Written representations of wars offer a case in point that serves to illustrate that what passes as 'facts' can be highly contested, and that the events and stories projected by a piece of writing largely depend on the point of view from which they are presented. In the case of news coverage of war, the extensive importance which the chosen perspective has for the acceptance of the events as facts is immediately evident. The various dimensions of perspectivity, i.e., the spatial, temporal, perceptional, and ideological dimension, each serves to color the narratives and stories that are disseminated about military conflicts. As Goodman observes, "some changes are reshapings or deformations that may according to point of view be considered either corrections or distortions." Written representations of the contested facts of wars, for instance, are always colored by perspective and point of view, regardless of their form of manifestation (e.g., literary, historiographic, or journalistic writings, in photography or other visual media). However, not only do the perspectives of witnesses, authors of press reportage, or photographers need to be considered, but so do the cultural frames of reference and culturally available plots, genres and media used and their respective conventions of representation.

The fifth act or dimension of cultural fact- and worldmaking through writing revolves around the insight that events, facts, and stories are not only discursively created and medially represented but also culturally specific and historically mutable constructs. One does not need to be a constructivist or historian, to want to add further characteristics to the criteria of eventfulness and the procedures of fact- and worldmaking which have been formulated so far: What immediately comes to mind here, is the constructivity, performativity, discursivity, and mediality of events, facts, and news stories. A happening only becomes an event through being reflected, or rather (re)constructed, in discourses and writing and by being represented or staged by media productions.The constructedness of facts and their dependence on writing and other media are based on the fact that events and facts are never simply given or found 'out there' but are made by the people and media outlets who provide accounts of them in writing or visual form: As analyses of the representations of great historical events like 9/11 or the wars in Iraq have amply demonstrated, the writings and images disseminated by the media have a performative function insofar that medial representations construct the events and facts as opposed to merely describing or reporting on them. In that sense, just as *'The Medium is the Witness'*, writing is as much the maker of facts and events as it is a medium for documenting and recording them.

#### **4. Reframing Narrative Factuality in Terms of the Fabrication of 'Knowledge', or: Writing as a Cultural Way of Making Facts, Conflicts and Crises, and Limiting the Horizon of Possibility**

What are the consequences of the argument delineated above, stating that writing does not necessarily describe facts or provide objective representations of occurrences that actually happened in the real world but should rather be seen as a cultural way of fact- and worldmaking? If we accept such a constructivist view, it seems apposite to reframe the problem of "narrative factuality"35 in terms of the 'fabrication' or "manufacture of knowledge." Although Karin Knorr-Cetina's pioneering monograph *The Manufacture of Knowledg*e is not primarily concerned with writing, her *Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science* can serve as a timely reminder that facts – just like scientific knowledge at large – are constructed or made rather than found.36 Knorr-Cetina did a brilliant job in demonstrating why Dorothy L. Sayers' comparison of facts with cows, which she uses as the perfect epigraph in her first chapter ("My lord, facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough, they generally run away."37), is much more than just a witty aphorism or famous quote. Instead of accepting the common-sense view underlying standard dictionary definitions according to which the term 'facts' refers to phenomena that are accepted as true, Knorr-Cetina reformulates the problem of factuality in terms of the fabrication of knowledge. She sheds a great deal of light on the procedures and processes involved in generating scientific facts in the laboratory, demonstrating that even science can be conceived of as a methodological way of *Making Truth*. 38

The constructivist and contextual nature of the production of facts in the natural sciences delineated by Knorr-Cetina holds equally true for facts in other domains, especially in the humanities, social sciences, journalism, and in our everyday life-worlds. As the philosopher John R. Searle has shown in his book *The Construction of Social Reality*, such a view has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of the ontology of social facts.39 Instead of accepting the naïve view that facts can be understood as something that has really occurred or is actually the case, Searle analyses in detail what he calls "the building blocks of social reality"40 and the processes that underlie the creation of institutional and social facts. According to his "General Theory of Institutional Facts,"41 social facts are created by such processes as iteration,

35 Cf. the recent handbook edited by Fludernik/Ryan 2020.

36 Knorr-Cetina 1981.

37 Sayers as cited in Knorr-Cetina 1981: 1.

38 Cf. the title of Brown 2003.

39 Cf. Searle 1995.

40 Ibid.: 1.

41 Ibid.: 79, 113.

interaction, and performative speech acts. Although important social phenomena like "money, property, government and marriages" no doubt really exist and are generally accepted as objective facts, they "are only facts by human agreement."42 Distinguishing between such social facts and "brute facts" about the natural world, Searle proposes to designate the former as 'institutional facts': "Institutional facts are so called because they require human institutions for their existence."43 Although Searle's book demonstrates the degree to which the creation and structure of institutional and social facts depend upon language, he focuses mainly on the role of speech acts rather than on writing as a way of fact-making.

Let us therefore turn our attention to the role of writing in the creation of institutional and social facts and look at a couple of examples that illustrate how writing can be used as a powerful way of fact- and worldmaking. For anyone working in academia, it will not come as a big surprise that universities, albeit probably unwittingly so, provide particularly rich examples of the importance of writing for the construction of institutional facts. The technocratic text-types known as five- or ten-year 'development plans,' 'masterplans,' and 'grant proposals' (e.g., in the context of the German 'Excellence Initiatives' and 'Excellence Strategy') are cases in point in that they do not so much represent the actual state of affairs at a given university but rather serve to create new institutional facts through writing. Although terminology differs from one university to the next, the act of designating particular research areas or disciplines as 'fields of focus,' 'centers of gravity' (i.e., '*Schwerpunktbereiche*'), or 'areas of potential' can be understood as a way of making institutional facts through writing. Such designations are not just a result of the ways of fact-making outlined above in that they involve processes of selection (and deletion) as well as hierarchization and prioritization, but they also serve to construct the institutional facts they purport merely to describe or reflect.

Representing a mode of governance, text-types like development plans and grant proposals not only provide paradigm examples of how writing serves to create institutional and social facts, they also unintentionally reveal that such institutional fact-making, despite its contingency and even arbitrariness, is both deterministic and prescriptive rather than descriptive, and has far-reaching consequences for the development of an institution and

42 Ibid.: 1.

43 Ibid.: 2.

the shaping future behavior. Being based on "intentional selection between possibilities,"44 texts like development plans arguably foster a fixed and rigid mindset and inhibit creativity and fresh thinking. By prescribing the future form of an institution in a deterministic way, they limit "the scope of our ability to identify our choices"45 as academics and reduce the range of institutional possibilities. Writing is thus not only a way of institutional fact-making but also an exercise of administrative power based on the implementation of a "selection and enforcement of one possibility among many."46 Development plans can thus be understood as a form of inscribing in the present probable futures, while pre-empting other possible future trajectories. In that light, such forms of institutional writing represent "a regime of visibility and invisibility: the exclusion of different possible concatenations from the space of visibility."47 Anything that is not delineated in strategic writing issued from the higher echelons of what can in many cases only be dubbed Kafkaesque administrations or bureaucracies (or in short: 'adminbureaucrazy'), ceases to be an institutional fact and does not really exist. Moreover, they also illustrate another form that power takes in today's corporate university in that texts that delineate an institution's 'strategy' can be seen as an "inscription of automated patterns of language and interaction."48 Such plans and patterns shape future behavior, foster conformity as well as linear thinking, and inhibit the capacity to respond creatively to emerging concerns and challenges.

In view of the "Authoritarian Turn in Universities,"49 we should be wary whenever authoritarian organizations and regimes attempt to make institutional facts through writing, define research fields that are deemed to be especially important, and tell us what to do. Relying on such authoritarian "systems means that we trade judgement for efficiency, reflection for obedience, inquiry for conformity and independence for constraint."50 As Margaret Heffernan poignantly observes in her monograph *Uncharted*, "the danger in making science efficient is the risk of inhibiting innovation, marginalising un-

44 Berardi 2019: 16, to whose inspiring book these paragraphs are indebted.

45 Heffernan 2021: 61.

46 Berardi 2019: 103.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid.: 107.

49 Fleming 2021.

50 Heffernan 2021: 81.

derrepresented ideas and discouraging new and multi-disciplinary fields."51 Addressing the complex relations between writing and the making of institutional facts can thus serve as a timely reminder that academics familiar with critical theory should keep their minds "open to the possibilities that power attempts to reduce to a single one."52 By making institutional facts and reducing the horizon of possibility, development plans often constrain "the dynamics of invention and innovation within the limits of a system"53 rather than fostering creativity and the ability to think outside of the technocratic boxes defined from above. Moreover, we should always remember what the Italian activist and cultural theorist Franco 'Bifo' Berardi has dubbed "futurability," i.e., "the multiplicity of immanent possible futures," and fight against "the reduction of the range of possibilities inscribed in the present to a pattern that acts as a formatting gestalt."54

The ideologically charged story that the Bush administration disseminated about the alleged existence of weapons of mass destruction provides another pertinent example of how writing can exert performative power, make political facts, albeit 'alternative facts,' and shape future development in a particularly ill-fated manner. As we have shown in an earlier article,55 the stories generated by the Bush administration turned out to be 'alternative facts' rather than true accounts of the actual state of affairs, resulting in propagandistic mass deception intended to justify aggressive military interventions. Here, political speeches and writing served to construct fake facts that provided the rhetorical justification for the ill-conceived and even more poorly executed so-called 'war on terror.' Such writings that intentionally disseminate misinformation and manipulate public opinion can even be seen as weapons of mass destruction in their own right in that many soldiers and civilians lost their lives as a result of propagandistic 'fact'-making. The rationale behind the Bush administration's preference for focusing on what Al Gore has aptly called "convenient untruths"56 is perfectly obvious with the benefit of hindsight, since the idea "that a 'mushroom cloud' might threaten American cities

51 Ibid.: 84.

52 Berardi 2019: 65.

53 Ibid.: 195.

54 Ibid.: 13, 15.

55 For a detailed examination of this story as a paradigm example of conflict-, fact-, and worldmaking, cf. Nünning/Nünning 2017.

56 Gore 2008: 104.

unless we invaded Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein from giving a nuclear weapon to the same terrorist group that had already attacked us with deadly consequences."57

The final example serves to demonstrate that writing can be much more than just a way of making political and social facts. Instead, it can even be seen as a form of world- and conflict-making that can function as "a very powerful – maybe even the most powerful – symbolic 'weapon' in structuring a world that is always, in the end, a cultural one."58 Anyone who has followed the news in recent years will easily be able to cite any number of additional examples that underscore the key hypothesis of this essay, viz. that writing should be seen as a powerful way of fact-, conflict-, and worldmaking. Cases in point include the conflict between the reductive slogans issued by the Remain- and Leave-Campaigns that led to the 2016 Referendum and, ultimately, to Brexit, the remarkable series of 'convenient untruths' that the clownish British Prime Minister came up with to cover up his embarrassing blunders and misdeeds, and the more recent speeches and writings by the Russian dictator that also attempt to factualize lies and legitimize an aggressive invasion of and war against Ukraine.  It is also a means of erasing the distinctions between facts and fictions and between truth and untruth.

