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11 Kittler (jr/d) 15/1/04 1:44 pm Page 169
The Flower of the Elite Troops
FRIEDRICH A. KITTLER
In phases of awakening and fundamental change critics of the German military have continued
to struggle against the mistakes and shortcomings of the past, while the ruling elites and the
military were already creating a new ruling order. Michael Geyer
Napoleon’s order to his elite troops to attack was always implemented as the very
last thing. Only when the battle was as good as won, as at Austerlitz, or as good
as lost, as was the case at Waterloo, would the Emperor risk his Old Guard. In
the following century elites played the opposite role: orders to attack always
reached them first. For this reason their way ‘of establishing their truth’ is ‘the
essential victim’.1
Italy’s first Arditi, called the ‘flowers of the elite troops’ in their own anthem,2
and in the rest of the army conversely the death company, were established on 1
October 1915 – only two months after the declaration of war on the German
Empire – by Colonel Cristofaro Baseggio. The following April they were
dissolved, after the company of volunteers lost 90 percent of its officers and men
in the storming of Sant’Osvaldo.3 The first German storm division, assembled in
March 1915 by Major Calsow from former companies of sappers, fared no better:
it had already been worn down in July.4
Nonetheless, this lost troop, which entered the stage of the First World War
as the reincarnation of the most modern infantries of the modern era, made
history, and not just military history. The Arditi made up three quarters of the
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170 Body and Society Vol. 9 No. 4
troops with whom D’Annunzio occupied Fiume for 16 months. Consequently

the name ‘storm troop’ was not first used by Corporal Hitler or Captain Röhm
for their SA or their Saal Protection Troop, but was an elite status created by an
order of Lieutenant-General von Falkenhayn applied to all divisions of the field
army.5 Until today, after a long journey from world war armies via storm batal-
lions, Freikorps and SA to the Waffen-SS, peacekeeping measures and rapid
deployment forces have become synonymous. Elite troops are stationed in
Bosnia, etc.
1
As the flower-bedecked armies climbed into their railway carriages in August
1914 in order to keep to precise mobilization plans, there was still no talk either
of storm divisions or Arditi. At least since Roon and Moltke had developed
Carnot’s revolutionary levée en masse into a military service in general quarters,
the war machine seemed to have been subsumed into the machinery of the
nation-state. Even imperial armies subscribed to the principle of giving equal
weaponry at least to all infantry companies, if not to all kinds of troops. Democ-
racy began with the breech-loader. Storm troops, on the other hand, were in all
probability the sole occurrence of an autopoiesis which brought forth a new
machinery of war both in and from the war. It was not invented by any ministry
or general staff. Positional warfare, which Schlieffen’s great plan of attack had
changed or descended into after six weeks, was seeking its own demise.
That was difficult enough. The trench systems, reaching since October 1914
from the English Channel to the Jura and since June 1915 from Isonzo to the
Tyrol, produced a no-man’s-land between the fronts, which cost all attackers
their lives.6 For in the contest between technology and tactics, as Hans
Linnenkohl called the First World War, weapons technology had won: machine
gun nests and field artillery liquidated all lines of troops who had the boldness
or orders to proceed over the ‘zone of destruction’7 called No-Man’s-Land. By
1914 the machine gun, this ‘implacable object’ (Jünger 1932: 105), had lost faith
with its original purpose of being brought to bear on masses with red, black or
yellow skin;8 it took aim at the infantries of its own inventors. (Something which
neither Kitchener nor Schlieffen, the victors of Omdurman and Waterfontein,
had reckoned with.) And because too the Poisson distribution of preparations
for constant barrage which lasted weeks could never guarantee that a single
enemy machine gun unit had not survived in some converted shell hole, the 14
British divisions which proceeded to the Somme in July 1916 lost every other
man on one single day.9 This mass killing in the firing line produced the units of
The Flower of the Elite Troops 171
shock troops. Jünger’s Arbeiter, the literary universalization of the First World
War, rightly stressed that:
the bearers of a new fighting force only became visible in the later parts of the war and that
their otherness was apparent in the extent to which the mass of the armies, formed according
to the principles of the nineteenth century, began to decompose. And above all they are to be
found where the specific nature of their age is particularly apparent in the deployment of
military methods: in the ground and air squadrons, in the shock troops, in which the soul of
the infantry, decaying and ground down by machines, gains new life. (Jünger, 1932: 107)
The Storm Division Calsow, which had suffered heavy casualties, found new
heart under a new commander at a new front. Captain Willy Martin Ernst Rohr
(1877–1930) boasted a career straight out of the copy book of the sociological
elite. The former teacher at the Infantry Shooting School and company comman-
der in the Garde-Schützen-Bataillon Lichterfelde (cf. Gruß, 1939: 20) loaded the
lost troop into railroad cars, which only came to a halt in the wine villages of
Oberrotweil, Bischoffingen, Niederrotweil, Oberbergen and Schelingen. Because
only the Kaiserstuhl was good enough for a training ground for revolutionary
infantry tactics. While 20 kilometres to the south-east, in the Main Post Office
in Freiburg, a revolutionary philosopher was just starting service as a censor of
military letters,10 the model captain of Colonel Bauer was transforming the
sunken roads and loess mountains of the Kaiserstuhl into a landscape of trenches.
This simulated Flanders on the Upper Rhine was created by a war machine which
was no longer interested in the mass armies of nation-states. For the first time
the steel helmet replaced the Pickelhaube, and instead of the 98 rifle, which
infantrymen had to shoulder as though on parade, Rohr’s shock troops carried a
light carbine.11 Colonel Bauer, responsible in Falkenhayn’s High Command only
for storm troops and not, as later was to be the case under Ludendorff, for the
entire war economy, presented to his elite troops weapons which no infantry had
ever borne: the flame throwers perfected by Colonel Reddemann,12 the light
machine guns appropriated from the Czar’s army (Linnenkohl, 1990: 179f.) and
3.7 cm storm cannons (209), and last but not least mine throwers developed from
Rhenish metal – all were to be found at the Kaiserstuhl with Captain Rohr. This
broke apart the weapons-technological unit called the infantry. A former batal-
lion of sappers in infantry training with field artillery weaponry was from now
on to be organized as a syndicate of variously equipped specialists.13 Rohr’s storm
division, workers in the sense of Jünger rather than Bebel, consisted according to
this principle of one staff, two companies of sappers, a vehicle company and a
cannon division. ‘In addition there were supplementary weapons: a machine gun
train 250 (6 MG), 1 troop of mine throwers (4 light launchers) and 1 troop of
flame throwers (4 small throwers).’14
Napoleon’s campaigns could only cover Europe so comprehensively because

