The Birth of Industry from the Destructive Spirit of War

I. The Thesis

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about "The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music." The title of this essay is a deliberate provocation — but perhaps also a historical truth we prefer to repress.

The thesis is uncomfortable: Modern industry was not born from the spirit of the Enlightenment, not from humanistic faith in progress, not from the desire to improve life. It was born from the destructive spirit of war — from the race for superior weapons, from existential fear, from the will to annihilate.

The Internet, GPS, radar, jet propulsion, nuclear energy, computers — the technologies that shape our civilian life are children of war. They were not developed for us. They were developed to kill, to surveil, to destroy. That they later served peace was a side effect.

Germany knows this better than most. Because Germany embodied this unholy alliance between Mars and Mercury, between the god of war and the god of commerce, for two centuries.

II. The Cannon King

Alfred Krupp — "The Cannon King" — was not born as an arms dealer. His father Friedrich had founded a cast steel factory in 1811 that produced tools and cutlery. When Alfred took over the indebted company at 14, there was no talk of cannons.

But Alfred Krupp understood something that would make him the richest man in Germany: Quality proves itself in the extreme case. And the extreme case is war. So he began casting cannons.

The story is well known: At first, he couldn't even sell his cannons in Prussia. The first customers were Egypt, Belgium, Russia. But then came the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71. The Krupp cannons proved superior.

The irony is cutting: The same Krupp who flooded Europe with weapons was a pioneer of social welfare. He built workers' settlements, hospitals, schools, pension funds. The capital for these good deeds came from the business of death.

III. Total War as Innovation Machine

If the Franco-Prussian War enabled Krupp's rise, then World War I made the company a superpower. From 81,000 employees in 1914, Krupp grew to 200,000 during the war.

A Krupp company memo from 1940 reveals the strategy:

Tanks were disguised as "agricultural tractors." Sometimes a sketch betrayed the secret: A "heavy tractor" with a 7.5-centimeter cannon.

World War II then brought the explosion:

Radar — developed to detect enemy aircraft. Today it controls air traffic.

Jet engine — Heinkel He 178, 1939. Developed to kill faster. Today we fly to vacation with it.

Computer — Colossus, built to crack codes, and ENIAC, built to calculate artillery trajectories. Today we type these lines on them.

The atomic bomb — the Manhattan Project, three years, two billion dollars, 125,000 people. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated. But from the same research came nuclear energy — and an enormous boost for computing and big science.

IV. The American Lesson: DARPA

The Americans drew a lesson from this history. And they — unlike Germany — drew the right conclusion.

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. For America, it was a shock comparable to Pearl Harbor. Within months, President Eisenhower founded ARPA — later DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The mission was clear: Never be technologically surprised again. And: Technologically surprise others.

Today's budget: about 4 billion dollars per year. The staff: tiny — only about 220 employees. But the impact: epochal.

The Internet? Started as ARPANET. GPS? Its precursor Transit with ARPA involvement, then the Pentagon. Speech recognition? DARPA. Stealth technology? DARPA. Drones? DARPA. Self-driving cars? The DARPA Grand Challenge brought the breakthrough. Even the mRNA vaccine against COVID-19 traces back to DARPA research.

The Economist called DARPA "the agency that shaped the modern world."

The secret is not just the money. It's the structure: DARPA program managers have enormous freedom. They're allowed to fail — 90% of projects never become products. But the 10% that make it change the world.

And — this is crucial — DARPA has a customer with "nearly infinitely deep pockets": the Pentagon. That is the American model: The destructive spirit of war as the engine of innovation.

V. The German Attempt: SPRIND

In 2019, Germany tried to found its own DARPA. It's called SPRIND — Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation. The comparison is sobering:

SPRIND thus has about one-sixteenth of DARPA's budget. That alone would be manageable. But there are deeper problems:

First: SPRIND was deliberately founded without connection to the Bundeswehr. It only funds civilian innovations. That sounds morally impeccable. But it also means: No regular customer with deep pockets. No bridge over the "Valley of Death."

Second: German bureaucracy. For years — at the insistence of the Federal Audit Office — the anti-betterment clause applied: SPRIND could not pay higher salaries than the public service. How were you supposed to recruit top researchers? Only the SPRIND Freedom Act at the end of 2023 created exceptions.

Third: Time. DARPA was founded in 1958. SPRIND has existed for five years — as an "experimental phase."

VI. The German Paradox

Germany faces a paradox that it cannot resolve — perhaps does not want to resolve.

On one hand: German industry grew large in war. Krupp, Thyssen, the entire heavy industry — they are children of the arms race and two world wars. The technological competence that Germany still has today is the legacy of this bloody history.

On the other hand: Precisely because of this history, Germany "feels strange" about the connection between military and civilian innovation. German society is — understandably — skeptical of anything that smells of armaments.

The uncomfortable truth is: Perhaps innovation needs the destructive spirit of war. Not as moral justification — but as practical necessity. War creates what peace does not create:

— Unlimited resources for risky research
— A guaranteed first market for immature technologies
— The urgency that overcomes bureaucracy
— The tolerance for failure that enables radical innovation

America has understood this. It uses the military complex as an innovation engine — and then channels the results into the civilian economy. Germany refuses this path. But it has not found an alternative path that works.

VII. Is There an Alternative?

The question must be asked: Can innovation also be born from the constructive spirit?

There are examples. Mondragón, the Basque cooperative group, was not born from the spirit of war, but from the spirit of a priest — Don José María Arizmendiarrieta. Without military, without armaments contracts, an industrial conglomerate with some 70,000 employees today emerged.

Switzerland has no DARPA — and yet, depending on the ranking, it has as many universities in the world's top 100 as Germany with nine times as many inhabitants.

But these examples are exceptions. They show that it's possible — not that it's the normal case.

Perhaps the answer lies in the question of whether a society can feel existential urgency even without war. Climate change would be such an occasion. The energy crisis. The demographic crisis. These threats are real, measurable, existential. But they don't generate the same urgency as an attacking enemy. They are abstract, slow, negotiable.

And so Germany muddles on. With a SPRIND that's too small. With a bureaucracy that suffocates innovation. Without the destructive spirit of war — but also without the constructive spirit that could replace it.

VIII. The Repressed Truth

Friedrich Nietzsche knew that great things often have dark origins. Greek tragedy arose not from cheerful optimism, but from Dionysian intoxication — from ecstasy and horror, from the gaze into the abyss.

Modern industry has similarly dark origins. It was not born to improve life. It was born to wage war. That it later improved life was a side effect.

Germany represses this truth. It builds innovation agencies without military connection. It hopes for breakthrough innovations without the urgency that enables them. It wants the fruits of the destructive spirit — without the destructive spirit itself.

That's understandable. After Krupp and Auschwitz, after two world wars and division, no one wants to return to the connection between industry and war. But repression doesn't solve the problem.

The real question is not whether Germany needs a DARPA. The question is: What can replace the destructive spirit of war as an innovation engine?

As long as Germany doesn't answer this question — and "just keep going" is not an answer — it will continue to fall behind.