Zeiten des Schreckens: Amok, Terror, Krieg

Wolfgang Sofsky examines the social forms of terror: the rampage and the assassination, the lynching and desecration, the horrors of persecution, the regular war of soldiers, the savage war of gangs and marauders, and the new war of terror. Sofsky is not only concerned with the detailed interpretation and elucidation of violent excesses that are difficult to understand. The microscopic description of historical and current events clearly shows that the impulses of cruelty and the dynamics of violence are deeply anchored socially and anthropologically – too deeply to be able to indulge in the hope that they can be permanently and reliably suppressed. The book thus resolutely contradicts common ideas about the supposed achievements of modern civilization. The last part of the book is dedicated to the time after the horror: retribution through revenge or punishment, forgetting and remembering, the moral feelings of guilt and shame, finally the disappearance of signs and traces.