his armies took seriously the army reform of 1792:15 they were all divided into
corps which were able to operate independently because they had at their
disposal their own infantry, artillery and cavalry. The storm divisions of 1915
took this differentiation from the operative to the tactical level. Every single
storm troop fought as an independent war machine, whose constituent parts or
weapon systems were coordinated by wrist watches16 and carefully thought-out
scenarios. Portable mine throwers brought enemy trenches and barbed wire
emplacements17 under heavy fire, machine guns held those of the enemy in check,
flame throwers destroyed last pockets of resistance – and all of this so that a
couple of marksmen with carbines and hand grenades (grenadiers in the sense of
the Second World War18) could safely cross the dead zone of no-man’s-land.
Thus the ‘narrow, deeply ordered’19 shock troop destroyed an entire chapter
of the infantry rule book. The thick line of similarly armed companies, as it had
been laid down since 1906, and had most recently been turned into the ‘self-
annihilation of the attacker’20 under the mythic machine-gun fire of Langemarck,
died a death as a theory. In October 1915 Rohr’s division needed to move only
50 kilometres over the Rhine, to covert its manoeuvres from the Kaiserstuhl into
the real situation of the Vosges and to be up in arms – and after only the 17th
volley of the mine throwers the French occupiers of the Hartmannsweilerkopf
surrendered one day before Christmas.
It was no wonder that Rohr’s storm division turned into a storm batallion
which became the favourite troop of the supreme commander, Crown Prince
William of Prussia. The front itself had discovered a new elite and new tactics,
which in turn served as a lesson for it. Because ‘the operations of the storm
division were nearly always successful with negligible casualties, the troop itself
expressed the wish to be trained in this way of fighting’.21
On 15 March 1916 Falkenhayn issued the order:
The ‘storm batallion’ is to be used in attacks against difficult positions and in times of calm as
a training troop. In order to make generally accessible the experiences of the storm batallion
in the organization and deployment of a storm troop, two experienced officers (captains or
older lieutenants) are . . . to be transferred to the storm batallion from all armies on the Western
Front for a period of 14 days. . . . After the return of the officers and NCOs storm divisions
are to be formed within the individual units. These divisions are gradually to be expanded, so
that in due course all divisions are in a position to assemble for difficult attack operations a
core troop consisting of selected and specially trained officers and men.22
For the first time in German military history a chief of general staff had altered
infantry tactics in the middle of a war. Directly or indirectly, the training storm
batallion trained lieutenants whose names have gone down in literary and
military history: Ernst Jünger from Infantry Regiment 73, Erwin Rommel from
the Württemberg mountain batallion, Felix Steiner from the machine gun
and marksman division 46, etc. The leadership of the First World War had been
recruited.
In October 1916 Crown Prince William was already able to predict what the
War Ministry only realized in August 1918: ‘A fully trained infantry, supported
by sappers and equipped with machine guns, light mine throwers and grenade
launchers has in the end to get by without having troops from the storm batal-
lions assigned to it.’23
But a fully trained infantry remained a pipe dream as long as the Supreme
Army Command and Colonel Bauer, responsible for the storm troops, remained
under the control of Falkenhayn. Only when, in August 1916, Hindenburg and
Ludendorff took power, did the mid-war tactical change take place and also its
essential precondition, changes to weapons technology. ‘The 3rd Supreme
Command completed the transition to machine-based warfare and thus to the
industrialization of the conduct of war in Germany with a radicalism which must
be viewed as unprecedented.’24 The reason was simple: with equally unprece-
dented radicalism which to this day enthuses the US Army in its conviction for
C4 (communications, command, control, computers),25 Ludendorff through his
endless phone calls listened to every wish of the army in the field. The General
Quartermaster himself operated as technical feedback, made possible by the
wireless radio of Dr Meißner’s valve link-up.
The so-called Hindenburg Programme – his name, associated with loyalty to
the Emperor, in effect hid the revolutionaries Ludendorff and Bauer –
commanded a war economy in its original sense: the output of munitions
doubled, machine gun production tripled, and the output of mine throwers
increased one hundredfold.26 Thus precisely the weapons systems, which the
Crown Prince and his 5th Army had intended for a storm troop in the great
trained infantry, went into mass production and to the front.27 On 4 June 1917
the War Ministry was able to decree a new organizational structure ‘which imple-
mented the melding of the infantry with the MG weapon by welding the smallest
infantry unit, the company, with the MG troop’.28 Thus the basic secret of Rohr’s
storm batallion – ‘the rigorous substitution of men by machines’ – was elevated
to the ‘core of the new deployment principles of the German army in the field’:
The weapon itself – the ‘war machine’, as it was called in the First World War – became the
means and the starting point of military deployment and of the organization of military units.
The movement of the lowest unit, the group, was determined by the firing properties and the
protection of the machine gun. Its use depended on the interplay of related weapons, i.e. of
artillery and the infantry grouped around the machine gun. Nowhere was this change in
deployment more clear than in the new training regulations. Drill and exercise regulations were
almost totally abandoned. Weapons training moved to the foreground in an imbalanced way
and in direct contradiction to Wilhelmine practice.29
A war costly in materials replaced a war costly in human lives.

