Klaus Mann: The whole country was transformed into an armed camp

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

German writers on peace and war

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Klaus Mann
From Mephisto
Translated by Robin Smith

His life seemed pleasant enough to him as it was, but his taste for adventure and excess would be fully satisfied only by another outbreak of war. In his eyes, war was an amusement of a more intense kind than all the other pleasures that he now enjoyed. He loved war as a child loves Christmas; and he saw it as his most essential task to prepare for war with care and cunning.

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German youth learned the word “pacifist” as a swear word. German youth no longer needed to read Goethe or Plato; they learned how to shoot and throw bombs; they enjoyed themselves on night maneuvers; and when the Führer preached about peace they understood that he was joking.

This militarily organized, disciplined, well-drilled youth had only one aim – the war of revenge, the war of conquest. Alsace-Lorraine was German. Switzerland was German. Holland was German. Czechoslovakia was German. The Ukraine was German. Austria was so completely German that the case did not even have to be stated. Germany must have its colonies back. The whole country was transformed into an armed camp; the armaments industry flourished; there was a permanent state of mobilization, and the foreigner gazed spellbound at this imposing, terrifying spectacle, like a rabbit at the snake that is just about to swallow it.