Where on April 25, 1945 American and Soviet troops shook hands after freeing Germany from Hitler’s dictatorship
or
To 16-year-old Theo at German Broadcaster ARD, who plays the organ in his spare time but is now determined to join the Army.
You want to do what really counts! Then do it!
Join the Bundeswehr!
You want to defend Western values, our freedom, like back in Afghanistan?
Then go!
I am old. I won’t stop you.
You want to know what war means? Then go!
Go to war!
You want to defend your country! Then go!
Let them tell you that the Russians are coming,
that Putin will be at the door tomorrow,
if we don’t keep him away from us in the Donbass today!
Believe what they tell you, because those who know nothing must believe a lot,
and those who don’t believe our propaganda are supporting our enemies!
Let yourself get stirred up against the Russians!
Go, close your eyes and go!
Go to where the black earth is already soaked
with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians.
Go!
Grass will grow over your body as well.
Come with me to Donetsk,
where already children have learned what war means,
where this war didn’t start in 2022, but back in 2014,
on the Maidan,
when this war started with the Right Sector’s assassinations,
what you don’t hear about at schools or universities.
Come with me to the city,
where everyone knows what that means: living in the death zone.
Where school kids hide under the table when the bell rings at recess,
because they fear the next bomb scare,
and where at night, in their dreams,
they watch death do its job for the rest of their lives.
Come with me to Mariupol,
where on the cellar wall is written in white paint: Sdez Detje! “Children still live here!”
But the cellar is burnt out.
Nobody lives there anymore.
If you want to find out what war means, then come!
If you want to come with me to the front line, come!
Come,
If you want to look into the abyss, through burnt-out window caves,
If you can’t pee in the ditch because there are butterfly mines,
when you can’t wash for days,
when the last ration has been eaten by maggots and there’s nothing else to eat,
when you’re in damp cellars with other filthy and distraught people licking the greasy
broth out of the radiator,
when you only have dirty water to drink,
when you catch dysentery from this dirty, contaminated water,
when you have to shit over a bar into a stinking hole and
when you can’t find any grass to wipe your ass,
when you still wear the same underpants on the first, second, third, fourth, fifth day
and the old hardened excrement collects in them,
when you lie in the dirt at night in your soaked army parka and
when you catch frostbite on a cot in a freezing cold shelter in winter,
when lice and fleas infest your smelly uniform,
when myriads of bugs feed on your skin,
when you get scabies,
when the cold, damp mud, in which you stand ankle-deep day in, day out, turns the skin
on your feet a bluish gray and gradually rots off your feet,
when the amputated, bloody trench feet lie in a heap in the dirt,
when the rats gnaw at the corpses and the crows eat out the eyes and intestines of the
dead,
when you hear the officers’ whistles,
when they chase you up the ladder with their gun drawn, their finger on the trigger,
out of the trench into the machine gun fire, into the minefields,
when the drones come flying towards you in a swarm,
when you can’t sleep at night because the wounded are stuck in the barbed wire trenches, moaning and pleading for their mothers,
when you are writhing on a dirty sheet in the military hospital and your foot itches
and you want to scratch your foot, but there is no foot left because your leg has been
amputated,
when only the phantom pain reminds you that you once had a leg,
where now there is only a stump in a bandage bled through
when the missiles are aimed at your phone and reach their target in cold geometry,
when all that remains of your tank is molten metal,
when you burn up in a fireball at 2,552 degrees Fahrenheit,
then you know what war means.
So go!
Get that taste of freedom and adventure!
Go and become a hero!
Go when power and the media stick together like pitch and brimstone.
Give your life for those who send you there but don’t go there themselves!
Don’t feel sorry for yourself! Go!
Go to your death for those who give speeches to the people on TV,
who stay on the stage or in the bunker and put their own children on the last plane
overseas,
convinced transatlanticists as they are.
Go!
If you fall, the stockmarket will rise!
So, go!
But first
Look at them,
how they sit behind their desks in their editorial offices and stir their coffee cups,
the mouthbreathers who don’t even send their children into the ditch;
take a good look at them,
the hasbardeurs and shellackers in government who want to deliver Taurus cruise-
missiles
but wet themselves at the first shotgun blast,
look at them,
the armor bosses who pop champagne corks while others bleed to death from their
weapons.
Take a good look at them.
Because all you have to do is look these guys in the face.
Peace Rally, Torgau, Germany (April 25, 2025).