Happy times began for Captain Rohr, who had won all the way along the line.
Only one month after assuming power, Ludendorff travelled to the army group
of the Crown Prince, where the storm batallion received him in battle fatigues30
as the ‘favourite troop of the Crown Prince’,31 and the Quartermaster General
saw ‘for the first time a closed formation in storm gear with the eminently
sensible steel helmet’.32 Shortly thereafter all storm batallions – Rohr’s being a
significant exception – transferred from the sappers to the infantry.33 The tactical
innovations at the front were converted by the operations division of the
Supreme Command, with Captain Hermann Geyer in command, into general
fighting regulations. But above all, these innovations reached a level that
prevented their inventors from continuing to be used as canon fodder. Under
Falkenhayn, Rohr’s storm batallion had been used – with little success and heavy
losses – in the attack on the ‘blood suction pump’ of Verdun.34 Under Luden-
dorff, however, this ‘fundamental principle’ – that troops were set up with the
aim of their death – was ‘increasingly lost sight of’, to the remarkable regret of
Colonel Bauer: the storm batallions ‘were deployed as elite shock troops and then
immediately withdrawn. But as the sharp end for the attacker came after the
position had been taken from the enemy – counterattacks with heavy artillery
fire – this kind of deployment gave rise to a deal of bad blood amongst the other
troops.’35
The 3rd Supreme Command thus gave official blessing to all the demands
made by Rohr since his deployment at Verdun. While the Italian Arditi had the
battle task of holding on hard in the area that had been stormed until (if they
were lucky) the ordinary infantry arrived in support,36 German storm troops
were ‘withdrawn immediately after fulfilling their task, so that they would
remain usable and fresh for further operations. They were therefore,’ as Rohr’s
Instructions for the use of a storm batallion concluded, ‘simply intended for
attack, and not for holding positions.’37 Just like their strategic successor in the
Second World War, the divisions and armies of the Waffen-SS, Ludendorff’s
tactical fire brigade were given the most modern weapons, the longest time
behind the lines and the most choice rations.
In this respect, we in the storm batallions had one advantage; we constantly received supple-
ments consisting of cheese, sausage or preserved meats. When parts of the batallion were
deployed, the whole batallion received a battle supplement, and when the whole batallion was
deployed, we received in addition an ‘extraordinary big battle supplement’. . . . Apart from the
food which was delivered, we could buy food and luxury goods in the shops and from the
sutlers behind the lines. If the batallion was pinned down, like in Beuville, as much by way of
food and luxury goods was fetched from the Belgian border towns as there was demand. And
besides this, companies were able substantially to improve their rations by the use of the garden
plots that had been allotted to them.38
It was no wonder therefore that from 1916 onwards the staffs no longer had
themselves to comb their companies for likely shock troop material. Volunteers,
who had to be not over 25 and single, reported voluntarily for a troop which was
the envy of all others. The figure of the soldier-specialist, just as the project had
envisaged multiplying, went in a series which worked towards the First World
War. In 1941, on the left bank of the Pruth, both Italian war reporters and
German tragedians had no longer any doubt that tank crews, whether from Essen
or Charkov, all spoke the same technical language.39
It was not surprising either, therefore, that the storm batallions of 1916, over
and above the pleasures they enjoyed behind the lines enjoyed one of the most
future-oriented of all privileges: they were motorized. A troop which was to be
thrown as an operational fire brigade at unforeseeable focuses and immediately
withdrawn after completion of their battle orders blew apart the logistical frame-
work of the First World War. Since Moltke’s innovations of 1866 and 1870/71, it
had remained the case that the railways were the sole mobilizing factor in war.
So mobilization in August 1914 was as good as its name, and Ludendorff’s
strategic castling in winter 1917/18 from the Eastern to the Western Front
succeeded. But when the troops had been unloaded and it was time for the tran-
sition from a mobilized strategy to mobilized tactics, everything seized up again
in trench warfare. In the barely passable battle area of trenches, grenade craters
and barbed wire fences attacks broke down, because the available carriers and
horses could launch neither reinforcements nor artillery quickly enough to the
front. The railway network on which the First World War depended logistically
only went as far as the rail heads way back behind the lines. All the tracks in the
battle zone, where they were most urgently needed, had been blown up or shot
to bits by the enemies long since.
The readjustment from a railway war to a motorized war therefore began in
the trenches of the First World War, in close parallel with the establishment of
storm batallions. It included not only the famous tanks, which appeared for the
first time in the Battle of the Somme, but above all completely inconspicuous
lorries, whose number on the Allied side eventually reached into the hundreds
of thousands, and on the German side 40,000 after great efforts by Ludendorff’s
3rd Supreme Command.40 The Blitzkrieg of 1939, a systematic yet half-hearted
attempt to transfer all logistics from the railways to motorization,41 cast its
shadow ahead of itself.
But all of the motorization the First World War had to offer was to the advan-
tage first and foremost of the storm troops. Hardly had a vehicle (training)
company been established than Captain Rohr claimed their entire vehicles for ‘re-
provisioning with equipment, munitions and food’.42 The railway wagons which
had transported Rohr’s batallion back in 1915 to the Kaiserstuhl could resign
from service. The same fate befell the first storm-panzer-vehicle-division,
composed of British booty tanks and German copies – Crown Prince William
ensured as usual that the brand new weapons be ‘loaded for Storm Batallion No.
5 (Rohr)’.43 Finally in summer 1918, as the deployment of the American
Expeditionary Corps put the seal on Allied superiority and storm batallions were
like the fire brigade rushing from one blaze to another, the transport to and from
locations in ‘speedy lorries’ had become commonplace.44
Wagner’s Valkyries, this first storm troop of military and operatic history,45
owed their superhuman speed to the optical trick of a laterna magica, which (at
the Bayreuth premiere) projected horses as clouds on the horizon of the stage.
The Valkyries only achieved technical positivity with the Otto motor: a form of
locomotion, based on the model of the storm, put an end to marching as the
millennia-old essence of all infantry. Storm batallions belonged (and still do) on
tanks, lorries or jeeps.
2
Arditi – as they were defined by the Comando Supremo in a secret circular
which, according to the letter head was never to reach the very front line – are
fundamentally men thrown around. The throw sends them to the place the text
of the order was never to reach. ‘Offensive tasks’, which could however also be
read as ‘transports’, ‘throw them into desired places at the front, preferably
though at the flank or even to the rear of enemies’ who have penetrated on to
Italian territory.46
No different from German storm batallions, Arditi in this sense of being
thrown in become essential to lorry crews. The infantry might continue to suffer
on manoeuvres from practising parade-ground or forced marching and to tolerate
the opposite, complete immobility, in the trenches – the Arditi were way beyond
these archaic means of movement.
On 10 November 1918, the day of the great Allied victory celebrations,
Mussolini only had to climb on one of their ‘lorries’ to celebrate the Arditi as the
‘wonderful warrior youth of Italy’. (The lorry which was to bear his corpse in
1945 to Milan had not yet been built.) While Mussolini’s motorized dais
proceeded across Milan from the Monument of the Five Days to Garibaldi’s
statue, the man who was to commission the first European motorways was
proclaiming the common will of Fascism and Arditism: ‘All the ills standing in
the way of a Greater Italy’ were to be ‘destroyed’ with the Arditi weapons of the
‘bomb and dagger’.47 And, almost as though the metaphor of the way were to be
translated in an automobilist plain text for his listeners, the venerable Agnelli,
lord of the Fiat works, spoke from the same lorry platform as Mussolini.
But the fronts had already been clear in the war. The Arditi with their privi-
leges, which freed them from any service in the trenches and extended from
special rations to model barracks, stood on one side, and the infantrymen and the
wretched on the other. For in contrast to the German Empire, which Ludendorff,
Bauer and Rathenau were systematically undermining with their revolution from
above, the no less youthful kingdom of Italy remained as intact in its power
politics as it was old-fashioned. Consequently, it was mainly violent criminals
who volunteered for Arditi companies48 and who turned once more to their
professional skills during the retreat from Isonzo, when the discipline of the
Italian army had in any case collapsed. At the end of 1917 the complaints of
pillaged farmers in the Veneto left the Comando Supremo with no other choice
but to intervene in their very own creation and to ban prisoners from a career in
the Arditi – at least as a general rule.49
The wretched, against whom Mussolini’s welcoming speech had made the
Arditi mobile, were therefore always powers of state: from the Minister Presi-
dent to the military police. And their powerlessness in blocking the way to a
Greater Italy followed from the simple fact that Arditi were basically motorized.
Even the famous scene, when four Arditi allegedly advancing to the front line
shot their carbines at the Carabinieri, with the result that the authority of the
military police literally fell to ground,50 could only result from the fact that those
heroes were not marching but ‘rushing in a lorry to the front line’.51
The Marcia su Ronchi was therefore only a logical continuation of well prac-
tised logistics. While writers like Marinetti saw reason to complain bitterly about
the ‘arduousness’ of their journey to Fiume (‘between woods and the shores of
the Mediterranean’),52 D’Annunzio’s Arditi covered the stretch once more in
lorries, armoured vehicles and tanks. After Guido Keller, flying hero and so-
called missions secretary of D’Annunzio, had heard after the midnight arrival in
Ronchi that the lorries urgently needed for the rapid transport of troops had not
arrived, ‘he disappeared with a handful of the others [Arditi] into the night, to
reappear a few hours later with 26 vehicles, which he had stolen from a vehicle
park only a few kilometres away’.53 And because the railway line from Trieste to
Fiume was ignored, a strategic operation ran its course perhaps for the first time
in military history on the model of coming Blitzkriege and armoured personnel
carrier divisions.
Only the target of the operation would not cooperate. The port of Fiume was
no trench system like in Flanders, no tunnel network like in the Dolomites. As
soon as the liberating army had lived up to its name and made Fiume a liberated
town, there was nothing left to storm. Arditi and legionnaires were reduced to
festive inactivity and the battle order which, in contrast to German storm
batallions, decreed that they dig-in in the regained territory until the arrival of
infantry reinforcements. But this battle order had not foreseen that their own
infantry would not arrive as envisaged as a merciful relief but as an opponent.
On 24 December 1920, the Natale di Sangue, the Arditi encountered their usual
enemy: the naval guns and Alpini of their own state. Guido Keller, because he
had not wanted to be bureaucratized even by his own Comandante,54 fought the
advancing Alpini with a bamboo stick as the only weapon allowed in this
fratricidal war;55 the Arditi of the Commandant’s Guard surrounded D’Annun-
zio’s palace with improvized trenches, lines of barbed wire and barricades, until
any storm troop tactics had been turned into trench warfare. That Bloody
Christmas ended with 203 dead legionnaires.56
In other words, Fiume had suspended Arditism. A whole army had frozen in
the pattern of a world war which was now over. D’Annunzio’s great promise that
‘the victorious army, being pulled apart by traitors and wreckers would . . .
reconstitute itself, heal, rise up and burst out in flame’57 in Fiume’s 10 legions
became an all too literal reality.
The Draft of a new organization for the liberation army, written by Captain
Giuseppe Pfiffer and signed by D’Annunzio, is the photographic still of such
immortalization. Just like storm troop lieutenant Ernst Jünger, whose Training
regulations of 1922 prepared the Imperial Infantry for anything but the future
Blitzkriege, D’Annunzio’s Army organization laid down the state of tactics and
weapons technology of 1918. The only assumption is fixed positions in positional
warfare, whether on the Isonzo or in Fiume, the only task the transition to
movement. Its solution amounts to recasting an entire army as a storm troop.
While in the Italian army of the world war there were no more than 50,000 Arditi,
the Army organization makes all 7000 activists under D’Annunzio’s control in
1920 into Arditi.58
Because storm troops, in contrast to the old infantry, are specialist workers in
weapons systems, the Army organization, in addition to the futuristic love of
metal, assembles any given unit around its particular equipment. And because the
waging of battle is a shock troop exercise on a large scale, the companies of
privates in all legions were armed like the Arditi: with machine guns and hand
grenades, machine pistols and flame throwers, not to mention the ever-present
dagger as the trademark of the Ardito. But because the legion – according to
D’Annunzio’s poetic and etymological insight59 – connotes as such an elite, then
particularly generalized elite troops, as constituted by Fiume’s Army organiz-
ation, must in their turn select out elites. The name Hilfskompanie (auxiliary
company) is pure understatement, because this company represented in fractal