In that respect, the former star of the reality TV show *The Apprentice*, who, unfortunately, also acted in the role of American President between 2016 and 2020, arguably takes the biscuit in that his writing is probably unsurpassed as a means of making alternative facts and perpetuating the erosion of truth. The speeches, tweets and other, well, pieces of writing that the former POTUS and uncrowned king of the tribe of the Twitterati bombarded the world-wide audience with show that accuracy or factuality are obviously no longer the default or norm for what passes as political communication. In his brilliant book *The Attention Merchants*, Tim Wu devotes a chapter tellingly entitled "An Absorbing Spectacle: The Attention Merchant Turned President" to how that notorious celebrity brander replaced factual forms of political communication with "techniques borrowed from entertainment and media industries, and especially reality TV and social media."59 Although he often asserts (pseudo-)facts as truths, his notorious and erratic tweets are paradigm examples of what

57 Ibid.: 104–105.

58 Müller-Funk 2012: viii.

59 Wu 2017: 344.

happens to writing as a means of fact-making when the traditional yardsticks by which factuality can be measured are wantonly abandoned:

Trump has rigorously elevated the exciting and outlandish at the expense of accuracy or consistency. Hence the importance of alternative facts and fake news, along with a constant barrage of presidential commentary, much delivered using Twitter – a form of attention carpet-bombing. Implicit is that values like consistency or truth would become subservient to the story being told. Trump, importantly, also never admits to being wrong but instead always reinforces his version of the truth.60

Once accuracy, consistency, and truth are abandoned, however, people will find it increasingly difficult to gauge whether they are dealing with facts or fictions. As far as the former POTUS or the former clown in Clowning Street are concerned, they probably could not have cared less, but for the world at large it will continue to be very important to agree on what is really the case. Just like the attention merchants examined in Wu's book, the "merchants of doubt" who willfully obscured truth on crucial issues are more interested in calling even well-established scientific facts about, e.g., the harmful effects of smoking and the existence and disastrous consequences of global warming, into question.61 Since digitalization and the boom of 'social media' have served as catalysts for the erosion of scientific consensus and truth, let us briefly look at what happens to writing as means of fact-making in the twentyfirst century that has seen an unprecedented proliferation of 'alternative facts' and 'fake news.'

#### **5. Modest Reflections on the Performative Power of Writing as a Cultural Way of Fact- and Fiction-Making in the Age of "Post-Truth"**

One of the conclusions which can be drawn from this account of writing as an important method of fact-making is that historical facts and events do not emerge 'naturally' but should rather be understood as the result of a series of complex procedures and processes of selection, deletion, abstraction, ordering, compression, and emplotment that go into fact- and worldmaking. By

60 Ibid.: 345.

61 Cf. Oreskes/Conway 2012.

recording things that happen (or perhaps never occurred) in writing, media and other means of written communication create facts and construct events, shape them in a certain way, and endow them with meaning. What I also hope to have shown is how pre-conditioned the notions of facts and events are, and how complex the processes of cultural fact- and worldmaking through which mere happenings and occurrences are gradually transformed into facts, events, and stories of a particular kind, are.The procedures which go into factand worldmaking include selection, deletion, abstraction, weighting and ratings of relevance, configuration, ordering, and emplotment, and, last but not least, the choice of point of view and the arrangement of perspectives. The range of fact- and worldmaking procedures discussed above suggests that Goodman's discussion of ways of worldmaking needs to be supplemented by additional categories if we are to fathom the complex dynamics of cultural fact- and worldmaking and the ways in which writing partakes in these processes. Goodman, however, struck the right sort of balance between, on the one hand, recognizing the usefulness of surveying the processes of worldmaking and, on the other hand, acknowledging the incompleteness and provisional nature that any attempt at systematizing ways of worldmaking necessarily entails: "All I have tried to do is to suggest something of the variety of processes in constant use. While a tighter systematization could surely be developed, none can be ultimate[...]."62

In the final section, I should like to offer some preliminary hypotheses and modest reflections on the ways in which the genesis, role, and status of 'facts' have changed in the transition from a more innocent period, in which the distinction between facts and fictions and between truth and lies seemed to be relatively straightforward, to the current digital era, in which words like 'alternative facts,' 'post-factual,' or 'post-truth' have gained such currency and traction that one finds entries for them in renowned dictionaries. Although I am more than just a bit skeptical about such sweeping period designations as the 'digital age,' the "Age of Sharing,"63 or, more ominously, the "New Dark Age,"64 there can be little doubt that in the wake of the ongoing digitalization of our life-worlds it has become more difficult than ever before to distinguish facts from fictions.

62 Goodman 1992: 17.

63 John 2017.

64 Bridle 2019.

As the editors and contributors to a recent volume on "postfactual storytelling" have shown, for the last two decades or so we have been witnessing a proliferation of alternative facts, fake news, and other forms of misinformation, and a concomitant erosion of truth.65 The choice of the term 'posttruth' as the 'Word of the Year' by the *O.E.D.* in 2016 is certainly indicative of a widespread concern about public disputes revolving around what is generally accepted as true. The "2016 Masterclass on Truth-Bending"66 and the ways in which the former POTUS shamelessly spread lies, show the degree to which postfactual forms of storytelling that disseminate alternative facts and fake news have become the new normal rather than the exception to the rules defined by the norms of factuality. The heated political debates in pre- and post-Brexit Britain also show that objective facts have become less influential in shaping public opinion than fake news, rumors, appeals to emotion, and personal beliefs. In her balanced account of the "Affordances and Limitations of the Post-Factual as an Explanatory Frame," Janine Hauthal rightly observes that "from the very beginning of the public debate 'Brexit' and 'post-factual' were linked."67

It stands to reason that such dangerous and daunting developments as the blurring of the boundaries between facts and fiction, as well as between truth and lies, necessitate a reassessment of the relations between writing and facts. I should like to conclude this contribution by suggesting that the argument delineated above, and the hypotheses about writing as a means of fact-making pertain just as much to fictions as they do to established facts. In his best-selling book *Homo Deus*, the historian Yuval Noah Harari observes that in "the twenty-first century fiction might therefore become the most potent force on earth, surpassing even wayward asteroids and natural selection. Hence, if we want to understand our future, cracking genomes and crunching numbers is hardly enough. We must also decipher the fictions that give meaning to the world."68 Taking my cue from Harari and heeding his clarioncall, I should like to conclude by suggesting that it is high time that we begin to put the examination of fictions that cultures live by on the research agendas of literary and cultural studies. Probably even more so than established facts,

65 Cf. the articles in Weixler et. al 2021.

66 Sommer 2021.

67 Hauthal 2021: 299, 298.

68 Harari 2016: 151.

fictions not only serve as important ways of meaning-, sense-, and worldmaking, they are also among the most powerful cultural resources of resilience. Whether the "Vote Leave"-Campaign in Britain, or Putin's metaphysical view of Russian history and his propaganda, for that matter, correspond to actual historical facts is arguably less important than understanding how political speeches and writings fashion a particular view of the world and foster a sense of belonging to an imagined or a narrative community.

Moreover, in the twenty-first century, digital media and writing in the form of text-types like those offered by Twitter have arguably done more than any other cultural force to undermine the factuality of facts, to boost the proliferation of fictions, and to erase the distinction between what is real or true and what is fake. Although the role of writing in digital media has not yet received the amount of scholarly attention that it arguably deserves, one can venture the hypothesis that writing in so-called 'social media' has served as a catalyst for the corrosion of facts and the erosion of truth as a yardstick for gauging the difference between facts and fictions. In his brilliant manifesto *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*, the Silicon Valley pioneer and scientist Jaron Lanier sums it up concisely in his Argument Four: "Social Media Is Undermining Truth."69 With regard to the topic of writing facts, it is anything but good news that the dominant forms of writing in the age of ever more digitalization tend to disseminate more bullshit, conspiracy theories, fictions, lies, and nonsense than established facts: "Media forms that promote truth are essential for survival, but the dominant media of our age do no such thing," Lanier drily observes.70

In an age in which the so-called 'social media' provide platforms on which anyone can easily turn 'convenient untruths' into 'alternative facts,' and pass them off as real facts by sharing them with thousands or millions of 'followers,' we as cultural studies scholars and critical theorists, would be well-advised to pay more attention to the various acts and procedures of narrative fact- and worldmaking that prevail in the digital realm. Any attempt at understanding why some 'facts' become more powerful and have much more impact on economic and political developments than others, requires taking the mechanisms that are involved in some memes and stories going viral, no matter how factual they really are, into consideration.71

69 Lanier 2018: 53.

70 Ibid.: 61.

71 Cf. Shiller 2019.

Notwithstanding whether we accept the term 'the age of post-truth' as an apt designation of the current era, we should at least acknowledge that writing has become one of the most powerful cultural ways not only of factmaking but also of disseminating alternative facts, fake news, and other fictions. It is also important to realize that inscribing facts, no matter whether they are true or fake, entails prescribing options, shaping the future, and limiting or enhancing the horizon of possibility: "The future is inscribed in the present as a tendency that we can imagine. [...] The future is written, willynilly, in the present."72 When writing and 'social media' are used to spread populist slogans like "Make America Great Again!", "Let's take back control!" or "We want our country back!", the prescriptive and performative dimension of such speech acts and writings as powerful ways of worldmaking becomes obvious. Berardi poignantly captures how such a deterministic strategy radically reduces the multiplicity of latent developments and possible futures: "The determinist strategy aims to subjugate the future, to constrain tendency into a prescribed pre-emptive model, and automate future behavior."73 Since writing has become so important for the dissemination of conspiracy theories, fake news, and other fictions in the twenty-first century, I should like to leave the last words to Harari, who reminds us that fictions may have been more powerful than written facts in shaping the world, and that we have lived in the age of post-truth for much longer than the recent coinage of that term might suggest:

In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions. Ever since the Stone Age, self-reinforcing myths have served to unite human collectives. Indeed, Homo sapiens conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions. [...] As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws, and can thereby cooperate effectively.74

72 Berardi 2019: 13, 234.

73 Ibid.: 12.

74 Harari 2018: 233.

#### **Bibliography**

Auster, Paul (2008): *Man in the Dark*, London.

John, Nicholas A. (2017): *The Age of Sharing*. Cambridge/Malden, MA.

## **Facts** What We Know about Them in the Postmodern Era

*Philipp Sarasin (University of Zurich)*

In 2004, the American journalist Ralph Keyes in his book *The Post-Truth Era. Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life* enumerated for his compatriots, in a retrospectively downright old-fashioned moral way, how often they use euphemisms, are dishonest, or just plain lie*.* While Keyes primarily aimed to pinpoint everyday white lies, he also put into focus the media and politicians as role models for lying. Today, doubts seem to have tainted all political discourses from the left to the right as to whether one can still rely on something like 'truth' or 'facts' in the political public sphere. A book from 2016 is a further example of this: In *Lies Incorporated*. *The World of Post-Truth Politics* by Ari Rabin-Havt, lies and fact-free speech no longer appear to be primarily a moral problem for average Americans but a preferred tool in the struggle for interpretive sovereignty and power.

### **1. Postmodern Arbitrariness?**

Disinformation and propaganda are certainly nothing new (they were commonplace during the Cold War). What is new, however – as Donald Trump and other politicians demonstrated every day – is that the goal has shifted from making false claims *look* like facts, something that intelligence agencies often put a lot of effort into during the Cold War. Today, perpetrators often no longer even attempt to make a serious, 'truthful' reference to facts. On the occasion of the dramatic US election campaign in 2016, *Weltwoche* chief editor Roger Köppel announced with a dry eye that "in the case of Trump, even the lies sound more honest than the highfalutin pseudo-truths of his competitor Clinton."1

That was not meant as criticism: it is better to lie 'honestly' than to tell the truth 'highfalutinly' (what on earth is a 'pseudo-truth' supposed to be?). Köppel did not hesitate to say what he thought of the truth in politics and journalism. And he is not alone. It now seems increasingly acceptable to suggest that all facts are up for 'interpretation'; to the right of the political center, this has become policy: The justification offered to historians is that what matters is not evidence and sources but "juicy stories."2 Completely normal scientific discussions, for example by climatologists, are considered as evidence that they, too, had nothing more to offer than mere "opinions"3 even in the serious *Neue Zürcher Zeitung*. Finally, a politician for the party 'Alternative for Germany' (AfD) countered the objection that there were far fewer refugees in Germany than claimed by his party with the now common, yet highly astonishing assertion: "It's not purely about statistics, it's about how the citizen feels. That means feelings are also reality."4

What has happened here? Can one seriously contradict official statistics because one 'feels' differently? Are scientific findings just a matter of opinion? Is it even possible to 'lie honestly'? Rubbing your eyes in disbelief, you wonder how it is even possible that people have started thinking that way. Many critical and rightly concerned observers claim that this is the result of postmodernity (and social media), i.e., the result of an allegedly widespread attitude that *anything goes*, the cynical play with mere words, the frivolous assertion that 'everything' is just an arbitrary 'construction' and knowledge cannot possibly be distinguished from belief. That would no doubt be confusing. Are facts truly not what they used to be? Are they now truth or constructions, even mere inventions?

