Thoughts on war: Otl Aicher, “the first sunday” – The beginning of the Second World War (Published on 16/06/2025)
Very readable and instructive are – not least because of their increasingly topical relevance – reports by those who were forced into military service and participation in the war despite being as opponents of the regime and war as such are.
Standing out insofar is the book “innenseiten des kriegs” (“insides of war”) by Otto “Otl” Aicher from 1985. Otl Aicher, born on 13/05/1922 in Ulm and deceased on 01/09/1991 in Günzburg, was an important German graphic designer. He was married to Inge Aicher-Scholl, the eldest sister of Hans and Sophie Scholl, members of the “White Rose” group who called for resistance against the National Socialist dictatorship and were executed for this on 22/02/1943.
Otl Aicher grew up in a home critical of the Nazis and came into contact with the Scholl siblings through a school friendship. As a convinced Catholic, he refused to join the Hitler Youth and was therefore imprisoned in 1937 and barred from taking his school-leaving exams in 1941. In the same year, Aicher was conscripted into the Wehrmacht and turned down an offer to become an officer. Due to a self-inflicted injury to his hand, he was able to avoid military service for a while, but was nevertheless drafted and sent to the Eastern Front. He deserted at the beginning of 1945 and successfully hid until the end of the war.
In 1985, he published his book “innenseiten des kriegs”, written entirely in small letters, in which he describes his experiences with the military, the war and the social zeitgeist of the time with unsparing candor.
Some excerpts from it are reproduced here as a reminder and as food for thought.
In the chapter “das verseuchte denken” (“contaminated thinking”), Otl Aicher reflects on the significance of the belief in natural science and the transfer of the rules of nature to human civilization and culture as causes of fascist thinking in the 1930s and 1940s (source: Otl Aicher, “innenseiten des kriegs” [1985], p. 9 ff. [translation from German language]):
“the first sunday
it was a bright sunday. it was the first sunday of the war. since the day before yesterday, the shooting is now returned. otherwise we hardly spent sunday with our families. we avoided the petty bourgeois rituals and, armed with a sleeping bag, retreated into the woods and their nights the day before. even in winter. sunday clothes were the last relic of a society of outward appearances. the youth movement gave us forms of behavior that helped us to get past the bourgeoisie by provoking it.
this time it was different. i stayed at home. i had been glued to the radio for days. mostly to listen to foreign stations. later there was a second receiver hidden in a closet, and radio beromünster or the bbc from london whispered out from under winter coats. listening to foreign stations was forbidden and threatened with severe penalties. some people were sent to concentration camps because of it.
we knew that this time it was serious. he played his game with threats and enticements as he had always done during the sudeten crisis. once he offered perpetual peace, spoke of a final demand, then again he threatened to invade gdansk. i knew that the diplomatic game bothered him, the attempt to save peace through embassies and ambassadors. everyone could read what he was really up to. he had written it down, in black and white, unencrypted.
but my mother had not read ‘mein kampf’.
there was no more back and forth. even our fear and trembling was over, ‘since this morning, zero forty-five, we are shooting back’, he had announced the day before yesterday. he had staged a polish raid on radio stations near the border in order to be able to set out to open up a new territory for a ‘people without space’. the east belongs to the germans. since the days of the ‘christian’ knights, since the middle ages, the germans have been moving eastwards.
what should have been historical, perhaps heroic, what should have driven people into the streets or made the church bells ring, was on this sunday a loss of feeling in the middle of a family environment. i had never imagined how a war would start, but i hadn’t thought of it that way.
with sunshine and a sunday roast. on the very days when the second world war began, i found myself isolated in ritual and convention. i found myself among baffled citizens looking for a spirit of optimism, for heroes they would one day venerate, but rejoicing in the beautiful sunday, their roast, their coffee and cake.
i managed to avoid the afternoon coffee and cake. werner scholl called. we arranged to meet after lunch at the end of the village at klosterwald. he came with a friend, ulli, whom i only knew by sight. since the speculation was over, the conversation couldn’t gain much height. the surprising thing about the war was its reality. we stuck to the facts, almost in a businesslike way.
it also sounded quite businesslike when werner asked if i would join him in setting up a resistance group, a sabotage group. i was neither surprised nor dismayed, it was just a question.
how long he thought the war would last, i asked. it would be quick, the english and french had time to arm themselves, they had emerged stronger from the first world war, they had built up a defensive and deployment line along the entire border, they had planes upon planes, tank armies. it would start in a few days.
don’t make fun of me, i said to werner. the war can last a long time. think about how highly technical armies from verdun to lille were so entangled that there was no going back and forth. a resistance group will be exposed sooner or later in this party and police state. everyone has become each other’s spies, since it’s for the fatherland.
