German writers on peace and war
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
German and other German-language writers on peace and war
Berthold Auerbach: Practicing for mutual manslaughter
Walter Benjamin: Self-alienated mankind experiences its own destruction as aesthetic pleasure
Friedrich Martin von Bodenstedt: Christianity and War
Heinrich Böll: Every death in war is a murder – a murder for which someone is responsible
Heinrich Böll: I saw the fateful gleam in his eyes too late
Heinrich Böll: I’m going to die soon and before the war is over. I shall never know peace again.
Wolfgang Borchert: It was war; stories from a primer
Wolfgang Borchert: Only one thing to do, say No!
Bertolt Brecht: Selections on war
Bertolt Brecht: German Miserere
Bertolt Brecht: I won’t let you spoil my war for me
Bertolt Brecht: In war the attacker always has an alibi
Bertolt Brecht: Maimed soldiers are anti-war demonstrators
Bertolt Brecht: One’s only got to make a war to become a millionaire. It’s amazing!
Bertolt Brecht: Picture-book generals more dangerous, less brave, than serial killers
Bertolt Brecht: The upper classes sacrifice for the soldiers
Bertolt Brecht: Wherein a holy war differs from other wars
Alfred Döblin: The law and the police are at the service of the war state and its slavery
Alfred Döblin: The old grim cry for war
Alfred Döblin: War is not ineluctable fate
Alfred Döblin: We march to war, Death folds his cloak singing: Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes.
Georg Ebers: Each one must bring a victim to the war
Lion Feuchtwanger: Selections on war
Lion Feuchtwanger: The demand for perpetual peace must be raised again and again
Lion Feuchtwanger: The future national state: A military power beyond conception
Lion Feuchtwanger: The privilege, the courage of fighting for peace
Lion Feuchtwanger: Service at the front gave him a burning hatred for militarism
Lion Feuchtwanger: There is no greater crime than an unnecessary war
Lion Feuchtwanger: War to make the world safe for democracy
Johann Gottlieb Fichte: The inexorable law of universal peace
Stefan George: Monsters of lead and iron, tubes and rods escape their maker’s hand and rage unruly
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: I have not a warlike nature nor warlike tastes
Goethe: “O wisdom, thou speakest as a dove!”
Goethe: Withdraw hands from your swords
Friedrich Melchior von Grimm: History lauds brutal warriors, views the peaceful with contempt
Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen: Soldiers and peasants
Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen: Study and let war alone
Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen: The war-god Mars sat over all Europe
Hans Habe: Hiroshima-born realization of man’s destructibility by man
Hans Habe: John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered
Peter Handke: The horror unleashed by NATO’s first war
Gerhart Hauptmann: American politics and warships
Willi Heinrich: “It’s quite enough that I know it”
Willi Heinrich: A people proud of its war dead has learned nothing from war
Johann Gottfried von Herder: Selections on war
Johann Gottfried von Herder: Disturbing the peace of the world for domestic benefits
Johann Gottfried von Herder: Divine law ordains more doves and sheep than lions and tigers
Johann Gottfried Herder: Hardly dare name or write the terrible word “war”
Johann Gottfried Herder: Peace, not war, is the natural state of mankind
Johann Gottfried von Herder: War springs from war and gives rise to another in turn
Stefan Heym: The whole scene was immersed in the silence of absolute death
Stefan Heym: The world market…making new wars
Friedrich Hölderlin: Celebration of Peace
Ödön von Horváth: We must prepare them to be warriors. Just that.
Immanuel Kant: Prescription for perpetual peace
Hans Hellmut Kirst: Selections on war and peace
Hans Hellmut Kirst: Each thinks it’s in the right, each wants peace and only wishes to defend itself
Hans Hellmut Kirst: Goose-Stepping for NATO
Hans Hellmut Kirst: It was as if the whole world had become simply one vast graveyard
Hans Hellmut Kirst: “Just a dirty, rotten business from beginning to end”
Hans Hellmut Kirst: Nothing – absolutely nothing – can justify war
Karl Kraus: Aphorisms and obloquies on war
Karl Kraus: This is world war. This is my manifesto to mankind.