repetition the independently operating legion along with all its weapons systems
– but as a ‘doomed troop, who threw itself into destruction in order to turn the
tide of battle’.60
Arditi, as has been said, were thrown into battle. And as long as no Natale di
Sangue threatened destruction, this process of throwing in excluded to a certain
extent marching like that of the infantry. Even the existence or availability of a
vehicle park raises the concern that of all the kinds of sport, which the Army
organization compelled its legionnaires to undertake,61 only one would involve
the practice of company marching.62 All other kinds of sport follow training
principles which had been tested for Arditi since 1917 in Sdricca di Manzano and
Borgnano, and which established locomotion from then on only as an existential
‘liminal situation’: sprinting and cross country,63 climbing and jumping, rowing
and swimming.64 In just this way weekend warriors (as Heiner Müller called
them) pursue their sports south-east of Riejka to this day.
But above all ‘the legionnaires’, as Captain Host-Venturi credited his teams,
‘have given one sport such an impetus that it [. . .] has become a town institution’
in Fiume: ‘football’.65 Two centuries after calcio66 in Florence had died out, team
sport seemed to be in vogue again. According to the views of military scientists
of 1939, football is based ‘less on individual performance than on the way the
entire team plays together, and on the subjugation of personal interests to those
of the team’.67 The ball is therefore not only round: it is the weapon around
which storm troops or Arditi have to gather. Not for nothing, as the counter-
espionage of the French 6th Army ascertained, did Rohr’s storm batallion indulge
itself in football games every other evening, ‘which officers joined in’.68
All so-called team spirit – this along with the ‘familiar Du’ form of address
practised between the ranks69 – stemmed from D’Annunzio’s Fiume or Rohr’s
Kaiserstuhl. In any case the no less soldierly men, whether during the march on
Rome or on Freikorps engagements east of the Elbe, hardly took with them the
tough character of drill determined by the grammar schools and cadet institutions
of the turn of the century. The lessons absorbed by a new elite – the systematic,
weapons-technical as well as sporting reinforcement ‘of the much-discussed
“camaraderie of the front”, that apparently classless unity of soldiers at the front’
– were ‘too deeply ingrained to be explained in terms merely of social psychol-
ogy as “male fantasies” ’.70
‘The applied physical exercises of the storm batallions,’ decreed their Nazi
historian, ‘formed the basis for the military sports movement after the world war.
Viewed chronologically, the exercises were carried out according to the same
views in the Stahlhelm, the League of Front Soldiers, the Reich Board of Trustees
for Youth Fitness and in the sections of the Party. The SA sports badge is founded
on the same principles.’71
Felix Steiner, commanding general of the III SS-Panzerkorps, stated even more
sweepingly that the shock troops of 1917 had, with their ‘idea of spontaneity, of
swift attack, of the automatic hand in handiwork’ ‘put the elite in the place of the
masses’.72 In the sense of the mass oratory of Hitler or Röhm, the SA could not
for this reason lay claim to be their ‘successors’. Only the ‘shock troops of the
Waffen-SS’ could ‘17 years later’ come into consideration as the ‘re-birth of the
idea’.73 ‘Comradeship’ between officers and men, ‘athletic training’ in an
obligatory basic training, ‘working together in a shock troop, in which machine
gunners, sharpshooters, grenade launcher crews and grenade throwers worked
together like in a well-oiled machine’74 – all these were the regulators of the
Waffen-SS, whose origins lay in the shock troop tactics practised by their trainers
themselves.75
‘Bright sunshine’76 lay on the camp at Munster, as Steiner’s regiment, the
Waffen-SS unit Deutschland, practised for the real thing on 19 May 1939:
After 20 minutes the fighting with live rounds began. Hitler was invited to retire into a concrete
bunker, because the firing would take place over his head. When he categorically refused, he
was led to a spot in front of the bunker, which at least offered him and those accompanying
him makeshift rear cover. Now the artillery divisions began to let loose on the target of attack,
a deep-lying trench system 300 metres from those viewing. The heavy infantry weapons joined
in. Heavy machine guns firing indirectly amplified the preparatory fire, while the light machine
guns cut in in suitable firing positions and held down the enemy in the trenches while, under
the cover of this thick fusillade, the first wave of around 60 storm troops pushed forward in
the gaps between the light machine gun fire to the already wrecked wire barriers. They burst
into passageways with explosive charges, and swept through these into the trenches at the very
front, smoking out the enemy with hand grenades and were overtaken from behind by a second
wave of shock troops, which then penetrated into the depths of the position with machine
pistols, hand grenades and flame throwers, while the artillery’s blanket of fire crashed down
directly in front of them.
Barely four months before the start of the Second World War, the Waffen-SS
therefore continued to pursue the storm troop tactics of the First.77 (Guderian’s
armour and radio techniques were absent.) But the recognition of this gave the
messenger who had made it to ‘guest observer’ no pleasure. ‘Hitler, who had been
fired over by all weapons, did not say a word. He probably recognized from the
example he had just seen that his image of a conventional troop of guards was
“destroyed” ’.78
3
On 14 August 1916 Rohr’s storm batallion tried out on its exercise grounds at
Beuville a strategy, which March 1918 was to raise to the strategy of the entire
Ludendorff offensive. The Kaiser’s personal press reporter Walter Bloem – before
the Soul of film79 rose up in him in the after-war period – stressed this much:
It was an attack of the storm batallion against an enemy marked with discs, during which live
ammunition was used, even on the part of the artillery put at their disposal for the exercise.
The combination of both weapons was to be demonstrated, the pushing forward of rolling
artillery fire, the task of the storm infantry to follow it close on, even at the risk of losses from
friendly fire. This task was carried out with such guts by the selected men, who had been drilled
for special purposes for weeks, that a couple of soldiers were actually wounded in the process.
Then Captain von Rohr80 introduced a number of NCOs and men who had distinguished
themselves in the last deployment of the batallion, and the Kaiser, in a splendid mood, handed
out Iron Crosses of both classes.81
So 1916 and 1939 saw one and the same scene, one and the same manoeuvre. But
what put the warlord of 1916 into a splendid mood, ruined the mood of the
warlord of 1939. William II saw the first version of the curtain of fire, which the
German Army was to put its last but misplaced hope in one and a half years later.
Instead of an outdated and dreamt-of personal guard, Hitler saw the same thing.
The curtain of fire as a concept goes back to General Nivelle, the French
supreme commander of 1917;82 as a tactic combining infantry and artillery on the
other hand, it goes back to the Russian–Japanese war, like so many innovations
of that century. Not for nothing did Italy’s Arditi import wherever possible
Japanese martial arts83 (and, like Keller, bamboo sticks). Because what artillery
curtains of fire produce for an army’s own infantry is kamikaze. A third of all
Japanese losses at Port Arthur arose from friendly fire.84
But the curtain of fire alone, as Captain Meyer would say, was the only possi-
bility for an attack in positional warfare. To begin with Colonel Georg Bruch-
müller, the person responsible for artillery in Supreme Command, synchronized
the curtain of fire with the weather forecast to maximize the effect of gas
grenades.85 Second, as in Steiner’s manoeuvre, the curtain of fire began directly
before the attack by storm troops, avoiding the kind of prior warning which
constant barrages gave.86 Third, the advance of the curtain of fire occurred, unlike
the British barrage at the Somme, not according to a fixed timetable laid down
by the general staff, but rather as a variable dependent on reports back or
feedback given by the infantry storming the lines through aerial observer or
radio.87 Fourth and finally, everything depended on pinning down enemy
machine guns which had survived the artillery bombardment in trenches or shell
holes: these had always made infantry attacks fail. The key to the entire
Ludendorff offensive was to become a ‘principle’, which the plan of attack was
always to be based on:
The principle, that infantry while attacking must run into their own artillery and mine-thrower
fire, which had been trained for in the storm batallions so successfully, must become common
practice for all infantry. It requires reckless courage and superior morale, because a number of
losses by our own artillery fire have to be accepted. But this action makes close quarters
fighting with enemy infantry and machine guns much easier. Thus the total losses will be
substantially lower. We must use all means to help foster understanding in the infantry for this.
This must be made possible. The energy of the infantry attack and its success depend largely
upon this.88
When storming positions, the important thing is to use to its greatest effect the preparation by
the artillery and the support of fire. When storming, the infantry must be standing in the enemy
position at the same time as the last artillery rounds and mines fall, and subsequently must
follow straight on from their own curtain of fire, so that the enemy has no time to get out of
any surviving dug-outs or to make itself ready to fight in any other way.89
The Ludendorff offensive of March 1918, an unfeasible and daring attack during
positional warfare, was nothing other than the transference of storm troop tactics
to his own field army. Top-down logic, which had led from the independently
operating Napoleonic corps to the technologically advanced and independent
storm batallion, came back bottom-up. And thus the ‘guts’, which in 1916 only
Rohr’s ‘hand-picked teams trained for weeks for special purposes’ had generated,
became general battle orders,90 which the operational division of supreme
command communicated to the troops ‘down to the last detail’.91 Storm Batal-
lion No. 5 had ‘become the mentor of the modern tactics of the entire German
Army’.92 After half a year of exercises and rearming, 56 of a total of 192 divisions
stood ready as shock divisions to ‘run into their own artillery and mine fire’ on
the morning of 21 March 1918. Only through death did the infantry become a
shock troop and thus a killing machine.
After large initial successes and breakthroughs of 50 kilometres, the Luden-
dorff offensive came to a standstill and failed strategically. Storm troop tactics
simply could not be extended to a whole country. But one consequence of this
failure is that the Struggle as inner experience (Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis)
continued straight away. Jünger’s narrator remains at the start of the Ludendorff
offensive until the very last page, and makes absolutely no mention of its result.93
This is the origin also of a philosophy, whose originator must have known very
well about it, because he himself had participated in the Ludendorff offensive
(along with its pedagogy right down to the last corporal).
In summer 1918:
Heidegger was deployed as a member of the Front Weather Station 414 in the operational area
of the 1st Army on the western front. This unit was under the command of the Army Weather
Station of the 3rd Army: its position, to be more precise, was in the Ardennes near Sedan. Its
main task in the battle of Marne-Champagne (which began on 15 July 1918) lay in covering
the left wing of the 1st Army, which was to push forwards towards Reims. The meteorologi-
cal services had been set up to support the use of poison gas with weather forecasts.94
In summer 1923, Heidegger accepted the call to Marburg, but not without taking
with him against his philosophical opponents ‘a storm troop of 16 people’.95 In
spring 1927, Sein und Zeit. Die erste Hälfte (Being and time. The first half)
appeared.96
Dasein (existence), which is concerned with its own being (Sein), abjures as is
well known the name ‘Mensch’ (person).97 It is always thrown into a world
which it must bring into existence. The totality of Sein, which Dasein has to be,
is still outstanding – ‘death is, as the end of Dasein, at its own end in the Sein of
the person existing [der Seiende]’.98
If Sein und Zeit dared the ‘existential [existenzial] proposal of an actual Sein
to death’, then philosophy stands before literally unheard-of questions: ‘Is the
proposal of an existential [existenzial] possibility of such a questionable existen-
tial [existenziell] capability of Sein not an unrealistic enterprise? And it might
require this, so that such a proposal may go beyond a merely poetic [dichtend],
voluntary construction. . . . In essence, does Dasein throw itself into death in
such a Sein?’99
The answer is yes. To cut the matter short and to make the construction as
unpoetical as it is compelling, it only requires a Ludendorff offensive. Despite all
accepted philosophy, death is not a category, but a Poisson distribution of all
historical kinds of death. The ‘position’100 alone, before which the supreme
command stands in the strategic sense and philosophy in the existential, allows
no doubt: before every possible attack lie a no-man’s-land and a curtain of fire
which give the infantry no chance of survival. Events at the front, which
Heidegger would call death, give ‘Dasein nothing to “realize” and nothing which
itself it could actually be as a real thing. It is the possibility of the impossibility
of any relationship to . . . any kind of existence’.101 Nonetheless the proposal, as
Geyer committed it to paper in Angriff im Stellungskriege (Attack in positional
warfare), has to overcome the sense of being thrown or the static position in the
trenches precisely by having storm troops ‘run into’ the curtain of fire of their
own artillery:
The more unclouded this possibility is understood, the more purely understanding penetrates
into the possibility as that of the impossibility of existence itself. . . . By running into this possi-
bility it becomes ‘larger and larger’ – in other words, it reveals itself as something which knows
no measure, no more or less, but is rather the possibility if the immeasurable impossibility of
existence. . . . This running forward makes accessible to existence the giving up of the self as
the ultimate possibility and thus breaks apart any immobility on the existence which has been
achieved. Dasein protects itself, running ahead, from falling back behind itself and the capa-
bility of being which has been understood and from ‘becoming too old for its victories’.
(Nietzsche)102
Philosophy, instead of falling back behind Ludendorff’s failed offensive, takes it

