international politics. With their heroic reading of the war, veteran associations assist the militarisation of Russian society and culture. However, the veterans also directly support Putin’s political positions and aims. In 2014, the RSVA and the “Battle Brotherhood” have formed the “Anti-Maidan” movement. This movement was established to prevent political changes in Moscow such as could be witnessed in Kiev (RSVA official website 2015b). Moreover, from its start in 2014, Afgantsy are involved in the

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armed conflict in Ukraine (Sklokina 2015).6 Especially the Russian veteran organisations depict themselves as supporters of the secessionist territories in East Ukraine. As an allusion to the present situation, the last commander of the 40th Army in Afghanistan and chairman of the “Battle Brotherhood”, Boris Gromov, stated at the commemoration ceremony of the Soviet-Afghan War in Moscow in February 2016: We, the veterans, must do everything to ensure that foreign forces do not provoke the hostility between our countries in the hearts of the people as well as the mutual respect and parts of that friendship, which has united us in a long common history (Russkaya Vesna 2016).

Thus, the associations committed to a close relationship between Russia and Ukraine. Furthermore, the new governmental perspective on the war has played to the RSVA’s advantage regarding their own objectives concerning the social reintegration. As the 2012 RSVA charter proclaims, such social reintegration will primarily be facilitated via “youth military-patriotic education” which should promote national spiritual and cultural prosperity in Russia (RSVA official website 2012).7 In this context, the official militarised canon offers the associations a useful framework for recognition of the veterans as heroic members of society (Galbas 2015, 122). This aspect is relevant concerning the current attitude towards the Soviet-Afghan War within the Russian society. Since the 2000s, a change in perception can be observed. By the end of the 1980s, the Soviet and Russian population developed critical perspectives on the war. A 1991 survey conducted by the Levada Institute showed that 88% of the respondents see the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan as “not necessary” (Levada 2014). In this context, the majority adapted the critical views of the war to their perception of the veterans and regarded them as murderers as well as avoiding any contact with them (see Petrone 2015; Braithwaite 2011; Sapper 1994; Riordan 1992). Such negative stances towards the deployment also existed at the end of the 1990s. According to a 1999 survey of the Levada Institute, 58% of the interviewees agreed with the assertion: “It was a political gamble, into which the leaders of the former Soviet Union dragged the country”. In contrast, only 19% of the respondents considered the intervention necessary “to protect the geopolitical interests of the

6

For the conflict in Ukraine see, Black and Johns 2016; Wood et al. 2016. For the relevance of the “youth military-patriotic education” in Russia, see Hemment 2016; Mijnssen 2010. 7

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USSR, in order to prevent the strengthening of U.S. influence in the region”. However, until 2014, these assessments have markedly changed. In a Levada survey that year, the estimation that the war was not necessary declined from 88% to 66% (Levada 2014).8 This applies also to the approval that the intervention was a “political gamble” which reduced by 13% to 45%. Simultaneously, the perspective on the deployment, as being relevant for the USSR, increased from 19% to 23%. This indicates that, despite the further existing negative perspectives, the intensified public glorification of the Soviet-Afghan War by the state with the support of the veteran organisations affected the attitude towards the war within the Russian society. The population gradually began to consider the intervention as a “necessity” for the country. Thus, it is in tune with the official narratives and the perspectives of the associations. Therefore, on the social level tendencies of glorifications of the war are ascertainable. In addition to this, similar representations of the intervention can currently also be found on a cultural level in the form of films.

Remembrance patterns on the cultural level Soviet documentaries and cinematic representations of the war in Afghanistan had already appeared during the mid-1980s (see Is It Easy to Be Young? 1986; Afganskiy Izlom 1991). Like the general political and social attitude at that time, the focus was primarily on a critical examination of the war and its consequences. In contrast, the recent films about the Soviet deployment assume a different perspective. Similar to the interpretations by the state and the veteran-organisations, the heroic fulfilment of duty is the main narrative focus (see Okhotniki za karavanami 2010). The 2005 Russian war film The Ninth Company, which was directed by Fyodor Bondarchuk, illustrates this. In terms of content, the film is loosely based on a real-life battle of the Soviet Ninth Company in early 1988. Like the British-American feature film Full Metal Jacket (1987), the story is divided into two parts: training and combat. The first part shows young recruits who are trained by a war traumatised Afghanistan veteran. During the heavy training, the soldiers develop a feeling of comradeship and mutual support. In the second part, the soldiers are assigned to the Ninth Company. Shortly thereafter, the unit is ordered to hold a hill at all costs. After some preliminary disputes, nu8 The survey was conducted from January 24-27, 2014 and included 1,603 respondents.

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merous Mujahedeen fighters attack and overrun the position. In the end, the Soviet soldiers are able to defend the heights, but only one of them survives. The film shows, that only one soldier of the company stayed alive because other Soviet military forces arrived too late. In reality, the Ninth Company received timely support and the company lost “only” six men (Firma «1S» 2007). The exorbitant numbers of victims are not the only instance in which the film refers to the negative aspects of the Soviet intervention. The Ninth Company also illustrates the lack of equipment and the insufficient supply of the soldiers as well as the misjudgements and strategic mistakes of the Soviet leadership. In the end of the film, the viewer learns that the Ninth Company was forgotten on the remote hill due to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Similar to the state narrative, the criticism that is voiced throughout the film serves as a way of emphasizing the efforts of the veterans. During the last scene, the surviving soldier mused: “We came back from Afghanistan. The Ninth Company. We triumphed.” (Film, 9 rota, 2:14:35) Thus, the message of the film is to show that despite all the difficulties, the Soviet soldiers had managed to fulfil their mission. Director Bondarchuk confirmed this in an interview in September 2005 with the Russian daily newspaper “Rossiiskaya Gazeta”, in which he described the idea of the film. According to this own statement, he wanted to shoot a blockbuster for which he chose as the main theme “the fate of the people and the Heroes of our time” (Rossiiskaya Gazeta 2005). For Bondarchuk, as he said in another interview during the same month, this subject was important because “each of them won his inner war. The film is aimed at the people who have survived. [...]. First of all, this is a story about men’s friendship, partnership, brotherhood.” (Pravda 2005). In this way, the The Ninth Company can be regarded as a tribute to the Afgantsy (see Liderman 2006). Thus, for producing a successful film, it seems that the director considered it as better suited to choose a glorifying theme. In 2005, about the box office revenues, The Ninth Company took first place in Russia with over 25 million US dollars (Kino-Teatr 2005b). Simultaneously, doing this, on the cultural level, films currently promote the new political and social perspectives on the war. By looking at the state narratives, the veteran organisations, the attitude within society as well as at one of the most popular war films, it can be argued that in present-day Russia the emphasis on military values and military virtues is more important than a debate on strategic planning or the experiences of suffering and violence by the veterans (Galbas 2017, 237). These collective views, however, affect the way the war is perceived

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by the veterans themselves, which can be demonstrated on the individual remembrance patterns of heroism, fascination and victimisation.

Individual remembrance pattern of heroism German Second World War veterans of the heroism-type in the abovequoted multigenerational analysis described themselves as hardened characters and underlined their combat-readiness and military skills (Welzer, Moller, and Tschuggnall 2012, 84, 97–104; Welzer, Montau, and Plaß 1997, 198–211). Such features are also part of the heroism-pattern of the Afgantsy. Their narrations are marked by militaristic patterns of behaviour and thought (Shaw 2013; Wilson 2008). Concerning the attitude, the interviewees usually appeared to the interviewer in a very dominant way, which was reminiscent of a command and obedience relationship. At the narrative level, the militaristic ways of thinking were reflected in the focus of the reports about the intervention by underlining the operational procedure of the 40th Soviet Army in Afghanistan as well as soldiers’ values and virtues. The different veterans’ stories about the war are linked by glorifying interpretations that serve as a central theme within the storyline. This is illustrated by Andrei’s narration (Andrei, interview 2015).9 Andrei was born in 1960. He started his military career at the age of 17. From 1981 until 1986, he was stationed in the GDR. Subsequently, he commanded a motorised infantry unit in Afghanistan from 1986 until 1988. After several deployments at different locations within the USSR, the interview partner had retired in 2012. Since this moment, he is an active member of a veteran organisation in Moscow where the interview was conducted in 2015. The narrative focus on the military is expressed in Andrei’s commentary on why the Soviet Union has intervened in Afghanistan: Of course, there were requests for military aid. Moreover, it was our southern borders and there was the tense situation with China and the Americans at this time [...]. There was a danger of rockets being stationed in Afghanistan. [...]. That was the danger. For us, the intervention was useful so that the Americans could not build a base in Afghanistan. There were enough such bases around the Soviet Union. (Andrei, interview 2015).

In Andrei’s remarks, the official reasons for the intervention were expressed in terms of the right of self-defence. The Soviet Union had to intervene in Afghanistan to prevent military encirclement by the USA. In 9

For a further analysis of the interview, see Galbas 2015, 124–130.

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this way, the veteran declares the deployment a heroic task for the safety of the collective and links the meaning of the intervention with patriotic and militaristic patterns of thought. In the course of glorification, representatives of the heroic-type tend to stress also particular aspects of the war. This was also observed in Andrei’s statements, in which he emphasised the supposed merits of the engagement, such as camaraderie and the loyalty of the soldiers. In this context, within their narrative interviews the veterans talked about the battles against the Mujahedeen. As special features of these reports, it can be noted that on the one hand, the Soviet soldiers are described as defenders and on the other hand, detailed descriptions about violence are missing. 10 This is reflected in Andrei’s account of an attack on the command post of his battalion: One of the guards probably had ‘winked’ [slept], and a group of Mujahedeen fighters managed to approach the command post of our battalion. However, passing the unguarded section, they were noticed by the guard of the other post. There was no answer to the question about the watchword. Therefore, immediately the fire was opened until the end. In the firefight, the brother of the local gang leader died (Andrei, interview 2015).

