When the second World War ended in Europe, seventeen-year-old Niklas Luhmann had been serving as an anti-aircraft auxiliary in the German army. He was briefly detained by the Americans. When asked in 1987 to describe this experience, he replied:
Before 1945, the hope was that after the defeat of the compulsory apparatus everything would be right by itself. Yet the first thing I experienced in American captivity was that my watch was taken off my arm and that I was beaten up. So it was not at all as I had thought it would be. Soon you could see that one could not compare political regimes according to a scheme of `good' versus `bad', but that you had to judge the figures according to a bounded reality. Of course I don't want to say that the time of the Nazi-regime and the time after 1945 are to be judged on equal terms. Yet I was simply disappointed in 1945. Yet is that really important? In any case the experience of the Nazi-regime for me has not been a moral one, but an experience of the arbitrary, of power, of the tactics to avoid the regime used by the man of the people. (Luhmann qtd. in Baecker, 2005)
The realization that human realities were subjective appears to have influenced the famous sociologist throughout the rest of his life. This chapter will introduce Luhmann and a few remarkable aspects of his theory.
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