up again. Every victory which did not occur remains relinquished:
Repetition is the express transference, that is to say, the return into possibilities of a Dasein
that has been. The actual repetition of a possibility of existence which has already been – that
Dasein chooses its own hero – is based existentially [existenzial] in the resolution to run ahead;
for in that resolution the very first choice is made, which makes things free for the struggling
successors and the faithfulness to that which can be repeated.103
The Greeks may have read in death a guilt in nature, and the Christians a
punishment from their God. But only with the philosophy of struggling succes-
sors is there no need to burden foreign powers with the end of mortals. Enemy
cannons and machine guns have ceased their role as a cause of death since they
were pinned down by the curtain of fire. The opposite is also true: because the
tactics of one’s own infantry and artillery arise from the same plan, which
expressly ‘accepts’ ‘a number of losses from one’s own artillery fire’, then running
into the curtain of fire reveals itself as the ‘most characteristic, most unrelatable,
certain and as such undefined, unrepeatable possibility of Dasein’.104 In its inner
turmoil of having to be a plan thrown together, Heidegger’s Dasein displays the
contest between tactics and technology, the generality and the work of the general
staff, the shock troop and the supreme command.
Storm Batallion No. 5 has become a lesson not only for an entire field army,
but also for its philosophers. And, unlike books, it has itself followed the law by
which it was formed. In March 1918 Rohr was promoted to major,105 in October
1918 (once more at the behest of the Crown Prince) he was ordered to Spa for
the personal protection of the Kaiser. Finally, after the ceasefire, abdication and
revolution, Storm Batallion No. 5 was absorbed into the Freikorps Hindenburg.
Translated by James Jordan
Notes
1. Heidegger, Martin (1950) ‘Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks’ in Holzwege. Frankfurt am Main:
p. 50.
2. Cf. [Padre] Giuliani, Reginaldo (1934) Gli arditi. 2nd edn. Milan: p. 1.
3. Cf. Cordova, Ferdinando (1969) Arditi e legionari dannunziani. Padua: p. 1f.
4. Cf. [First Lt.] Graf von Schwerin (1932) ‘Das Sturmbataillon Rohr’ in Paul Heinrici (ed.) Das
Ehrenbuch der deutschen Pioniere. Berlin: p. 559.
5. Cf. Gruß, Helmuth (1939) Die deutschen Sturmbataillone im Weltkrieg. Aufbau und
Verwendung. Berlin: p. 152. (Schriften der kriegsgeschichtlichen Abteilung im Historischen Seminar

