`Breathless by the tense vigil,Breathless by trepidation in the unbreathable splendor of the night ...''

Hermann Broch Der Tod der Vergil (1976, page 103)

1. Gaswar, or the atmoterrorist modelIf one wanted to say with one phrase and with the minimum of expressions what the20th century, together with its incommensurable accomplishment in the arts, contrib-uted as an unmistakable characteristic proper to the history of civilization, answeringwith three criteria could suffice. Whoever wants to understand the originality of thisage will have to take into account: the praxis of terrorism, the conception of productdesign, and concepts of the environment. Through the first, interactions betweenenemies were established on postmilitary foundations; through the second, function-alism was able to reintegrate itself in the world of perception; through the third, thephenomena of life and knowledge were entwined to depths hitherto unknown. Takentogether, these three criteria indicate the acceleration of explicationöof the revealinginclusion of latencies and background data in manifest operations.

Additionally, if the task were to be formulated to determine when the 20th centurybegan, the answer could be given with a higher level of punctual exactitude. With thesame date can be illustrated how the three primary characteristics of this epoch wereunited at the beginning in a common primordial scene. The 20th century eruptedspectacularly on 22 April 1915 with the first significant use of chlorine gas as a weapon

AirquakesÀ

Peter SloterdijkFrom Spha« ren III: Scha« ume (Suhrkamp, 2004), pp 89 ^ 126Translated by Eduardo Mendieta, Department of Philosophy, University of New York at StonyBrook, NY 11794, USA

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2009, volume 27, pages 41 ^ 57

Abstract. In this excerpt from the introduction to volume three of Spha« ren (Spheres), subtitledScha« ume ( foam), Sloterdijk argues that what makes the 20th century uniquely singular and creativeis its invention of what he calls here atmosterrorism, the assault not on the body of the enemy, but onhis or her environment. This terrorism of the atmosphere is to be understood as a human-made formof quake that turns the enemy's environment into a weapon against them. Living organisms, amongthem humans, simply cannot not breathe, and it is this double negative that is at the heart ofatmoterrorism. Weaving a fascinating narrative that links the development of insecticides and pesti-cides to the first use of poisonous gas during World War I, to the development of the gas chamber asthe tool of supreme punishment in the United States, to the eventual convergence of putative humanekilling and disinfection and delousing into the mobile and stationary gas chambers of exterminationused in the Nazi concentration camps. Terrorism, argues Sloterdijk, reveals the essence of war, the willto exterminate the enemy, with the difference that the former expands the extermination of theenemy to the very world that enables the enemy to exist. In the 20th century, atmoterrorism leadsto the exterminism of total war.

doi:10.1068/dst1

À Part of this paper appeared in 2002 in a small book published by Peter Sloterdijk, entitledLuftbeben: Aus den Quellen des Terror (Air tremors: out of the sources of terror) (Suhrkamp,Frankfurt am Main). A full translation of this book is forthcoming with Semiotext(e). This paper,however, is a modification and amplification of those pages. I have translated Luftbeben asAirquakes' because of the obvious echo that Sloterdijk makes to Erdbeben (earthquakes) andSeebeben (seaquakes) (translator's note).

by a `gas regiment' (Gasregiment)öcreated expressly for this purposeöof the GermanWestern Front army against the Franco-Canadian infantry positions in the northernarch of the Ypres. In the previous weeks in this sector of the front, German soldiers,unbeknownst to the enemy, had installed in their batteries thousands of concealedcanisters of a previously unknown type. At exactly 18:00 hours, pioneers of the newregiment, under the command of Colonel Max Peterson, with a strong wind fromthe north and northeast, opened 1600 large (40 kg) and 4130 small (20 kg) canistersfilled with chlorine. Through this `release' (Abblasen) of the liquefied element, approx-imately 150 tonnes of chlorine were deployed, becoming a cloud of gas approximately6 km wide and 600 m to 900 m deep.(1) An aerial picture preserved for all time thedevelopment of this first toxic cloud of war over theYpres war front. The favorable windpushed the cloud to speeds from 2 m to 3 m per second against the French positions.The concentration of the toxic gas was calculated at approximately 0.5%. Prolongedexposure to the gas produced intense damage to the lungs and respiratory system.

The French general Jean-Jules Henry Mordacq (1868 ^ 1943), who then was 5 kmfrom the front, received a telephone call shortly after 18:20 hours from the fieldin which an officer of the first sharpshooter (tirailleurs) regiment announced theappearance of yellowish clouds of smoke that stretched from the German to the Frenchtrenches (Mordacq, 1933, cited in Hanslian, 1935, page 123f). Because of that warning,at first questionable but subsequently confirmed by other calls, Mordacq rode his horsewith his adjutants to examine the front in person, and he and his companions quicklyexhibited respiratory complications, bronchial irritations, and acute ear-ringing. Afterthe horses refused to continue, Mordacq's team had to approach the gassed areaon foot. Soon, they were met by swarms of panicked soldiers, running, with openedtunics, throwing their weapons away, spitting blood, and begging for water. Somerolled on the ground, struggling in vain to breathe. Around 19:00 hours a breach of6 km opened up in the Franco-Canadian front; then the German troops advanced andoccupied Langemarck (cf Martinetz, 1996, page 23f). The attacking units had availableonly gauze pads soaked in a soda solution and a liquid that captured chlorine, thesewere worn over the mouth and nose for their own protection. Mordacq survived theattack and published his war memoirs the year that Hitler took power.

The military success of the operation was at no point challenged. A few days afterYpres, Kaiser Wilhelm II had a personal audience with the scientific director of theGerman gas-war program, the chemistry professor Fritz Haber, director of the KaiserWilhelm Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrical Chemistry at Dahlem, promotinghim to captain.(2) In any event, the consensus emerged that the German troops weresurprised by the efficiency of the new method and had not gripped their victorioustriumph of 22 April successfully enough. On the contrary, the data on the number ofvictims differed significantly, then as now. According to nonofficial French sources, therehad been only 625 gas victims, of whom only three had succumbed to poisoning, whileaccording to initial German report there were 15 000 poisoned and 5000 dead to be

(1) These figures follow the presentation of Martinetz (1996); slight variations in the identificationof place, time, and quantity can be found in Lepick (1998).(2) Haber (1868 ^ 1934) was at the time of the war also the director of a department for `gas war' inthe Ministry of War. As a Jew, he was forced to leave Germany in 1933, after he gave the Germanmilitary command suggestions for the reintroduction of gas weaponry in the summer of the sameyear. After a stay in England, he died on 29 January 1934 in Basel on his way to Palestine. Someof his associates were executed in Auschwitz. In military science, the Haberian mortality productis derived by multiplying the concentration of poison (c) by exposure time (t) (c6t � product).The awarding of the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1918 to Haber in recognition of his discoveryof ammonia synthesis unleashed strong protests in England and France, where his name was linkedabove all to the organization of chemical warfare.