Karl Kraus: The evolution of humanitarian bombing
Karl Kraus: The Last Days of Mankind
Karl Kraus: War renders unto Caesar that which is God’s
Karl Kraus: In war, business is business
Karl Kraus: Wire dispatches are instruments of war
Karl Kraus: The vampire generation; prayer in wartime
Wilhelm Lamszus: The Human Slaughter-House
Emil Ludwig: Dialogue on “humanitarian 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: Nowadays the real power is peace
Thomas Mann: Selections on war
Thomas Mann: By nature evil and harmful, war is destructive even to the victor
Thomas Mann: Dirge for a homeland wasted by war
Thomas Mann: Parallel, oracle and warning
Thomas Mann: Tolstoy, a force that could have stopped war
Thomas Mann: War is a blood-orgy of egotism, corruption, and vileness
Thomas Mann: William Faulkner’s love for man, protest against militarism and war
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Arnold Schoenberg: Peace on Earth
Luise Mühlbach: Battle-field writes names of its heroes in blood
Alfred Neumann: Selections on war
Alfred Neumann: Debunking the glory of twenty murderous years, the greatest mass-murderer in history
Alfred Neumann: Empire destroys peace, converts liberalism into harvest of blood
Alfred Neumann: European hegemony emerges from piled-up corpses, out of recent graves
Alfred Neumann: Four thousand miles of fratricidal murder
Alfred Neumann: Modern war, the murderous happiness of the greatest number
Alfred Neumann: The morals and manners of the War God
Alfred Neumann: Sacred recalcitrance toward the black hatred of war
Alfred Neumann: The stench of burning flesh. That happens sometimes.
Alfred Neumann: Ten million lives for one man’s glory; the emperor changes his hat
Alfred Neumann: Twilight of a conqueror
Alfred Neumann: The ultima ratio of all dictatorships: war
Alfred Neumann: War and the stock market
Alfred Neumann: War, the Great Incendiary, the everlasting prototype of annihilation
Alfred Neumann: War is not ambiguous after all, but a horribly intelligent affair
Alfred Neumann: The War Minister
Alfred Neumann: War nights were never silent
Alfred Neumann: War: Sad, hate-filled, hopeless and God-forsaken
Alfred Neumann: War’s arena, a monstrous distortion, a blasphemous coupling of life and death
Novalis: Celebrating a great banquet of love as a festival of peace
Samuel von Pufendorf: Perverted animals wage wars for superfluities
Erich Maria Remarque: Selections on war
Erich Maria Remarque: After the war: The day of great dreams for the future of mankind was past
Erich Maria Remarque: The front begins and we become on the instant human animals
Erich Maria Remarque: It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation
Erich Maria Remarque: Like a dove, a lonely white dove of assurance and peace
Erich Maria Remarque: Now, for the first time, I feel it; I see it; I comprehend it fully: Peace.
Erich Maria Remarque: On every yard there lies a dead man
Erich Maria Remarque: War dreams
Erich Maria Remarque: The war has ruined us for everything
Erich Maria Remarque: War, mass production of corpses
Erich Maria Remarque: War turns us into thugs, into murderers, into God only knows what devils
Erich Maria Remarque: A war veteran’s indictment
Erich Maria Remarque: War was everywhere. Everywhere, even in the brain and the heart.
Erich Maria Remarque: War’s conqueror worms
Erich Maria Remarque: We want to be men again, not war machines!
Erich Maria Remarque: We were making war against ourselves without knowing it
Erich Maria Remarque: What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over?
Erich Maria Remarque: With the melting came the dead
Erich Maria Remarque: Worse than a slaughterhouse
Jean Paul Richter: The arch of peace
Jean Paul Richter: The fathers of war
Jean Paul Richter: The Goddess of Peace
Rainer Maria Rilke: War is always a prison
Joseph Roth: Black and red, death fluttered over them
Joseph Roth: His son was dead. His world had ended.
Joseph Victor von Scheffel: The Muses heal what Mars has wrought
Joseph Victor von Scheffel: The wood of peace
Friedrich Schiller: Beauty, peace and reconciliation
Friedrich Schiller: Oh, blessed peace, may the day of grim War’s ruthless crew never dawn
August Wilhelm Schlegel: Aristophanes, tragedian of peace
Arthur Schnitzler: Cannot praise war in general and oppose individual wars
Arthur Schnitzler: Remold the structure of government so that war becomes impossible
Arthur Schnitzler: War, making fathers pay wages to their sons whom we sent to their deaths
Arthur Schopenhauer: Are not almost all wars undertaken for purposes of plunder?
