'The German Will to War'

Reflections on the cathartic qualities of impending doom, courtesy of the sick ramblings of an escort and her loyal 'NATO man' customer

I’m travelling this week, hence please accept a footnoted travelogue before too long. In the interim, I’m ‘happy™’ to share the below piece with you.

Enjoy. Or Puke. Translation, emphases, and [snark] mine.

---

The Will to War

The Third World War in the Mirror of German-German Sensitivities

By Hanna Lakomy, Berliner Zeitung, 26 June 2022 [paywalled; archived]

The subtitle could suggest that the Third World War has already begun. I cannot judge that—but even if it has perhaps not yet become a reality, the third world war is at least a thought. A spirit that is being conjured up [a spectre is haunting Europe…]. The spirit of war nests itself and says: I am here! Recognise me at last. I am your war too. There is no way out, only to flee forwards. Fight back while you still can. Attack is the best defence. Do you want to be the next victim?

This reasoning is powerful. I have to follow those who put it forward. Only who it is that I know, I must not reveal. My obligations as a prostitute in terms of discretion prohibit me from doing so.

Smokescreens

Just imagine if one of my clients was a bigwig in NATO. There’s no way I’d admit that. Maybe he’s not such a bigwig at all, but more of a middle-ranking guy? At the NATO security conference, for example, there were a lot of men there. It’s possible that it’s one of them. But it could be that not just one of the men in this photo knows me, but several?

Perhaps he is just an employee of some larger company with which the Bundeswehr has dealings. Or he is simply a lobbyist for a company that has something to do with weapons, and there are a lot of them in Blackrock’s portfolio alone. In any case, it would be better if I were to lead the way here in the direction of the economy and distract attention from ministries, of which there are several that have something to do with the war. Not just foreign affairs and defence, but also the economy, for example.

I don’t want anyone to start blindly suspecting people because of my text. I have to protect my client. Perhaps he is a married family man in human difficulties and dependencies. I can tell you that he is nowhere near as free as I am and is correspondingly cautious. Perhaps he suspects Russian spies in my clientele who are keen to hear what I blurt out after two bottles of champagne? That would give me my own Profumo scandal!

But I mustn’t alienate him too much either: too much discretion makes the story superfluous in the end. I don’t want to tell anything superfluous here. I don’t abuse my column for gossip, and I know what it means to skewer a customer—or a female customer—in a text from my days at Die Welt.

If he reads this, he can rest assured that I won’t reveal his identity. Especially as I have learnt on another occasion what he is capable of. It was about a colleague—or a colleague—from his industry who spread rumours about him, the truth of which I cannot judge. That’s why I'm not going to go into the content here, but it was certainly something disreputable and private. On this occasion, I learnt what kind of stupid thoughts he gets when he feels threatened: he knows someone from the construction industry, and this guy in turn knows two taciturn but quick-witted young men.

Well, now that I’ve written it down here, he probably won’t resort to this treacherous means with me. On the contrary, he should have an interest in ensuring that nothing happens to me. I still hope that he’s on holiday with his family, which is why I’ve waited until midsummer to write this. Because it would be a great loss for me to lose this regular customer. Who has been loyal to me for so many years.

Heroism

When I met him for the first time, I heroically said to him that, according to my left-wing ideals, I should actually murder him. But in the absence of a conspiratorial background, I would refrain from doing so. I had said that to tease him, and it did tease him—in a different way to my heroic intention: he showed me how good a really good red wine can be. And it was very nice in other ways too, unfortunately. I’m corrupt, but honest [lol].

There was an imbalance between us right from the start: he was jovial, I was sarcastic. I made jokes without him realising. When he did, he was extremely lenient with me. He patiently endeavoured to gain my understanding. In his world, war had always been a fact of life. No diplomacy in the world had ever been so influential that wars had not broken out.

Besides, any diplomacy in his world is rubbish if you don't have the better arguments. And in the form of better weapons. For him, peace is synonymous with a surplus of weapons. Peace is military superiority that rests on its laurels. When in doubt, peace is the will to war [Nietzsche would be proud of today’s self-professed lefties].

But too much peace is unhealthy. War is the father of all things. After all, what are weapons for? Just to threaten what could be done? So much money for a subjunctive? Making weapons, sophisticated technology, high-tech, tested and proven, never to be used?