42 P Sloterdijk

accounted for. These numbers have continually decreased during the period of theresearch. It is evident that interpretative controversies are manifest in these differences,which exhibit in illuminating ways the different military ^ technical and moral senses ofthe operation. As a Canadian autopsy report of a gas victim from the hardest hitsection of the front says: ` With the removal of the lungs a considerable amount of afoaming light yellowish liquid spilled out ... .The veins on the surface of the brain wereseverely obstructed; all the small blood vessels had clearly burst'' (cited in Martinetz,1996, page 24).

While the unfortunate 20th century today readies itself to enter into the history booksas the age of extremes', and as the progressive inactuality of its lines of struggle andmobilized conceptsöits scripts for world history are no less yellowed than the proclama-tions of medieval theologians for the liberation of the holy graveöconsumes it, theremanifests with greater clarity one of the technical models of the last century. One couldcall it the introduction of the environment into the struggle between adversaries.

Since there has been artillery, it belongs to the role of defenders and warlords todirect themselves towards the enemy and the enemy's protective shields with directshots. Whoever intends to eliminate an enemy according to the military rules of theart of killing at a distance has to establish, through artillery cannon, an intentio directaat the enemy's body and to immobilize the object in the line of sight with a sufficientlyprecise hit. From the late Middle Ages until the beginning of the First World War,the definition of the soldier was constituted by the fact that he would establish and`maintain' this intentionality. During this time, masculinity was codified, among otherthings, by the capacity and disposition to kill an enemy directly and causally with one'sown hand and one's own weapon. To aim at an adversary is, as it were, the continua-tion of the struggle between two people but with ballistic means. For this reason, thegesture of one man killing another remains closely linked to the prebourgeois idea ofpersonal valor and possible heroism that continues to exercise influence even underconditions of combat at a distance and in anonymous logistical battle, regardless oftheir anachronism. If the members of the armies of the 20th century could be of theopinion that they still performed a `manly' and, under martial premises, an `honorable'profession then they appealed to the risk of the immediate encounter with death.The manifestation of this idea in technical weaponry is the rifle with a mounted(aufgeflanztem) bayonet: if for some reason the (bourgeois) elimination of the enemywith shots at a distance fails, the rifle always offers the possibility of returning to the(noble and archaic) direct running through of an enemy in proximity.

The 20th century will be remembered as the period whose decisive idea consistedin targeting not the body of the enemy, but his environment. This is the fundamentalthought of terror in a more explicit and contemporary sense. Shakespeare put itsprinciple prophetically in Shylock's mouth: ` You take my life/When you do take themeans whereby I live'' (Merchant of Venice IV, 1). Among those means today, alongwith the economic, are the ecological and psychosocial conditions of human existence,which have moved to the center of attention. In these new procedures to enable theextraction of the enemy's conditions of survival from the environment or surroundings,there appear the contours of a specifically modern, post-Hegelian concept of horror(see Hegel, 1979, page 355f).(3)

(3) According to Hegel, in terror is realized the ``discrete, absolute hard rigidity and self-willedatomism of actual self-consciousness'' (1979, page 359). ` The sole work and deed of universalfreedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what isnegated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest ofall deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthfulof water'' (page 360, italics in original).

Airquakes 43

The horror of the 20th century is essentially more than `I-can-because-I-will', withwhich the Jacobin self-consciousness stepped over the corpses of those who stepped infront of the path of freedom; it also essentially differentiates itself, notwithstandingformal similarities, from the bomb attacks of the anarchist and nihilists of the lastthird of the 19th century, who attempted a prerevolutionary destabilization of thebourgeois-late-aristocratic social order; among them there flourishes not a few timesa comfortable and portly `philosophy of the bomb', which gave expression to fantasiesof power of the petty-bourgeois friend of destruction.(4) Additionally, neither method-ically nor because of its objectives can the philosophy of the bomb be confused withthe phobocratic (phobokratischen) techniques of permanent or emergent dictatorshipsin order to make their own populations submissive by means of a calculated mix of` ceremony and terror'' (see Fest, 2002, page 144). Finally, we have to maintain as distantfrom its precise concept the innumerable episodes, in which particular desperados, outof vengeful, paranoid, and demonic motives, appropriate modern means of destructionin order to stage punctual Armageddons.

The horror of our epoch is a form of appearance of the theoretical-environmentalmodernized science of extermination, thanks to which the terrorist understands hisvictims better than they do themselves. When the body of the enemy can no longer beliquidated with direct assault, the possibility presents itself to the attacker of makinghis existence impossible, by immersing the enemy in an unlivable milieu.

From this conclusion emerges modern chemical war', as an attack on the vitalfunctions of the enemy that depend on the environmentönamely, breathing, central-neural regulations, and the temperature and radiation appropriate for living. In fact,it is here that the transition from classical war to terrorism is accomplished, inasmuchas terrorism has as a presupposition the rejection of the old engagement of armsbetween adversaries of the same power. Contemporary terror operates beyond thena|« ve exchange of armed strikes between regular troops. It has to do with the sub-stitution of classical forms of struggle with attempts on the environmental conditionsof life of the enemy. Such a change is insinuated when two very unequal forces confronteach other, as can be seen in the contemporary trend of nonstate wars and the tensionsbetween state armies and nonstate combatants. Yet, the affirmation that terror is theweapon of the weak is completely false. Any look at the history of terror in the 20thcentury shows that it was states, and among them the strongest, that were the firstto have recourse to terrorist methods and means.

Seen retrospectively, the historical-military curiosity of the gas war from 1915 to1918 lies in the fact that, on both sides of the front, forms of environmental terror wereofficially commanded, and were integrated into the regular execution of war by legallyrecruited armies, in conscious violation of Article 23a of the HagueWar Convention of1907, which explicitly forbade the use of poison and weapons, of any kind, thatincrease the suffering of the enemy, and, above all, their deployment against thenoncombatant population.(5) It seems that in 1918 the Germans had more than ninegas battalions with approximately 7000 men, and the allies had more than thirteenbattalions of chemical troops' with more than 12 000 men. Not without reason, therewere experts who spoke of a `war within the war'. This formulation announces the

(4) See the work German idealist anarchist Johann Most, who first conceived of the letter bomb,as well as Camus (1992, particularly pages 149 ^ 245), with emphasis on the difference betweenindividual terror and state terrorism.(5) Since both sides were conscious of violating the laws of war, they renounced raising protest withthe opposing governments against the application of poisonous gas. Haber's false argument thatchlorine was not a poisonous gas but only an irritant, and therefore not addressed by the HagueConvention, has received support in recent German nationalist apologetics.

