In the first weeks of 1993, Karl Schlögel wrote for the news magazine The mirror a text in which he brought an old figure back to mind: the Landsknecht. At that time he was certainly under the impression of the beginning of wars in the disintegrating Yugoslavia. But his description of a type was strangely colorful, as if he were trying to achieve something greater. Landsknechts were soldiers in early modern Europe, a time in which wars were omnipresent and in which fighters often had to collect their own wages from these wars. Looting was part of everyday life, and the population often suffered terribly from the armies that marched across the continent. Schlögel probably had these experiences in mind when he wrote: “Landsknecht Europe is in the process of creating its liberated zones and making the laws of brutalization general even where they do not yet apply.”
