Heinrich Mann: Nowadays the real power is peace

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

German writers on peace and war

Heinrich Mann: Mission of letters in a world in rubble with 10 million corpses underground

Heinrich Mann: Nietzsche, war and the butchery of ten to twenty million souls

Heinrich Mann: “No! The less force exercised in the world the better!”

====

Heinrich Mann
From The Subject (1918)
Translated by Ernest Boyd

Diederich fully realized that everything here, their treatment, the language used, the whole military system, had only one end in view, to degrade the sense of self-respect to the lowest level. And that impressed him. Miserable as he was, indeed precisely on that account, it inspired him with deep respect and a sort of suicidal enthusiasm…There were no more comfortable intervals when one could remember one’s manhood. Slowly and inevitably one sank to the dimensions of an insect, of a part in the machine, of so much raw material, which was moulded by an omnipotent will. It would have been ruin and folly to raise oneself up, even in one’s secret heart..

***

Diederich was proud and glad of his excellent training. The students’ corps, his military service and the atmosphere of Imperialism had educated him and made him firm. He resolved to give effect to his well-earned principles at home in Netzig, and to become a pioneer of the spirit of the times. In order to show an outward and visible sign of this resolution he went the following morning to the court hairdresser, Haby, in Mittelstrasse, and had a change made which he had more frequently noticed of late in officers and gentlemen of rank. Hitherto it had seemed to him too distinguished to be imitated. By means of a special apparatus he had the ends of his mustache turned up at right angles. When this was done he could hardly recognize himself in the glass. When no longer concealed by hair, his mouth had something tigerish and threatening about it, especially when his lips were drawn, and the points of his mustache aimed straight at his eyes, which inspired fear in Diederich himself, as though they flashed from the countenance of the all-powerful Emperor.

***

“Blood and iron are still the most effective remedy! Might before right!” His head became heated at the utterance of this credo. But Buck also became excited. “Might! Might will not allow itself to be carried eternally on the bayonet’s point like a skewered sausage. Nowadays the real power is peace…”