44 P Sloterdijk

liberation of extermination from the moderation of the violence of war. Numeroustestimonies of soldiers from the First World Waröabove all, from the professionalofficers of the nobilityötestify that they considered that war with gas was a degenera-tion of the means of carrying out war, dishonoring all the participants. Nonetheless,no case has been preserved in which a member of the army had openly opposed thenew `law of war' (cf Friedrich, 1993).

The discovery of the `environment' took place in the trenches of the First WorldWar, in which soldiers from both sides had become so unreachable by munitions orexplosives that the problem of atmospheric war must have appeared to them acutely.What was later called `gas war' (and, much later, an aerial bombing war), offered itselfas a technical solution: its principle lies in surrounding the enemy long enoughöwhichin practice meant at least some minutesöwith a cloud of polluting materials, with asufficient `tactical concentration', until he would fall victim to his own need to breathe.(The production of psychological clouds of contamination over one's own populationdepends on the rules of mass media of the warring groups: these transform theirimperative to inform into an involuntary complicity with terrorists, since, as an honestgesture, they generalize nationally what are local horrors.) These toxic clouds werenever composed practically of gas in a physical sense, but instead of very fine particlesof dust that were released with explosive charges. With this there appeared thephenomenon of a second artillery, since it no longer aimed directly at the enemysoldiers and their positions, but rather at the air surrounding the bodies of theenemy. As a consequence, the concept of the `target' was displaced following a blurredlogic: what was sufficiently near the object could now count as sufficiently exact and,for that reason, was operationally dominated. In a later period, the highly explosiveprojectiles of classical artillery were recombined with the projectiles that generatedclouds of the new gas artilleries.(6) Feverish research then concerned itself with thequestion of how to confront the rapid dissolution of toxic clouds over the battlefield:a matter that according to general rules was accomplished through chemical supple-ments that modified the highly volatile behavior of the dust particles in combat in thedesired direction. As a consequences of the events at Ypres, there rapidly emergeda type of military climatology from nothing, about which one does not say too littleif one recognizes it as the guiding phenomenon of terrorism.

The production of poison clouds is the first science with which the 20th centurypresents its identity documents. Before 22 April 1915 that affirmation had been pata-physical, later on it would count as the core of an ontology of the present. It makesexplicit the phenomenon of unbreathable space, which was traditionally implicit in theconcept of miasma. The until today still unclear status of knowledge about poisonclouds or the theory of unlivable spaces within climatology only makes clear that thetheory of climate has not yet emancipated itself from its scientific-naturalistic stupor.As we will show, it was truly the earliest among the new human sciences that emergedfrom the science of world war (Weltkriegwissen).(7)

The breathtaking development of the respiratory defensive military apparatuses(more popularly, the line of gas masks) revealed the accommodation of the troops toa situation in which human respiration was on the way to assuming a direct role inmilitary events. Fritz Haber was immediately celebrated as the father of the gas mask.

(6) This effect was augured by the massive application of explosive missiles: ` The force of the shellsbalanced out their lack of precision'' (Ferguson, 2001, page 290).(7) On the rise of a more lighthearted nephrology (or, to use the words of Thomas Mann, a theoryof the `higher movements') at the beginning of the 19th century, see Hamblyn (2002). The mostimportant social scientific findings from the phenomenon of war propaganda and its elevationto poisonous mass communication can be found in the mass hysteria theory of Hermann Broch.

Airquakes 45

As one can gather from the military-historical literature, between February and June1916, among the German troops at Verdun alone, the corresponding depot of therearguard handed out close to five and a half million gas masks, as well as 4300 oxygentanks (many of them taken from the mining industry) with 2 million litres of oxygen (seeMartinetz, 1996, page 93). It becomes clear from these figures to what extent by thatstage the `ecologized' war, transferred to an atmospheric environment, had alreadybecome a struggle concerning the breathing potentials of warring parties. The strugglethen included the weak biological sites of partners to the conflict. The image of the gasmask, which quickly became popular, shows that the attacked attempt to liberatethemselves from their dependence on their immediate environment of breathable air,hiding behind an air filteröa first step towards the principle of air conditioning, whichis based on the uncoupling of a defined volume of air from the surrounding air. To thiscorresponds, on the attacking side, an escalation to an attack on the atmospherethrough the use of toxic materials that penetrate the protective respiratory devices ofthe enemy. From the summer of 1917, chemists and German officials began to use theweapon diphenylchlorarsin, also known as `blue cross' or `Clark I', which, in the formof extremely fine particles in suspension, could overcome the protective filters of theenemy. The effect of this led its victims to give it the name `mask-breaker'. At the sametime, the German gas artillery introduced the new combat gas, `yellow cross' or`Lost',(8) in the Western front against British troops, which produced severe injuriesto the organism especially loss of sight and catastrophic nervous disorders whenit came in contact with the skin or membranes of the eyes and respiratory paths.One of the most recognized Lost or Yperite victims was Private Adolf Hitler, who onthe night of 13 ^ 14 October 1918 on a hill near Werwick (La Montagne), to the southof Ypres, was involved in one of the last gas attacks of World War I, carried out by theBritish. In his memoirs, he related that on the morning of the 14 October his eyes hadbecome something like glowing coals and that, in addition, after the events of the9 November in Germany, that he survived in the military hospital Pasewalk in Pomeriaby word of mouth, literally, since he had suffered a relapse of the loss of vision thathe had suffered through Lost; during this stay he made the decision to ` become apolitician''. In the spring of 1944 he told [Albert] Speer, in anticipation of the impend-ing defeat, that he feared losing his sight again. The trauma of gas remained with himuntil the end, as a nervous trace. It would seem that among the technical ^militarydeterminants of World War II was that fact that Hitler introduced, as a result of hisown experiences, an idiosyncratic understanding of gas into his personal conceptionof war, on the one hand, and of the praxis of genocide, on the other.(9)

In its first appearance, the gas war brought together operative criteria of the 20thcentury: terrorism, design consciousness, and consideration of the environment. Theexact concept of terrorism presupposes, as has been shown, an explicit concept forthe environment since terrorism represents the displacement of destructive actionfrom the `system' (here, the physically concrete body of the enemy) to its `environment'(in this case, to the atmospheric environment in which the bodies of the enemy move,having to breathe). For this reason, the terrorist act always possesses, right from thestart, the characteristic of being an attempt, for the definition of the attempt (in Latin:attentatum, attempt, essaying an assassination) includes not only the unexpected hit of

(8) This was so named by Fritz Haber after the responsible scientists Dr Lommel (Bayer,Leverkusen) and Professor Steinkopf (associate at Haber's Dahlem Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute forPhysical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, the `Prussian Military Institute' during the war). This wargas was also called `mustard gas' because of its smell, `Huns' Material', because of its devastatingeffects, or `Yperite', after its first place of application.(9) On the nonuse of gas weapons in the Second World War, see Gellermann (1986).