#### **2. Ask Kant!**

Asking such questions, one quickly comes into contact with the truly big problems in the history of Western philosophy: What are truth, reality, reason,

1 Köppel 2016. All quotations are translated into English by Ph.S.

2 Keller 2015.

3 Binswanger 2016.

4 Pazderski 2016.

knowledge? Modernity – in this case post-Kant – has provided an answer to these old questions in many variants of the thought that we recognize of reality what our reason "puts into it," as Kant said.5 Kant saw in this contribution of human reason nothing less than the guarantee for scientific knowledge in general: Definitive statements about reality are *only* possible because human reason structures the world substantially and reliably through its "categories" (starting with space and time). In other words, the immutable categories of our reason create knowable facts out of the "chaotic manifold" of the external world. The "things-in-themselves," on the other hand, remain hidden from us forever, are inaccessible to our perception.

Throughout modernity, this idea has varied up to our postmodern present. Since then, 'modern' has been a society or an epoch in which the prevailing thought is that there can be no absolute – such as religious – truths, only relative truths, i.e. truths dependent on our cognitive abilities. Kant tried to rescue the certainty of (scientific) knowledge by positing the structures of human reason as absolutely certain and immutable. Without wanting to unravel the entire history of philosophy since Kant, it can be said that this certainty has gradually dissolved. For example, in Hegel and Marx, but also in so-called historicism, truths were *historically* relativized by being viewed as time-bound, only valid for a specific epoch.

Equally influential was the assumption that there could be no truth outside of *language*, which had been forming since the end of the 19th century. Since we cannot think and make statements about reality without language, it is assumed that language forms the insurmountable framework, indeed, the limit of our knowledge of the world. After all, language is constantly changing, it never 'fits' completely but always represents the never completely successful attempt to put things into words. Nietzsche and Wittgenstein are the most important informants for this concept which is commonly attributed to postmodernity, i.e., the late 20th century. What is true, however, is that only postmodern philosophy has consistently thought through the epistemological concepts of modernity as proposed since Kant and further developed by Nietzsche and Wittgenstein.

5 Cf. Kant 2019 [1781/1787].

#### **3. Facts Are Not Arbitrary**

Truths, and thus what we call 'facts,' are bound to human cognitive faculties, vary historically and do not move beyond what is possible with our language. From the philosophy of the natural sciences, the insight also developed that "scientific facts" come from a "thought collective" and are inevitably shaped by a certain "thought style," as Ludwick Fleck has put it,6 and finally that they also depend on the apparatus and instruments with which nature is observed, measured and analyzed.

Taken together, all this means that facts cannot be thought outside of theories, concepts, models and experimental systems, because without them it is not possible to somehow interpret or understand the 'chaotic manifold' of the world. However, because models and theories become outdated, knowledge can become stale and what was previously believed to be true can become false. What is more, statements about facts are fundamentally exposed to the danger of remaining trapped in erroneous assumptions and fixed convictions, in routine thinking and ideologies. Does this mean that facts are indistinguishable from feelings, truths from lies, and science from beliefs? And if not – why not?

In today's dominant philosophy of science – in the natural sciences as well as in the social sciences and humanities – facts are considered 'constructions,' i.e., *made* – that is *factum* – and shaped by the conditions of their production as scientific facts. Conversely, this does not mean, however, that they are therefore arbitrary, mere inventions, opinions or even indistinguishable from lies. No postmodernist has ever claimed that. Today, however, the assurance of the – always only relative – reliability of scientific knowledge no longer lies in reason, as with Kant, but in a research process of the scientific community that is structured by reciprocal examination, review and criticism. Arguments and claims about reality must be comprehensible and verifiable, they must convince other participants in the discussion, and they must be able to connect to previous discussions and explanatory models.

Statements about the world must, in a word, 'make sense.' If they do not, there are really only two possibilities: they will either be deemed wrong by all standards or uninteresting (or both) – *or*, sooner or later, they will become the source of new truths, new insights, new facts. Since modernity, and explicitly in our postmodernity, facts have therefore been "contingent" as the sociologist

6 Cf. Fleck 1980 [1935].

Niklas Luhmann said: They cannot be "ultimately" and "necessarily" proven to be "absolutely" true, and they belong in the space of what is, or can be the case (from which we exclude, for example, UFOs).

One last point: As far as the social, but not the natural world, is concerned, since postmodernity, it has become clearer than ever that our world consists exclusively of contingent rules and of time-bound institutions, of communication and of interpretation – from political constitutions to football games. Thus, the postmodern era has clearly revealed the extent of our inability to experience our own social reality outside of our media and speech. However, that does not mean that reality is arbitrary: A red traffic light is a fully contingent rule; a simple code that needs to be interpreted. If you misinterpret it, you risk death.

#### **4. A Matter of Integrity**

Despite this rejection of an 'objectivity' that is understood as absolute, facts are still 'robust' ‒ they are confirmed by a lot of evidence and appear to be the best information currently available to us. Referring to facts as 'non-absolute,' i.e. contingent, and being aware of this contingency therefore has an ethical dimension: it is a matter of integrity to always footnote our sources for facts in order to disclose which assumptions, sources and models prove a certain fact to be 'possible,' even 'true.' To the best of my knowledge and belief, so to speak.

This integrity is a protection in two ways: *On the one hand*, it protects us from being positivists, that is, from making us believe that facts are – quite independently of our cognitive activity – inherently there and true and just have to be brought to light. Whoever asserts such a conception of facts is acting more powerfully than humanly possible ‒ a dogmatist, an ideologue in the guise of a realist. In light of such temptations, postmodern philosophy has repeatedly warned us not only about constructedness but also the *variety* of statements about reality that is always possible in this context. However, as I said, this does not mean that one can say *n'importe quoi*, that one can say anything about reality. Statements about the world must be justifiable and understandable for others. Otherwise, they are beliefs – or lies. There is no pink elephant in the garden, even if someone claims to 'feel' it.

*On the other hand*, this integrity also protects against the kind of cynicism currently observable on the (broad) right edge of the political spectrum: Because science, experts and explanations of the world, which tend to be complicated, are strangely perceived by large parts of the political public as 'leftist' or 'elitist,' postmodern epistemology is used in a rather brazen way to flatten the distinction between lies and truth. This has nothing to do with the postmodern era per se, rather it reveals how little these people think of science, argumentation, verifiability and rationality. That is nothing new in itself. Today, however, it seems that there is no longer a need for intelligence agencies to carry out complicated operations of black propaganda to give lies the appearance of truth. The New Right simply laughs at those who still believe in something as silly as truth.7

#### **Bibliography**

Pazderski, Georg (2016): in: *hr-online.de* (the article is no longer available).

Rabin-Havt, Art (2016): *Lies Incorporated*. *The World of Post-Truth Politics*, New York.

7 The original German text was first published online at *Geschichte der Gegenwart* on October 9, 2016.

## **WRITING SOCIETY, POLITICS, AND LAW**

## **Writing Social Facts** Some Observations on Max Weber's Concept of Modern Politics

*Harro Müller (Columbia University in the City of New York)*

Since this article on Max Weber is an essay, I would like to start with some personal remarks. In the 1960s, I studied German Literature, History and Philosophy at the University of Kiel. If I remember correctly, Max Weber was no topic during my studies. Just once, on the occasion of an introduction to modern history, Weber was mentioned briefly because of his application of typological argumentation. Nevertheless, I decided to buy the Kröner-edition1 (first published in 1956), read some texts, but for a long time this was the only text of Max Weber in my private library. In 1973, I started to work at the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies of the University of Bielefeld which was equipped with a famous History Department where eminent professors like Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Reinhart Koselleck, and Jürgen Kocka were teaching. Hans-Ulrich Wehler often mentioned that his design of modern social history had two founding fathers ("Säulenheilige"): Karl Marx and Max Weber. Later in 1991, I started to teach at Columbia University, met Guenther Roth, talked with him several times about Max Weber and read some of his texts on Weber. Fairly soon, I offered a class called "Theories of Modernity" for graduate students of various departments and repeated this class with some changes in the syllabus quite often. One session had always been reserved for Max Weber and a discussion of his "Science as a Vocation." My teaching of Weber was always met with great interest by the students and was quite a success (as, somewhat surprisingly, also the teaching of Carl Schmitt), although many students did not know anything about Max Weber. I retired in 2018.The emeritus status has its advantages and disadvantages. One huge advantage is that

1 Weber 1956.

you have much more time for reading books you could not deal with before. So, at a certain point, I started going through the many volumes of the Georg-Simmel-edition2 by Otthein Rammstedt and wrote an article on the German author.3 After Simmel, I chose Max Weber and read him in an intensive way. Even if I did not finish all the 47 volumes of the new edition,4 I got a much better insight into the importance of Weber for the understanding of modernity and the modern social sciences. His discussion of what to understand by facts builds a decisive point in modernity.

The focus of this essay is on the analysis of Weber's practice of writing which builds the basis for his theoretical and methodological choices. After some general observations on the problem of writing facts in its theoretical and methodological implications, I will discuss two texts: Weber's inauguration lecture from 1895 "The Nation State and Economic Policy"5 and his late talk "The Profession and Vocation of Politics" (1919).6 Of a certain importance is that the work of Max Weber is a torso. During his lifetime, he published two books (his dissertation and his habilitation) and a large number of articles which he often qualified as sketches ("Skizzen") or attempts ("Versuche"). More or less all of his writings are concerned with the three dimensions of scientific work: the *context of discovery* (how to formulate the problem?), the *context of justification* (how to legitimate the claims of truth?), and the *context of application* (what are the functions of the scientific findings concerning their different social relations?). In the following, I will discuss Weber's scientific project in its approach to these three contexts.

#### **1.**

Let me start with some introductory remarks on Max Weber's general project by stressing the problem of writing facts. It seems very helpful to locate his project within a semantic-pragmatic model which not only concentrates on the dimension of meaning and arguments (in our case concerning 'fact') but also on writing texts as doing. Weber himself did not use the term 'Faktum/

2 Simmel 2015 [1989].

3 Müller 2020.

4 Weber 2021.

5 Weber 1994a: 1–28.

6 Weber 1994b: 309–369.

Fakt,' he prefers the term 'Tatsache' which combines a practical side ('Tat') with an empirical dimension by including its referential implications ('Sache'). At the same time, he did not differentiate between the term 'fact/Tatsache' and 'data' – another term he sometimes uses – in a systematic way. Since for Weber reality is definitely indefinite, from a systematic perspective there is always so much data that in the end one has to reduce the information to facts. Now, the interesting point here is: Within the context of discovery, facts are always the effect of questions/problem formulations concerning the way of *how* you want to formulate your object field. Facts are never just given. Contrary to Adorno,7 I want to stress that Weber was not a positivist in a strict sense who starts with facts and continues with the construction of inductive rules. Rather, for Weber a fact could also have a negative connotation. He despised "men of fact/Tatsachenmenschen"8 who only follow seemingly given facts and are unable to produce their own responsible decisions which for Weber are necessary to live a life that deserves the predicate 'human.' But more interesting concerning facts is, that for Weber one cannot deal with *the* or *a* fact in singular. As a starting point, one always has to think of facts in plural inserted in a relational field with its inferential and referential dimensions. Such an approach has massive consequences. Talking about facts here is to locate them within a semantic-pragmatic model which in its results cannot be reduced to one single and conclusive fact. As a consequence, there is no Archimedean point to be found within the social sciences. If, as for Weber, your aim is to produce a science of reality ("Wirklichkeitswissenschaft"), you always need different forms of scientific perspectivism which can never be homogenized. Just to quote the Bible exemplarily, "In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and God was the word." For Weber, this is a form of prescientific or metascientific religious talk that can never be scientifically proved. No one can verify if this sentence is right or wrong. As opposed to this, within the context of discovery you have to start with questions and problem formulations by using words which are facts themselves and which are selected out of an infinite amount of data. Such selections are constructions with certain referential dimensions on the one hand, and a certain reliance on excluding or complementary relations to other word fields on the other. Thus, Weber is a nominalist *cum grano salis* when it comes to the

7 Adorno 2003: 133–136.

8 Mommsen 1974: 119.

construction of facts. At the same time, he is a realist concerning the referential dimension. Therefore, my argument is that his position is much more complex than often formulated in the "Weberei."9

### **2.**

Weber's science of reality is, in a strict sense, a science of realities. His perspectivism does not relate to a *universum* but to a *pluriversum*. Concerning the context of discovery, the latter depends on paradigms that were different in the past and will be different in the future. As for the context of justification, within the social sciences the writing (of) facts obeys the rules of scientific discourse and therefore includes the clarity of concepts, internal logical consistency, empirical and argumentative consistency, evidence, and, last but not least, plausibility. Weber adds the value of neutrality because for him only neutrality allows for the value of objectivity within the social sciences. Thus, there are value relations in the context of discovery that can always be transformed within the social scientific discourse concerning facts. Consequently, facts can be described, interpreted, and explained without any form of foundational normative discourse. On the methodological level, Max Weber resolves such an approach of nearly unlimited possibilities of facts through a construction of ideal types for which he is famous and which he later called pure types or just types (e.g., modern capitalism, types of legitimation, etc.). These ideal types are constructions stressing important points of the questions at issue and neglecting unimportant points. At the same time, they are methodological tools located on the level of heuristic, historical and systematic procedures. It is these ideal types that allow a comparison of the gained scientific evidence with reality data. But where in these procedures is objectivity to be found?

