Stell Dir vor es ist Frieden und alle gehen hin

“A little sunshine, a sea of gladness | To wash away all the tears of sadness | A little hoping, a little praying | For our tomorrow, a little peace …” Nicole sang in 1982, a period of rearmament and the Falklands crisis, and won the Eurovision Song Contest. Who would not want this? But what is peace actually? The period between two wars? Ancient literature is full of descriptions of war. The Bible invokes the concept of the just war and places it above Jesus’s demand for peaceful co-existence. The world of Germanic sagas also reads like a treatise on the history of war and the ensuing desire for a peaceful world. Starting with songs from the Peasants’ War and the wars that followed up until the present, we embark on a journey through time and examine the history of anti-war songs and the desire for peace that they express. With the aid of facts, interviews and videos we look for answers to the questions cited above and many others: how do we differ from our closest genetic relatives, chimpanzees? What is inner peace? Are we amusing ourselves to death? The world is full of love songs — so why don’t we all love each other? Are governments just the entertainment departments of the arms industry? Or, as Udo Lindenberg put it: “No one wants to die, that much is clear | So what’s the point of having wars?”