In Andrei’s report, the Soviet units are not represented as an aggressor but as a victim of the Mujahedeen. Like the justification for the intervention as a whole, the use of weapons served purely as a means of self-defence. Here again, the achievements of the Soviet soldiers are glorified in the sense that they had successfully fended off the attack. Detailed information about the course of the fighting, the number of enemies or the experienced suffering as well as the wounded and casualties are missing in the account. The listener only learns that the fire ended. What this exactly meant was not clarified. Thus, it remains unknown whether the attackers were killed or escaped. The veteran only informs us about the death of the brother of a gang leader. The omission of violence is also found in narrations of German veterans of Second World War. The sociologist Rosenthal assessed this as a tactic of the veterans, not to be associated with the atrocities of National Socialism (Rosenthal 1995, 653–655). The same can be said of the Afgantsy. From the point of view of glorification, the representations as defenders, as well as the masking of violence, become a functional expres-

10 For the experience of combat and physical violence during the Soviet War in Afghanistan, see Behrends 2015.

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sion of the veterans to stage the former combatants as honourable and decent soldiers, who heroically fulfilled their military duty. A glorification of the Soviet achievements in Afghanistan can also be identified in the remembrance patterns of fascination, but with a different focus.

Individual remembrance pattern of fascination According to the results of the multigenerational analysis, the representatives of the fascination-type show an affirmation of the National Socialism’s society. They tell, for example, with a certain enthusiasm and excitement about their youth and the achievements during that time, such as the economic development or social policy measures (Welzer, Moller, and Tschuggnall 2012, 83; Welzer, Montau, and Plaß 1997, 186–197). Similarly, the Afgantsy of the fascination-pattern confirm with fervour the ideological values propagated by the Soviet leadership, such as internationalism, mutual support and international friendship (see Hildermeier 1998), and report with bright eyes about these norms and values. At the same time, these ideals in turn organise the narrative structure of the reports about the Soviet-Afghan War. In contrast to the remembrance pattern of heroism, the military aspects of the intervention are pushed to the background. Instead, the representatives of the fascination-type represent the war as successful developmental aid. The biographical construction of Konstantin can be used as an example to illustrate this in more detail (Konstantin, interview 2015). Konstantin was born in early 1966. After finishing school, he started training as a Political Commissar, which he completed in summer 1987. Subsequently, he volunteered for the war in Afghanistan. There he stayed for two years. During this time, he became the deputy commander of the political reconnaissance department of a motorised rifle regiment. Konstantin’s deployment in Afghanistan ended on February 8, 1989. Afterwards, he was stationed in the GDR and at different locations in the USSR, such as Pskov, where Konstantin settled down after his retirement in 2012 and began to participate in a veteran association. The interview with the veteran, however, was conducted in Moscow in 2015. In the interview, Konstantin emphasised the socialist ideals and values in his comments about the invasion in Afghanistan. As in the official Soviet statements, the interview partner justified the intervention with the support of an allied nation: “We went there for help: We have trained the Afghan army. In addition, our specialists set up factories and production facilities.” (Konstantin, interview 2015). Like Konstantin, the representa-

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tives of the remembrance pattern of fascination declare the Soviet intervention as an assistance in state building (see Nunan 2016; Robinson and Jay Dixon 2013; Kipping 2011). In their accounts of the deployment, the veterans frequently explain how Soviet engineers planned and built factories, schools, bridges or tunnels. In contrast to the heroism-type, there are almost no reports concerning the fighting. Rather, the close and peaceful cooperation between the Soviet units and the Afghan population is emphasised. A special feature of these depictions is that the veterans narrated them as a modernisation discourse in the form of forwardness vs. backwardness. This is shown by a report on the cooperation with the Afghan population: Concerning the locals, I want to say that we helped them to build up things. The medical care for example. That means healing the sick. In Afghanistan were wild, very wild habits. According to our calendar, it was the year 1987, but according to their calendar 1367. The people really lived like during this time. In comparison to us, there was the 14th century. Ok, there were some progressive things, like jeans or TV. Nevertheless, if you used to drive there, the Middle Ages still existed….it was just trash. I went to a kishlak 11 [...]. There we were seated at a table. Not at a table, but on the floor, on a rug. The hosts decided to feed us. Everything was very poor. There were scrambled eggs, no forks, cornbread, they took a piece of flatbread and served it with a potato. Moreover, I thought to myself, would I get infected by all the diseases and die immediately? It was insanely unhygienic. Children were everywhere. They were naked and screamed all the time (Konstantin, interview 2015).

In his descriptions of Afghans’ daily life, Konstantin accentuated the importance of the Soviet support. Afghanistan was mostly viewed as an archaic land with bad living conditions. There was a lack of minimum hygienic standards, technical equipment and no sufficient food supply. Only by the aid of the Soviet Union the circumstances in Afghanistan could be improved, for example, a medical care system was being built. In this way, the veteran depicted the intervention as a humanitarian act. Thus, the Soviet mission made an essential contribution to the modernisation and progress of Afghanistan. In order to portray the intervention as a socialist success story, veterans of the fascination-type highlighted not only the Soviet efforts but also the peaceful cooperation with the local people.

11 The meaning of kishlak is “wintering place” in Turkic languages and refers to a rural settlement of semi-nomadic Turkic peoples of Central Asia.

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However, the interview partners did not fail to address negative aspects of the intervention like the fighting and the losses of the war. In this context, two observations can be made: Firstly, the veterans do not mention Afghan victims, but only the Soviet ones. Secondly, the Afgantsy relativize the latter. Konstantin for example compared the number of the fallen Soviet soldiers to the American fatalities in Vietnam: “We did not fight badly. 15,000 deaths within ten years. In Vietnam, 58,000 people died [...] 10 out of 15 years during this time period.” (Konstantin, interview 2015). The interviewee used the American operation in Vietnam in order to underline the military achievements of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. According to the veteran, in a comparable period much fewer Soviet soldiers fell than Americans did during their engagement in Vietnam.12 By this comparison, the veteran incorporates negative aspects of the intervention into the chosen leitmotif of a successful mission. In contrast, the representatives of the victimisation do not downplay the suffering experienced in Afghanistan in their biographical constructions. Grief and suffering form the centre of these reports.

Individual remembrance pattern of victimisation The agents of the victimisation-type in the analysis of the social psychologist Welzer represent themselves as sufferers of different situations, such as the social circumstances, the war captivity, the occupation, or the military services (Welzer, Moller, and Tschuggnall 2012: 86–97; Welzer, Montau, and Plaß 1997: 145–158). This is similar to the Afghanistan veterans of the victimisation-type who draw a self-image as victims of a hard and terrible time. The content of their stories shows parallels to the depictions of the veterans and their associations in the 1990s. In their memories after the war, the former combatants described in detail the grievances in the 40th Soviet Army in Afghanistan, such as a lack of equipment, poor supplies, harassment in the military or the brutality and cruelty of the operations (Heinämaa, Leppänen, and Yurchenko 1994; Buser and Gail A. Broadhead 1992; Alexievich 1992; Bocharov 1990). Taking up on this, in complete contrast to the heroism or fascination types, the current narrations of the veterans within the remembrance pattern of victimisation show a condemning perspective on the intervention and its objectives. In this sense, especially reports of the everyday life or the combat missions are narrated mostly negatively. The veterans address in detail the difficulties 12

For a comparison of the deployments to Afghanistan and Vietnam, see Borer 1999.

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and problems during the mission in Afghanistan as well as violence and death or give insight into their feelings. In order to illustrate the remembrance pattern of victimisation, Nikita’s above-mentioned narrative interview is being adduced (Nikita, interview 2014). Back in the USSR after his service, the veteran started to train as a locksmith. In the course of the economic downturn at the end of the 1980s, he was unemployed for a long time. During the 1990s, he scraped through with casual jobs before working as a security guard at a state library in Ryazan since the beginning of 2007. In contrast to the other two veterans, this interview partner is not a member of a veteran organisation and does not participate in the state commemoration ceremonies. Nikita’s negative attitude towards deployment was not only shown with regard to the results of the mission as quoted above, but also with respect to the reasons for the invasion: The politicians sent us there to do business. That is certainly true. While some of them stuffed their bags, others paid with their lives. In Afghanistan, the people only enriched themselves. There was everything, we did not have in the Soviet Union like as jeans, video cameras, tape recorders. We had to pick up all this stuff and send it to the Soviet Union, where everything was sold (Nikita, interview 2014).

In contrast to the other remembrances patterns, the veteran does not try to legitimise the intervention and to present it as a “bellum iustum” (see Hensel 2013; Steinhoff 2007). Instead, the former combatant considers the deployment as an unwarranted war. Nikita views the war in Afghanistan primarily as a search for profits. According to his reasoning, politicians used Afghanistan as a “warehouse” from where everything was transported to the Soviet Union. However, while the country’s leaders raked in profits, the soldiers paid for it with their lives. The former combatant describes himself as a pawn of a kleptocratic state, sending soldiers off to die because of pure greed. Especially the latter notion is further elaborated upon in the remembrance pattern of victimisation. In his life story, the veteran presents Afghanistan as a source of manifold dangers. This involved, inter alia, their lack of preparation or the extreme climatic conditions at the Hindu Kush. A special focus is placed on narrating the actual events of war. In doing so, a cruel picture of Afghanistan and the battles is drawn, which includes not only the brutality of the enemies but also one’s own cruelty. On both aspects, Nikita, for example, went into detail as he told about a military operation:

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Chapter Seven Exploring a hill with a comrade, I have worked as a scout, we went under fire. Suddenly, torn feet of my comrade laid in a pool of blood. In addition, I realised that I could not take my comrade with me because it is pointless and the group has to withdraw. Therefore, you had to leave the man behind. Nevertheless, how to leave him behind? That is … you have to shoot him. Now you have to imagine. You have to kill the person with whom you have eaten bread from the same plate an hour ago. You have to shoot or to leave him to the enemy for desecration (Nikita, interview 2014).