der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin, Heft 26)
6. Despite newer works, cf. Fussell, Paul (1975) The Great War and Modern Memory. London.
7. Jünger, Ernst (1932) Der Arbeiter. Herrschaft und Gestalt. Hamburg: p. 143.
8. Jünger, 1932; cf. Ellis, John (1975) The Social History of the Machine Gun. London.
9. Cf. Linnenkohl, Hans (1990) Von Einzelschuß zur Feuerwalze. Der Wettlauf zwischen Technik
und Taktik im Ersten Weltkrieg. Koblenz: p. 272.
10. Cf. Ott, Hugo (1988) Martin Heidegger. Unterwegs zu einer Biographie. Frankfurt am Main,
New York: pp. 85–7. Ott goes so far as to suspect that Heidegger’s secret reading of their correspon-
dence made it impossible for the Freiburg professors to stop his career (particularly the recall from
Marburg to Freiburg).
11. Schauwecker, Franz (1921) Im Todesrachen. Halle an der Saal: p. 282. These and other irregu-
larities were later to be made the norm for infantry by the Troop Office of the Reichswehr, under the
overall control of Lieutenant Ernst Jünger: ‘The rifle may be carried in open order as desired, if
necessary hung around the body, but not borne on the shoulder. The rifle strap should generally be
kept long. The bearing and movement of the marksmen are to be free and unconstrained.’ (Ausbil-
dungsvorschrift für die Infanterie ( = Heeresdienstvorschrift No. 130). Heft 2. New impression Berlin
1934: p. 50). Finally in 1942 the Waffen-SS elevated the small-calibre storm rifle 44, the direct prede-
cessor of the Kalashnikov, to the standard for today. Steiner, Felix (1963) Die Armee der Geächteten.
Göttingen: p. 134 f.
12. Furthermore Reddemann, who interestingly came from the Leipzig Fire Brigade, is also
thought to have been the originator of the term ‘shock troop’ (Gruß, Sturmbataillone, p. 24).
13. This kind of specialization went even further with the shock troops of other states: the French
Army no longer even expected general knowledge of guns and grenades (Linnenkohl, Feuerwalze,
p. 211).
14. Gruß, Sturmbataillone, p. 21. This corresponded to the organigram of the Italian Arditi: the
1000-man batallion consisted of 4 companies, each with 4 infantry trains, a machine gun and
flamethrower department (Cordova, Arditi, p. 5).
15. Cf. Albrecht, Christoph, Geopolitik und Geschichtsphilosophie 1748–1798. PhD, Bochum:
1994: p. 179.
16. Cf. Gruß, Sturmbataillone, p. 165 and p. 181.
17. Barbed wire, the Wild West measure of American ranchers against their cattle herds, had
already been deployed in the Boer War against prisoners and the Russo–Japanese War against enemies.
18. Cf. Gruß, Sturmbataillone, p. 80: ‘At the suggestion of the Supreme Commander Mackensen
on 12 March 1917 the teams [of the storm batallion] were called the Grenadiers (hand grenade
throwers). Storm Batallion No. 5 (Rohr) and the Jäger-(Sturm)-Batallion No. 3 were excepted from
this.
19. Cf. (Colonel) Max Bauer, Der große Krieg in Feld und Heimat, Tübingen 1921, p. 87f: ‘The
new element was that attacks were staged no longer in a broad line but in narrow, highly ordered
troops. The troop was equipped appropriately for the task which awaited it. The principle of equal
weaponry for all infantrymen was breached for the first time.’
20. Linnenkohl, Feuerwalze, p. 171.
21. Gruß, Sturmbataillone, p. 26f.
22. Gruß, Sturmbataillone, p. 152.
23. Quoted in Gruß, Sturmbataillone, p. 48, cf. also p. 121.
24. Geyer, Michael, Deutsche Rüstungspolitik 1860–1980, Frankfurt am Main 1984, p. 102. Inci-
dentally, Geyer emphasizes that he is not related to Captain Hermann Geyer.
25. Cf. Lupfer, Timothy T., The Dynamics of Doctrine: The Changes in German Tactical Doctrine
During the First World War. Leavenworth Papers, No. 4, Fort Leavenworth/Kansas 1981, p. 9: ‘Besides
personal visits, the telephone was another major means of communication with the front line during
the First World War. Ludendorff used it extensively and thought that it was good to use when personal
visits could not be conducted. He also felt that the telephone had some value as a counter to
the drawbacks of personal visits, such as false personal impressions.’ Accordingly, the war was lost at
the precise historical moment when military psychiatry allowed Ludendorff to ‘free himself from the
telephone’ and ‘place flowers in the room’. (Dr Hochheimer, quoted in Foerster, Wolfgang, Der
Feldherr Ludendorff im Unglück. Eine Studie über seine seelische Haltung in der Endphase des ersten
Weltkrieges, Wiesbaden 1952, p. 77f.)
26. Cf. Geyer, Rüstungspolitik, p. 102f., and Linnenkohl, Feuerwalze, p. 194f.
27. Cf. Berz, Peter, 08/15. Ein Standard des 20. Jahrhunderts. PhD, Berlin 1996.
28. Cron, Hermann, Die Organization des deutschen Heeres im Weltkriege, Berlin 1923: p. 49f.
(Forschungen und Darstellungen aus dem Reichsarchiv, Pamphlet 5)
29. Geyer, Rüstungspolitik, p. 101.
30. Cf. Lupfer, Dynamics of Doctrine, p. 27.
31. Bauer, Großer Krieg, p. 87.
32. [General] Erich Ludendorff, Meine Kriegserinnerungen, Berlin 1919, vol. 1, p. 208.
33. Cf. Cron, Organisation des deutschen Heeres, p. 47.
34. Cf. Gruß, Sturmbataillone, pp. 28–31.
35. Bauer, Großer Krieg, p. 88.
36. Cf. Comando dell corpo d’armata d’assalto, Norme per l’impiego tattico delle Grandi Unità
d’assalto, 1 July 1918, quoted in Cordova, Arditi, p. 3.
37. Captain Rohr, quoted in Gruß, Sturmbataillone, p. 45.
38. Senior Postal Director Nehrkorn (1937), quoted in Gruß, Sturmbataillone, p. 88. (The orthog-
raphy has been retained.)
39. Cf. Malaparte, Curzio, Die Wolga entspringt in Europa. With a foreword by Heiner Müller,
Cologne 1989: p. 23 and p. –1 [sic].
40. Cf. Cron, Organisation des deutschen Heeres, p. 141.
41. Cf. Van Crefeld, Martin, Supplying War. Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton. Cambridge,
London, New York, Melbourne 1977: p. 143.
42. Cf. Gruß, Sturmbataillone, p. 45.
43. Gruß, Sturmbataillone, p. 101. The numeration of the storm batallions did not follow the
chronology of their establishment, but rather the numeration of the armies they were allotted to.
44. Gruß, Sturmbataillone, p. 135. Cf. also v. Schwerin, Sturmbataillon Rohr, p. 562.
45. In relation to the etymology of storm troops, cf. also Wotan’s historic task for his Valkyries:
‘Daß stark zum Streit
uns fände der Feind,
hieß ich euch Helden mir schaffen;
die herrisch wir sonst
in Gesetzen hielten,
die Männer, denen
den Mut wir gewehrt,
die durch trüber Verträge
trügende Bande
zu blindem Gehorsam
wir uns gebunden -
die solltet zu Sturm
und Streit ihr nun stacheln,
ihre Kraft reizen
zu rauhem Krieg,
daß kühner Kämpfer Scharen

