How much cruelty fits inside an ordinary person—and at what point do we start calling it “duty”? In the short piece “Kleine Begebenheit” (“A Small Incident”), Kurt Tucholsky—writing under his pseudonym Peter Panter—offers an answer that is as simple as it is unsettling: not much is needed. A few instructions, a bit of organization, and, if necessary, the right costume.
What emerges is not an exceptional world, but a disturbingly familiar one. The figures are no monsters, but stocking-makers, farmers’ sons, coal dealers—people you might pass on the street without a second thought. And that is precisely the point. The world Tucholsky sketches does not function despite this normality, but because of it. Violence is not an aberration; it becomes a social routine as soon as it is wrapped in acceptable forms. The moral abyss wears the mask of everyday life.
The lives of these characters are not driven by inner conviction but by external instruction. “They had been told to do it.” That single line is enough to outline an entire view of humanity. The individual is no autonomous agent, but a remarkably efficient cog. Those who can read and write give direction; those who cannot, comply. The hierarchy is clear, yet it does not even require brute force—it is willingly embraced. Power here operates not only through coercion, but through its ability to present itself as natural.
What makes this especially insidious is how ordinary power looks. The coal dealer gives orders, the lawyer records statements, the doctor watches with professional curiosity. No one appears as a classic tyrant, and yet a perfectly functioning system of violence emerges. Influence reveals itself not as dark conspiracy, but as a web of roles, expectations, and small vanities. The coal dealer wants to impress, the doctor wants to observe, the lawyer wants to feel important. Grand ideologies are unnecessary when minor motives suffice.
And the individual? Strikingly passive. There is, in theory, room for choice—no one forces the eighty volunteers to step forward. And yet they do. Not out of necessity, but out of curiosity, out of a vague sense that “it is allowed.” That is the bitter twist: the greatest freedom is used to willingly submit to a system that absolves one of moral responsibility. Responsibility is outsourced like an inconvenient piece of furniture. Once inside the system, judgment becomes optional.
Then comes the final move, almost casually delivered: the uniform. It transforms what seemed like a grotesque village episode into an ordinary scene of war. Suddenly, everything becomes explainable, even justifiable. What moments ago appeared as collective madness now reads as structured necessity. The difference lies not in the act itself, but in how it is framed.
And this is where the present becomes uncomfortable. The mechanism has not disappeared; it has merely changed its costume. Power today rarely relies on overt brutality. It organizes, reframes, renames. It creates contexts in which actions no longer need to be questioned, because they are “part of the system.” And the human being remains, as ever, remarkably cooperative—not out of inherent malice, but because it is easier to conform than to resist.
Tucholsky’s text is therefore less an accusation against individual perpetrators than a diagnosis of the conditions under which almost anyone can become one. It is not a comforting realization, but it is an accurate one. It shifts the question from “Who is guilty?” to “What makes it so easy?”
In the end, what lingers is a thought as dry as it is disturbing: the line between civilization and barbarism does not run between different kinds of people, but straight through the same one—and sometimes, all it takes is a uniform for him to forget on which side he stands.
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