The former combatant described the Mujahedeen as inhuman barbarians, who took no pity in the fate of wounded soldiers but mistreated them instead. However, the violent environment in Afghanistan also influenced the behaviour of the Soviet soldiers. Nikita felt he was forced to kill his own comrade in order to “save” him from captivity and torture. According to the veteran, all humanitarian standards were lost in Afghanistan. Here, another feature of the victimisation-type can be illustrated. In order to explain the gravity of the deployment, the interview partners detail the casualties. They are not represented as abstract numbers as in Konstantin’s narrative. The veterans of this remembrance-type rather create a personal connection to the fallen. Nikita, for example, had previously eaten together with the comrade, who lost his life in Afghanistan. In this way, death became a constant companion of the combats in the narration. By stressing this aspect of war, the veterans tried to explain to the listeners that the soldiers could have been killed at every moment. For themselves, the only goal was to survive and return home safely. The representatives of the victimisation-type also often provide insights into their emotional worlds. The veterans primarily demonstrate that they were mentally unprepared for the mission (see Ol’shanskii 1991: 121). Descriptions of fear, panic and discouragement are often found in these stories. Nikita revealed his despair, for example. He was not able to rescue the comrade. However, to do something good, the former soldier had to “redeem” his comrade by sparing him from even worse things. In summary, instead of painting a self-image of heroic warriors of a meaningful intervention, the veterans of the remembrance pattern of victimisation depict themselves as victims of the state that sent them into a pointless war where they went through hell.

Glorification as a link Despite their thematic differences, the presented types of remembrance have in common that they are not limited to their narrative worlds. On the contrary, all patterns are connected to each other. Within certain limits,

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characteristics and features of each type can be found and analysed in all narrations. For example, Andrei as a representative of the heroism-type also refers to the Soviet developmental aid. The three types have in common that in all interviews, the veterans show a certain pride in the individual achievements as well as that they derived something positive from the Soviet-Afghan War. The representatives of the heroism and the fascination-types expressed these aspects in the form of the defence of the fatherland and the developmental work. The veterans of the victimisation-type, on the other hand, indicate such glorifications implicitly. A statement of Nikita can demonstrate this. The interview partner reported on the risk and threats for the soldiers in Afghanistan. He stressed the good equipment of the Mujahedeen or their use of mines. In this context, he also criticised the lack of experience of the own troops, leading to losses: In general, the young recruits died first. Raise your head and ... and snap the sniper. As you say, a high head is a stroke of luck. A good sniper can fire ten shoots in two minutes. This is a good sniper. In addition, to discover such a sniper is difficult, but if you succeed, you have to examine closely. Did you really discover a sniper or not? A good sniper has calluses on the index finger, as here [he points to his finger], and on the shoulder are the same, right here [touches his shoulder]. This marks a good sniper (Nikita, interview 2014).

Here again, Nikita followed his previous reading of the war. A criticism of the state can be seen in his statement, that young and inexperienced soldiers have been sent to war by the state. Because of their lack of training, they were the first to die; for example, when they stuck out their head above the parapet. However, the veteran uses these explanations to refer to his own achievements. Even if he does not do this directly, the characterisations of a good sniper can be regarded as a self-description. Thus, the former combat experience marks his own body as one that carries the signs of a professional. This can be interpreted as pride about the fulfilment of his tasks and especially about his abilities as a good soldier. Such aspects also came into play when Nikita addressed the importance of the war at the end of the interview. After some deliberation, he replied: “Well ... I am glad to have survived everything safely. The war has changed my attitude towards the life. I have learned to appreciate it” (Nikita, interview 2014). Despite the difficulties and suffering he described, Nikita attached something positive to the Soviet-Afghan War. Thus, he had not only overcome all adversities of the mission and fulfilled

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his duty honourably, but also learned to recognise the value of “peaceful” life after the war.

The power of collective images Several factors can be mentioned for the glorification of the war and the military efforts in the narrations. In addition to the respective perceptions, experiences and feelings of veterans, the political, social and cultural frameworks contribute to a positive assessment of the Soviet deployment in Afghanistan on the individual level of remembrance. Concerning the political or social level, studies on the memories of the Soviet-Afghan War in today’s Russia illustrate that members of the veteran organisations and those who are regularly participating in commemoration ceremonies do in fact exemplify such heroic interpretations as the representatives of the state and of the associations propagate (Galbas 2017, 243–246). Those similarities are often shown in explanations for the reasons of the intervention. In addition to the defence against a “military threat” by the US, members of the veterans’ associations frequently justified the war as a fight against drugs. For example, Andrei also demonstrates further advantages of the Soviet deployment in Afghanistan: It was right that we were in Afghanistan. However, it was wrong that we left. When we finished the war in Afghanistan, there were only three factories for the production of [illegal] drugs. Furthermore, they were supervised. Now, there are approximately 1,500 officially known factories to be found again (Andrei, interview 2015).

Andrei declared the intervention as a fight against the production and trafficking of drugs. During the presence of the Soviet troops, drug production was diminished. Only after the withdrawal, drug trafficking increased. Thus, Andrei participates in a relatively recent communicative construction of the past and, by doing so contributes to its consolidation within the veteran group. As shown, Nikita, who is not a member of an association, condemns the intervention in Afghanistan as an unwarranted war. This indicates that within the veteran movement it is the heroic perspective rather than the victim’s perspective of the war that shapes the self-image of the organised veterans nowadays (Galbas 2015, 126-127). In addition, next to the interpretations by the state and the organisations, the current individual veterans’ perceptions on the Soviet intervention are also influenced by media portrayals on the cultural level. Various psychological and cultural studies have shown how cinematic representations affect the memories of individuals (Welzer, Moller and Tschuggnall

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2012, 105–133). In their stories, they often outline film scenes as their own experiences. This is especially evident in Nikita’s biographical construction. Within the narrative, numerous descriptions have strong similarities to the film The Ninth Company. According to his own statements, Nikita has seen the film. As a result, he rated it as a realistic assessment of the situation in Afghanistan, even if “not everything was completely correct. But all in all, yes, the film tells the truth” (Nikita, interview 2014). In Nikita’s story, similarities can be found, for example, in his discussion of the relationship to the Afghan population. Contrary to the representatives of the fascination-type, the veteran described a hostile attitude of the Afghans to the Soviet soldiers: What relationship did we have? It was normal with some of the Afghans, but ... going to a kishlak. There in the courtyard, in the centre of the village, it is haram—forbidden, haram, for them it is forbidden to attack you. However, as soon as you cross the village boundary, any boy can shoot you in the back (Nikita, interview 2014).

This section about the relationship between the natives and the foreign armed forces implies not only a strong parallel to the content of the film The Ninth Company, but also an almost word-for-word rendering. In the film scene, a Soviet officer instructs the soldiers to the existing customs, traditions and rules in Afghanistan. The instructor tells the recruits about an Afghan tradition, according to which it is forbidden for the locals to kill people within the village. In this context, he also has used the term “haram” (Film, 9 rota, 38:45). A further parallel to the feature film is shown by Nikita’s comments on the effects of the war: “We were asked what we are going to do after Afghanistan .... I will drink, then I will drink again, and afterwards I will drink again.” (Nikita, interview 2014). His statement is also comparable to a sequence of the film. In this scene, soldiers discussed their aims after returning to the Soviet Union: If you are back from Afghanistan, what will you do? -I will drink. -Ok, that is clear. One week you will drink, but afterwards? -I am going to drink again. -And then? -I will drink until I have forgotten that all. Then I will get up, wash my face and start living again, if it works (Film, 9 rota, 1:50:50).

The similarities between the veteran’s descriptions and the contents of the The Ninth Company suggests that the film is used a kind of reference point

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for his stories about the Soviet-Afghan War. In this context, the veteran account on the deployment has to be estimated. Precisely Nikita’s mode of glorification exhibited overlaps with that of The Ninth Company, as in the central message of the film the Soviet mission in Afghanistan acts as a symbol for surviving the difficulties of combat. This indicates that frames also influence the remembrance of the veterans who are not members of organisations or participate in state commemorative events. In this case, not by political or social, but primarily by the cultural glorification of the war in present-day Russia. However, there is another point which affects the memories on the individual level. Against the background of social and cultural militarisation, the glorifying narratives of the Afghanistan war can also be explained by their function.

Function of glorification Oral history studies have shown that the contents of biographical narratives are related to the goals of the narrator. They try to tell stories which could be heard by understanding listeners (Welzer, Montau and Plaß 1997, 198). Such tendencies can also be determined by the narrations of the Afgantsy. In many interviews, the veterans make the state’s material support and the social recognition for them a subject of discussion. Concerning welfare, Andrei pointed out: There are different ways of doing this. I.e. there is a category ‘combat veterans’ and ‘veterans of World War II’. Nonetheless, we also have been under fire (Andrei, interview 2015).

In his statement, Andrei criticised the state’s welfare for the veterans. In 1995, in the wake of the veterans’ law in Russia the status of the Afgantsy was fixed as “veterans of combat operations” (Rossiiskaya Gazeta 1995). Nonetheless, this provides them with a different set of rights and privileges than the Great Patriotic War veterans, who are designated as “veterans of war”. Andrei considers this as an injustice because the Afgantsy were also under attack. In contrast, in his interview Nikita has taken note with concern not of the veterans’ welfare, but of their social recognition. Asked about the attitude of the people towards him, he reported about a situation taking place in a school in Ryazan on February 23, 2007. On the “Day of the Defender of the Fatherland”, the veteran was invited to a school in order to tell about his war experiences:

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The school’s director said that I should bring some items to show them to the pupils. Therefore, I have brought pictures and my medals [...]. After the lecture, a schoolchild asked me if I really had fought or if I just had put on the medals. I did not know how to answer. I just thought, well ... if you think ... you are still young (Nikita, interview 2014).