ich sammle in Walhalls Saal!
(Die Walküre, II 2. In: Wagner, Richard, Die Musikdramen, Munich 1978: p. 613). A line-
by-line commentary can be carried out in future studies.
46. Cf. Cordova, Arditi, p. 2.
47. Cordova, Arditi, p. 22.
48. Cf. Giuliani, Arditi, p. 21.
49. Cf. Cordova, Arditi, p. 4f.
50. Cf. Pamela Ballinger, Blutopfer und Feuertaufe (Sacrifice of blood and baptism of fire). In this
volume, p. 189.
51. Mario Carli, quoted in Cordova, Arditi, p. 5. According to this logic Guido Keller, who like
no other represented Fiume’s Arditism, died in 1929 in a ‘tragica disgrazia automobilista’ (Ferrari,
Atlantico, L’asso di cuori. Guido Keller, Rome 1933: p. 163.) Means of death remain, particularly after
the death of Ingeborg Bachmann, a desideratum of researchers.
52. Cf. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, Letter to Benito Mussolini, quoted in Cordova, Arditi, p. 51.
53. Ledeen, Michael A., The First Duce. D’Annunzio at Fiume. Baltimore, London 1977: p. 66. In
this volume, Bettina Vogel gives a figure of 40 for the lorries.
54. Cf. Ferrari, Asso di cuori, p. 110.
55. Cf. Ferrari, Asso di cuori, p. 161.
56. Ledda, Elena, L’esercito liberatore. Fiume. Rivista di studi fiumani, NF 19, 1990: p. 21.
57. D’Annunzio, Gabriele, Altri Taccuini, ed. Bianchetti, Enrica. Milan 1976: p. 377.
58. Cf. Ledda, L’esercito liberatore, p. 3.
59. Cf. Gabriele d’Annunzio/Giuseppe Pfiffer, Entwurf einer neuen Ordnung des Befreiung-
sheeres. § 49. In this volume, p. 76.
60. Entwurf . . ., p. 79.
61. Cf. also d’Annunzio, Letter to Captain Nino Host-Venturi, 16 September, 1919, quoted in
Ledda, L’esercito liberatore, p. 4: ‘Grande sviluppo dovranno avere le esercitationi sportive.’
62. Cf. Ledda, L’esercito liberatore, p. 8.
63. Ledda, L’esercito liberatore, p. 8, reports on prize competitions in 100 m and 21,000 m races,
which the legionnaires in Fiume had to hold.
64. For futuristic Arditi there was, in addition to ‘running and swimming’, also ‘flying’ (L’Ardito
Futurista – Manifesto [November 1919], quoted in Cordova, Arditi, p. 215).
65. Nino Host-Venturi, Letter to Gabriele D’Annunzio, 28 April, 1920, quoted in Ledda,
L’esercito liberatore, p. 9.
66. Cf. Bredekamp, Horst, Florentiner Fußball. Die Renaissance der Spiele: Calcio als Fest der
Medici. Frankfurt am Main, etc. 1993.
68. VI Armée, État majeur, 2e bureau, Annexe au Bulletin de Renseignements, Le ‘Sturmbatail-
lon’ Rohr à la date du 7 Août 1916, quoted in Gruß, Sturmbataillone, p. 180. In the myth of the
‘Frontschweine’ (the lags at the front) the teamwork went even further: on Christmas Eve 1914 British
and Germans (or, more precisely, Saxons) are said to have played against each other in football teams.
Cf. Eksteins, Modris, Tanz über Gräben. Die Geburt der Moderne und der Erste Weltkrieg. Reinbek
1990: p. 177.
70. Geyer, Deutsche Rüstung, p. 100.
72. Steiner, Armee der Geächteten, p. 24.
73. Steiner, Armee der Geächteten, p. 25.
74. Steiner, Armee der Geächteten, pp. 91–97.
75. Cf. Steiner, Armee der Geächteten, p. 24 and p. 351.