Arthur Schopenhauer: Beasts of prey in the human race
Albert Schweitzer: On nuclear weapons in NATO’s hands
Anna Seghers: War enthusiasm, brewed from equal parts of age-old memories and total oblivion
Hermann Sudermann: Militarism and its terminus
Hermann Sudermann: War irrigates the soil with blood, fertilizes it with corpses
Bertha von Suttner: Selections on peace and war
Bertha von Suttner: All Souls’ Day. Field of honor gives way to wasteland of broken hearts
Bertha von Suttner: Among these ills the most dreadful of all – War
Bertha von Suttner: Education hardens children against natural horror which terrors of war awaken
Bertha von Suttner: Higher unity in which every war will appear impious fratricide
Bertha von Suttner: Mounting doubts about war
Bertha von Suttner: Outgrowing the old idolatry for war
Bertha von Suttner: The Protocol of Peace
Bertha von Suttner: Vengeance! War breeds more war.
Bertha von Suttner: War’s sophistry. At last the monster creeps out.
Ernst Toller: Corpses In The Woods
Georg Trakl: Night beckons to dying soldiers, the ghosts of the killed are sighing
Kurt Tucholsky: Murder in disguise
Kurt Tucholsky: The White Spots
Jakob Wassermann: Was there ever since the world began a just cause for war?
Franz Werfel: Selections on war
Franz Werfel: Advent of air war and apocalyptic visions
Franz Werfel: Cities disintegrated within seconds in the Last War
Franz Werfel: How describe in a few words a world war?
Franz Werfel: Leaders’ fear of their people drives them to war
Franz Werfel: To a Lark in War-Time
Franz Werfel: Twenty thousand well-preserved human skulls of the Last War
Franz Werfel: Waging currish, cowardly war to plunder the poor
Franz Werfel: War behind and in front, outside and inside
Franz Werfel: War is the cause and not the result of all conflicts
Arnold Zweig: Selections on war
Arnold Zweig: Conducting the business of murder with embittered reluctance
Arnold Zweig: Education Before Verdun
Arnold Zweig: The final trump in the struggle for world markets: the Gun
Arnold Zweig: From the joy of the slayer to being dimly aware of the man on the other side
Arnold Zweig: In the war you’ve lost all the personality you’ve ever had
Arnold Zweig: Keep the war going to the last drop of – other – people’s blood
Arnold Zweig: The meaning, or rather the meaninglessness, of war
Arnold Zweig: Mere existence of armies imposes upon mankind the mentality of the Stone Age
Arnold Zweig: Military strips nation of all that is worthy of defense
Arnold Zweig: Never again! On reading Barbusse
Arnold Zweig: No joy to be born into world of war
Arnold Zweig: Of course, one had to shoot at crowds of civilians, men, women and children
Arnold Zweig: Only the wrong people are killed in a war
Arnold Zweig: The plague has always played a part in war
Arnold Zweig: Pro-war clerks and clerics are Herod’s mercenaries
Arnold Zweig: Reason is the highest patriotism and militarism is evil its very essence
Arnold Zweig: They won no more ground than they could cover with their corpses
Arnold Zweig: War a deliberate act, not an unavoidable natural catastrophe
Arnold Zweig: War, a gigantic undertaking on the part of the destruction industry
Arnold Zweig: War of all against all, jaded multitudes of death
Arnold Zweig: War transforms rescue parties into murder parties
Arnold Zweig: War was in the world, and war prevailed
Arnold Zweig: War’s brutality, folly and tyranny practiced even on its own
Arnold Zweig: War’s communion, hideous multiplication of human disasters
Arnold Zweig: War’s hecatomb from the air, on land and at sea
Stefan Zweig: Selections on peace and war
Stefan Zweig: The army of the spirit, not the army of force
Stefan Zweig: The bloody cloud-bank of war will give way to a new dawn
Stefan Zweig: The fear of opposing military hysteria
Stefan Zweig: The fruits of peace, the drive toward war
Stefan Zweig: “How much rottenness there is in war”
Stefan Zweig: I would never have believed such a crime on the part of humanity possible
Stefan Zweig: Idea of human brotherhood buried by the grave-diggers of war
Stefan Zweig: The idealism which sees beyond blood-drenched battlefields
Stefan Zweig: Opposition to war, a higher heroism still
Stefan Zweig: Origin of the Nobel Peace Prize
Stefan Zweig: Propaganda is as much war matériel as arms and planes
Stefan Zweig: Romain Rolland and the campaign against hatred
Stefan Zweig: A single conscience defies the madness of war
Stefan Zweig: Stendhal, in war but not of it
Stefan Zweig: War, the ultimate betrayal of the intellectuals
Stefan Zweig: The whole world of feeling, the whole world of thought, became militarized
Stefan Zweig: World war and Romain Rolland, the conscience of the world
For peace, against war: literary selections 