Aussichten auf den Bürgerkrieg was published by Suhrkamp in 1993, with the English translation appearing in 1994 as Civil Wars: From L.A. to Bosnia. The book collects essays written in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War’s end, when the expected “peace dividend” was replaced by an eruption of civil conflicts worldwide: Yugoslavia, Somalia, Rwanda, Liberia, the Los Angeles riots, the rise of skinhead violence in Germany.
Enzensberger’s central argument is that these conflicts represent something genuinely new — not wars in the traditional sense (between states, motivated by territorial ambition or ideological commitment) but the breakdown of the social contract itself. The new civil wars have no clear goals, no negotiating positions, no coherent political programs: they are violence for its own sake, destruction as an end rather than a means. The combatants are not soldiers but ordinary citizens who have discovered that the thin membrane of civilization can be punctured with terrifying ease.
The essays are characteristically brilliant, provocative, and uncomfortable. Enzensberger refuses the liberal pieties that explain violence as a response to poverty, oppression, or injustice: sometimes people are violent because they enjoy it, because violence is exciting, because destruction is easier than construction. This refusal to sentimentalize makes the book disturbing reading — but also more honest than most political commentary on civil conflict.
Collecting Civil Wars
First German edition (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1993): Paperback original.
Market values:
- First German edition: $10–$25
- First English edition (Granta, 1994): $10–$30