76. Völkischer Beobachter, 21 May, 1939, quoted in Steiner, Armee der Geächteten, p. 108.
77. Cf. Geyer, Deutsche Rüstung, p. 101: ‘[The 3rd Supreme Command under Ludendorff and
Hindenburg] changed the tactics and deployment principles of the German Army . . . so radically and
decisively (in contrast particularly to the French Army) that it basically required until 1941/42 to work
through all of the consequences.’
78. Steiner, Armee der Geächteten, p. 106f.
79. Cf. Bloem, Walter, Seele des Lichtspiels. Ein Bekenntnis zum Film. Leipzig 1922. Incidentally:
on 7 October 1918 – just in time for World War – Storm Batallion No. 7 made its first training film
(Gruß, Sturmbataillone, p. 120).
80. Gruß’s back-handed commentary on this point (‘Captain Rohr was not of the nobility,’ Sturm-
bataillone, p. 56, note) only serves to make clear how the criteria for recruitment to the elite changed
between 1914 (the Imperial Army) and 1939 (the Waffen-SS).
81. Bloem, Walter, Das Ganze – halt! Leipzig 1934, p. 229.
82. Cf. Linnenkohl, Feuerwalze, p. 272.
83. Cf. Cordova, Arditi, p. 3.
84. Cf. Linnenkohl, Feuerwalze, p. 39.
85. Cf. Lupfer, Dynamics of Doctrine, p. 45.
86. Cf. Lupfer, Dynamics of Doctrine, p. 44: ‘The Germans wanted to avoid any prolonged artillery
fire, for surprise would be lost and an artillery duel would develop in which the Allies, with greater
amounts of munitions, would eventually prevail. Therefore, German fire had to be fast and accurate,
and its mission was neutralization, rather than elusive and costly destruction.’
87. Cf. [Captain] Hermann Geyer, Der Angriff im Stellungskriege. In: Urkunden der Obersten
Heeresleitung über ihre Tätigkeit 1916/1918, ed. Erich Ludendorff. Berlin, 2. Edn. 1921, p. 648, p. 659
and p. 671.
88. Geyer, Angriff im Stellungskriege, p. 672, cf. also p. 652. The Ludendorff offensive shortened
the distance between artillery and infantry from 50 to 30 m and accelerated the curtain of fire to 1.5
km/h. The Red Army proceeded likewise in March 1945 on the Oder (Linnenkohl, Feuerwalze,
pp. 272–4).
89. Geyer, Angriff im Stellungskriege, p. 657. The same principle pertained in the training regu-
lations for the Reichswehr (Ausbildungsvorschrift für die Infanterie, p. 50).
90. Hitler commented on Steiner’s manoeuvre at the Munster Camp: ‘One can only do such things
with specially selected people!’ (Steiner, Armee der Geächteten, p. 106)
91. Lupfer, Dynamics of Doctrine, p. 46.
92. Von Schwerin, Sturmbataillon Rohr, p. 560.
93. Cf. Jünger, Ernst, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis. Berlin 1922: pp. 101–16.
94. Ott, Martin Heidegger, p. 104f.
95. Heidegger, Martin, Letter to Karl Jaspers, 19 June, 1923, quoted in Ott, Martin Heidegger,
p. 122.
96. The following thoughts should be attributed to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht from the winter
semester we spent together in 1988/89, between palms in the lobby and iced-up motorways.
97. Cf. Heidegger, Martin, Sein und Zeit. Erste Hälfte. Halle 1931, 3rd edn: p. 46.
98. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p. 259.
99. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p. 260 and p. 266.
102. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, pp. 262–4.
104. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p. 285f. Domenico Losurdo put forward the proposition that the
conception of death in Sein und Zeit had been derived from the First World War, thus countering
unhistorical readings (Die Gemeinschaft, der Tod, das Abendland. Heidegger und die Kriegsideologie.
Stuttgart, Weimar 1995). My only suggestion would be to replace the non-concept of ‘war ideology’
by documented plans of attack, and Heidegger’s subsequent reference to the ‘camaraderie of soldiers
at the front’ with the militarily well-defined ‘running forwards towards death’.
105. Cf. Lupfer, Dynamics of Doctrine, p. 10, fn.: ‘One important characteristic of the Imperial
German Army was its extreme stinginess in promotions during the war. This army could not be
accused of inflation of rank, unlike its World War II counterpart, the Wehrmacht.’
Friedrich Kittler is Professor of Aesthetics and Media Studies at the Institute for Aesthetics and
Cultural Studies at Humboldt University, Berlin. He is the author of Discourse Networks, 1800/1900
and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.

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11 Kittler (jr/d) 15/1/04 1:44 pm Page 169

The Flower of the Elite Troops

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troops with whom D’Annunzio occupied Fiume for 16 months. Consequently

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Napoleon’s campaigns could only cover Europe so comprehensively because

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A war costly in materials replaced a war costly in human lives.

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company) is pure understatement, because this company represented in fractal

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Philosophy, instead of falling back behind Ludendorff’s failed offensive, takes it

Translated by James Jordan

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Verwendung. Berlin: p. 152. (Schriften der kriegsgeschichtlichen Abteilung im Historischen Seminar

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daß kühner Kämpfer Scharen

188 Body and Society Vol. 9 No. 4

75. Cf. Steiner, Armee der Geächteten, p. 24 and p. 351.

The Flower of the Elite Troops 189

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