This episode exposes distinct expectations of receiving confirmation for his efforts in Afghanistan. The insinuation of putting on medals illegally affronted Nikita and left him speechless. Only because it was a child who offended him he did not object and abstained from getting into an argument, instead he put it off to the student’s ignorance. All the analysed interviews have in common that the veterans expected either material or social recognition for their deployment in Afghanistan. In this light the glorification of the Soviet intervention by the veterans can be regarded as an instrument for attaining these goals. In the 1990s, the Afgantsy and their organisations developed the self-image of a “community of loss” in order to gain sympathy and material support from the state among other population groups (Oushakine 2009, 190). However, in the course of the cultural and social militarisation of the country, it seems that facing this return to a heroism-oriented society, the former Soviet combatants in Russia consider the glorification of the war a much better means for being heard and putting some of their concerns forward. According to the Afgantsy, they have accomplished similar heroic achievements as their predecessors in the Second World War, which is why they are also entitled to the same privileges offered by the Russian state. Therefore, contrary to the interviews of the victimisation-type in the multigenerational study (Welzer 2012, 82), the Afgantsys’ narrations of the remembrance patterns of victimisation cannot be regarded as a means for evoking empathy. Rather, the Soviet veterans are asked to explain what they have experienced in Afghanistan in order to gain social recognition as war heroes. This shows that the current political, social and cultural frames shape the individual memories of the war. However, driven by self-interest, the veterans themselves add to this harmonised glorification of the Afghanistan war remembrance in present Russia.

Conclusion The analysis of the interpretations of the Soviet-Afghan War has presented how the respective memories increasingly converge to a heroic image of the war in today’s Russia. As a trigger of this development, the shift in the official dealing with the war can be regarded. Since the 2000s, in the course of the militarisation of society and culture state officials have been

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glorifying the Soviet intervention, using it as a pillar for nation building. On the social level, this revaluation affected the perspective on the war in Afghanistan of the veterans’ organisations and of society as a whole. In contrast to the 1990s, the associations emphasise also the relevance of the war and its achievements, aiming to obtain material and social recognition for their members’ deployment. Furthermore, a changed attitude towards the intervention in Afghanistan is visible within the Russian population. This can be derived from the fact that, according to a 2014 survey, negative assessments of the war by society are less pronounced than in the 1990s. In Russia, such glorifying tendencies can be currently also found on the cultural level in the form of media portrayals. In films, for example, the efforts of the soldiers are honoured, because they have mastered difficult conditions. Pushed by the new state handling of the war, precisely the social and cultural interpretations significantly influenced the individual memories. On this level, derived from the results of the multigenerational analysis with contemporary witnesses of the NS-past, the heroism, the fascination and the victimisation represent three patterns of remembrance with different thematic priorities. While the Afgantsy of the heroism-type highlight the military achievements, the representatives of fascination focus on development assistance. Both patterns have in common that they describe the Afghanistan intervention as an important and successful mission. However, the victimisation-pattern differs from these descriptions. Like classic anti-war literature, the veterans of this type mainly condemn the intervention and present themselves as victims of the state who sent them to “hell”. However, the different types shared a certain pride in their achievements in Afghanistan. In addition to their own experiences and perspectives, the existing collective narratives in Russia can be identified as a reason for this attitude. Members of veteran organisations, for example, report about the developments similar to those of the state and the associations. Meanwhile, non-members who are not participating in such heroic discourses do not share those perspectives on the deployment. Their narrations mainly contain descriptions as victims of war. However, like in other biographical constructions of the veterans, in such reports the interpretations on a cultural level are often reflected. For example, in the veterans’ stories numerous overlaps can be found between the feature film The Ninth Company and their own accounts, which amounts to glorifying assessments of their efforts. Nevertheless, the glorification has also to be evaluated from a tactical point of view. In the analysed interviews, the veterans often complain

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about inadequate care and lack of social recognition. In this context, like the associations, in the course of the government-initiated militarisation the veterans try to achieve their objectives by portraying themselves as heroes. Unlike the 1990s narratives, the self-representations as victims by the veterans are, therefore, not mainly to be seen as a classic anti-war rhetoric, neither are they comparable to the victimisation-type of the multigenerational analysis. In the case of the Afgantsy, rather, the remembrance pattern of victimisation has to be regarded as another form of glorification. By doing so, due to the political, social and cultural frames the individual veterans currently support the new perspective on the Soviet– Afghan War in today’s Russia.

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Oushakine, Serguei Alex. 2009. The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Petrone, Karen. 2015. “Coming Home Soviet Style: The Reintegration of Afghan Veterans into Soviet Everyday Life.” In Everyday Life in Russia Past and Present, edited by Choi Chatterjee, David L. Ransel, Mary Cavender, and Karen Petrone, 350–67, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pravda. 2005. “Fil'm «9 rota»: Poslednii gvozd' v grob Sovetskogo Soyuza.” September 23, 2005, https://www.pravda.ru/world/europe/23-09-2005/52079-0. Prezident Rossii official website. 2004. “Vystuplenie na sobranii, posvyashchennom Dni pamyati voinov-internatsionalistov” February 15, 2004. Accessed November 1, 2017. http://www.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/24 827. RIA Novosti. 2011. “Putin predlagaet sozdat’ pri pravitel’stve sovet po delam veteranov.” January 19, 2011. http://ria.ru/society/20110119/323597827.html. RIA Novosti. 2004. “V Moskve otkryt pamyatnik voinaminternatsionalistam.” December 27, 2004. https://ria.ru/society/20041227/772429.html. Riordan, Jim. 1992. “Disabled Afgantsy: Fighters for a Better Deal.” In Social Change and Social Issues in the Former USSR, edited by Walter Joyce, 136–57. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Robinson, Paul, and Jay Dixon. 2013. Aiding Afghanistan. A History of Soviet Assistance to a Developing Country. London: Hurst & Company. Rosenthal, Gabriele. 2015. Interpretative Sozialforschung. Eine Einführung. Weinheim: Beltz Juventa. Rosenthal, Gabriele. 1995. “Vom Krieg erzählen, von den Verbrechen schweigen.” In Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 19411944, edited by Hannes Heer and Klaus Neumann, 651–633. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition. Rossiiskaya Gazeta. 2005. “‘9 rota’ Fedora Bondarchuka.” September 30, 2005. https://rg.ru/2005/09/30/bondarchuk.html. —. 1995. “Federal’nyi zakon N 5-F3 ‘O veteranach’ ot 12 yanvarya 1995.” 15 January 1995. Accessed November 1, 2017. http://www.rg.ru/1995/01/25/zakon-dok.html. —. 2009. “Pomnit’ vse. Ispolniaetsia 20 let so dnia vyvoda sovetskikh voisk iz Afganistana.” February 13, 2009. http://www.rg.ru/2009/02/13/gromov.html.

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RSVA official website (a). n.a. “Istoricheskaya spravkɚ (2015 version).” Accessed November 1, 2017. http://old-rsva.ru/content/istoricheskaya-spravka. RSVA official website (b). 2015. “Desantniki, ‘afgantsy’ i baikery sozdali v Rossii ‘Antimaidan’.” January 15, 2015. Accessed November 1, 2017. http://old-rsva.ru/content/desantniki-%C2%ABafgantsy%C2%BB-ibaikery-sozdali-v-rossii-%C2%ABantimaidan%C2%BB. RSVA official website. n.a. “Ustav RSVA 2012, 2.5”. Accessed November 1, 2017. http://rsva.ru/doc-menu/ustav-rsva. Russkaya Vesna. 2016. “Nasha pamyat’—Afganistan: 27-ya godovshchina vyvoda Sovetskikh voisk.” February 16, 2016. http://rusvesna.su/news/1455563302. Sapper, Manfred. 1994. Die Auswirkungen des Afghanistan-Krieges auf die Sowjetgesellschaft: Eine Studie zum Legitimitätsverlust des Militärischen in der Perestrojka. Münster/ Hamburg: LIT. Sarasin, Philipp. 2003. Geschichtswissenschaft und Diskursanalyse. Frankfurt am Main 2003: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag. Schütze, Fritz. 2012. “Biographieforschung und narratives Interview”. In Oral History. Basistexte, edited by Julia Obertreis, 99-111. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Shaw, Martin. 2013. “Twenty-First Century Militarism: A HistoricalSociological Framework.” In Militarism and International Relations: Political economy, security, theory, edited by Anna Stavrianakis and Jan Selby, 19–32. London: Routledge. Sklokina, Iryna. 2015. “Veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War and the Ukrainian Nation-Building Project: From Perestroika to the Maidan and the War in the Donbas.” Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 1 (2): 133–167. Steinhoff, Uwe. 2007. On the Ethics of War and Terrorism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tomsen, Peter. 2011. The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures of Great Powers. New York: Public Affairs. Welzer, Harald, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall. 2012. »Opa war kein Nazi«. Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Welzer, Harald, Robert Montau, and Christine Plaß. 1997. “Was wir für böse Menschen sind! Der Nationalsozialismus im Gespräch zwischen den Generationen.” Tübingen: Edition Diskord.