In a neo-Kantian way, Max Weber always asks a transcendental question: What are the conditions that make science possible, especially the social sciences? His Kantian answer: a theory of concepts combined with a theory of causality. But his concepts are always historical/changing concepts, his form of causal argumentation is a pragmatic form of argumentation for which professional skills are needed to terminate the plurality of causal explanations.

9 Knöbl 2022: 89.

At the same time, there is no fixed methodological rule for this ending. Therefore, in a certain sense, Max Weber pleads for a restricted form of objectivity which is a form of objectivity beyond any value presuppositions. In retrospective, though, one might not accept Weber's assumption. Because concerning the context of discovery the Weberian value relations also implicate value judgements which, to a certain degree, always influence the context of justification.10 On the other hand, concerning the context of application, Max Weber opts for an openly normative approach. As a teacher, he is engaged in a humanistic program with the telos to educate mature people who follow their own individual laws and make responsible and autonomous decisions concerning a life within the different value spheres of modern capitalistic society. A life that, on the political level, can only be organized in a liberal-democratic way. This at least was the perspective of the late Max Weber.

All three dimensions – *the context of discovery*, *the context of justification* and *the context of application* – constituting Weber's scientific project concerning the foundation of the social sciences can be described as an empirical-normative project applying semantic-pragmatic models. In fact, Weber's project is a strictly historical-systematic project which reflects its own historicity. Therefore, it negates all forms of teleological philosophy of history, of essentialism, of substantialism, of naturalistic or organic holism, including all forms of theodicy and of cosmodicy, by offering an ambivalent form of anthropodicy on the level of philosophy. In his scientific project with its empirical and normative implications, Weber is a social scientist, a philosopher and at the same time an educator.11

Concerning his writing choices, Max Weber was a strong member of the Gutenberg galaxy. His scientific texts are handwritten and then published in the form of printed articles or books. In his role as a German citizen and a public intellectual, he also published non-scientific texts, especially during and after the First World War. The best example of such a form of writing seems to be the political treatise "Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order". It presents "a reworked and extended version of articles which appeared in the *Frankfurter Zeitung* in the summer of 1917."12 In general, theoretical reflections and ways of practical writing do not build a homogenous field. There may be tensions, sometimes also contradictions. Let

10 Oakes 1990: 143.

11 Marty 2019: 37.

12 Weber 1994c: 130.

us see how Weber proceeds and approaches such tensions in the two chosen examples.

### **3.**

In 1894, Max Weber moved from the University of Berlin to the University of Freiburg to accept a chair of Political Economy ("Nationalökonomie"). In the following year, he delivered his inaugural lecture "The Nation State and Economic Policy" on May 31st which he published in a rewritten version as a brochure of 34 pages by the end of June. In German university tradition, the inaugural lecture is a specific genre with a specific function. The new colleague introduces him-/herself not only to the university public but also to the general public, with a lecture presenting the respective way of doing research and giving hints on how to proceed in the future concerning one's own discipline. Max Weber fulfilled these expectations in a superb and courageous way. He exemplified his empirical approach combined with a massive intervention regarding the present and future role of political economy within the political and economic spheres of the German state. How did he structure his lecture? The solution is twofold:

What I intend is firstly to illustrate, just *one example*, the role played by physical and psychological racial differences between nationalities in the economic struggle of existence. I should then like to add some reflections on the situation of states which rest on national foundations – as ours does – in the framework of a consideration of economic policy.13

After a preface, he continues with the presentation of a series of dry and uncomfortable facts concerning the present economic, political, and cultural situation between German and Polish people in West Prussia. He discusses the economic quality of land, the social stratification of the population and especially the differences between German and Polish people when it comes to their economic, cultural, religious, and political status which he characterizes in a racist neo-Darwinian way. Weber's point is the following: Economic and cultural problems must be discussed in political terms, there being a massive contradiction between the economic class interests of the landed gentry and

13 Weber 1994a: 2.

the political interests of the nation in the Eastern provinces. At the time, Germany was a powerful national state which, in the opinion of Weber, played an important role within world politics. Therefore, he sees the necessity of accelerating German industrialization in order to be able to maintain its function as world power within a capitalistic society. Now,Weber was always interested in the history of the present as well as in a scientifically oriented diagnosis of the present political, economic, and cultural situation. He diagnoses in his lecture an eminent lack of political leadership: The landed aristocracy is an economically declining class that can no longer exercise any political role in a responsible way (21), the German bourgeois class lacks political maturity. Even if it had a political vocation, it would not follow the call, while, at the same time, the working class is even more immature than the bourgeois class. (25) Weber confesses: "I am a member of the bourgeois (*bürgerlich*) classes, and I have been brought up to share their views and ideals." (23) He notices a situation of crisis in political leadership at the end of his century. This is even more precarious, since for Weber power struggle and power conflicts are necessary qualities of politics within and especially between national states. The national state as a power state (like Germany) has to continue its power policy with the necessary ingredients of different forms of violence and has to do so in a responsible way. For there is a permanent competition in peaceful or non-peaceful ways between powerful national states, which meant that there is always the possibility of war for which the state has to be prepared. Therefore, for Weber anarchism, pacifism, socialism, utilitarianism, universal happiness, even universal human rights and forms of democracy as proposed by Rousseau are off limits. He describes the function of political economy within the present situation as follows: "The science of political economy is a *political* science. It is a servant of politics, not the day-to-day-politics of the persons and classes who happen to be ruling at any given time, but enduring power-political interests of the nation." (16) Thus, regarding the context of justification in political economy, Weber negates all values like, e.g., happiness. In his historical argumentation, he implicitly favors value neutrality combining empirical, interpretative, explanative and to a certain degree narrative sentences. Later he stresses such an approach in an explicit way. As one can see in retrospect, the Weberian plea for the national power state has massive normative implications, and attributions like 'power state' would need further empirically tested evidence.

In the context of application, the situation is quite different and the program explicitly normative. Weber states in his role as educator: "We do not

want to breed well-being in people, but rather those characteristics which we think of as constituting the human greatness and nobility of our nature." (15) Here, he favors a form of bourgeois aristocratic individualism which underlies the code noble/rough and which in its exclusivity negates all forms or moral argumentation with an egalitarian approach. Weber's plea for human greatness implies different possibilities. One is heroism during wartime: to sacrifice your life. Or to put it bluntly: to be prepared to kill or to be killed in national wars. The other one concerns his own way of thinking which makes him run one *syntagma* that seems most interesting: the "magic of *freedom*." (8) During his whole career as an academic, Weber was totally fascinated by this "magic of *freedom*." Freedom in the sense that one has to live one's own responsible, autonomous life is for Weber a main normative assumption decisive for all three contexts.14 It is the central motivation for his extremely ambitious scientific project aimed at reflecting the historic present and future dimensions. Concerning the present and concerning the future dimension, especially political economy can play an important intervening role when it comes to increasing freedom. Or in other words: For Max Weber, it is not the charm of equality, fraternity, or the pursuit of happiness, but the charm of freedom that offers a normative starting point.

This inaugural lecture was the highly ambivalent beginning of an astonishing scientific career. There are continuities between its beginning and its end: the massive nationalism and apology of the national state, politics as struggle, conflicts with its necessary ingredients rule, power, and violence, the problem of responsibility concerning history, aristocratic individualism, heroic forms of existence, and, last but not least, the magic of freedom. But for the later Weber, all forms of racism and Neo-Darwinism no longer had any cognitive power. He also changed his political role. He started as a staunch conservative with liberal connotations and ended as a liberal who favored parliamentary democracy.

#### **4.**

In retrospect, Max Weber qualified his inaugural lecture as immature but provocative. A mature discussion of the concept of politics with its scientific, sociological, philosophical, and pedagogical implications can be found in his

14 Marty 2019: 35.

talk "The Profession and Vocation of Politics" from 28th January 1919. In the summer of the same year, he published the talk in a massively rewritten form compared to the stenographic version of his oral talk (67 pages). Contrary to his inaugural lecture, this text has no footnotes, does not discuss the state of the art of research and shows some stylistic hints to its original oral presentation. He starts his texts with the question: "What do we understand by politics (*Politik*)?"15 The answer is similar to his earlier texts: "In our terms, then, 'politics' would mean striving for a share of power, […] whether it be between states or between the groups of people contained within a single state." (311) And further: "The state is a relationship of rule (*Herrschaft*) by human beings over human beings, and one that rests on the legitimate use of violence." (Ibid.) Weber introduces a threefold typology of forms as to how the state could be legitimated: traditional, charismatic, and legal. (311–312) He then continues with a well-informed genealogical reconstruction of tendencies in Europe and America leading to the modern state with its form of rational administration, its party system, its forms of parliamentarianism. Regarding types of politicians, he introduces two. Either one lives for politics (mainly valid for the 19th century) or one lives from politics (mainly valid for 20th century). (318) This genealogical reconstruction of the modern political system reveals Max Weber to be a historically oriented sociologist who with the help of his typological procedures produces superb overviews concerning midterm and long-term periods of history in relation to the present. As such, the typologies are extremely convincing, although Weber does not discuss certain omissions and the form of selection. Since too complicated typologies are often unsuccessful, Weber limits his typology of forms of legitimation to three and the typology of politicians to two possibilities. As for the political situation, he constructs another binary opposition: "But the only choice lies between a leadership democracy with a 'machine' and democracy without a leader, which means rule by the 'professional politician' who has no vocation, the type of man who lacks precisely those inner, charismatic qualities which make leaders." (351)

What are the presuppositions, then, for a politician's successful career? First of all, there must be a feeling of power. (352) But as a politician you have to do justice to this power. And this is not only a question of power but also a question of ethics. In the perspective of Max Weber, three qualities are decisive for a politician: "passion, a sense of responsibility, judgement. […] The

15 Weber 1994b: 309.

passionate commitment to a 'cause'" (352–353) is one requirement, but even more important is a "*responsibility* for that cause. […] This requires […] *judgement*, the ability to maintain one's inner composure and calm while being receptive to realities, in other words, *distance* from things and people." (353) The enemy of all political personalities is vanity leading to a lack of objectivity and responsibility. (354) The result would be the mere power politician whose actions steer into absurdity. He does know "nothing of the tragedy, in which all action, particularly political action, is in truth enmeshed." (354–355) This sentence about the tragic quality of all actions is an empirical statement, but it is also a massive philosophical-anthropological statement which demonstrates how Weber combines an empirical with a philosophical approach by also including pedagogical implications. The following citation explains this "fundamental fact" in an interesting way: "It is certainly true, and it is a fundamental fact of history […], that the eventual outcome of political action frequently, indeed regularly, stands in a quite inadequate, even paradoxical relation to its original, intended meaning and purpose (*Sinn*)." (355) Now in the perspective of Max Weber, it is most interesting that the nature of the causes a politician seeks to serve by striving for power is a question of faith. These causes are values that belong to different spheres: religious, political, cultural, aesthetic, erotic, etc. Although the theory of value spheres is not elaborated by Max Weber in a systematic way, the consequences of this presupposition are evident. There is no hierarchy between the different values, and their validity cannot be scientifically proved. They just have to be chosen and defended.16 The relations between these values – and this is the tragedy and a fundamental fact in this world as irrational *pluriversum* – are antagonistic. This not only concerns the relationship between different value spheres but is also active within a single value sphere.