46 P Sloterdijk

the ambush, but also the malignant exploitation of the life habits of the victims. In thegas war, deep levels of the biological conditions of human beings are implicatedin the very attack against them: the inescapable need to breathe is turned againstbreathers in such a way that they become involuntary accomplices in their owndestructionöassuming that the terrorist has been able to corner his victims longenough in the toxic environment so that they, inevitably having to breath, give themselvesover to the unbreathable environment. As Jean-Paul Sartre noted, despair is not onlyan attack of the human against itself, the air attack of the gas terrorist (Gasterroristen)produces in the attacked the despair of being forced to cooperate in the exterminationof their own lives, because they cannot not breathe.

With the phenomenon of the gas war, we reached a new explanatory level for theclimatic and atmospheric premises of human existence. In it, the immersion of livingbeings in a breathable environment is carried to a formal elaboration. From the outset,the principle of design is included in this explicatory thrust, since the operativemanipulation of gassed environments in open territories forces a series of atmosphericinnovations. Because of them, the combating of toxic clouds became a task of produc-tive design. The regular soldiers in the gas fronts, as much in the East as in the West,were mobilized combatants confronted with the problem of having to develop routinesfor the design of regional atmospheres. The artificial installation or production ofcombat clouds of dust required the efficient coordination of the generative factorsof clouds under criteria of concentration, diffusion, sedimentation, coherence, mass,expansion, and movement. Here is announced a dark meteorology, one that is concernedwith `precipitations' of a totally unique character.

A stronghold of this particular type of knowledge could be found at the Berlin ^Dahlem Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, oneof the most ominous theoretical addresses of the 20th century, which was directed byFritz Haber. But similar institutes were to be found on both the French and Germansides. In most of the cases, the combat materials had to be mixed with stabilizingsubstances in order to achieve the appropriate concentrations, which would to beeffective in open areas. In the face of the definitive, once and for all, principle ofaiming poisonous gas clouds over a defined, vaguely determined outdoor terrain,whether the production of poisonous clouds over a specific area depended on theapplication of gas grenades during a specific duration or whether it depended onthe `release' in the direction of the wind of gas pipes was a relatively insignificanttechnological difference. In a German gas artillery attack with Green-Cross-Difosgendiphosgene at Fleury, on the Maas River, on the night of the 22 to 23 June 1916,the starting point was the consistency of a cloud needed to bring about the samenumber of deaths in open fields as would be guaranteed by, at least, 50 howitzer shotsor 100 canon shots per hectare per minute. Such quantities were not reached at all,as the next morning the French claimed to have suffered `only' 1600 intoxications and90 dead (see Martinetz, 1996, page 70).

It was decisive that, through the use of gas terrorism, technology broke throughthe horizon of the design of the nonobjective, through which latent themes such as thephysical quality of the air, artificial additives for the atmosphere, as well as climaticallyconditioned factors in human dwellings fell under explicative expression. Throughthe progressive explication, humanism and terrorism are chained to one another.The Nobel Prize winner Fritz Haber declared himself through his entire life an ardentpatriot and humanist. As he affirmed in a tragic letter of departure, directed to hisinstitute on 1 October 1933, he was proud to have worked for his fatherland, in the war,and for humanity, in peace.

Airquakes 47

Terrorism dissolves the difference between violence against people and violenceagainst things in the environment; it is violence against those human ^ environmental`things' without which people cannot remain as people. Violence against the breath-ing air of groups transforms the immediate atmospheric shell of human beings intosomething whose vulnerability or invulnerability stands open to technical control.Only in reaction to terrorist depravations could air and the atmosphereöprimarymeans of survival in physical as well as metaphorical sensesöbecome objects ofexplicit provision and aerotechnical, medical, juridical, political, aesthetic, andtheoretical ^ cultural care. In this sense, the theory of air and the technologyof climate are neither mere sediments of war and postwar knowledge, nor, eo ipsofirst objects of a science of peace that could emerge only in the shadows of the `stressof war' (for this phrase see Mu« hlmann, 2004); instead, they are above all primarypostterrorist forms of knowledge. To call them this already clarifies why such knowl-edge has until now been maintained in labile, incoherent, and nonauthoritativecontexts; perhaps the idea that there can be something like authentic experts ofterror is, as such, hybrid.

Professional soldiers and analysts of terror demonstrate a striking ability to ignoreits nature to a remarkable degree, a phenomenon for which clear evidence was given bythe flood of declarations by experts after the attacks on the World Trade Center inNew York and the Pentagon in Washington on September 11, which delivered theirelaborated helplessness with clear evidence. The tenor of almost all the declarationsabout the attack on the prominent symbols of the United States was that of surprise,along with the entire world, with what had taken place, but that confirmed, however,the thesis that there are things against which we cannot be sufficiently protected. TheWar on Terror campaign on US televisions, which in its language codes stuck closelyto Pentagon communiques, was reoriented, almost without exception, to becomingpropaganda; not once was there talk of an elemental notion of how terrorism is notan enemy, but a modus operandi, a method of fighting that as a general rule is sharedby both sides in a conflictöwhich is why a `war against terrorism' is a nonsensicalformulation.(10) The expression raises an allegory to the condition of a political enemy.But inasmuch as one puts in parentheses the infectious demand to take sides, and onefollows instead the principle of the process of peace, it becomes evident that the singleterrorist act never constitutes an absolute beginning. There is no terrorist acte gratuit,no originary `it becomes' (Es-werde) of terror. Every terrorist attack understands itselfas a counterattack in a series, which in any event is always described as having beeninitiated by the adversary. Terrorism, thus, conceives itself antiterroristically; this holdsas much for the `original scene' in the Ypres front in 1915, not only because this wasfollowed immediately by the customary sequence of attack and counterattacks, but alsobecause on the German side factual claims could be made that the French and Britishhad already used gas ammunitions.(11) The beginning of terror is not the concreteattack carried out by one of the sides, but rather the will and disposition of partnersin conflict to operate in an expanded battle zone. Through the broadening of the battlezone, the principle of explication in execution of war becomes perceptible: the enemyis made explicit as an object in the environment, whose removal counts as a conditionof survival of the system. Terrorism is the explication of the other from the point of

(10) On the other hand, there is nothing nonsensical about the organization of police or evenmilitary measures against definite groups who have dedicated themselves to advancing violenceagainst institutions, persons, and symbols.(11) The use of chlorine gas in Ypres was also not an absolute first for the German side, who hadalready in January 1915 tried out the T12 gas shells on the Eastern Front and in March used themat Nieuport on the Western Front.