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Wilson, Peter H. 2008. “Defining Military Culture.” The Journal of Military History 72, no. 1 (January): 11–41. https://doi.org/10.1353/jmh.2008.0041. Wood, Elizabeth A., William E. Pomeranz, E. Wayne Merry, and Maxim Trudolyubov, eds. 2016. Roots of Russia’s War in Ukraine. New York: Columbia University Press.

CHAPTER EIGHT “I DON’T BELONG HERE ANYMORE”: HOMELAND AS AN UNCOMFORTABLE SPACE FOR WAR VETERANS IN IRWIN WINKLER’S HOME OF THE BRAVE TATIANA PROROKOVA

“Wars begin where you will but they do not end where you please” (Home of the Brave 2006). Irwin Winkler’s Home of the Brave concludes with this quote by Niccolò Machiavelli. The phrase manages to succinctly transmit the main message of the film. Home of the Brave deservedly takes its niche in the war movie genre. The film, however, deals not only with the hardships of war, including despair, the psychological difficulty of the first killing, the first loss of a comrade, and many other issues that are, undoubtedly, significant. In Home of the Brave, the director does not focus on combat only, but he also attempts to demonstrate what happens after the soldier returns home from war. Importantly, the filmmaker does so through the stories of different soldiers, underscoring the significance of viewing war veterans not only as a social group but also as individuals. What happens after one’s military contract is over? What happens to all those millions of soldiers who bravely fought, sacrificing their youth, health, and peaceful life, after the war is over? Largely abandoning the problem, Hollywood fails to reveal its complexity, only scratching the surface of a difficult, painful, and poignant issue of the life of war veterans, their return home, and their reintegration into society they once belonged to. Scholars claim that in the United States even that handful of films that do touch upon the issue of war veterans do not attract much of an audience’s attention; they are shown for a rather short time in the cinema, and make “almost no money,” which one can explain by “our collective indifference” to the problem (Gosline 2015).

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Films that focus purely on war tend to be more popular among viewers. When centering its plot on war only, films, however, suggest that the issue of war is the most complex one, excluding various other problems that are connected to the problem of war. Refusing to deal with the life of a soldier before and after war, numerous war films, including The Longest Day (1962), Casualties of War (1989), Saving Private Ryan (1998), The Thin Red Line (1998), Three Kings (1999), Behind Enemy Lines (2001), and Lone Survivor (2013), suggest that it is somehow a less significant issue. As it becomes clear after a thorough analysis of multiple cinematic examples, shifting the focus from war to the life after war is not a common cinematic practice. Most probably this happens because some filmmakers choose to impress the viewer with various special effects that can be aptly used in war films. Thus, they prefer to accentuate the scale of a specific conflict, instead of focusing on individual stories. However, Winkler’s war drama that lasts longer than one-and-a-half hours only briefly displays the Iraq War, zeroing in on the last mission of four American soldiers before they are sent home. The major part of the film is devoted to the stories of traumatic adaptations of four young people, whose lives prove that war itself is not necessarily the most horrible stage in life of a military man or woman; rather, the uncertainty of what comes next, the unpreparedness to what might seem a usual thing— to the life back home—can be scarier than war itself. War as a political event may be ceased; however, it cannot be stopped so easily in the mind of a soldier. War can reincarnate, taking the form of a psychological war that some veterans fight back home. And this is exactly what the concluding quote by Machiavelli intends to posit: for soldiers, the moment the treaty is signed may not signify the end of war because once having been in combat, they will accumulate every bit of it, and no matter how hard they try, they will not be able to erase it. After a deployment, their memory will store the images of fear and death, their bodies will always feel the weight of their weapons and equipment, the uncomfortable sleeping, or, rather the lack of it, the pain from a shot, and the unusual or sometimes even physically unbearable climate conditions of a foreign land they were sent to. The return home that might be viewed as a reward is, hence, not the end of war but yet another trial. What do veterans feel (and do) when they are back? How are they perceived by society? Are they heroes or victims? Does society care to understand that for many the peaceful life back home turns into a game, as veterans must pretend that they are back to normal: ready to watch TV, play with their kids, and be the same loving spouses as before? What about the cases, when soldiers return severely mutilated—

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either physically, or psychologically, or both? Homeland (and even home), therefore, may turn into another battlefield—silent and invisible for many but intimidating for veterans. Home of the Brave aptly unveils how homeland becomes the space that oppresses, drives crazy, punishes, and almost never comforts. Kim Toffoletti and Victoria Grace comment on the film as follows: [Home of the Brave] chronicles the traumatic experiences and emotions of soldiers during and after their tour of duty. In doing so [it] offer[s] a poignant commentary on the effect of the US invasion of Iraq on the American psyche and its cultural ego. The film foreground[s] the way the experience of being an American soldier in Iraq creates an uncanny rebound as traumatised men and women try to live through its consequences (otherwise known as “post-traumatic stress disorder”). The film […] insinuate[s] that the victims of the “war on terror” are ordinary Americans—not only soldiers, but their friends, families and wider society, who are depicted as bearing the cost of war; a war that is somehow less like a “war” and more like an amorphous combat zone lacking the kind of “enemy” soldiers are trained to confront, and without the boundaries creating the distinction of enemy from civilians that soldiers are trained to navigate. The “normal” horrors of “war” that result from a polarization of defined forces are somehow transformed into a form of abjection as the soldiers lose their civilian and “American” coordinates (Toffeleti and Grace 2010).

The film thus tackles the problem of victimisation from an unusual perspective, suggesting that it was not only 9/11 that traumatised the nation; the interventions in the Middle East that were carried out as a response to the terrorist attacks intensified the feelings of loss and loneliness in both American soldiers and civilians, which is distinctly visible through the images of war veterans. Home of the Brave narrates the stories of four soldiers: Will Marsh (Samuel L. Jackson), Vanessa Price (Jessica Biel), Tommy Yates (Brian Presley), and Jamal Aiken (Curtis Jackson). They are ready to go back home, when they find out that they will have to perform one last mission, which, quite predictably, will not have finished successfully. American soldiers are ambushed. Tommy loses his best friend in action. Jamal accidentally shoots an innocent Arab woman, and several scenes later falls down himself. Because of that, he later experiences severe backaches. Vanessa and Will try to escape, when a bomb is activated by one of the locals. Vanessa gets badly injured. Will manages to help her, but, as the audience finds out later, he comes too late and Vanessa´s hand has to be amputated. Eventually, all four characters arrive back home. The moment

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of their return is, however, darkened by the failed mission, and the meeting with their families and friends turns into a rather awkward and sad moment—so much different from how they imagined it would look like while still being in Iraq. The distinct advantage of the film is that it displays the lives of four absolutely different people, who have different social statuses and, as a result, different problems. Indeed, the veterans in Home of the Brave “vary in types of service (medical, supply delivery, combat), age, race, and gender” (Gosline 2015). Thus, upon her return, Vanessa—the only female soldier presented in the film—has to solve three problems for herself: how to live without a hand, how to be a handicapped single mother at the age of twenty-four, and how to feel confident with men again. Vanessa is the only handicapped veteran in the film. Her situation is dramatised by the fact that she is a young and attractive woman with a small child. She obviously suffers from pains, but doctors only offer prescriptions, while what she really needs is care, attention, and, most importantly, understanding. People pay attention only to her prosthesis and think of her as a physically handicapped woman who needs help, like, for example, to carry or close something, whereas deep inside Vanessa is more concerned and apparently annoyed that nobody sees her as a person who survived war and—pivotally to her—her last mission. Vanessa’s story is arguably viewed as the most dramatic one because she is a woman. One can speculate that the audience believes that what Vanessa came through is horrible not only because it was a really dangerous situation but because a young woman had to experience it. Such an impression is arguably created because of the traditional association of the military with men. While women have always played a significant role in various conflicts (serving as nurses, soldiers, etc.), the percentage of female soldiers is dramatically low compared to that of males. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie writes: Females have composed about 15% of the United States military for many years. The percentage is slightly lower in the recent combat environment. In Afghanistan females have averaged 8.4% of the military between 2001 and 2013. In Iraq they have averaged at 10.2% between 2003 and 2011 (Ritchie 2015).

This results in female veterans being even more invisible than male veterans. The feeling of foreboding never leaves Vanessa during her last mission. When she sees a local boy taking something out of the inside pocket in his jacket, the camera focuses on the woman, who is obviously nervous, fearing that the boy would take out a gun and shoot her. But he only has a lollipop. When eventually a bomb explodes right next to the car

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that Vanessa drives, the audience sees Vanessa all covered with blood. She turns to the soldier who is sitting next to her, trying to help him, not realising that he is already dead, when suddenly she notices that two of her fingers on her right hand are torn off. She pleads for help, screaming in despair, when Will, who is nearby, runs to her and provides her with first medical aid. The fact that Vanessa is a woman intensifies the tragedy of her story. Scholars claim that “war itself is a gendering activity—one of the few remaining true male experiences in our society” (Donald and MacDonald 2011). The presence of a woman in war—although Vanessa is obviously not the first female heroine in the war film genre—even after having thousands of women enlisted and served in the army, remains “an aberration” (Ibid). After a long medical treatment, Vanessa returns home; but instead of a happy and proud veteran, the viewer observes a shy, rather embarrassed woman in uniform, awkwardly trying to hide her prosthesis under the sleeve. The happiness from seeing her family, as described before the mission, is substituted with a painful and rather sad meeting, where the only one whom Vanessa wants to hug is her little son. She shuts herself off from everybody. The only person, as she thinks, who might understand her is Will—the doctor, who saved her life back in Iraq. She comes to visit him but instead of a friend whom she expected to meet there, she has to communicate with a doctor whom Will assumes Vanessa wants to get professional help from. “Jesus! Everybody is just trying to drug me!” (Home of the Brave 2006), she exclaims, realising that the doctor, whom she considered a hero, the one, who went through the same hell, now pretends that everything is back to normal and they all just have to play the roles they had played before Iraq. Homeland, therefore, makes Vanessa face two major problems. First, she must learn how to live with the prosthesis: to stroke her child, to manage a household, to work as a coach, to make love to a man. Second, she has to overcome a psychological barrier, as she realises that she will not get the attention that she so much craves for. The only person who succeeds in making her heart melt is her colleague at a sport school—the only character who asks her how she lost her hand and how it was in Iraq. Jamal—also a war veteran—finds himself in a similar situation. His backaches never cease, and thus his body constantly reminds him of the war experience in Iraq. The film vividly illustrates a significant issue raised by Ian Bremmer: [H]undreds of thousands of those who have served in this country’s wars are trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare that frustrates their ability to receive the physical, mental, and emotional health care they need. Veterans

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of the war in Vietnam, who make up nearly 40 percent of those filing new benefit claims, now [2015] face a wide variety of health challenges related to advanced age. Another 20 percent of claims comes from service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan (Bremer 2015).

