Inclination Toward Death: Suicide, Sacrifice, and State Collapse in First World War Germany

Abstract

“Inclination Toward Death: Suicide, Sacrifice, and State Collapse in First World War Germany” examines the history of self-destruction in German-controlled territory from 1914 to 1918. It reconstructs the historically-situated meanings and experiences of wartime suicide, their relations to the concept of “sacrifice,” and how these relations ultimately influenced and inflected the political behavior of Germany’s denizens. Drawing on the surviving military, juridical, and medical records on German suicides; diaries, letters, photographs, and other personal documents held in both private and public archives, as well as published collections; the extant statistical data; and a variety of governmental and military records, “Inclination Toward Death” explores how moral assumptions about the righteousness of sacrificing one’s life for a higher cause combined with state-mandated bureaucratic and military practices to enable both soldiers and civilians to categorically separate “suicide” from “sacrifice” throughout the war. While the deaths contemporaries defined as “suicides” were rare and exceptional, they highlighted the specific ways that the political and military authorities’ wartime decisions engendered the mass shattering of socio-emotional ties and moral certainties, which proved integral to the Imperial regime’s delegitimization and eventual collapse.

Simultaneously, “Inclination Toward Death” examines the bureaucratic, archival, and historiographical processes through which the Imperial state attempted to obscure these histories of self-destruction and the larger socio-emotional devastation left in their wake, the role those processes played in the history of the regime’s collapse, and their continuing effects in the present literature. When the latent, implicit self-destructiveness of the sacrificial consensus of 1914 became blatant and overt over the course of 1918, sacrifice “became” suicide, and Germans rejected calls for a “final battle,” ultimately refusing to continue fighting in 1918—collapsing the regime and permanently removing Imperial Germany from the geo-political map in the process. From the very beginning of the war, suicide was not the inverse or “flipside” of sacrifice, but its largely unspoken, implicit shadow: what sacrifice risked becoming in the absence of an adequate victory. “Inclination Toward Death” thus explores how and why the Imperial German regime ended in the course of the First World War, how this violent end inflected the specific conditions of possibility for the new Weimar regime, and what this history of death and erasure can illustrate about the methodological possibilities of history and the meta-historical nature of social and political power.