48 P Sloterdijk

view of his exterminability.(12) If war always meant a particular behavior before anenemy, terrorism first reveals its `essence'. Inasmuch as conflicts are domesticatedin accordance with the rights of peoples, a technical relation to the enemy over-takes command, which is nothing other than the will to exterminate the opponent.Technically enabled enmity is called `exterminism'. This explicates why the mature styleof war of the 20th century was oriented towards annihilation.

The stabilization of a communicable knowledge about terror not only depends,then, on the precise remembering of its practices, it demands the formulation of theprinciples to which the practice of terror is subject in its technical explicitness andconcurring explication since 1915. One can understand terrorism when this is conceivedas a form of investigation of the environment from the point of view of its destructi-bility. It makes use of the fact that the simple inhabitants have a relation to theirenvironment as users and that, at first, they consume it exclusively in a natural wayas a mute condition of their existence. Destruction, however, is in this case moreanalytical than use: punctual terror extracts advantage from the difference in the levelof innocuousness between the attack and the defenseless object, whereas systematizedterror creates a relentless climate of anguish, in which defense adapts to permanentattacks, without being able to counter them.While things stand like this, terroristicallyescalated struggle becomes more and more a competition about explicative advantageswith respect to weak points of the rival's environment. New terror weapons are thosethrough which the conditions of life are made more explicit; new categories of attemptsmake evidentöin the mode of a malignant surpriseönew levels of vulnerability.A terrorist is one who can obtain an explicative advantage with respect to the implicitconditions of life of the opponent and uses them to act. This is the reason why, aftergreat terrorist-induced caesuras, one can have the feeling that what has happened canbe future oriented. That which brings out what is implicit and reveals vulnerabilitiesin the zones of struggle has future.

According to its principle of execution, all terrorism is thus conceived as atmo-terrorism. It has the form of an attempted attack against the environmental conditionsof the enemy's life, beginning with the toxic attack on the most immediate resourcesof the surrounding of a human organism, the air that it breathes.(13) With this it is to begranted that what since 1793 and even more so since 1915 we call terreur or `terror'could be anticipated in any possible way of using violence against the environmentalconditions of human existence. Think here of the poisoning of potable water, of whichantiquity already provided us with examples, in medieval infectious attacks on defen-sive forts, as well burning and smoking of cities and refugee caves by besieging troops,or as with the spreading of horrifying rumors or demoralizing news. But such compar-isons fail in the essential. The matter rather is to identify terrorism as a child ofmodernity, given that it could not mature to an exact definition until the principleof the attack on the environment and the immunological defense of an organism orform of life could be made sufficiently explicit. This happened for the first time, as hasalready been explained, with the events of 2 April 1915, when the cloud of chlorine gas,produced by the release of 5700 gas canisters, was carried by the gentle wind fromthe German positions to the French trenches between Bixschoote and Langemarck.

(12) Exterminism represents a simplification of the sadism classically described by Sartre: it is nolonger a question of appropriating for oneself the freedom of the other, but of freeing one's ownenvironment of the freedom of the other.(13) This is poisoning (Vergiftung), literally as well as figuratively. On 4 August 2002, the late-nightedition of the ARD broadcast Themes of the Day presented an interview with a young woman on aTel Aviv beach who, against the background of a Palestinian suicide bomb attack on an Israeli bus,asked the question, `Are we supposed to stop breathing?''

Airquakes 49

In the late hours of the afternoon of that day, between 18:00 and 19:00 hours, the handsof the epochal clock jumped from the modern vitalist-late-romantic phase to atmoter-rorist objectivity. Since then, there never has been a caesura of similar depth. The greatdisasters of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries belong, without exception, asI will show, to the history of the explication that was inaugurated that April afternoonon the Western Front, when surprised Franco-Canadian units retreated, panic stricken,under the impact of the whitish-yellowish cloud of gas that crept from the northeasttowards them.

The further technical explication of this procedural knowledge of climatologicalstruggle, achieved during the war, took, in a natural manner, no later than November1918, the circuitous path of its `peaceful use'.With the imminent end of the war, bed bugs,flour moths, ticks, and above all cloth lice enter into the sights of the Berlin chemists. It isevident that the prohibition by the Versailles Treaty against any production of bellicosesubstances in German territory did not make them lose their professional fascination.Professor Ferdinand Flury, one of Fritz Haber's closest collaborators at the DahlemInstitute, presented in September 1918, in Munich, at a meeting of the German Societyfor Applied Entomology, a programmatic conference on the theme: ` The activities ofthe Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Berlin ^Dahlem at the service of struggle against parasites.'' During the discussion Fritz Habertook the stage to inform about the activities of a `Technical Committee for the StruggleAgainst Parasites' (Tasch: Technischer Ausschusses fu« r Scha« dlingsbeka« mpfung), whichwas working on, above all, the introduction of hydrocyanic acid (HCN: hydrogencyanide) in the protection of German farmers against insects. He remarked withrespect to this: ``The principle base idea, after peace has been restored, is to make,in addition to the hydrocyanic acid, other combat substance that the war produceduseful for the advancement of farming through the struggle against parasites'' (citedin Kalthoff and Werner, 1998, page 24). Flury offered in his paper for consideration` that in the effect of gases on insects or mites entirely different circumstances comeinto question than in the case of the inhalation of gases and vapors through the lungsof mammalians, although there exists a parallelism with the toxicity of higher animal''(Kalthoff and Werner, 1998, page 25). Already in 1920 a specialized journal of the`German Society for the Struggle Against Parasites' (Degesch: Deutschen Gesellschaftfu« r Scha« dlingsbeka« mpfung GmbH), established shortly before the end of the war,revealed that since 1917 around 20 million cubic meters of ` built space, in windmills,boats, barracks, schools, military hospitals, and grain and seed silos'' and similar sites,according to the criteria of the advanced technique of hydrocyanic acidöfollowing theso-called Bottich procedureöhad been gassed. To this it has to be added that since1920 a gaseous product, was developed by Flury and others, which preserves theadvantages of hydrocyanic acid, its extreme toxicity, and without its disadvantages:the dangerous nonperception of the gas through smell, taste, or other senses by thehuman faculties (with greater precision, by a group of human beings, since it appearsthat the perception or nonperception capacity for perceiving hydrocyanic acid isdetermined genetically). The point of the new invention consisted in adding to thetoxic effect of hydrocyanic acid 10% of a highly perceptible irritant gas (such aschloroformic acid methylester, Chlorkohlensa« uremethylester). The new product wasbrought out into the market under the name of Zyklon A, and was recommended forthe ` disinfection of insect infested living quarters''. What was interesting aboutZyklon A was that it was a designer gas, in which a specific task of design could beexemplarily observed: the reintroduction in the perception of the user of the functionsof the product that were not perceptible or had been made imperceptible. Since theessential component of the mix, hydrocyanic gas, which evaporates at 27 8C, was not

