从战争到战争:论一战对二战的影响

From One War to the Other: The Impact of the First World War on the Second World War

本文以第一次世界大战与第二次世界大战的战争本质中的"共同点"为基础展开讨论。这两场战争都是大规模的工业化战争,均历经过度的、失控的暴力、死亡和破坏。它们不仅见证了包括新技术和强大武器在内的军事方法和战争手段的发展,也见证了全面的扩张,或者说是战争向人类生活各个领域的越界(Entgrenzung)。在两次世界大战中,扩张或者侵略的概念已经延伸并超越"总体战"的概念范畴。如果忽略德国记忆的存在和对大战争的解读,只谈"第二次战争"是绝对不全面的,20世纪30年代的德国社会目睹了——一代人的——第一次世界大战的异化,即一战逐渐失去了在记忆中的重要位置。随后的世界大战用大规模屠杀、破碎的档案和巨大的破坏强化了该进程。更多的受害者,特别是平民百姓的死难,对六百万欧洲犹太人的谋杀使这场规模宏大的暴力的越界达到了巅峰,这一切都使第一次世界大战似乎成了第二次世界大战的灾难的序曲。

This essay will therefore begin by establishing some 'common ground' regarding the nature of the two wars. Both were industrialized mass wars characterized by a common and lasting experience of excessive and uncontrolled violence, death, and destruction. Both saw an increase in military means and methods of warfare that included new and powerful technology and weapons, but also a general expansion, or perhaps transgression(Entgrenzung), of the war into all areas of human life.In the two World Wars, the concept of expansion or aggression has been extended beyond the definition of 'total war'. The understanding of World War II is definitely improper if the German memory and interpretation of the war were ignored. German society in the 1930 s witnessed a certain alienation from the Great War that gradually lost its dominant position in memory. This process was enhanced by the experience of the following war with hecatombs of lives, cut-off biographies, and an enormous scale of destruction. The even greater number of victims,especially among the civilian population, a radical transgression of massive violence reaching its apogee with the murder of 6 million European Jews, made the First World War appear to be a mere prologue to the cataclysm of the Second World War.