The physical pain is, however, incomparable to the psychological one: Jamal constantly remembers in flashbacks the house they were checking, and the scared Arab woman suddenly running out of one of the rooms, and himself immediately shooting her. Jamal is angry for two reasons: first, because he shot an innocent civilian woman; second, because he cannot forget about it. His girlfriend does not want to see him either, and not really realising what he is doing, he is taking her and a group of people working with her hostage. Tommy—another veteran—tries to stop him, and he succeeds but the police, misunderstanding the actions of Jamal, shoot him dead. Homeland for Jamal, therefore, is not only a place where nobody wants to help him; it is a place that rejects him, for he no longer fits the “norms and standards” of all other humans living there. Hence, it becomes easier to get rid of him, instead of facilitating his reintegration. The problem of society’s unwillingness to understand the veteran echoes in the story of Will, too. Being a doctor, he is represented as the one who has the highest social status: a good job, a loving family, a big house. Yet, when he returns home, people who surround him do not seem to be so close anymore. There is a war being fought right in Will’s house. His wife tries to make Will talk to her about his experience in Iraq; his son, who becomes a pacifist not only because he is against violence in general but also because his father had to become part of that violence, does not want to communicate with him anymore. Will, in turn, shrinks into himself, and, after sleepless nights, considers alcohol the only solution to his problems. Nonetheless, his wife does not allow him to be alone in that situation and, having prevented him from committing suicide, she makes Will visit a psychologist. That is where Will finally articulates his problems, telling about what happened to him in Iraq, when once he was not able to save the lives of young guys whose names he did not even know. Will’s return becomes a hard trial for him but his story, or rather its resolution, is radically different from that of Jamal. It can be easily explained by the fact that Will still has a family who take care of him; he has children whom he lives for; he has a good job; finally, he has money for a good psychologist. Jamal did not have any of those. There was nobody for Jamal to save him. Homeland, therefore, is a place of salvation for Will, but only because his social status enables it. Finally, the story of Tommy is perhaps the most tragic one as it uncovers one’s complete estrangement from homeland. Having lost his

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best friend in action, Tommy cannot get over his grief. It is not only the burden of his own war that tortures him but also the pain from realisation that the guy whom he knew for many years will never even have a chance to try to continue living. Tommy cannot find a job and eventually starts selling tickets in the cinema. He is the only character in the film who is so explicitly portrayed as being in contradiction with social norms, unable to fit in: there is no job for him; the uniform of a cinema worker makes him look ridiculous; at nights he just drives his car; his father calls him a “pussy” (Home of the Brave 2006) blaming him for complaining all the time instead of being a real man. The only way out that Tommy finds for himself is to reenlist and return to Iraq. This is what he does at the end of the film. Thus, in case of Tommy, homeland—an idyllic place of love and peace—turns into a nightmare that is even worse than the battlefield. The four stories unveil four obstacles that homeland may put on the way of a war veteran. These obstacles, however, overlap, revealing a characteristic of homeland to be not a place of peace that soldiers so much want to return to but a place of suffering and alienation. It is enough to remember the first scenes of being home as represented in Home of the Brave. Will leaves his family and friends who grill in the backyard, taking his beer and getting back inside the house alone. Tommy and Jamal meet at the funeral of their comrade. Vanessa is displayed in her room, sitting on the bed, trying to unbutton her military jacket, and failing to do so with one hand only. The camera lingers on her face for some time, and the audience witnesses despair and sadness that change to firmness and confidence for multiple times. Vanessa is at first angry for not being able to perform such a simple task as to unbutton her jacket; then, she looks exhausted from being so helpless; she raises her head up, silently appealing to God, as if asking “why me?”; later, her face turns into that of a real warrior as she tries to make herself be strong; then, immediately, tears fill up her eyes, and she raises her head up again, almost weeping, and then stops, as if trying to say that even if she is not able to overcome all the hardships, she will do her best to do so. All the four characters are fighters; all of them are heroes—but heroes whom hardly anybody cares for. The United States of America, whose interests they were fighting for, becomes a more foreign country to them than Iraq; their homeland turns into a more dangerous place for them than the land of their enemy. The veterans feel comfortable only communicating with other soldiers or veterans. This communication, however, happens all the time in Iraq and practically never in the U.S. There is a very provocative scene in the film when Vanessa, buying cinema tickets for herself and her son, recognises Tommy and they engage in conversation.

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Tommy tells her about his loss; they vigorously discuss what medication helps them, share that they watch the History Channel at night when they cannot sleep, and so on. They are the only people who can say to each other: “I know exactly what you mean.” Neither their children, nor parents, nor lovers, nor friends have this privilege. The film makes it explicit that only a veteran can say this to a veteran, once again underscoring spatial, physical, and psychological limits that homeland pushes war veterans to. Vanessa confesses to Tommy: I barely know you. But I’m sitting here with you and I feel like I’ve known you my entire life. And then there are all those people that I do actually know and now I just don’t feel like I know them at all (Home of the Brave 2006).

This is what Tommy apparently feels, too. By the examples of these two people, the film overtly attempts to convey a more general message, namely that this is what to a certain degree every veteran feels. The prize that a soldier, or rather a veteran, receives upon his/her return is not recognition and understanding but rejection. Home of the Brave provides three possible ways the life of the veteran can unfold in: first, veterans stay in their home country and suffer either physically, or psychologically, or both, like Will and Vanessa do; second, they fall victims to society and literally die—exactly what happens to Jamal; third, they leave their homeland in order to stay sane and alive, and go back to war, like Tommy does. Home of the Brave is a fine cinematic example that openly criticises society and, consequently, homeland as a social construct for not being able to bear responsibility for what it makes its members experience. While there is a considerable number of films that deal with the problem of war veterans, like, for example, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Coming Home (1978), First Blood (1982), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), The Veteran (2011), and American Sniper (2014), Home of the Brave stands out from this list due to the film’s attempt to provide a more detailed commentary on the issue. Narrating the stories of such different people, Home of the Brave aims at accentuating the role that race, class, and gender play in the problem of reintegration, vividly illustrating how these factors can both facilitate and complicate it. Veterans, whom scholars define as “groups of individuals, usually victimized by war in some way,” are left to deal with the problems that indirectly were provoked by the social and political elite of their homeland on their own (Winder and Sivan 1999). Home of the Brave illustrates how veterans are unable to reintegrate, for the only people they can open to are soldiers and

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veterans like them. This can be accurately explained by a speculation that “lacking an identity easily reconstructed in civilian life, many disabled men and their companions succeeded in forming a new identity, a corporate one through their own associations” (Winter 1999). The actions and deeds of war veterans are remembered but they turn into more generalised, collective memories of a specific battle or war. Scholars state that “the story of the war will remain collective property,” whereas “individual memories—painful, exciting, unresolved—will be lost” as the generations of war participants die (Merridale 1999). It is, however, important to consider, as Ted Barris aptly puts it, “the human part,” i.e., “who they [veterans] are, what their perceptions of combat are, what made them respond the way they did, and why the events of war changed them” (Barris 2009). Thus, when Tommy asks Vanessa if she thinks in some time there will be “statues” (Home of the Brave 2006) of them in Iraq as the acknowledgement of what they did for the country, he asks not for real statues but, rather, for remembering him not as part of a collective but as an individual, a human being who experienced his own losses and pain. Every veteran has his/her own story that is often neglected or quickly forgotten, for it merges into collective memory of war.