Regarding the ethic of politics, Weber discusses two alternatives: the ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility. The ethic of conviction presupposes a dominant value and does not care about the consequences. The ethic of responsibility reflects consequences and side effects and makes decisions based on such reflections. Even after having opted for a decision, you have to take responsibility for your choice and to reflect the amount of guilt following the decision, because the problem of guilt is a massive problem in the political sphere. It has a "diabolic dimension" because politics cannot do without its essentials power and violence.

16 Bruun 2017: 292.

Now, what are the relations between the ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility? They can be paradox or mutually exclusive in a strict sense. But in the perspective of Weber – and this is the much better way of treating the dilemma – a form of cooperation between the ethic of conviction and ethic of responsibility seems possible. For such a form of cooperation, a quick reference in the sense of Luther and Kierkegaard is necessary:

On the other hand, it is immensely moving when a mature person (whether old or young) who feels with his whole soul the responsibility he bears for the real consequences of his actions, and who acts on the basis of an ethics of responsibility, says at some point, 'Here I stand, I can do no other.' This is something genuinely human and profoundly moving. For it must be *possible* for *each* of us to find ourselves in such a situation at some point if we are not inwardly dead. In this respect, the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility are not absolute opposites. They are complementary to one another, and only in combination do they produce the true human being who is *capable* of having a 'vocation for politics.'17

Thus, even in the sphere of politics with its demonic dimensions, it is possible for mature people to lead a form of life which could reclaim the predicate of authenticity.

At this point, I want to come back to the question of facts. The beginning of the last paragraph of Weber's essay contains the most famous citation of "The Profession and Vocation of Politics": "Politics means slow, strong drilling through hard boards, with a combination of passion and a sense of judgement." (369) Not so famous are the following sentences which reclaim factual empirical knowledge:

It is of course entirely correct, and a fact confirmed by all historical experience, that what is possible would never have been achieved if, in this world, people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible. But the person who can do this must be a leader, not only that, he must, in a very simple sense of the word, be a hero. (Ibid.)

Thus, at the beginning of his career as social scientist and in his inaugural lecture "The Nation State and Economic Policy" Weber starts with the apology of great men. At the end of his career as social scientist, philosopher, and educator, he ends with an apology for political heroism. Therefore, it seems

17 Weber 1994b: 367–368.

quite correct to locate Weber within the period of tragic modern heroism with its catchwords of nation, sovereignty, charisma, and sacrifice.

#### **Conclusion**

My excursion into the concepts of Max Weber concerning his ideas on the discipline of Social Sciences and the possible ways to treat them within this paradigm on politics brings me to the following conclusion. It is the view of the question of writing facts that allows to locate Weber within a semantic-pragmatic model. The way he treated *the context of discovery*, *the context of justification* and *the context of application* in his role as social scientist, philosopher, and educator allowed him to formulate an empirical-normative theory which reflects its own historicity and fallibility.18 When looking at this approach in retrospective, one can state that as far as the context of justification is concerned, Weber reclaims a form of restricted objectivity and a form of restricted value neutrality. This postulated form of restrictive objectivity treats facts produced from data with typological procedures, mixing an empirical-factual with a constructive approach in such a way that this form of typological argumentation presents massive pragmatic implications. Weber's postulated restricted form of value neutrality enables his main normative assumption of freedom to be not only constitutive for the context of discovery (how to formulate the problem?) and the context of application (how to relate to social dimensions of reality?) but also for the context of justification (how to legitimize the claims of truth?).

At the end of this essay, I allow myself one more personal remark. In "Profession and Vocation of Politics", Max Weber offers the following perspective concerning the immediate future after the end of World War I: "What lies immediately ahead of us is not the flowering of summer but a polar night of icy darkness and hardness."19 From a metaphorical perspective, this image might work. From a factual, empirical perspective, it is not correct. Polar nights are cold but have a magic light darkness, extremely clear skies with sparkling stars, and moreover, there is always the possibility of polar lights.

18 Weber 2012: 138.

19 Weber 1994b: 368.

#### **Bibliography**

Adorno, Theodor W. (2003): *Einleitung in die Soziologie*, Frankfurt am Main.

Müller, Harro (2020): "Schreibszene, Schreibfeld, zwei Kriegsreden und *Lebensanschauung*", in: Knaller, Susanne/Pany-Habsa, Doris/Scholger, Martina (eds.): *Schreibforschung interdisziplinär. Praxis – Prozess – Produkt*, Bielefeld, 157–174.

Weber, Max (2021): *Max-Weber-Gesamtausgabe*, ed. Horst Baier et al., Tübingen.

## **Writing 'Volksgemeinschaft' into 'Fact'** Letters from the National Socialist Labor Service (RAD)

*Gero von Roedern (University of Graz)*

## **1. Introduction**

"The hard, unrelenting service doesn't affect me too much, because I always did a lot of sports,"1 Friedrich Pohl wrote to his parents on June 18, 1940, after only four days in the National Socialist Labor Service (*RAD*).2 Initially just intrigued by the choice of words, I started my investigation into Friedrich Pohl's letters with the assumption that the young man simply replicated discursive formations he may have picked up in the Labor Service. My scope then expanded to the hypothesis that the young author's reference to and replication of impressions from the Labor Service can be understood as participation in the organization's project of creating the avant-garde for the 'Volksgemeinschaft.'3 Konstantin Hierl, the man in charge of the *RAD*, asserted: "The Labor Service is the best tool to realize this national socialist demand for a people's community."4 Basing my work on a collection of a young man's letters stemming from his time in the organization, I investigate the *RAD*'s claim of realizing the 'people's community' on a micro-level. In doing so, this study discusses the writing of 'facts' by Friedrich Pohl while also reflecting on its own perspective. I approach the letters with a combination of qualitative content analysis with inductive category-building5 and close reading.

1 Pohl 1940: June 18. All quotes from the diary are originally in German and translated into English by G.v.R. The same applies to translations from other primary sources or secondary literature in German.

2 *Reichsarbeitsdienst* or short: *RAD*.

3 The 'people's community.'

4 Hierl 1941: 201. Hierl, a former soldier and *völkisch*/national socialist functionary, since 1935 was officially the leader of the *RAD* [*Reichsarbeitsführer*].

5 Mayring 2015: 85–90.

Since the merit of operating with 'Volksgemeinschaft' as an analytical category has been debated by historical scholars for nearly two decades,6 it is critical to point out that the study at hand focuses on the social vision of the concept. As such, following historians Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto, it entailed "a guideline for the actions both of private individuals and political leaders"7 and contained the promise of a social 'utopia' for those it included.8 At the latest *Historikertag* in October 2021, it was precisely this power of appeals to the "we", that formed the basis for a panel discussion on the making of collectives.9 For the purpose of this essay, I therefore define the concept of 'Volksgemeinschaft' as a place of ideal perfection and impractical scheme for social improvement as well as a vague guide on how to achieve this state. I argue that the analyzed letters not only picked up on such vague directives but on a micro- and meso-level actively participated in the attempts of creating a new social reality.

In developing the argument, my analysis identifies and works on and with five different facets of reality.10 Firstly, (1) the layer of historiography, on which I operate and on which I unfold 'facts,' which are intersubjectively comprehensible and verifiable but nevertheless characterized by my subjective emphasis and methodical approach to the sources.11 Secondly, there is the (2) material aspect of the investigated letters,12 whose text is a linguistic 'fact.' This text, however, does not need to resemble the (3) historical state of things in the Labor Service and national socialist Germany, which I understand as a product of historical relations13 that can only be approximated through research. Rather, the letters also reveal (4) references to as well as interpretations of

6 Janosch Steuwer composed a report on the debate, which still provides a helpful overview on the major positions. Since then, some rapprochement can be observed. (Cf. Steuwer 2013)

7 Steber/Gotto 2018: 3.

8 Or from a non-national socialist point of view rather: dystopia.

9 Historikertag 2021: *Das umstrittene Wir: Auf der Suche nach neuen Wegen zur historischen Erforschung von Kollektiven.*

10 My gratitude for the suggestion goes to Susanne Knaller, who outlines her considerations on "several levels of data and dimensions of reality" in the introduction of this volume.

11 For the historian's/narrator's "situatedness between factuality and fictionality" cf. Jaeger 2019: 336. What is critical in this analysis is that 'facts' in historiography are created in a dialogue between the object of research, the approach and its result.

12 Cf. Henzel 2020.

13 Cf. Daniel 2016: 385–387.

the reality encountered in the *RAD*. 14 Such (re)actions in the letters may or may not be truthful, but as they can be interpreted both as indications and as parts of negotiating experiences,15 in this respect they can be considered reliable. As a fifth facet of reality, I discuss the question regarding (5) the effect of the letters as participation in the construction of a new social reality16 through language.17 Based on these five facets, I undertake a cultural reading of personal documents that is dedicated to the interface between textual and social reality. Therefore, I intend to contribute to the expansion of our understanding of the writing of 'fact' in history and historiography. My analysis can reveal how all five identified facets are in one form or another affected by the social vision of the 'Volksgemeinschaft' and the attempts of the *RAD* to realize it as social 'facts.'

#### **2. The** *RAD***-Letters**

In today's academic research, several lines of inquiry into the many facets of the *RAD* can be identified, which all contribute to the conception of this essay. Important studies into the institutional history of the Labor Service have, for instance, provided valuable insight into the size, composition, and political relevance of the organization.18 They allow for the creation of a general framework that contributes to the contextualization of Friedrich Pohl's letters. Relatively early research into the *RAD* was undertaken by the Educational

14 Cf. Susanne Knaller's contribution in this volume for the underlying constructive model, traced to Immanuel Kant's theory of cognition.

15 The primacy of discourse or experience is subject to major debate in historical analysis. For the central positions, cf. Scott 1999 and Canning 1994. My use of "experience" touches on the issue, but as my focus is on negotiations in the letters, I avoid the summary of a lengthy polarizing and quasi-ontological debate.

16 Cf. Berger/Luckmann 1972.

17 Cf. Marszolek 2013.

18 For an overview of the Labor Service for the male youth (*RADmJ*) cf. Patel 2005; for the Labor Service for the female youth (*RADwJ*), cf. Stephenson 1982. For practical purposes, in this paper I speak only of the *RAD*.

Sciences, which investigated educational practices19 in the organization.20 Furthermore, the research of cultural anthropologist Manfred Seifert21 and historian and cultural scholar Heidrun Zettelbauer22 contribute to my own approach.

The focus of my investigation is directed at the Labor Service's role as the setting for an ideological project, which meant to create the avant-garde for the national socialist 'Volksgemeinschaft.'23 From June 1935 onwards, (initially) 200,000 young men had to undergo this process per year.24 In the organization "work, after-work [activities], local history, state education, folk culture and the nationalist interpretation thereof "25 as well as incessant drilling and monitoring by the leaders26 were dedicated to the cultivation of "innate abilities," which "require[d] training, namely self-education."27 Even after the outbreak of World War II there existed units of the Labor Service that were particularly drilled in representative purposes such as performing at the *Reichsparteitage*. Friedrich Pohl was selected for such tasks and physical labor or the war remained only side topics in his letters.28 In contrast, drill and

19 Cf. Tenorth 1989: 277. Following Heinz-Elmar Tenorth, the term education is used impartially in this paper. Tenorth argues that holding educational practices of the national socialist regime to the standard of pedagogics would render their investigation pointless. See also Langewiesche/Tenorth 1989: 111–144.

