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The World from Berlin

Germany's Shame

The publication of images showing German soldiers playing with a skull in Afghanistan have unleashed outrage in Berlin. But it's a war zone after all -- and it's about time the German public realizes it.

For years, Germany has been happy to believe the best of its soldiers in Afghanistan. The troops are there, so goes the public perception, to help provide security in a dangerous part of the world and to prevent the Islamist Taliban from once again taking power. The country's soldiers, the myth holds, are little more than helpful, concerned citizens in uniform. The mission, a largely humanitarian one.

The pictures release by tabloid Bild Zeitung on Wednesday, though, have turned that perception on its head. The images, apparently taken in spring of 2003, show soldiers playing and posing with a human skull. One particularly disgusting picture shows a soldier holding his penis up to the skull's mouth. Where the skull came from remains a matter of speculation -- perhaps from a mass grave -- but the images have done their damage.

Reaction has been quick, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel calling the images "repugnant" and Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung saying "those who behave like that have no place in the Bundeswehr," -- though four of the six soldiers involved are no longer in the German armed forces. An investigation was quickly able to identify all the soldiers involved and defense ministry said it will be "merciless" in its prosecution of the case. The press, too, has jumped on the story on Thursday.

But not all. The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung argues that the images were ultimately to be expected. "In Afghanistan, despite assurances to the contrary, a war is being waged and every war brings innumerable and inconceivable abominations with it." Indeed, the paper points out, it was Freud who said during World War I that mankind hadn't sunk as far as it thought because it hadn't previously risen as far as it thought. The main shock value of the photos, the papers argues, comes from the fact that they don't fit in with Germans' image of what their modern-day army stands for -- namely an armed group of humanitarian helpers. That image, though, is wrong. The images of German troops playing with the skull "don't show just any old disgusting game, rather it is a war game." A game, in other words, that shows a ritual of young men asserting power over their enemy, even if the skull may be that of an innocent civilian. But what if the game showed something else as well, the paper wonders? What if "the gesture of absolute superiority" is merely a sign of the disappointment and confusion German soldiers must feel after coming to Afghanistan as saviors and being treated as invaders? What if the pictures were made "to demonstrate a superiority that in reality doesn't exist?" In other words, it's time for Germany to wake up. "Germany wanted to help, but we ended up in a war."

Almost the entire front page of the left-leaning daily Die Tageszeitung is black on Thursday for the occasion. The headline in white: "We Are the Pope" -- a reference to the Bild Zeitung headline when Josef Ratzinger was elected as pope. But this time, the word "pope" is crossed out and replaced by the word "wankers." Inside, though, the paper goes surprisingly easy on the soldiers. After all, the paper points out, it's a skull -- maybe even that of a Russian soldier from the time when the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan. It's not as if German soldiers were torturing real live human beings like the US military did. Still, though, the photos show the supposed "good guys" who are supposed to be in the service of "freedom against the supposed anarchistic, pre-modern 'bad guys.'" They prove "that the achievement we call civilization is in reality quite fragile." At some level, though, the photos are honest, the paper argues. "The German soldiers present to the world merely the reality that exists in Afghanistan: poorly outfitted, powerless, fearful men who, in a last effort at self-affirmation, have the courage to show a skull just what a soldier is made of."

The mass-circulation tabloid Bild Zeitung, following its standard practice, sinks its teeth further into the story on Thursday. Aside from its daily, half-naked Page One Girl, the first three pages are devoted to coverage of the German military and reactions to the images. "Who Actually Trains Our Soldiers," one headline wonders. And gap-toothed commentator Franz Josef Wagner writes that he is ashamed to be German when he sees the pictures. "If we're honest," he writes, "we can see the fear and the desperation. I would withdraw our soldiers from the Hindu Kush because (our soldiers) should remain human and not animals."

SPIEGEL ONLINE's Claus Christian Malzahn, who has reported from the battlefield in Afghanistan, places a large share of the blame at the feet of the government. Not that Berlin is to be blamed for the soldier's having defiled a skull. "Such incidents cannot be excused, not even with the constant stress that soldiers have to live with in war zones." But it was the government, at the end of the day, which sought to spread the image of German soldiers as "armed social workers." At the same time, the government did its best to hide the fact that Afghanistan is a place where "nightmares are a part of everyday life." The policy of covering up the full scope of the danger was not followed "out of interest for the military security of the government, but rather for the political security of a government that didn't want to admit that German soldiers overseas weren't just there to distribute candy to children but also to kill the enemy."

It's a point of view to which the center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung subscribes as well. Germany has to get used to the idea that, even if it prefers to see its soldiers as helpers rather than part of an armed military, many of the regions it is operating in are war zones. "It is hardly news that conditions at the front are different from those in the barracks or in course rooms. This is something that the cabinet and the parliament has to consider each time it sends the Bundeswehr on a so-called peace mission."

Finally, the conservative Die Welt agrees that it's time Germany wakes up to the fact that the military exists to fight and not just to participate in humanitarian missions. "Soldiers are also fighters." But it's also time that Germany sets aside its superiority complex with regards to its soldiers. The country, the paper argues, has tended toward believing that its soldiers are more sensitive, more enlightened and more peaceful than those from other countries. Indeed, "German public opinion has leaned toward treating isolated excesses, like the GIs in Iraq's Abu Ghraib, as proof for the baseness of the entire US army." The new photos of German soldiers with the skull should now teach us otherwise, the paper writes.

-- Charles Hawley, 12:30 p.m. CET