Bibliography Barris, Ted. 2009. Breaking the Silence: Veterans’ Untold Stories from the Great War to Afghanistan. Toronto: Thomas Allen Publishers. Bremmer, Ian. 2015. Superpower: Three Choices for America’s Role in the World. London: Portfolio Penguin. Donald, Ralph, and Karen MacDonald. 2011. Reel Men at War: Masculinity and the American War Film. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press. Gosline, Jeanie Elenor. 2008. “Trapped: The Iraq War Veteran on Film.” Dissent 55, no. 3: 89-95. Accessed July 28, 2015. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dss/summary/v055/55.3.gosline.html. Home of the Brave. Directed by Irwin Winkler. 2006. Beverly Hills, CA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, DVD. Merridale, Catherine. 1999. “War, Death, and Remembrance in Soviet Russia.” In War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, edited by Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, 61-83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ritchie, Elspeth Cameron. 2015. “Introduction.” In Women at War, edited by Elspeth Cameron Ritchie and Anne L. Naclerio, xv-xxiv. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Toffoletti, Kim, and Victoria Grace. 2010. “Terminal Indifference: The Hollywood War Film Post-September 11.” Film-Philosophy 14, no. 2: 62-83. Accessed July 28, 2015. www.film-philosophy.com/index.php/f-p/article/viewFile/101/270. Winter, Jay. 1999. “Forms of Kinship and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Great War.” In War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, edited by Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, 40-60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winter, Jay, and Emmanuel Sivan. 1999. “Setting the Framework.” In War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, edited by Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, 6-39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CONTRIBUTORS

Eva Baumgärtner, M.A., works at the press department of the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration IZM in Berlin. She is a journalist by profession, and holds a Master’s Degree in political science from the Freie Universität in Berlin. Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Michael Daxner, after his PhD at the University of Vienna (1972) was appointed Professor for Higher Education at the University of Osnabrück in 1974. Between 1986 and 1998 he was President of the University of Oldenburg, where he later obtained a chair in Sociology until 2011. 2000-2002 he served as Principal International Officer with UNMIK in Kosovo, since 2003 he is active in peace-building in Afghanistan. Daxner has acted as a Board Member for International Higher Education (EUA, IAUP) and worked in conflict areas with the Council of Europe, DAAD, and other IGOs. Daxner earned honorary degrees from Towson University and Novosibirsk State University. He is Dty. Chair of the Board for the University of Marburg. Since 2010 Daxner has been leading the Afghanistan project of the Collaborative Research Center 700 at Free University Berlin. He also directs peace & conflict research in Caucasus since 2010 and was a team leader in the Governance Forum Afghanistan (2015-16). Currently, he directs research projects on the Afghan Diaspora in Germany and on veterans from German out of area deployment (see for example his publications Homeland Discourse—The German Case. Working Paper, University of Stuttgart IRWP 2013/1; and Michael Daxner (ed.). Deutschland in Afghanistan. BIS Verlag Oldenburg. 2014). Michael Galbas, M.A., is a lecturer of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) at the Institute of Philology, Journalism and Intercultural Communication, Southern Federal University Rostov on Don. At the department of History/Eastern European History, University of Konstanz/Germany, he is writing his PhD thesis on the memories of the Soviet-Afghan War in today's Russia. Among his publications are “Afghanistanveteranen, Veteranenverbände und die Geschichtspolitik im Putin-Russland” In Sovietnam. Die UdSSR in Afghanistan 1979 – 1989, edited by Tanja Penter and Esther Meier. 233-251. Paderborn 2017; “‘Our

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Pain and Our Glory’: Strategies of Legitimization and Functionalization of the Soviet–Afghan War in the Russian Federation.” In The Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 1 (2015) 2: 91-132. Tim Kucharzewski, M.A., received his B.A. in History and Anglistics/Americanistics at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University Bonn and holds a Master’s degree in “Military Studies” from the University of Potsdam. He completed internships at institutions including the ZMSBw or the UN. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in the field of War and Conflict Studies at the University of Potsdam, writing about the conflicts in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Georgia. His PhD is being supported by a grant from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. His recent publications focus on the intersection of game studies and war: “Die Nacht, in der ich Bush tötete. Erfahrungsbericht aus dem digitalen Jihad.” In: Spiel-KulturWissenschaften, “I, Terrorist. Narratives of Terrorism in Call of Duty.” In Call of Duty Essay Collection, edited by Nate C. Garrlets. McFarland. 2017. Marion Näser-Lather, PhD, has studied European Ethnology and Philosophy. After her PhD in European Ethnology on soldier families of the German Armed Forces (Bundeswehrfamilien, Nomos 2011), she held postdoctoral positions at the DFG Research Training Group “Automatisms” at the University of Paderborn, at the Institute for European Ethnology/Cultural Science of the University of Marburg and at the Institute for Historical Sciences and European Ethnology (Innsbruck University). After finishing her habilitation project on the new Italian Feminist Movement “Se Non Ora Quando?”, Marion Näser-Lather is currently conducting a BMBF project on antifeminist discourses at the Center for Gender Studies and Feminist Future Research of the Philipps-University Marburg. Among her research interests are Critical Military Studies, Gender Studies, social movements and digitization. Her ongoing research on the German Armed Forces focusses on gender issues and deployment experiences, e.g., the paper “Experiencing war. The reconfiguration of the senses among German soldiers deployed to Afghanistan.” In: Critical Military Studies 2016. Silvia-Lucretia Nicola, M.A., holds a B.A. in Political Science from the Free University of Berlin and the University of Granada, as well as a M.A. in Military History and Sociology from the University of Potsdam. She is currently working as a Research Associate at the Felsberg Institute for Education and Academic Research, as well as a policy consultant. During

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the past three years, Ms. Nicola worked on various development cooperation projects on Afghanistan for GIZ and the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Her academic interests lie on the research of various forms of violence, the dynamics of (armed) conflicts, and international organizations, such as the EU, NATO and the UN. Ms. Nicola’s regional focus falls on Afghanistan and the Middle East. She holds strong expertise on Iraq, especially its northern parts, the Autonomous Region of Kurdistan. Among her most recent publications are articles co-authored with Müzehher Selcuk: “Das kurdische schwarze Gold:” In: ÖMZ (Austrian Military Journal) 2 (2015), 142-151; and, with Tim Kucharzewski: “Contrasting Education Policies regarding the Holocaust and the World WAR II in East Germany and Romania. A schoolbook comparison.” In Holocaust. Studii si Cercetari IX, no. 1 (10) /2017, Bucharest and several studies on the Autonomous Region of Kurdistan, such as: Adding ‘oil’ to the fire? International Economic Cooperation and the Dynamics of Contentions. The Case Study of the Autonomous Region of Kurdistan. FI Working Paper No.9, edition eins: Felsberg, 2017. Tatiana Prorokova, Ph.D, is currently working on her second book project that examines representations of the environment and climate change in fiction since the Industrial Revolution (financed through the Equal Opportunity Scholarship for Outstanding Female Junior Scholars, MARA, the University of Marburg, Germany). She holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Marburg, Germany, a European Joint Master’s Degree in English and American Studies from the University of Bamberg, Germany, and a Teaching Degree in English and German from Ryazan State University, Russia. In 2016, she was a Visiting Scholar at the University of South Alabama, USA (English Department & Center for the Study of War and Memory). Her research interests include war studies, ecocriticism, gender studies, and race studies. She is a co-editor of Cultures of War in Graphic Novels: Violence, Trauma, and Memory (forthcoming in 2018 with Rutgers University Press). Prof. Dr. Birgitte Refslund Sørensen, has been Junior Professional Officer at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development and served as a consultant for Danida, GTZ, WHO, UNIFEM, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and on several Danish veteran projects. She is currently an associate professor at the Department of Anthropology of the University of Copenhagen/Denmark. Relevant publications (selection): Together with Mads Daugbjerg: “Becoming a warring nation: The Danish ‘military moment’ and its repercussions.” In: Critical Military Studies 3(1):

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1-6, 2017; “Public commemorations of Danish soldiers: monuments, memorials, and tombstones.” In Critical Military Studies 3(1): 27-49, 2017; “Veterans' homecomings: Secrecy and post-deployment social becoming.” In Current Anthropology 56, No. Supplement 12: 231-240, 2015. Philipp Schultheiss, M.A., studied political science and peace and conflict studies in Tübingen, Istanbul and Marburg. He is a fellow of the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship (Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED Diktatur), Berlin, as well as a lecturer and PhD candidate at the Centre for Conflict Studies, Philipps-University Marburg, Germany. His research interests are in politics of memory, transitional justice, veterans’ culture and grounded theory method. Relevant publications: Cárdenas, Maria; Schultheiß, Philipp. 2017. “Kriegstraumata und ihre Langzeitfolgen in Guatemala.” In 360° Journal 21(1): 20-31; Cárdenas, Maria; Schultheiß, Philipp. 2013. “Das zerrissene Geflecht der Seele. Sozial- und individualpsychologische Langzeitfolgen des internen Konflikts in Guatemala.” In Wissenschaft und Frieden 2/2013: 6-9. Maria Vivod, PhD, is an associate researcher (freelance status) at CNRS (Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques) research laboratory UMR 7367 “Dynamics of Europe” Strasbourg, France. She defended her PhD thesis from Ethnology in 2005 at the University of Strasbourg/France. Maria Vivod gives lectures, makes documentaries and publishes in German, English, French, Hungarian, Serbian. She also holds a degree (1996) in French Literature from the University of Novi Sad, Serbia. Beside peace and conflict studies, she is also interested in Visual Anthropology. Ms. Vivod is the author of several ethnographic documentaries which are part of the permanent exposition of the media library of Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Relevant publications (selection): “In the Shadow of the Serbian Paramilitary Units: Narrative Patterns about the Role of Paramilitary Units in Former Yugoslav Conflict.” In Advances in Anthropology 3(1). 2013. DOI: 10.4236/aa.2013.31004; “Between a collective amnesia and a memory reconstruction: the case of the Serbian paramilitary units.” In Die sozio-kulturelle (De-)Konstruktion des Vergessens. Bruch und Kontinuität in den Gedächtnisrahmen um 1945 und 1989, edited by Nicoletta Diasio and Klaus Wieland. 275-287. Bielefeld. 2012. The Master and its Servants: The Entangled Web between the Serbian Secret Service, Organized Crime, and Paramilitary Units in the Yugoslav Conflict. New York: Nova Science Publisher. 2015.