23 It is to be made explicit, however, that this was just one facet of the organization. The *RAD* was, among other things, a tool for combating mass unemployment, a source of manpower, a place for pre- and para-military training and a link in the chain of national socialist organizations dedicated to capture the hearts and minds of the German youth.

(self-)education were central themes in his impressions of life in different camps of the *RAD* and are of central importance for this essay.29

The analyzed corpus of communication covers the time span from June 16 to October 2, 1940. In total it consists of 49 pieces of writing. 41 of these were sent by Friedrich Pohl to his family and eight were addressed to him and written by his mother and father.30 My work is primarily based on the digitized correspondence and some other documents which were temporarily entrusted to the NS-Documentation Center of the City of Cologne by a niece of the author in the year 2010. As the youngest of eight children, Friedrich Pohl was born in Cologne on January 26, 1920. He left junior high school in Cologne in 1936 with his intermediate degree and then started to work in an architectural firm in his home city. When he was drafted into the *RAD* on June 14, 1940, he had finished his apprenticeship and had been gathering practical experience on construction sites for nearly a year. After having been discharged from the *RAD* on September 28, 1940, the young man was drafted directly into the Wehrmacht, in which he served until he was killed on July 24, 1942 on the Eastern Front.

The better part of the young man's letters in one form or another contain requests for daily necessities. However, many of them emphasize the good provisions and Friedrich Pohl's overall well-being in the camp. His letters can be read somewhat analogous to the signs of life encountered in most letters from the front, usually meant to put the recipients at ease. Requests for food for "[…] the time between dinner and going to sleep [which] is so long that one gets hungry"31 and multiple bouts of homesickness underline the likely soothing, and not necessarily straightforward side of his regular assurances. The biggest challenge to the young man's efforts to continue his social life as much as possible through letters may be identified in the lack of time for

ordination of *RAD* units under the command of the Wehrmacht could make a huge difference in the individual experience of the Labor Service.

29 As part of such an unusual unit, the *Nürnbergzüge*, Friedrich Pohl was transferred multiple times. He served in Immenhausen near the city of Kassel, then in Türkismühle, 50 km to the north of the city of Saarbrücken. Afterward he was sent to Hermeskeil, a small town 25 km to the West and later returned to Türkismühle. Eventually he was assigned to a construction detail in the village of Ehr, 30 km south of Koblenz.

30 The frequency of mail sent remained quite constant for the first ten weeks, in September it dropped significantly. On average, Friedrich Pohl's letters are about 1.5 pages of handwriting (approximately 200–300 words).

31 Pohl 1940: June 23.

writing. Hierl's demand "In the Labor Service not a single quarter hour may be 'idled away', every single one has to serve for purposeful labor or intended relaxation and recuperation"32 clearly shows in nine of the analyzed letters: "There is no time left to write at all. I am so tired. I can barely stand. […] On Saturday or Sunday, I'll write more. I'm simply finished. I'm done."33 Rigorously repetitive daily schedules and the "time-hysterical" (Seifert) frenetic activism complemented physical isolation, control and functionalization of social relationships as well as the removal of spaces to withdraw to:34 "I lie in my bed and write. there [sic!] is no other time. Although it is forbidden."35 Despite the many challenges, Friedrich Pohl attempted to still participate in his family's life and also mentions communication with at least two other individuals outside his family. He demanded to stay in the loop and used the letters as substitute for everyday communication as well as on special occasions and often begged for information on life at home.

#### **3. Negotiation and Integration**

When investigating the negotiation and narration of experiences in the letters (4) at their interface with the program of the *RAD*, the analysis needs to consider the difficult situation for writing while serving in the Labor Service as well as some unique properties which make letters distinct from most other texts. Private letters are conceptualized to fit a common frame of reference36 and anticipate a particular reception by the addressee. Assumptions about who may read a letter and knowledge of their convictions, fears and one's relationship to them influences the text often in at least as much as the individual desire to share certain aspects of life with them.37 "How do you, as an old soldier, like my posture in the picture, where we line up."38 Friedrich Pohl for

32 Hierl 1941: 245.

33 Pohl 1940: September 19.

34 Seifert 1996: 143–144.

35 Pohl 1940: June 16.

36 As this frame of reference is not necessarily shared by me as a historiographer, private or secrete implications in the letters can be overseen and time-specific meanings lost. Additionally, my account of (4) experience as the fourth facet of reality of the letters is subject to and filtered through (1) my own perspective, knowledge and background.

37 Cf. Dobson 2009: 57.

38 Pohl 1940: July 7.

example asked his father, who, a veteran, responded positively and jokingly: "[…] I'm going to have the entire column stand at attention when I come for a visit. […] Well, a bit of fun is essential.  While the extent of it is all but certain, it is clear that in Friedrich Pohl's unit received mail was centralized and given out after the daily ceremony of saluting the flag:40 "I'm waiting every evening. But mostly in vain."41 Compared with other authors writing such letters, the young man's criticism of his experience is very moderate. Although there is no clear indication of external censorship having been carried out by *RAD* officials in the unit, one can hold for certain that some form of self-censoring42 influenced the young man's writing. These considerations are compounded by the social, cultural, and individual limitations of being able to formulate something which restrict all forms of communication.43

Addressing his life in the *RAD*, Friedrich Pohl's letters reveal both homesickness and dauntless optimism to rise to the task at hand. Approaching the sources from the field of *Erfahrungsgeschichte*, one may state that the young man drew on a store of societal knowledge. Knowledge, he acquired through primary and secondary socialization which to a great extent became routinized and turned into a frame of reference for making sense of things.When he successfully negotiated new challenges while in the Labor Service with knowledge obtained during his previous socialization, he was able to make experiences.44 This makes the letters, as a space in which home and camp could be mediated, all the more important. Through fervent repetition the education in the camp was meant to facilitate a deep internalization of "[…] a kind of National Socialist consciousness […] as well as ideological patterns of thinking, reasoning and causal relations."45 For Friedrich Pohl, writing his letters and negotiating in them seems to have been both part and emblematic of this process.

When relating selected events of his everyday life in the *RAD*, he sometimes appears to have invested particular effort in attempts at making existing

39 Ibid.: July 9.

40 At least when stationed in camps in Immenhausen and Türkismühle.

41 Pohl 1940: August 27.

42 Cf. Dobson 2009: 62.

43 Cf. Schuster 2020: 25.

44 Cf. Latzel 1997: 13–14.

45 Zettelbauer 2018: 555.

and newly acquired knowledge fit.46 In doing so, his letters picked up on one of the central demands of the concept of 'Volksgemeinschaft'– to integrate. "I am the most senior cadet in the room [*Stubenältester*] of the first squad. Even though I'm one of the youngest. Well, the sports helped a lot. Because of it, the hard and fast service doesn't affect the legs as much."47 The young man repeatedly connected the rigorous drills in the *RAD* to his past experience with sports. Frequently he displayed a sportsmanlike attitude towards the harsh living conditions, characterized by a strong disregard for individual needs or privacy, constant stress and arbitrary harassment. But the missing separation between work and spare time, privacy, and shared life48 clearly also affected him when he wrote to his mother: "I often go into the great silent pine-forest and dream of home. Those are my best hours."49 Sometimes in the letters he also displayed anger or frustration: "Because of the reluctance towards this whole operation I, in fact, do not know what to write."50 Considering these effects of life in the Labor Service on his writing, a likely explanation for his usually positive characterization of "[…] locker check, stool construction,51 bedmaking, inspection of the boots and all the other [tasks] that make life difficult for us"52 as sports challenges is that it helped the young man to make sense of the routine. Thereby, it would have on the one hand provided him with a mode of dealing with the harassment, on the other hand of presenting himself to the family members as up to the challenge. Through the analogy

46 As the *RAD* was only a link in the chain of national socialist institutions devoted to seizing the hearts and minds of the German youth, it isn't always possible to determine whether an ideological pattern of thinking was learned in the organization or already existed before the Service. This makes no difference for my argument, since the *RAD* and its education provided context and content for the letters, which makes its contribution to the internalization unequivocal.

47 Pohl 1940: June 23.

51 A peculiarity of the Labor Service, for the "stool-construction" [Schemelbau] "the young men had to take off their clothes and to arrange them on their stool according to a precisely defined scheme. […] The least bit of real or alleged deviation or disorder provided a pretext for harassment by the leader, especially in the form of the so called Budenzauber, which referred to unscheduled cleaning and scrubbing of the barracks as a form of punishment." (Patel 2005: 225)

52 Pohl 1940: September 4.

of sports, the narration of life in the Labor Service could be formed and formulated according to the expectations of those who had not lived through something similar. This way he could convey these things to others and make them and himself comprehend without burdening the readers too much. In the words of Pierre Bourdieu "in the service of a general intention, [Friedrich Pohl] selected significant events and created own connections between them to make them coherent."53 Supposing that fitting in, performing well or, in short, integration formed at least part of Friedrich Pohl's 'general intention,' in his letters he (5) actively integrated the education in the Service in his own biography. In writing, the social vision, underlying the ideological project, was woven into the events experienced in the *RAD* (4) and simultaneously as text turned into (2) material 'fact' in the form of letters.

#### **4. Writing 'Volksgemeinschaft' into 'Fact'?**

Did letters like these also affect the German society at the time? Did they contribute to turning a social vision into 'fact'? Following the premises of sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckman,54 every act of corresponding with another person entails some reflection on oneself and a response to the world which one finds oneself living in and reacts to. Friedrich Pohl then was, on the one hand, a product of social contexts and conditions. On the other hand, as a 'bridge' home, Friedrich Pohl's letters did not just represent attempts to continue his social life. Rather, through living and writing in a certain way, he himself influenced the society he lived in.55 From the *RAD* camps as laboratories for the 'Volksgemeinschaft,'56 text flowed to Friedrich Pohl's family outside. I do not mean to disguise that the lack of sources makes it nearly impossible to quantify the effect of this or to even say much about the reaction of Friedrich Pohl's parents. Nevertheless, the letters, in another way, appear to have (5) participated in the attempt of constructing a new social reality.

To reiterate: The Labor Service was supposed to form young people into the avant-garde of the 'people's community,' to (contribute to) turn the na-

53 Bourdieu 1990: 76.

54 Cf. Berger/Luckmann 1972.

55 Traceable to a micro-level of engaging with his family and a meso-level of being a functioning part of an organization.

56 Cf. Patel 2013: 323.

tional socialist vision of the 'Volksgemeinschaft' into social reality. The organization based its education on a three-step-practice: "Demonstrating [Vorleben], experiencing [Erleben] and imitating [Nachleben]."57 The focus lay on creating a practical experience, which not only created knowledge but equally trained body and character. Youths were to be made fit into the 'people's community' and to put individual needs aside.58 The process attempted to achieve deindividuation and the deprivation of individuality in favor of the 'Volksgemeinschaft.'59 To be successful, the organization required the young people to live through its program, to replicate it and to apply it to their life. Therefore, when Friedrich, in writing his letters, actively tried to fit into the community and reproduced the education in the Labor Service, I interpret it as participation in the making of the 'Volksgemeinschaft' – the construction of social reality through writing.

Considering that subordination and disciplining of the recruits "was the signature element of the Labor Service,"60 Friedrich Pohl's preoccupation with the drills and his reactions to them are important. The combination of drill and physical exercise was meant to foster obedience and to instill qualities identified as essential for the 'people's community' and military service. The ability to take initiative and responsibility, to make decisions and to unwaveringly stick to them were regarded equally important to self-control and the willingness to self-sacrifice oneself for one's people.61 The already discussed characterizations of the drills as sports challenges show that the young man concerned himself with the drills. In his writing he tried to make sense of them and, in doing so, made and replicated the experiences of the daily events. He tried to make them fit with existing knowledge, with himself – and simultaneously made himself fit better into the (3) community of the *RAD*. He did so according to the guidelines of the social vision, but in his unique way. The letters speak of his *Eigensinn* (Lüdtke),62 his very own take on the events in the *RAD*, negotiating (4) the reality of his experience in his letters and giving it a particular twist. It is the transformative, even subversive

57 Cf. Seifert 1996: 180–181; Zettelbauer 2018: 555 speaks of "demonstration, practice, imitation."

58 Cf. Hierl 1942: 201, 219; cf. ibid. 1941: 274.

59 Cf. Hierl 1941: 297.

60 Patel 2005: 225.

61 Cf. Hierl 1941: 196, 205, 267–270.

62 Cf. Lüdtke 2015.

power of this twist which stands at the core of historian Alf Lüdtke's concept. Friedrich Pohl's interpretation of the drills (5) did change a fraction of the social reality but rather through integration and subordination in an organization in which no "[…] private sphere, no space which could escape the law of the community"63 was meant to remain. His acts of subscribing to the *RAD*'s rules in his letters can, for instance, be observed when they affirmed the "[…] principle of achievement [which was] fully affirmed by our [national socialist] worldview,"64 as Hierl put it. When, e.g., planning his home leave, Friedrich Pohl judged: "No comrade gets leave on Sunday. It very much depends on the conduct.65 […] As goes the work, so goes the reward."66 Thus, the young man characterized the particular decision, the underlying principle as well as the power of the leader to decide such matters as just.

