In the domestic realm, people continue to use violence against their partners, children, and pets, and violence occurs frequently in relatively isolated social realms like churches and boarding schools. Fistfights and attacks are still common in public spaces like sports arenas, nightclubs, bars, and subways as well as on the street. In addition, there are regular forms of organized public violence beyond the state monopoly, for instance, at boxing or martial arts contests or performances in S&M clubs. One need only to take a drive on an ordinary highway to experience the chronic potential for violence and even homicide among perfectly normal people. It is impossible to imagine television, cinema, or computer games without violence. Indeed, as everyday reality increasingly distances itself from violence, our need for symbolic or compensatory acts of violence may even be growing. And internationally, humankind is far removed indeed from any sort of monopoly on force. States still wage war, no matter how problematic that might be for relatively pacifist societies like contemporary Germany.
In other words, violence has by no means disappeared from societies that consider themselves fundamentally nonviolent. It exists at all times as both a fact and a possibility, and as such plays a major role in human imaginations. That, too, is a kind of presence, even in situations where violence would seem to be absent. If we rewind history seven decades, back to the point when Pohl and Meyer’s conversation took place, and consider how much closer to violence people were back then, we will realize that exercising and suffering from violence was something many people experienced on a daily basis. Corporal punishment and severity were the norm in the Wilhelmine educational system of the nineteenth century. Indeed, they were considered not only permissible, but essential to a child’s proper upbringing.90 The educational reforms of the early twentieth century were nothing more than a reflexive response to this phenomenon. Violence continued to feature in German educational institutions of all levels as well as in agricultural labor and trade apprenticeships.
On all levels of society, violence was much more present than it is today. Political violence was common in the Weimar Republic, which saw no shortage of brawls at political meetings, street fights between left- and right-wingers, and political assassinations. Moreover, everyday social interactions—between police and detainees, husbands and wives, teachers and pupils, and parents and children—were permeated with physical violence. After taking power, the Nazis further undermined the state monopoly on legitimate force. Para-state organizations like the SA arose alongside the actual state and operated as a kind of auxiliary police force. They exercised massive violence until the summer of 1934 without ever being called to account by the government. We have already discussed the socializing function of violence and its capacity for differentiating groups within a society, and there is no doubt that the violence perpetrated against Jews and other persecuted groups helped raise the level of violence in Nazi society and in the everyday consciousness of its members.
A pilot and low-level officer named Hagen, for example, described the situation as follows:
HAGEN: I took part in all that business with the Jews in 1936—these poor Jews! (Laughter.) We smashed the window panes and hauled the people out. They quickly put on some clothes and (we drove them) away. We made short work of them. I hit them on the head with an iron truncheon. It was great fun. I was in the SA at that time. We used to go along the streets at night and haul them out. No time was lost, we packed them off to the station and away they went. They were out of the village and gone in a flash. They had to work in quarries but they would rather be shot than work. There was plenty of shooting, I assure you. As early as 1932, we used to stand outside the windows and shout: “Germany awake!”91