50 P Sloterdijk

immediately perceptible to humans, it seemed to the creators of this substanceopportune to lace it with a provocative substance, which through its strong aversiveeffect would announce the presence of the substance (from a philosophical point of viewone could speak of the rephenomenalization of the nonappearing).(14) Let us note thatthe first disinfection of great spaces' was carried out almost exactly the same day that theYpres attack had taken place, two years prior, on the occasion of the fumigation of the millat Heidingsfeld, near Wu« rburg, on 21 April 1917. Between the death of Goethe and theintroduction of the word GroÞraumentwesung ( disinfection of great space') in the Germanlanguage only eighty-five years had passed; the expressions `Entmottung' (industrial clean-ing) and `Entrattung' (literally getting rid of rats), since then, have enriched the Germanlexicon. The owner of the mill declared that his establishment remained completely `freeof mites' even a long time after the fumigation.

The civil production of hydrocyanic acid clouds was reduced almost exclusively toreconstructed enclosed spaces (some of the exceptions were freestanding orchards,which were covered with tents and then gassed). In such cases one could work withconcentrations that would allow the providers of such services to assure the completeextermination of the local population of insects, including their eggs and nitsönotleast because of the properties of hydrocyanic acid, which could slip into everynook and cranny. In the first phase of these practices, the relation between the specialair sectionöthat is, the specific volume to be fumigatedöand general air, the public

Spha« ren III page 114. Zyklon can be found in Auschwitz.

(14)With a view to the fact that such additives would have been counterproductive for the purposesof human extermination, a variant of Zyklon B without the additive was provided to the hygienesections of Auschwitz, Oranienburg, and other camps (Kalthoff and Werner, 1998, page 162f ).

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atmosphere, was not considered problematic. The consequence was that the finalstage of fumigation normally consisted simply in ventilationöthat is to say, in thedilution of the toxic gas in the open air until reaching `harmless values'. No one wasconcerned that the `ventilation' (Entluftung) of the first spaces would lead to a con-sequence in the second. It seemed a priori indisputable, and established for all time, theindifference of the internal fumigated spaces in relation to the external nonfumigatedair. The specialized bibliography of the field notes, not without pride, in the first yearsof the 1940s, noted that meanwhile 142 million cubic meters had been disinfected' (entwest),usingöand, we would add, introducing without protection into the atmosphereöfor thetask 1.5 million kg of hydrocyanic acid.With the progressive development of the environ-mental problem, the sense of the relation between the surrounding air and the special airzone was inverted, since now the artificially establishedöand we would say, meanwhile,acclimatizedözone offered privileged conditions of air, while the environs are loadedwith an increasing respiratory risk that may lead to acute unbreathability and chronicinhabitability.

During the 1920s a series of disinfecting and pest control companies from the northof Germany offered routine fumigations with Zyklon for boats, storage facilities,motels, train carriages, and similar spaces. Among these, beginning in 1924, was therecently established company Tesch & Stabenow (Testa) of Hamburg, whose principalproduct, patented in 1926, had reached popularity under the name of Zyklon B (seeKalthoff and Werner, 1998, pages 56f and 241). The fact is that one of the founders ofthe firm, Dr Bruno Tesch, born 1890, worked from 1915 to 1920 at Fritz Haber'schemical ^military institute, and had been busy since the beginning of the war devel-oping war gasses; he was condemned to death after having been tried before the Britishmilitary tribunal in the Curio-Haus in 1946 and executed in the prison at Hameln.This specific case confirms, additionally, the broadly expanded personal and objectivecontinuity of the new antiseptic (Entwesungspraktiken) practices beyond war and peace.The advantage of Zyklon B, invented and developed by Dr Walter Heerdt, wasthat the hydrocyanic acid, which is very volatile, could be absorbed by transferablesubstances, dry and porous, such as infusorial earth (Kieselgur), thus decisivelyimproving the conditions both of its transport and storage, compared with thoseoffered by its liquid form. It appeared in the market in cans of 200 g, 500 g, 1 kg,and 5 kg. Already Zyklon Böwhich was at first was exclusively produced in Dessau(later also at Kolin), and was commercialized, in cooperation, by the Testa firm andthe German Society for the Struggle Against Parasitesöhad reached a situation ofnear-monopoly in the world market for pest control, a position that can only bematched in the field of the fumigation of boats by the competition of an older procedurewith sulphur gas (Kalthoff and Werner, 1998, pages 45 ^ 102). At that time the antisepticpractice of delousing, whether stationary or mobile, or of using `disinfection rooms'(Entwesungskammern)öinto which the materials to be treated were placed, such ascarpets, uniforms, and textiles of every type, including upholstered furniture, to thenbe airedöhad already been introduced.

After the beginning of the war in autumn 1939 the firm of Testa offered smallcourses of disinfection in the East for the members of the armed forces and the civilianpopulation. In these courses they also had included demonstrations of the gas room.Again, as before, the delousing of troops as well as prisoners of war constituted a moreurgent task for the fighters against vermin. In the shift from 1941 to 1942 the firm Tesch& Stabenow edited for its clientsöamong which stood out, among others, the EasternGerman army and the SSöa pamphlet with the title ` The small Testa-primer forZyklon'' (Die kleine Testa-Fibel u« ber Zyklon), in which could be found symptomaticexpressions of the militarization of the `procedures of disinfection', perhaps even a

52 P Sloterdijk

possible reapplication of hydrocyanic acid in human environments. There it isclaimed, for example, that disinfection ``corresponds not only to the imperative ofprudence, but also represents a necessary act of defense!'' (Kalthoff and Werner,1998, page 109). In a medical context, this could be interpreted as a reference tothe typhus epidemic that had broken out in 1941 in the Eastern German army, thisis in which almost 10% of the infected died; this is in contrast with the normal rate ofmortality of 30%, and thus a complete triumph of German hygiene, given that theprovoking agent of the typhus fever, Rickettsia prowazcki, is transmitted by cloth lice.In light of the posterior events, one can understand how with the juridical terminustechnicus `necessary defense' (Notwehr), at a semantic level, the potential reapproxima-tion of the technique of fumigation to the realm of human objects was anticipated. Onlya few months later, it became evident that the atmotechnical form of the exterminationof organisms would have to discover applications to environments with human dwellers.When in 1941 and 1942 some articles by the firm's own historians of chemistrycelebrated the 25th anniversary of the first use of hydrocyanic acid in the struggleagainst parasites as an event of relevance for the entire cultural world, their authorsdid not know yet to what an extent their opportunistic hyperbole would have significantresults for the diagnostic determination of the civilizational context in general.