INDEX

9/11 100-101, 166 Abkhaz, Caucasus 15 Afghanistan Danish military engagement 26, 40 German military engagement xviii, 8, 15, 52, 53, 93, 99, 100-102, 117, 126 OEF 9 PTSD treatment 11 Soviet–Afghan War xxiii, 134136, 138-139, 141-142, 146, 151152, 154-155 Soviet intervention 134-144, 146150, 152-156 US military engagement 4, 100, 169 US female soldiers 167 war 3, 101, 137, 146 Afgantsy 135-140, 143-144, 146, 148, 154-157 All Saints 103 altruistic self-harming 75 appreciation xv, 53-57, 62-64, 67-69, 126 biographical construction 146 Bosnia-Herzegovina 73, 76, 78, 83, 117 Bund Deutscher Veteranen 54, 56, 59, 61-68 Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces) definition of veterans xviii, xix, 58, 94 female soldiers xii, 94 historical foundation xxi, 91, 9798, 118-119

institution xii, xv, xvii, 3, 17, 54, 63, 94-95, 103, 105, 111, 116, 120-125, 127 medial representation 9, 115-116 missions abroad ix, xi, xvii, 7-8, 52-53, 63, 66, 92-93, 95, 99, 102, 111,113 perception by society xxiii, 17, 62, 64, 66, 101, 111-114, 119 PTSD treatment xxi, 4, 9, 13-15, 17 Canadian Armed Forces 16 career change 23, 25, 27, 29 civil-military relations 31 citizens in uniform xv, 63, 97, 120 collective memory xxii, xxiii, 68, 85, 98, 100-101, 137, 172 combat veteran xix, 120 Combat Veteran (association) 5456, 58, 61-62, 64-67, 69, 105 comradeship 55-56, 67, 104, 123, 142 Churchill, Winston 2 Clausewitz, Carl von 2 CHARLY (Chaos Driven Situations Management Retrieval System) 14 Combat Fatigue 4-5 commemoration 60, 138-141, 149 Commemoration of the Dead 103 conscription xvii, 81, 98 conscript 72-72, 76 Croatia 73, 76, 78, 83 cultural intimacy 74 cultural memory xvi, 137 Dallaire, Roméo 16 Denmark ix, 23-27, 30 Deutscher Bundeswehrverband 52-54, 56, 59, 60-64, 66-68

Conflict Veterans deployment returnees ix, x, xxiii, 7, 8, 13, 16, 18, 52-55, 58-63, 65, 67, 110, 111, 113, 115 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) 2 draft 58, 72, 76, 78-79, 81, 98 drone, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) xix, 12 drone industry 30 duty xviii, 5, 17, 26-27, 36, 40-41, 63, 77, 82, 104, 117, 124-125, 138139, 142, 146, 152, 166 dyssemia 74 economy of nationalism 75, 86 Einsatz-Weiterverwendungsgesetz 60 Einsatzversorgungsgesetz 60 EinsatzversorgungsVerbesserungsgesetz 60 Eisblume 13 elitism 127 entitlement 140 European Court for Human Rights (ECHR) xxii, 73, 78-79, 86 execution 23, 33-34, 36, 44-45 expertise 23, 33, 41, 44-45 female soldier 94, 167 fighter 15, 73, 78, 99-100, 111, 115, 123, 143, 145 film vii, 8, 9, 27, 110, 136, 137, 142143, 153-154, 156, 164-168, 170171 First World War xii, xvi, 4, 5, 17, 77, 112 gender viii-xi, 33, 93, 167-168, 171 German Bundestag 60-61 Germany East Germany xvii, 92, 118 PTSD treatment 4, 7-8, 12-17 veterans affairs vii, ix-x, xii-xv, xvii-xxii, 3, 6, 52-53, 67, 9194, 98, 100, 103-105, 111-113, 115, 118, 122 glorification xxiii, 134-135, 140, 142, 145-146, 150, 152, 154-156 Guttenberg, Karl-Theodor zu 7, 114

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HaveKompagniet (the Garden Company) 30 hero vii, x, xii, xv, xxii, xxiii, 26, 58, 83, 91-92, 102-104, 110-127, 134, 136, 140-142, 144-147, 150-152, 155-157, 165, 168, 170 Hollywood 8, 110, 164 Holocaust 6, 112 homeland xx, xxiii, 101, 112-114, 139, 164, 166, 168-171 Homeland Discourse 94, 100-101 Homeland (series) 8 Home of the Brave xxiii, 164, 166167, 170-172 identity 44, 53, 83, 113, 172 collective identity 55, 66 crisis identity 121 cultural identity 137 institutionalised identity 33, 42, 44 new work identity 23, 32, 44 Innere Führung 97, 119 Interforce 29 Iraq 9-11, 26, 40, 110, 165-170, 172 ISAF 7, 114 Jünger, Ernst 2 KFOR 7 killing x, 7, 12, 97-98, 102,115, 121, 164 Kosovo 52, 73, 75-82, 86, 92-93, 100101 Kunduz 111, 112, 115, 116, 125 law 28, 43, 59-61, 65, 67, 76-79, 81, 86, 138, 154 legislation 66, 77, 78, 85 Leviathan 86 lobbying xx, 29, 57, 60, 67, 68 S.L.A. Marshall 7 martyr 103 masculinity 33, 44, 112 medals 16-17, 26, 36, 102, 125, 155 Cross of Honour 17, 114, 116, 120, 125 Purple Heart 16 Sacrifice Medal 16

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media xii, xxiii, 9, 17, 24, 27-28, 30, 52, 54, 61, 64, 65, 68, 75, 81, 83, 86, 94, 115, 121, 137, 152, 156 Members of Parliament (MPs) 61, 63, 65 memory culture 112 meta-communication 75 militarisation 96, 139-140, 154-155, 157 military-civilian trajectories 45 Ministry of Defence British xvi German (BMVg) xviii, 60, 63, 97, 105 Serbian 76 Yugoslav 77 moral xi, xv, 26, 31-32, 57, 75, 81-84, 96, 113, 115, 138 motivation 23, 33, 34, 38, 40, 44, 58 narrative interviews 136, 145 nation state xx, 74-75, 82 nation building 156 Nationale Volksarmee xvii, 92 nationalism 110, 118 ethnic nationalism 75, 83-87 narrative xi-xiii, 3, 23, 27, 43-44, 73, 85, 92-94, 110, 135-137, 139, 142146, 149-150, 153-154, 156-157 NATO 3, 4, 9, 79-81, 91, 93, 139 Nazi Regime 112, 119 NGO 15, 97 oral history 154 parallel society 125, 127 Particular Way xii, xxi, xxii, 92 patriotism 75, 84, 85, 104, 110 Penance Day 103 Poppy Day 103 post-deployment career 23, 28, 30, 33, 45 post-military life 24, 32, 33, 43, 44 post heroic society 113, 125 Post-Vietnam Syndrome 5 PTSD viii, 2, 5-9, 27, 32, 35, 40-41, 82, 99 Afghanistan xiv, 8

treatment xxi, 3-4, 9, 10, 12-19, 94, 96 Putin, Vladimir 135, 138, 139, 140 race 167, 171 recognition xv-xvi, xix, xii, 27, 56-57, 59, 62-64, 66-69, 95, 100, 104105, 113-115, 119, 126, 141, 171 Recognition and Support 26 social recognition x, 26-27, 53, 60, 62, 64, 127, 154-157 theory of recognition 53-55, 57 Recondos 105 refugee 39, 66, 72, 81 reintegration xv, 29, 118, 141, 164, 169, 171 rejection 43, 112, 171 Remembrance Day 105 reserve military reserve 66, 72, 73, 75-81, 85, 95 Reserve Association 105 reservist 66, 79 Reservistenverband 53-56, 59, 60, 65-68 Dr Albert “Skip” Rizzo 11 Russia ix, xxii, 110, 134-143, 152, 154-157 Russian Alliance of Veterans of Afghanistan (RSVA) 135, 136, 140, 141 sacrifice 27, 83, 102, 103, 113-115, 123, 124, 139, 140 Second World War ix, xvii, xxi, xxii, 5, 6, 7, 16, 68, 91, 99, 112, 119, 135, 139, 140, 144, 145, 155 security viii, xi, xvii, xxi, xxii, 23, 25, 31, 33-37, 44-45, 62, 92-93, 95-96, 100-101, 122, 139-140, 149 shell shock 4-5 situational schizophrenia 75 Serbia ix, xxii, 72-87 Sherman, William T. 2 social communication 137 social group vii, ix, x, xvi, xviii-xx, xxii, 8, 52-57, 65, 67-68, 75, 9293, 99, 104-105, 137, 165

Conflict Veterans social imaginaries 43 soldier families vii, xi, xiv, xvi, 6, 9, 43, 54, 102, 113, 116, 124, 166167 Sonderweg xii, xxii, 91-93, 99, 101, 106 Soviet Union 92, 141, 144, 147-149, 153 stigmatisation 43 SS 112 strike xxii, 73, 75-77, 81, 82, 84, 86 The Ninth Company (film) 136, 142, 143, 153, 154, 156 Third Reich 112, 118 Totensonntag 103 Trump, Donald 17 unemployment 25, 28 United Kingdom xii, 5, 110 United States of America vii, ix, xii, xvi, xxi, 3-4, 7-9, 12-13, 16, 26, 53, 100, 105, 110, 142, 164, 166167, 170 U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs xvi, 10 values xxii, xxiii, 56, 116, 121, 123125, 143, 144, 146

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Velkommen Hjem (Welcome Home) 30 veteran Veterancenteret (the Veterans Centre) 27 Veteran CrossOver 29 Veterans Day 17 Veterans’ Organisations xxii, 52, 53, 56, 65, 140, 142, 143, 156 victimisation 27, 43, 136, 144, 148151, 155-157 Vietnam 3, 4, 6-10, 58, 148, 169 Virtual Reality (VR) 3, 10, 11, 13 Vojvodina 72, 82 War On Terror 111, 166 warrior xv, xxiii, 26, 110, 111, 119, 150, 170 Wald der Erinnerung 60 Wehrmacht xvii, 68, 91, 92, 94, 97, 103, 104, 112, 114, 119, 121 Weimar Republic 112, 119 welfare 29, 30, 43, 54, 59-62, 64, 67, 68, 96, 136, 140, 154 Yugoslavia xxii, 72, 76, 85