The process of subordination becomes especially perceptible where it is aligned with self-education. "Whatever may come, I am strong enough to take everything upon myself. Only one [person] can be victorious and that's me. Ha Ha Ha!", Friedrich Pohl wrote in a letter, in which he also mentioned his homesickness: "Homesickness comes in an ever-recurring wave. Then one is good for nothing. Maybe tomorrow it passes again for a couple days."67 The proximity of the expressed homesickness to the boundless optimism of the previous quote in the same letter make it seem likely that the process of writing helped him in reassuring and educating himself. Actions demanded by the *RAD*: "Without the willingness of every individual to respond to the educational influences and to work on himself, there is no educational success."68 In replicating the behavior required and putting it into writing, the young man did his part to (5) fit into the envisioned new society in the making and thereby partook in trying to create it. This also becomes apparent in efforts of reevaluation and re-formation of experiences in retrospect. Even particularly negative events and phases are made compliant with the guidelines of the Labor Service and purpose is attributed in hindsight: "The service may be tough but by far not as tough as that in Immenhausen. I am glad now to have

63 Krüger 1937: 99. Quoted in Seifert 1996.

64 Hierl 1941: 273.

65 "*Führung*," which could also be translated as leadership.

66 Pohl 1940: July 27.

67 Ibid.: August 27.

68 Hierl 1941: 265.

been there."69 While this statement can also be read as him being glad to have been 'hardened' before joining the new unit, the bottom-line is the same: The young man asserted to acknowledge the merits of his education and created a narration that appeared to make sense. Thereby, in the letters he assumed the role the *RAD* had intended for him in the 'people's community': "You can be pleased with your workingman [*Arbeitsmann*]."70

Other central elements of the *RAD*'s ideological project were also reproduced throughout the letters. One statement in particular, connected to the topos of 'challenge' in Friedrich Pohl's letters, is noteworthy: "I always wished for the tough, unrelenting service. If you are healthy and strong, you can make it. Otherwise however, it is nearly impossible."71 The quote conveys more than self-praise as it corresponds strongly to a cornerstone of the Labor Service's agenda: biological selection. Selection was exercised in a two-pronged approach in the *RAD*. On the one hand, access to the Labor Service was denied on "Social Darwinian, political, and racist" grounds. "Community aliens" [*Gemeinschaftsfremde*] such as "Non-Aryans" or people married to them, individuals with a criminal record and the mentally or physically unfit were excluded.72 On the other hand, Hierl's organization strove to select future leaders for the community: "Selection, which in turbulent revolutionary times is implemented by battle, in quieter times must be carried out by […] human management […] in order to prevent mediocrity and mechanical thinking to gain the upper hand in the leadership of the community."73 In this process, attitude and character were regarded as being more important than theoretical knowledge or technical ability.74

In the letters, Friedrich Pohl's competitiveness, his praise of toughness and relentlessness can be read as manifestation of this agenda of selection. However, it becomes most apparent when he decidedly distanced himself from a comrade: "'Friend' Rösgen has three days special detention. He fell asleep while on guard duty. He isn't mentally accountable. He is the camel of the unit. He is always just writing to his 'Billa'. He isn't in my room anymore.

73 Hierl 1941: 274.

69 Pohl 1940: August 18.

70 Ibid.: July 7.

71 Ibid.: July 9.

72 Cf. Patel 2005 : 129–32. Quote on p. 129.

74 Cf. ibid.: 273.

He was too bad at his duties. He isn't on the pictures either."75 Friedrich Pohl's comment on mental unfitness does not necessarily refer to Social Darwinian selection, but it certainly corresponds to the processes of selection within the organization. As the Labor Service counted on 'education' by the peers,76 one may assume that in (3) historical reality the pressure on comrade Rösgen and the consequences for him would have gone beyond not being in a photograph. The letter reiterates the clear-cut distinction between those adjusting to the norms in the Service and those not fitting in. In doing so, it (5) reproduced and asserted the norms of the 'Volksgemeinschaft' in the making and contributed to increasing the pressure on those not meeting the standard. In contrast to the inappropriate behavior of his comrade, Friedrich Pohl displayed the appropriate determination in his letters: "Tomorrow we'll go to work with a hurray. Nothing can unsettle us."77 This now definitely was in accordance with what Hierl desired: "[…] the Labor Service needs men of action."78

#### **5. Conclusion**

If there is one thing most historians who work with and on the concept of 'Volksgemeinschaft' seem to be able to agree to, it is that the 'people's community' never came to exist in the form the national socialists vaguely and opaquely promised. Nevertheless, the social vision managed to affect all five facets of reality discussed in this analysis.

This influence on (1) historical research and historiography is obvious. For roughly two decades, 'Volksgemeinschaft' – both as an object of research but mostly as an analytical category – has been fiercely debated. While already "in the Weimar Republic almost no party was willing to refrain from the term,"79 it is chiefly the complex relationship of national socialist propaganda, the effects of 'Volksgemeinschaft' as or on the historical reality, and considerations of approaching the two which give historians pause. The term is used as a

75 Pohl 1940: July 16.

76 Cf. Hierl 1941: 264. This is precisely where creating 'Volksgemeinschaft' on the mesolevel of an institution like the *RAD* comes into play.

77 Pohl 1940: July 14.

78 Hierl 1941: 273.

79 Wildt 2011: 104.

reference to changed power relations, for the depiction of inclusion and exclusion or, as in my analysis, for the investigation of "the mobilizing force of the vision of a better community."80

The results of my analysis underline the value of focusing on the social promise of the discourse of the 'Volksgemeinschaft,' since "[…] in the mobilization lay its political power."81 Cultural historian Inge Marszolek argued that "the NS-Volksgemeinschaft in all its aspects is generated again and again through communication, or, spoken with Foucault, that processes of communitization [Vergemeinschaftung] […] were parts of the microphysics of power."82 Following this view, the specific effect of Friedrich's letters on his parents, which due to a lack of sources cannot be ascertained anyhow, does not need to be measured. Rather, it is the revealed integration of the *RAD* into (4) the young man's experiences, his narration of self and biography which points to processes of participation and deindividuation. His subordination under and reiteration of the norms of the service contributed (5) to the actualization of an incomplete version of the 'Volksgemeinschaft' through communication – to the making of a community in the making. Allowing to investigate mobilization through an ideological project without reverting to dichotomies can be a significant benefit of using the concept of 'Volksgemeinschaft' as a social vision. With this approach, the 'fact' that it is possible to observe the intricate relationship of vision and effects is quite the opposite of a dilemma.83

Of course, the (3) historical reality of life in the *RAD* and in the German Society under the rule of national socialism as a whole was dependent on many factors. Also, aspects other than the "new social practice which served to symbolically emphasize the ideologically propagated community of all 'Volksgenossen', while excluding those discriminated as community aliens or those politically distanced."84 But it is exactly this new social practice which Friedrich Pohl's letters were part of. A practice which did not turn the national socialist vision into 'fact' but nonetheless had very real effects – not the least of which was the reproduction of itself as well as the vague shadow of a community. It is precisely the driving forces inherent to the

80 Cf. Kershaw 2011: 3–9. Quote on p. 3.

81 Wildt 2011: 103–104.

82 Marszolek 2013: 67.

83 As stated by: Gruner 2018: 75.

84 Schmiechen-Ackermann 2012: 14.

social vision which are reflected in the sources and condensed in my analysis. When separating the different facets of reality, the simultaneity of vision and impact becomes discernible and becomes downright fundamental for the mechanism of the ideological project Friedrich Pohl underwent in the Labor Service.85

Friedrich Pohl wrote the national socialist social vision of a 'people's community' as text of letters into (2) material 'fact.' He made it 'fact' in (4) narrating his experiences and took part in an ideological project that influenced the German society. Even when the effects of his letters cannot be ascertained, I reason that the concept of 'Volksgemeinschaft' (5) had an impact on the (3) historical reality in becoming communicative and therefore social practice. The best example of its impact is to observe the driving force this social vision developed in Friedrich Pohl's letters.

Considering historian Wolf Gruner's caveat not to dismiss possible ambivalences in the experience of communitization,86 I do not claim that Friedrich Pohl subscribed unconditionally or entirely to the *RAD*'s attempt to realize the social vision. I offer no more and no less than a reading of his letters as negotiations of and participation in an organization he at other times wrote very disapproving of. As presented in this paper, it was not simply the mobilizing capacity inherent to the national socialist vision which affected the young author of the analyzed letters. Rather, his texts speak of the cumulative effect of social promise and rigorous discipline, drill and (mutual) supervision in an ideological project. The realities of life in a prototypical community aiming for deindividuation created a setting that urged not only to obedience but also to self-education. A setting that demonstrated the importance of becoming a valuable part of the 'Volksgemeinschaft.'

Since for Hierl "[…] the regard for the collective" had to "[…] outrank the regard for the individual"87 it is somewhat ironic that it is precisely in the writing of an individual that the effects of this social vision become evident. In Friedrich Pohl's letters, composed under difficult circumstances, substituting for other forms of interaction and serving various functions, the education in the *RAD* showed its effects: In and through the young man's writing the

85 The *RAD* served as a catalyst for existing knowledge and/or made new experiences available. Whether in the case of some individual letters only one of the two applies makes no difference for my argument.

86 Gruner 2018: 78–79.

87 Hierl 1941: 274.

mobilizing potential became 'fact' – something the 'Volksgemeinschaft,' as envisioned by the national socialists, never achieved.

#### **Bibliography**

## **Manufacturing Legal Facts**

*Kristin Y. Albrecht (University of Salzburg); Sebastian Ibing (Prosecutor Office in Germany)*

#### **1. Introduction**

In any legal proceeding, there needs to be a set of facts on which to base a decision. It is often said that the facts of a case are found by the court. In the folllowing, we will outline how these legal facts are manufactured in different types of proceedings before the court, and that in many cases they – intentionally – do not live up to the claim that truth can be found. We will thus delineate how legal facts are produced in different types of litigation and that the truth claim at stake varies depending on the type of litigation. Finally, we argue that legal facts are neither found nor constructed but manufactured.

Several perspectives can be distinguished in the field of 'law and fact': Firstly, one can describe law or individual legal systems as facts (law as fact). Secondly, one can look at how law reacts to facts: For example, it prohibits racist statements or the denial of the Holocaust, and it protects the free expression of opinions in public discourse (legal protection of facts). Thirdly, law itself creates facts by influencing behavior through law or judgements (facts by law). Furthermore, law itself determines facts within the framework of legal processes on the basis of which judicial decisions are made (legal facts).

In the first case, law itself is a fact. This perspective also includes positions such as Eugen Ehrlich's sociology of law which holds the view that the validity of law depends on facts. In this case, one can speak of a normative legal-realistic concept of validity which makes validity, among other things, dependent on factual relations of recognition. The second and third perspectives refer to extra-legal facts to which the law pertains. For example, expressions of opinion which are fundamentally protected by law. In the last case, it is a question

*Figure 1*

of how facts are recognized, established or (re)constructed as such according to the law. In law, there are basically two connecting factors. One is customary law. If a legal practice has existed for a long time and the conviction prevails that this is legal (*opinio iuris*), then one can speak of (legally binding) customary law. On the other hand, in the context of court proceedings, facts that are relevant for the proceedings are determined; in this respect, one can also speak of 'legal facts.' Our paper will focus on what it means when law itself establishes facts in the context of legal proceedings, especially civil and criminal proceedings. In doing so, we will draw on the legal situation in Germany.

