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 that 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 destroy.
The Internet, GPS, radar, jet propulsion, nuclear energy, computers — the technologies that shape our civilian lives 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 has embodied this unholy alliance between Mars and Mercury, between the god of war and the god of commerce, for two centuries.
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 to cast cannons.
The story is well known: At first, he couldn't even sell his cannons in Prussia. His first customers were Egypt, Belgium, Russia. But then came the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71. The Krupp cannons proved superior. And suddenly Krupp became the "Arsenal of the Reich."
"At his death in 1887, Alfred Krupp had armed 46 nations. He was, in a sense, the founder of modern warfare." — Britannica
The irony is cutting: The same Krupp who flooded Europe with weapons was a pioneer of social welfare. He built workers' housing, hospitals, schools, pension funds. His workers were "fanatically devoted" to him. The capital for these charities came from the business of death.
But Krupp was not an isolated case. He was a symptom. Throughout Europe, the great industrial conglomerates emerged in the shadow of the arms race: Vickers in England, Schneider-Creusot in France. The industrialization of Europe was a militarization.
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. The Treaty of Versailles banned weapons production — so they switched to locomotives. But in secret, development continued.
A Krupp company memo from 1940 reveals the strategy:
"Krupp was already able to produce war equipment on a large scale again in 1933. This was possible because Krupp had maintained its workforce, workshops, and experience from 1918 to 1933 without government contracts."
Tanks were disguised as "agricultural tractors." Sometimes a sketch betrayed the secret: A "heavy tractor" with a 7.5-centimeter cannon. Another "tractor" with specifications for the Belgian and French railway network — what else for?
World War II then brought the explosion:
Radar — developed in England and America to detect enemy aircraft. Today it controls air traffic and warns of storms.
Jet engine — Heinkel He 178, 1939, the world's first jet aircraft. Developed to kill faster. Today we fly to vacation with it.
Computer — Colossus and ENIAC, built to crack codes and perform ballistic calculations. Today we type these lines on them.
The atomic bomb — the Manhattan Project, three years, two billion dollars, 125,000 people. The greatest concentration of scientific resources in history. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated. But from the same research came nuclear energy — and the foundations of quantum physics and computing.
The Tizard Mission of 1940, when British scientists brought their secrets to America — including the cavity magnetron for radar — was later described as "the most valuable cargo ever to land on our shores." The mission laid the foundation for the MIT Radiation Lab, which soon employed 4,000 people. Born of war, destined for war.
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, a DARPA project for decentralized military communication. GPS? A DARPA project for precision navigation. Speech recognition? DARPA. Stealth technology? DARPA. Drones? DARPA. Self-driving cars? The DARPA Grand Challenge of 2004 and 2005 brought the technology to 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 actively search for the "next big thing." They work with universities, companies, startups. 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 and very low price sensitivity": the Pentagon. When a technology is promising, the military buys it. The company gets revenue. Investors are attracted. The technology matures. And eventually — often years later — it becomes civilly usable.
That is the American model: The destructive spirit of war as the engine of innovation. Institutionalized, rationalized, turned productive.
In 2019, Germany tried to found its own DARPA. It's called SPRIND — Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation. It sits in Leipzig and is led by Rafael Laguna de la Vera.
The comparison is sobering:
SPRIND thus has about one-sixteenth of DARPA's budget. That alone would be manageable — Germany is smaller than the USA. 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 guaranteed market for risky technologies. No bridge over the "Valley of Death" — that phase when an innovation is promising but not yet market-ready.
Second: German bureaucracy. Even Chancellor Merkel criticized in 2021 the "structures that allow too little movement." The Federal Audit Office ensured that the anti-betterment clause applies — so SPRIND may not pay higher salaries than the public service. How are you supposed to recruit top researchers who could earn three times as much in industry?
Third: Time. DARPA was founded in 1958. It had 67 years to develop its structures, build its networks, accumulate its success stories. SPRIND has existed for five years. And it's initially planned for only ten years — as an "experimental phase."
Rafael Laguna defends against the criticism. The 360-meter high-altitude wind turbine that SPRIND funds could multiply onshore wind energy. The "Rulemapping project" digitalizes laws. Fusion startups are supported.
But let's be honest: SPRIND is far from breakthrough innovations that change the world. How could it be — with a budget smaller than the annual salary of some American tech CEOs?
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. SPRIND was deliberately founded as civilian. German society is — understandably — skeptical of anything that smells of armaments.
But what does that mean for the future?
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.
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, without destructive drive, an industrial conglomerate with over 80,000 employees today emerged.
Switzerland has no DARPA — and yet it has four universities in the world's top 100, more than Germany with five times as many inhabitants. ETH Zurich was not built for war.
But these examples are exceptions. They show that it's possible — not that it's the normal case. The vast majority of transformative technologies of the 20th century came from military research. And in the 21st century, the pattern repeats: Artificial intelligence, quantum computing, hypersonic — DARPA is involved in all of them.
Perhaps the answer lies not in the choice between war and peace as innovation drivers. Perhaps it 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 an Excellence Initiative that produces mediocre excellence. With a bureaucracy that suffocates innovation. Without the destructive spirit of war — but also without the constructive spirit that could replace it.
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. Not because it's incapable. But because it doesn't want to pay the price for innovation — and hasn't found an alternative price that works.
The birth of industry from the destructive spirit of war — that's not a thesis one should celebrate. But it's a thesis one must understand. Because those who repress the past cannot shape the future.