In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Blitzkrieg: “Gott Stinnes” or the Depoliticization of the Sublime
  • Karlheinz Barck (bio)

Wer den Blitz liebt, darf den Schlag nicht fürchten.

—Felix Dahn 1

Auf die Dauer imponiert dem Mann aus dem Volk nur die Entfaltung von Kraft und Disziplin.

—Joseph Goebbels 2

Blitzkrieg, one of those international notions of German origin, like “kitsch” or “kindergarten,” sprang from two types of critical discourse or reflection, one military or strategic and one more sociopolitical or sociopsychological. Let me briefly characterize them.

In October 1941, shortly after the beginning of the Nazi onslaught against the Soviet Union in accordance with the “Aufmarschanweisung Barbarossa” (Barbarossa marching orders) 3 one could read the following in a book published that year:

It is too early to see more than the widest outline of what is happening in the largest blitzkrieg of the lot, that on the Russian front. All we can tell is that there are some signs that the German forces have been slowed down, and a number of signs show that they are meeting with an opposition not only powerful in numbers and materials, but more effective in its tactics than has been met by the Nazi Army in almost all its previous campaigns. We cannot tell whether this opposition will succeed; but we can say already that the Russians seem to have attempted on a very large scale the creation of a web of defence that separates the armoured spear-head of the blitzkrieg from the infantry divisions following it. . . . The blitzkrieg has decided the [End Page 57] fate of too many nations. The principles that I have emphasized here are to my mind the essence of the blitzkrieg: concentration for a “rolling thrust,” the linking of various arms in combat teams, large scale counter-attack as one main element in the only sort of defence possible, and a web of tank-proof islands of resistance as the other main element. 4

This was written by Tom Wintringham in his introduction to the first and best description of blitzkrieg doctrine we have, Ferdinand Otto Miksche’s Blitzkrieg. 5 Both Miksche and Wintringham participated in the Spanish Civil War, the first “Nazi laboratory” for the blitzkrieg. Miksche was a Czechoslovak major on the General Staff of the Spanish Republican Army, while Wintringham was a commander of the British battalion. Miksche’s book is the only serious study of the epoch, written by an expert and an eyewitness for whom the principles of blitzkrieg “were well known by 1939, at the end of the Spanish War. The road that the evolution of war was taking could not fail to be seen by an attentive observer who studied it in Spain.” 6

What is well known by military historians today as the basic concept of blitzkrieg was analyzed by Miksche as a combination of two factors, dromological (having to do with increasing speed) and territorial (space-making):

The first [features of blitzkrieg] are surprise, speed, and material superiority; the second ones are motorization as method of transport, mechanization as method of breakthrough [ Durchbruch ], air action as method of support, protection, and communication—that gives the warfare of to-day a character entirely different from that of the last World War.

Speed and communication, their articulation or linking by means of new hard- and software technologies, can be seen as the differentia specifica that distinguish blitzkrieg from the war machine of World War I. The new era that blitzkrieg opened in the history of war is characterized by the use of communication weapons and transmission media, by what Heinz Guderian, commander of the tank troops and one of the first theorists of blitzkrieg, called the “concert of weapons,” a symphony made possible by new communication technologies, such as FM radio, facilitating the control of command. 7

The other discourse mentioned has another horizon and another dimension. After the beginning of World War II, several entries in the Arbeitsjournal (working journal) of Bertolt Brecht refer to the speed of German blitzkrieg as an astonishing new aspect of the war machine. Brecht characterizes this new quality as a substitution of the traditional battlefield by what he calls a “Schlachtwürfel,” a “battle cube” or “battle dice.” 8...

Share