It’s a shame somehow: budgets in the billions for the eventuality that these budgets are designed to rule out. An armoury of God forbid. Absurd waste. Weapons in the subjunctive are such strange things. If you simply own them and never use them, they develop a secret life of their own ... Only rarely has a state, let alone a world power, allowed its abundance of weapons to become obsolete and scrapped unused [hence the scrapping of old arms in Ukraine]. Armour that has cost such a fortune that it is a fortune in itself, a fortune that can do something, could do something, if one wanted to.

Ah, but some would like to! The drop of desire shines on the armour. Potent potential. And the atmosphere crackles with tension. Who will break out of agreements and treaties first? Reasons can be found. A conflict can simply fall from the sky like a stray bullet.

He appreciated my sarcasm (and my appetising young body) and repeatedly deigned to explain his position to me. The man had his reasons and wanted to convince me. An honest lobbyist believes what he says. Only weapons create peace. Terrible constraint: he is defending my freedom. And he would also be happy to defend me personally if Germany ever turned into a war zone. And later we fantasised about how he would rescue me from burning ruins, into his officers’ quarters, so that I would have a better life with him than with the crazy soldiers with orders to rape me. And so on.

The sex and the erotic thoughts are better when there is also mental friction. But friction rubs off, and in the end my constant little revolt consisted solely of forcing him, in his post-orgasmic, incapacitated state, to listen to Nina Hagen’s rendition of ‘War Song’ on YouTube: ‘Tis is war, and I desire not to be guilty of it ...’

He never took offence. Or do men like him just not care enough about what women like me think? Because they focus on other things with us? For my part, I learnt a lot from him. I learnt that any attitude, however different from my own, can be completely justified in itself. I was grateful to be allowed to be a service provider who is not required to express her opinion. Or to have one at all.

It gave me the chance to discover human depth and contradictions even in such a man, whom I would have despised, me being a stupid youthful left-wing radical. Like that of his ideals of courage and valour, a heroic romanticism that hardly has a place in modern war anymore. And he himself is helping to ensure that there is less and less of it, thanks to ever more modern weapons systems, in drone warfare.

Moral Bankruptcy

I had always felt confident about my case against him. Physically inferior, but morally confident. The fact that I could understand his point of view without appropriating it preserved my integrity. But at our last meeting, the first after the outbreak of the war, I felt lost: lost, lost. I didn’t feel like discussing politics with him as I always did.

It was the unease of no longer being able to find my way in my left-wing world view. In the debate about Western values, with which I had always had an ambivalent relationship because of the attribute Western. Yet I know that I owe my freedom as a woman and as a whore with civil rights to the development of modern Western values. And I would certainly be one of the first victims of Putin’s regime. Only NATO’s weapons make it possible for something like me to exist at this moment. I know, I know. I know all this.

But even if I don’t have a single good objection to recognising the West, NATO, as a club of good guys against evil—I simply can’t bring myself to say such things. Everything in me resists. Against this simplification.

I, who cannot believe in evil, cannot accept that there should be good and evil in the real world. And then Russian politics overturns all my relativism and literally forces me to suddenly divide the world into very simple, black and white categories: victims and perpetrators, good and evil. And any attempt to relativise inevitably leads to moral bankruptcy.

But there is this eternal defiance. This strong emotion when someone says ‘freedom’. I grew up with the fact that these phrases about freedom had the flavour of a lie for those around me. Flimsy pretexts for the West to assert its own interests. Legitimate, but offensive. You can’t get rid of something like that. It is an imprint. And the fact that Pastor Gauck of all people is blessing the cannons doesn’t make it any easier for me.

Now I was sitting in the bath with him, my suitor and fellow citizen, and told him a bit about my acquaintances from the East. Who identify with the Russians in an oppressive way. Not necessarily by trivialising Putin or even approving of him—it’s much trickier: they have nothing to do with Putin, but feel that they are included in the criticism of Russia. By the Wessis [the slightly ironic self-depreciation of citizens of the old West Germany whose mirror image would be the Ossis, i.e., citizens of the GDR], the mainstream media in the West German self-image. Quite unnecessarily!

Nobody has called the East Germans out. Not even in the parties in the Bundestag, where this division is evident, on both the left and the far right. A typical German-German phenomenon, without which it would be impossible to understand the divisions in our public sphere: former GDR citizens feel they have been transported back to the Cold War.