The year 1924 plays an important role in the drama of atmospheric explication, notonly because of the establishment of the firm that produced Zyklon Bönamely, Tesch& Stabenow of Hamburg. It is also the year in which the atmoterrorist motive ofexterminating organisms through the destruction of their environment was introducedin the penal code of a democratic state. The state of Nevada in the United States beganthe use of the first civil' gas chamber (Gaskammer) for the purpose of supposedlyefficient executions of humans on 8 February 1924. This served as an example for otherUS states, among them California, which became famous because of its octagonal,bicameral gas chamber that resembled a crypt, in the San Quentin penitentiary, andsadly well known because of the possible legal assassination in it of Cheryl Chessmanon 2 May 1960. The first person to be executed with this new method was Gee Jon,29 years old, born in China, who (against the background of the gang wars in Californiain the early 1920s) had been found guilty of the killing of the Chinese Tom Quong Kee.In the USA's gas chambers, criminals died through the inhalation of hydrocyanic acidvapors, which were produced after the introduction of toxic elements in a container.As the chemical ^military research had recognized in the laboratory and as was provenin the battlefield, gas prevents the transport of oxygen in the blood, thus producinginternal asphyxiation.

The international community of experts of toxic gas and the design of atmosphere-spheres was, since the last years of the First World War, sufficiently permeable so as tobe able to react within the minimal span of timeöas much on this side of the Atlanticas transatlanticallyöto the technical innovations as well as to the fluctuations in themoral climate of their application. Since the construction of the Edgewood arsenalnear Baltimoreöa gigantic installation dedicated to military research, which after theentry into the war in 1917 was energetically expanded with great meansöthe UnitedStates had at its disposal an academic ^military ^ industrial complex that allowedcloser cooperation among the different departments of weapons development thanwas present in the corresponding European institutions. Edgewood was one of theplaces of the birth of teamwork; this was in any case superseded by the dream teamof the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which since 1943, like a meditation camp forexterminism, worked on the atom bomb. As a result of the waning of war conjunctureafter 1918, what mattered to the Edgewood teams, made up of scientists, officers,and entrepreneurs, was to find civil forms of survival. The inventor of the gas chamber

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in the state prison of Nevada, in Carson City, D A Turner, had served during thewar as commander of the medical corps of the US army; his contribution consistedin transferring the experiences of the military use of hydrocyanic acid to conditionsof civil execution.

As opposed to the application of poisonous gas in open air, its use in a chamberoffered the advantage of eliminating the problem of unstable deadly concentrationsin unconfined sites. With this, before the invention of the gas chamber and apparatus,the production of toxic clouds was relegated to the background. But the fact that therelation between chamber and cloud could become problematic is shown not only inthe accidents that took place during the executions by gas chamber in the UnitedStates, but also in the different unfolding of the Sarin attacks in the various Tokyometro lines on 20 March 1995. Both demonstrate that the ideal conditions of thecontrolled relation between toxic gas and spatial volume are not easy to establishempirically.(15) This holds as much for the authors of the attacks that proceeded withgreater professionalism as for those of the Aum Shrinrikyo sect, who deposited theirplastic bags with prepared Sarin, wrapped in newspaper, on the floor of the subwaycars, and punctured them with the filed metal points of umbrellas, before arriving atthe station in which they got off, while the passengers who continued their voyageinhaled the poison that emanated from the bags (see Murakami, 2001).(16)

What assures the justice of granting Nevada a place in the history of the explicationof the human dependence on the atmosphere is its serene, and yet anticipatory, sensibilityfor the modern qualities of death by gas. In this field, what promotes the ties ofhumanity with great efficiency can count as modernöin the given case, the presumedreduction of suffering of the sentenced by the rapid action of the poison. Major Turnerhad recommended his gas chamber as a milder alternative to the then notoriouselectric chair, through which strong electric currents could melt the brain of the delin-quents under a cap of wetted rubber closely tied to the head. In the idea of execution

Spha« ren III page 118. Gas chamber of the Nevada State Prison in Carson City, 1926.

(15) The combat gas Sarin (T144) was synthesized in 1938 in the research department of I G Farben,directed by Dr Gerhard Schrader. Its toxicity amounted to more than thirty times that of hydrocyanicacid; at the time of exposition, a gram of Sarin would suffice to kill up to 1000 people.(16) Josef Haslinger has provided an Austro-terrorist variant of these events: in Haslinger (1995),he plays out the notion that a building of the proportions of the Vienna State Opera might betransformed by a group of criminals into a large gas chamber.

54 P Sloterdijk

by gas is manifested the fact that not only war acts as an explicit marker of things;the same effect follows so frequently from an unapologetic humanism, which since themiddle of the 19th century has constituted the spontaneous American philosophyand has become pragmatism in its academic form. In its will to unify the effectivewith the painless, this way of thinking is not to be misled by execution protocols, whichspeak of torment for many of the delinquents in gas chambers, descriptions that are sodrastic that one is led to think that there has been produced, in the 20th century, in theUnited States, under humanitarian pretexts, a regression to the tortures of medievalexecutions. For the official perception of things, death by gas will have to be helduntil further notice as a procedure that is practical as well as humane; from this pointof view, the gas chamber in Nevada was a place of worship of pragmatic humanism.Its installation was dictated by that sentimental law of modernity that prescribesmaintaining public space free of acts of manifest cruelty. No one has expressed withsuch pregnancy as has Elias Canetti the compulsion of the modern to hide the cruelaspects of its own operation: ` The sum total of sensibility in the world of culture hasbecome very large ... today it would be more difficult to sentence a singular humanbeing to public burning than to unleash a world war'' (Canetti, 1981, page 23).

