Introduction
Eckhart Kuhn-Dietrich is a polarizing figure in the Post-Occupation of Sector Seventeen. An academic at heart, Kuhn-Dietrich was launched into political stardom for a book not dissimilar from
Reflections. In fact, the working title of this book was
Reflections on Post-Unification Terror, before the publisher suggested a more striking name,
Terrorism. Kuhn-Dietrich would flirt with joining the elite of the Berlin Civil Authority before electing to join a newly-formed cabinet in Beijing, considering his tenure there a "flirtation with a different sort of bureaucracy." In later interviews, he would state that Beijing served as a stepping stone, a training ground for his ambitions in Berlin, which we know never came to fruition. The civil administration in Beijing, having pursued a ruthless campaign against terrorism, discovered the city was "90% insurgent, 10% indifferent." An Overwatch junta deposed the cabinet shortly thereafter. Kuhn-Dietrich returned to Europe, taking a lengthy vacation to tour Sector 17, producing a sizeable album of photography and a detailed travel log. Upon his return to Berlin, he resumed teaching and lecturing until the Fall of the Citadel. This brings us to the present.
The ensuing riots in Berlin, the deposition of numerous Civil Authorities by Overwatch and Lambda alike, and the death of Wallace Breen convinced Kuhn-Dietrich of the untenability of the Combine Empire's grip on Earth. Seeing the successor to his 'Unification State' in the territories seized by Lambda, the professor fled East.[1] Arriving in the territories
de jure governed by Lambda, Kuhn-Dietrich settled down, offering his services to a bureaucracy not yet entrenched. Working alongside a handful of Civil Authority defectors and dissident intellectuals, he would pioneer a stable method of trade and transport across the Outlands, capable of subsidizing sprouting resistance cells with the supplies and armaments needed to fend off enemy combatants. Despite this, Kuhn-Dietrich was arrested, faced with a list of charges ranging from crimes against humanity to embezzlement. All charges were dropped. Despite announcing his intent to retire afterwards, Kuhn-Dietrich began lecturing at a prototype 'cultural university' in the Lambda Zone following a failed investment in 'Magnusson Microwaves.'
The philosophical and political thought of Eckhart Kuhn-Dietrich derives chiefly from two thinkers: Carl Schmitt and Alexandre Kojève. Of the seminars held in Berlin, none rang more infamous than that of Kuhn-Dietrich's lectures on Kojève, in which he lambasted the prevailing theories of Administrator Francis Fukuyama, criticizing them for misreadings of Hegel and neglect of the Kojèvean philosophy from which he was sorely indebted to. In fact, Kuhn-Dietrich's theory of the diad Unification-Universal State was derivative of Kojève, as stated by the professor himself. "[Kojève's] Universal and Homogeneous State, realized by Napoleon, collapsed back into previous moments of discourse, only to be realized again by Breen." For Kuhn-Dietrich, Breen was the synthesis of Kojève's tyrant and philosopher, once embodied in the diad Napoleon-Hegel and again in Kojève-Stalin. Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political, critiques of romanticism, and his letters with Kojève permitted Kuhn-Dietrich to analyze political terrorism at the End of History. For Kuhn-Dietrich and Kojève, history is not a sequence of events that comes to an end in metric time, but rather philosophical discourse and its unraveling, which 'ends' with an uncontradictable synthesis of thesis and antithesis, emerging from hypothesis. Just as with language, the discussion, even if reaching its logical conclusion, can always be brought back to a point from before, thus explaining why, despite history ending with Napoleon in Jena, it has recapitulated. This is why, despite the failure of Humanity-through-Combine to cement the Universal and Homogeneous State, it is still possible for Kuhn-Dietrich that it shall return in the form of a Post-Occupation World Governance. Even in the existence of the Unification State, Urban Centers had recapitulated to previous points in discourse with riots, terror, and looting, just as had occurred in Berlin. So long as the struggle for recognition, the dialectic of master and slave, exists, there too exists the political, the enemy and the friend. When discourse collapses back to this stage, the necessity of Schmitt becomes apparent.
In
Reflections, Kuhn-Dietrich conducts a historic study, charting the philosophical foundations of the Unification State, its hegemony, and what its collapse means for humanity. Kuhn-Dietrich paints a picture not as what 'SOL III' ought to have been, as in his other books, but rather as what it had been, warts and all, and how a future 'universal and homgeneous' state can learn from it.
[1] This exodus in itself is a gripping story but not within the scope of this introduction.