werner had a cold audacity. recently, at night, he tied a swastika bandage around the eyes of the bust of justitia in front of the courthouse. she stood there, tall, lofty, a bronze scale in her stone hand, now a piece of cloth with the symbol of the party around her eyes. on the garrison’s hero’s memorial day, there was suddenly a deafening bang during the ceremonial taps on the nightly münsterplatz. a firecracker had gone off. that’s how he was.
werner and i went to the same school class, which was soon to graduate from high school. we had become friends because i stubbornly refused to join the hitler youth. as a result, i was neither admitted to high school nor to university. my isolation in the class had been broken. werner drew his own conclusions from this. he left the nazi organization, which caused a stir. his siblings, especially hans and inge, had previously been in the hitler youth and were known throughout the city.
werner and i determined the political discussion in class, used school essays to make allusions, so that the teachers returned the work to us with the request that it be taken away. we involved teachers, who we had the feeling wouldn’t rat us out, in discussions about the new interpretation of german history and its contradictions. we knew nietzsche, an alleged ideologue of the new state, so well that we could play him off against it.
i trusted werner to organize a conspiratorial group, he would get hold of radios and sabotage material if necessary. but the network of spying and observation was too tight for anyone to survive for long without conspiratorial training. the entire public, from the ‘block warden’ to the ‘house warden’, was riddled with party members, and alongside the party stood the omnipresent secret state police. the walls had ears, and the night had eyes.
was there still any support? could individuals withstand the total isolation? werner and i were not part of any political movement. the parties had already been eliminated six years ago. we had hardly any memories of them. our resistance to the nazis was based on our everyday experience and our perception of how a regime could bring thinking into line. this was not based on reason or insight, but on the often arbitrary directives of its leaders. anyone who resisted was put out of work or disappeared without a trace. they wanted to force to no longer think our own thoughts.
i asked werner if he wasn’t going too far, if he did’t feel he had to pay off a debt because he had once joined the nazis. converts are often more radical than the orthodox. he felt guilty. first and foremost because of the inability of the germans to escape the new state. no one wanted to see what he saw every day, no one wanted to believe what he heard every day. and anyone who uttered a critical word was shunned like a leper, like someone who was tarnishing the great upswing of an entire nation with egotism. they had all elected him.
that can create feelings of guilt. feelings of guilt for an entire people. i talked to werner. i tried to convince him that resistance would only make sense if there was a way to survive. resistance is not an end in itself. it has to happen for the sake of change, out of the will to replace the current world with a different one.
what form of resistance has any chance at all of achieving anything against this state? and only the prospect of success justifies action against it. sacrifice in itself is not a motive. can it be that i was a coward?
how should we behave? should we attack this state like cats of prey, attack it from hiding like snakes, or should we undermine it like moles?
foxes do not resist. they also take out their opponents and get their prey. but they are neither heroic nor loyal, neither incorruptible nor predictable. they have no norms of behavior, but they have an understanding of what is right. they are cunning. they are cowardly without loss of honor. if one action has yielded nothing, then just do it the next time. they are not loyal to their methods as a method if they yield nothing. a deer is a fleeing animal, it hurries away, the fox does not flee, it uses an intelligence of adaptation, of disguise, of assertion through inconspicuousness. it builds castles under the earth and operates above ground. it lives underground and also gets its chicken in daylight. but it lives in secrecy, and it operates alone. it is only successful as an individual. it neither has the power of the many, nor can it flee. so it relies on surprise, which only comes from acting as an individual.
werner saw the possibility that the war could be ended in short, hard blows, just as prussia had once defeated france in virtually only one battle, at sedan. the prerequisite for this was that trains also derailed behind the front. this would require small groups that disappeared from the earth’s surface when the mine was laid.
my problem was a different one. i didn’t see a war here in which armies stood against armies, soldiers against soldiers, guns against guns. it was states against states. hitler had not only commissioned generals to wage a war. the entire nation was involved in the mobilization, its workers, its economy, its science, its universities, its churches. it couldn’t be a walk in the park.
my problem was that i wanted to survive the third reich without harming myself, without having to despise myself, without having become a cripple in front of myself. if the war was to last for years, i didn’t see any cracks in the system that could encourage me to take underground action. but i saw a pressure coming on me that i might not be able to withstand.
wouldn’t resistance actions then be necessary for reasons of self-preservation alone, simply because there is no life with a broken back? nevertheless, i maintained my objection.”
The most powerful means against the repetition of history are remembrance and commemoration.
(Head picture:
German military cemetery Himmerod Abbey near Großlittgen,
July 2023)
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