The penal technically (straftechnisch) innovative idea of execution in a gas chamberpresupposes the complete control over the difference between the lethal internalclimate of the chamber and the external climateöa motive that is made concrete inthe installation of glass windowed execution cells, through which invited witnessesto the executions could be convinced of the efficacy of the atmospheric conditionsin the interior of the chamber. Thus is installed spatially a type of ontological differ-ence: the lethal climate in the interior of the chamber clearly defined, meticulouslymade hermetic, and the convivial climate of the vital ^ worldly realm of the execu-tioners and observers: to be (Sein) and to-be-able (Seinko« nnen) to be outside, to exist(Seiendes) and not-to-be-able (Nicht-Seinko« nnen) to be inside. In this context, to be anobserver means as much as to be an observer of an agony, endowed with the privilegeof continuingöfrom outsideöthe collapse of an `organic' system by the fact thatits `environment' has been turned unlivable. The doors of the gas chambers in theGerman extermination camps were also equipped with glass windows that allowedthe executioners to make use of their privilege as observers.

If it is a matter of considering the administration of death as a production ina strict sense and, consequently, of making explicit the processes that result from theexisting corpses of the dead, the Nevada gas chamber represents one of the militarymilestones of rational exterminism of the 20th century, although its use and imitationin numerous other states of the United States may have been sporadic (the chamberof Carson City was used 32 times between 1924 and 1979). When Heidegger spoke,in 1927, in Being and Time, with ontological ceremoniousness about the existentialcharacteristic of being-towards-death (Seins-zum-Tode), American prison officersand medical executioners had already put in operation an apparatus that made thebreathing-towards-death (Atmen-zum-Tode) an ontically controlled procedure. It is nota matter of `rushing forward' (Vorlaufen) towards one's own death; now it concernsholding the candidate in the lethal air-trap.

What matters here is not to reproduce in detail how the coexisting gas chambersin the 1930s are fused to one another on both sides. It is enough to hold on to the stageor processor of this fusion that was a certain SS intelligence, which, on the one hand,received confirmation from the German industry for the antiparasite struggle, and,on the other, could be assured of the order received, coming from the Reich Chancelleryin Berlin, to select `unusual methods' (ungewo« hnlicher Mittel ), especially after the deci-sion made then by Hitler of the `final solution of the Jewish question' (Endlo« sung der

Airquakes 55

Judenfrage)öa secret decision communicated by word of mouth, which from thesummer of 1941 became the order of the day in select SS units. Charged with thistask, which left ample margin for their initiative, Hitler's most faithful helpers set outon their homicidal path of their fulfillment of duty. The systematic killing of prisonersof war with the help of motor exhaust gases (in the Belzec, Chelmno, and other camps),as well as the extensive killings of German psychiatric patients with gas showersinstalled on trucks, acted as a catalyst for the union of the idea of the antiparasitestruggle with the execution of human beings by means of hydrocyanic acid gas.

The Hitler factor enters into play, as a moment of escalation, at this relativelylate point of the explication of the background atmospheric realities of technicallysupported terrorism. There can be little doubt that the extreme exacerbation of theGerman exterminist `Jewish politics' was mediated by the metaphorics of parasitesöthat had since the first years of the 1920s constituted an essential component of therhetoric of the National Socialist Partyöwhich Hitler had coined and which since 1933was elevated, so to say, to a category of official idiomatic regulation in the standard-ized German public sphere. The pseudo-normalizing effect of the way of speakingof `parasites of the people' (Volksscha« dlingen) (which covered a wide semantic field,including defeatism, the black market, jokes against the Fu« hrer, critics of the system,and those with internationalist convictions) was coresponsible for the fact that thedemagogs of the national movement could if not popularize its idiosyncratic formof excessive anti-Semitism as a specific German creation of supposed hygiene then atleast make it bearable or imitable on a broad base. The metaphorics of insects andparasites belonged also, at the same time, to the rhetorical ammunition of Stalinism,which produced the most comprehensive politics of camp terror, without reaching theextremes of the `disinfection' (Entwesung) praxis of the SS.

At the center of the production of gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz,and other camps, was unequivocally the real metaphor of the antiparasite struggle'.The expression of `special treatment' (Sonderbehandlung) meant, above all, the directapplication of procedures of extermination of insects to human populations. The practicaltransformation of this metaphorical operation reached even to the use of the mostcommon means for the disinfection', Zyklon B, as well as to the use, analogously fanatical,of gas chambers in many places. In the extreme pragmatism of the executors, the psychoticoperation of a metaphor and the equanimity of the official execution of measuresconverged with one another, without any friction.

Holocaust research has recognized, with good reason, the fusion of homicidalmadness and routine as the brandname of Auschwitz. The fact that Zyklon B, appar-ently, was brought in most cases to the concentration camps in Red Cross vehiclescorresponds, similarly, to the hygienic and medical tendency of the measures, as well asto the need to camouflage the perpetrators. In the specialized journal Der praktischeDesinfektor (The practical disinfector) a military doctor spoke in 1941 of Jews as almostthe only carriers of epidemics', which in the broader temporal context presupposed analmost conventional pronouncement but against the background of such a precisemoment expressed a barely codified threat. An aphoristic diary entry of Goebbels'sministry of propaganda of the Reich, on 2 November of the same year, confirms thestable association between the entomological and political fields of representation:` The Jews are the lice of civilized humanity'' (quoted in Aly, 1995, page 374).(17)

This entry shows that Goebbels communicated with himself as an agitator beforea multitude. Evil, like stupidity, is autohypnosis.

(17) Hate speech utterances of this sort are only recently being adequately analyzed in linguistic andmoral philosophical ways (see Butler, 1997).

56 P Sloterdijk

In January of 1942, in a remodeled farmhouse (named Bunker I), within thepremises of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, two gas chambers were installed and `putto work'. It soon became obvious that their capacity would have to be expanded. Newfacilities were added in quick succession. On the night of 13 ^ 14 March 1943, 1492 Jewsfrom the Krakow Ghetto who were `incapable of working' (arbeitsunfa« hige) were gassedin the mortuary basement I of crematorium II of Auschwitz. A concentration ofapproximately 20 g of hydrocyanic acid per cubic meter of air was produced by using6 kg of Zyklon B, as was recommended by Degesch for delousing. During the summerthe mortuary basement of crematorium III was outfitted with a gas hermetic door andfourteen simulacra of showers. At the beginning of the summer of 1944 technicaladvancement made its entry into Auschwitz with the installation of a shortwaveelectric device developed by Siemens for the delousing of work clothes and uniforms.The Commanding General of the SS, Himmler, in November of that year ordered thecessation of killings by poisonous gas. According to reliable low estimates, up to thatmoment 750 000 human beings had been sacrificed through these treatments; the realnumbers could be higher. During the winter of 1944 ^ 1945, camp troops and prisonerswere busy destroying the traces of the gas-terrorist installations, before the arrival of theAllied troops. Within the firms Degesch (Frankfurt), Tesch & Stabenow (Hamburg), andHeerdt-Linger (Frankfurt), which had provided their product to the camps knowingtheir anticipated use, it was understood that business documents had to be destroyed.

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