‘But Putin is not Gorbachev!’ I shook my head. ‘And the Russians are no longer the Russians, the old Soviet power!’ But he said calmly: ‘Yes, the Russians have always been the Russians for me. Our enemies.’

Yes, dear former GDR citizens among my readers, what were you thinking, which country did you join, which world power, which military alliance? [as if the GDR did so voluntarily…] Of course the Russians are now our enemies too. At least not the entire former Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact states. In the past, they were all enemies of the West, and so were we, the East Germans. That’s why there was that iron curtain, wasn't it?

But it no longer exists. We’ve defected. We [East Germans] are now the West too, we are the West, regardless of whether you feel that way or not. We are the West. Learn it at last. Look at the Ukrainians, they also want to become the West. But they don’t have any Westerners either.

Truth

So is it really our war? In any case, it is the war of this man who sat in the bathtub with me. The man with the will to go to war. And the aim of the war was absolutely clear to him—he was surprised that the politicians were beating about the bush in public: Russia must lose. In other words: Russia must be so damaged that it can no longer attack Ukraine. And no other country, of course. In other words: Russia must be destroyed militarily. By means of Ukrainian artillery or Western air forces. And ideally through a European military alliance of its own without the unreliable Americans and their Trump. A European army under German leadership against Russia [oh my, WTF…].

Once again, very clearly: a man from inside NATO says that Russia must be defeated. By us. Us Germans. The red wine in my glass was getting too strong. ‘And the nuclear bomb?’ It plays absolutely no role, he explained. Putin would never use it. ‘How do you know that so well?’ He just knew it. He had decided to take it as a certain fact. What a military-strategic genius: he literally took away my fear of nuclear war! Simply by explaining to me that something that is morally wrong to fear cannot happen [I’m for once at a loss of words].

We moved from the bathtub to the bed, he wanted his neck massage at the end, as always. A whore and her regular customer, that’s also something like an old married couple. And that’s when I found the truth: the only truth that was really accessible to me. The truth about him and about me. Whatever he told me, his body was the only real fact here, the truth of his flesh, his muscles and cartilage: namely, his tensions were gone. I could hardly believe it. He had been in pain all these years. Shoulders and neck as hard as iron like rusty armour. Now his back was as soft as molten steel.

I made another of my hidden jokes: ‘The war is like a spa treatment for you!’ It was infamous to say that, because it was a quote from Hindenburg, and he had said it on the occasion of the First World War. But perhaps my regular customer didn’t know the quote, or perhaps he couldn’t hear my sarcasm. ‘Yes, that's right!’ he exclaimed happily.

So his world is finally in order. What a relief after years of doubt and uncertainty. Through feminism, the refugee and climate debates. The fact that the Social Democrats are now showing their true colours as left-wing fascists, Putinists and Russians perfectly confirms his reservations about everything to the left of the CDU. And the CDU itself is finally recovering: he had always favoured Friedrich Merz. Even the fact that the Greens are now in power doesn’t bother him. He doesn’t think they’re so bad [well, I disagree]. You can even like the Springer press again and use it to form your own opinion [I almost fell off my chair].

I felt it again, the resentment I had domesticated for years: my impotent defiance towards him. The West in its sense of moral and military superiority.

So much for my understanding.

---

Bottom Lines

Believe it or not, this was penned by…

Klara Johanna Lakomy, alias Salomé Balthus, is an author and prostitute. She studied philosophy and literature in Berlin and founded the feminist escort portal HETAERA in 2016. She was a columnist for WELT from 2018-2019. Since then, she has written for SZ-Magazin and Berliner Zeitung from November 2020 to May 2024. In her texts and public appearances, she campaigns against the stigmatisation of sex work and for the rights of prostitutes, among other things.

Why do I publish her writings from summer 2022? I think it represents, in actually quite clear words, some of the German-German issues at play.

I could now go on and tell you about my grandfather who spent 2+ years on the Eastern Front in WW2 and joined the Austrian Army in 1961. After all, combat experience against the presumed ‘correct’ enemy was a valuable commodity. But I won’t bore you with these things.

The casual treatment of war and peace, including nuclear armageddon, is striking, and I believe it to be quite wide-spread among Western ‘military men’, which is also why I reproduced the piece.

And if you’d excuse me know, I’m off to vomit.