According to Peter Sloterdijk, the twentieth century started on a specific day and place — on April 22, 1915, at Ypres in Northern France. That day, for the first time in the history of humanity, the German army used against the Franco-Canadian forces a chlorine gas meant to indiscriminately exterminate the enemy. Until then, the war described by Clausewitz and practiced by Napoleon involved attacking the adversary’s vital function first. Using poison gas jumped a paradigm. It signaled the passage “from classical war to terrorism, ending the old duel between adversaries of comparable grade and birth.” Terrorism revealed what the “essence” of war is in its pure form: whenever international law fails to contain it, hostility turns into a mere technical problem whose only purpose is to annihilate the enemy. Already opening the second millennium into the first, this terror from the air inaugurated “an era in which the main idea wasn't to target the body of enemies, but destroy their environment.” From then on, what would be attacked in wartime as well as in peacetime would be the very conditions necessary for life — the air, climate, atmosphere, and environment in which the human body is wrapped as if in a shell, .

The beginning of terror wasn’t an isolated act committed by one side, but a decision made by both adversaries to extend the conflict to an enlarged combat zone in which the “other” becomes a mere object in an environment. This kind of terrorism became the matrix of modern and postmodern war, from WWI toxic gas to the Nazi Zyklon B used in Auschwitz, from the bombing of Dresden to the attack on the World Trade Center. But Sloterdijk doesn’t stop there, but goes on to evoke a cultural counter-offensive: “the offensive of modern aesthetics, from the Surrealists to Dalí, and Malevich to André Breton in their relation to the double emersion of the idea of the environment and of this terror “from the air.”

This book was originally published in German by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, in 2002.