#### **2. Where Legal Facts Arise: A Very Brief Introduction**

Before we talk about the rules of origin for legal facts, we must look at when they came into being. They arose in the context of legal proceedings. In national law, there are three types of legal proceedings in which facts are established: civil, administrative, and criminal proceedings.

In addition, there are other procedures such as lawsuits under constitutional and European law. However, it is always required that the basic proceedings have at least begun or have even been exhausted so that the facts (the 'facts of the case') have already been established at that point. Thus, there is little to be found concerning the question of the emergence of legal facts. Therefore, let us take a closer look at the three types of proceedings in which facts are established. In civil proceedings, one citizen sues another. This includes, for example, disputes between landlord and tenant or employer and employee. In criminal and administrative proceedings, the state sues the citizen. In this case we are confronted with fraud, murder, and theft, or overly large chicken coops and swimming pools.

In civil proceedings, the principle of production or negotiation applies. According to this, what the parties present to the judge by consensus is considered a fact. What is fact is therefore determined by the parties. If the disputing persons A and B both state that the traffic lights were green when B drove his car through them, then it is a fact for the judge. The fact that the traffic light may have been red is of no interest. What is presented by the disputing parties is considered to be true. In Roman law, this was elegantly summed up with *da mihi factum, dabo tibi ius* ('give me the facts, I'll give you the law').

This framework includes two important points: First, the parties determine what is fact. And secondly, the facts are borne by the consensus of the parties or, if they disagree, determined by the judge on request. At first glance, this might be disturbing to non-lawyers: Why is it of no importance in trials what actually happened? Why can't the judge question eyewitnesses or look at the data from a surveillance camera to determine whether the traffic light was actually green? This is because the main focus of civil proceedings is that – roughly speaking – the involved parties walk out of the courtroom pacified. The public's interest in a fair decision based on facts that are as objective as possible is not of priority here. The so-called 'formal truth,' which results from the consensually presented facts, is sufficient for this type of process.

Once the fact-finding is completed (*da mihi factum*), it comes to the heart of the legal work – the subsumption. In subsumption, 'the facts are brought under the norm' or, to put it more pathetically, the factual is interwoven with the normative. We will return to this procedure later. As soon as this has been done, the judge pronounces the law (*dabo tibi ius*) in the form of a judgement or a decision. This is based on the following steps of procedure:

At the same time, there are administrative and criminal proceedings to be executed. In this case the state is involved, which investigates 'ex officio' what really happened. In contrast to civil proceedings, it is not the principle of negotiation but the principle of investigation that applies here. The facts are not negotiated but investigated. In this kind of search for facts, a distinction must be made between different procedural stages, especially in criminal proceedings:

In the first two procedural stages, the facts are determined by the public prosecutor (e.g., by searching for and questioning witnesses) while in the main proceedings they are decided by the judge (by questioning the same witness again). For the judgement it is of relevance what facts the judge was able to establish. This is the stage for which the procedural rules of fact-finding were established. Once the facts are established in the main proceedings, i.e., the so-called 'facts of the case' are determined, they are legally assessed by the judge – as in civil proceedings. In a last step, the judgement will be pronounced.

### **3. Rules of Fact-***Finding*

Based on the distinctions discussed above, the different procedures used by the court to determine the facts on which its judgement is established can be outlined in more detail. In all areas of law, the separation between facts and law can already be found in the judgement, since the facts are always decided first, followed by a legal evaluation.

### 3.1 Facts in Civil Proceedings

Determining the facts of a case in civil law is one of the most difficult tasks, especially for aspiring judges and lawyers. The basic principle is easily comprehensible: As already explained, civil proceedings are about the legal dispute of two (or more) legal subjects of civil law, i.e., citizens who are of equal rank before the law. Since the latter bring the matter before the court to resolve their legal dispute, the main principle is that the parties determine the procedure and the subject matter of the proceedings. It follows that the parties determine the beginning – by filing a lawsuit – and the end – by judgement, constellations must be distinguished: First, the parties can present facts in agreement. In this case, the court has no possibility to review the facts. However, in the second case, there are usually factual differences concerning the decisive points of the dispute, so that a taking of evidence is necessary. This determines which alternative of the facts presented by the parties is correct. settlement, or discharge – of the legal dispute. Central to the present discussion is that the parties determine the factual basis of the legal dispute at the same time. This results from the so-called 'principle of contribution' ('Beibringungsgrundsatz') according to which the court may only base its legal assessment on those facts that have been submitted by the parties. Two basic

This two-tiered approach results in the distinction of who must present a certain fact (so-called 'burden of presentation') and who must prove it (socalled 'burden of proof ').

#### 3.1.1 The Presentation

Based on the alternative facts presented by both sides, it is in a first step the court's task to determine which points are in dispute. Insofar as the court is presented with a concordant set of facts, it is bound by these and is, so to speak, 'blind' to everything that is not directly presented by the parties. If the buyer of an item – e.g., a toaster – wants to return it because of a defect, he must also claim that it is defective. In the case of the toaster, this would be the fact that it does not heat up sufficiently. Whether the court must examine how the toaster heats up depends on the reaction of the seller: If the seller refuses to take back the toaster – and of course also to refund the purchase price – by claiming that the low temperature is a special energy-saving function, then the seller must also claim that the toaster is not defective. As a consequence, the low temperature is a fact that the court can no longer examine. In order to be open to judicial review, the seller is required to dispute the temperature that the toaster reaches.

At this point, it must be emphasized that as long as a fact is undisputed, it does not matter whether or not it is actually true or at least true to the knowledge of the court. In principle, the parties of civil proceedings have a duty to tell the truth.1 However, this only concerns the circumstances that are in dispute between the parties, i.e., it does not embrace undisputed cir-

1 § 138 para. 1 ZPO.

cumstances.2 Therefore, it is also possible that even if the court knows that a certain fact described by the parties is not true, it may be 'forced' by them to accept their view. If the parties agree that there was one meter of snow on the day in question in August, this is to be accepted by the court as true, even if it is false according to its own knowledge. The court's own expertise is only relevant when it comes to assessing the alternative facts that can be considered.

Furthermore, everything – and here the burden of proof plays a decisive role – that is asserted by one party and not contested by the other in a sufficiently substantiated manner is assumed to be true.3 If it is said that an item is defective – e.g., that a pool is leaking – the seller must claim that this is not true. In our example, that means that the pool is leak-proof. Thus, what one party claims but the other does not dispute can become part of the facts of the case.

It is important to note that under certain circumstances more stringent requirements are to be placed on such a denial. It may be sufficient for one party to claim that a fact of the other party is not true.4 Normally, the other party does not have to give reasons why this is the case and how it could have happened otherwise. However, under certain circumstances, such a proof may be required: If it is rather difficult for one side of a dispute to make a factual allegation, while the opposite side can do so easily, this advantaged side cannot limit itself to denying it.5 If the subject matter of the dispute touches, for example, the internal production process, it is not possible for the individual purchaser to overlook it as a whole. Therefore, the manufacturer cannot limit himself to denying that a mistake has been made during the quality control. He must rather describe the circumstances that prove that the necessary care was taken. Only if he substantiates this, the objection is relevant, so that the fact is disputed.

2 Stadler ZPO 2022: § 138 para. 2. The citations here and in the following comply with the rules of a quotation system used in German Law. In the case of comments to paragraphs the respective commentators are not individually indicated in the bibliography, while the respective books of commentaries are listed under the names of their editors/authors in alphabetical order.

3 Results from § 138 para. 3 ZPO.

4 Laumen 2016: 3rd chap., para. 12.

5 Federal Constitutional Court, Decision 06.10.1999, Az. 1 BvR 2110/93, Rn. 40, NJW 2000: 1483.

#### 3.1.2 Proof

Once it has been determined which facts are undisputed and which are disputed, the next level is to determine the facts for the judgement. This is done through procedures of taking and assessing evidence.

#### <IP_ADDRESS> Strict Evidence Procedure

In principle, there is the so-called 'strict evidence procedure' for this.There are written rules on which evidence is admissible and in which procedure it has to be collected.6 In civil law, the *numerus clausus*7 of evidence applies with the testimony of witnesses, the expert appraisal, the visual inspection, the deed and – as subsidiary evidence – the hearing of the parties.8

The most common means of evidence is the witness. The witness is supposed to tell the court about his or her own perceptions in the past. At the same time, the witness is the most uncertain means of evidence, since both the human sensory apparatus and the human memory are not geared to testifying in a court case.9 This is most obvious in road traffic. Without aids, it is impossible to determine what specific speed a vehicle is traveling at, or how large a certain distance is. For the court, therefore, error is much more likely than lying to prevent a testimony that is not consistent with the actual course of events.10

The expert appraisal is supposed to inform the court about valid principles of expertise, the state of the art and to assess a situation accordingly. A visual inspection is deployed when it comes to examining the condition of a certain object. Finally, the deed concerns the content of a specific document.

#### <IP_ADDRESS> Free Assessment of Evidence

The fundamental standard is the free assessment of evidence by the court.11 This concerns a subjective standard of the court when it considers the proof of a fact to be proven: "The judge may and must, however, be content in actually doubtful cases with a degree of certainty that is useful for practical life and

6 Laumen 2016: 2nd chap., para. 24.

7 Bacher ZPO 2022: § 284 para. 11.

8 §§ 371 ZPO.

9 Häcker 2021: para. 13.

10 Ibid.: para. 14.

11 § 286 ZPO.

that silences doubts without excluding them completely."12 It is important that a differentiation according to the individual case is made, whereby the possibilities of proof are also to be considered. For example, the statement that a document has been sent is not sufficient as a proof that it has been sent off. Although in Germany around 99.995% of all letters are sent correctly, a simple proof is possible by using a registered letter. In contrast, the probability of a paternity test of 99.95% is sufficient, as a further proof is simply not possible.13

Certain rules of evidence may contain an exception to the free assessment of evidence, e.g., in the case of a document. In this case the court must accept the content of the document as accurate, unless the opposing party succeeds in proving that the document itself has been falsified.

This results in two constellations that are to be examined for fact-finding:

#### <IP_ADDRESS>.1 The Proof of a Certain Fact Is Provided

If a party succeeds in convincing the court of an alleged fact with the evidence offered, the court will base its legal assessment on this.

#### <IP_ADDRESS>.2 Proof Cannot Be Provided

The situation becomes more difficult, however, if a party does not succeed in proving a certain fact, the so-called 'non-liquet situation.' In this case, the socalled 'burden of proof ' must be applied: According to this, it is asked who has to provide the evidence for a disputed fact.14 These regulations are very differentiated in detail and depend on the respective substantive law. In principle, however, the person who has to prove a fact and thus bears the burden of proof is the one who benefits from it. If, for example, in proceedings for compensation for pain and suffering, it is argued that the injured party suffered a long-term restriction of mobility as a result of the injury, the injured party must prove this by submitting medical reports. If he or she fails to do so, the court cannot use the long-term consequences as a basis for assessing

12 "Der Richter darf und muss sich aber in tatsächlich zweifelhaften Fällen mit einem für das praktische Leben brauchbaren Grad von Gewissheit begnügen, der den Zweifeln Schweigen gebietet, ohne sie völlig auszuschließen." "Anastasia" Federal Constitutional Court, Judgement 17.02.1970, Az. III ZR 139/67, NJW 1970: 946.

13 Federal Constitutional Court, Judgement 14.03.1990, Az. XII ZR 56/89 FamRZ 1990: 615–616.

14 Laumen 2016: 9th chap. para. 2.

the damages for pain and suffering. The burden of proof thus ultimately determines as a legal rule which factual basis has to be considered if an actual clarification of a circumstance is not possible. It is important to note that the party not burdened with proof does not have to prove the opposite: if the burdened party fails with its submission, the submission of the opposing party applies.