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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Arnold Zweig: Selections on war
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Arnold Zweig
From Education Before Verdun (1935)
Translated by Eric Sutton
“Where are the blessings you were promised at the outset of the war? The real consequences of the war are all too plain: misery and privation, unemployment and death, starvation and disease. For generations the costs of the war will paralyze the strength of the nations, and destroy all that you have fought for and won to ennoble your lives. Spiritual and moral desolation, economic catastrophes and political reaction – such are the fruits of this horrible international conflict, as of all those that came before it…”
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All that these men suffered, all that the world suffered in the war, slipped through the films of consciousness into the deeper chambers of the soul. Thence, in time to come, it would re-emerge, and demand a reckoning…From the darkness came the thunder of guns. It was Christmas night, a festival that meant a great deal to Germans, but they felt they must discipline the indulgence of such feelings by a display of manly vigour; so their guns were scattering steel Christmas gifts, and the French followed their example. Peace upon earth, sang the Gospel; War upon earth thundered the reality.
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By now, however, individual cases had ceased to count. The whole scurvy race of man stood ripe for judgment, before the spiritual bar of one for whom the first four decades of life had been a quest for justice and truth, under guidance of a greater man – his father. He had reached the point when he could no longer hear certain words without a desire to cough and a sense of nausea; and especially the word “nation.” Men had ceased to exist; there was only a nation. Man had become absorbed into the herd, and must follow the appointed leader, no matter whom. Aristotle had known this, and Plato too. The zoon politikon; what else did this definition contain but the damnation of man to a vile and irredeemable dependence? Except that for the two Greeks and all their disciples in Europe this fact made manifest how great was the moral obligation laid upon individuals and men of intelligence to remedy this deplorable state of affairs, and by their wisdom and insight, their human loyalty and goodwill, their patience and self-restraint, to reform and purify humanity. Since the renascence of human reason in the Italy of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the churches and the secular seats of learning had tried to meet this duty; they had inspired religions, reformations, and revolutions – with the result that in this war the peak of our achievement stood in a glare of light; the spirit of Europe was arrayed in uniform; only nations now existed, in the scarlet, black, and white of their several self-isolated creeds, and civilization served at the best as a technique of slaughter, as a mask for villainy, as a phrase to justify the insatiable lust for conquest which had made the earth too narrow for Alexander of Macedon, and for which the Romans at least had paid the modest price of five hundred years of peace and a world civilization. What price should we pay? With merchandise and lies.
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How long had this house stood? Certainly more than a hundred years. When it was new the great names of Goethe, Beethoven, and Hegel shed their glories upon Germany; Europe stood in the shadow of Napoleon the First, a commander who made good the devastation of his campaigns by political reform and codes of law. And now, a hundred years later, of these faded conquests nothing survived but moral disintegration, the destruction of all individual values, the deliberate wreck of the moral culture that had revived after the Thirty Years’ War. He wondered what his father would have said had he lived to see the unanimous glorification of war by all the intellectuals of Germany; a war of which they knew nothing, and which they busily palliated, falsified, and distorted until it suited their vision of reality. The jurists and theologians, the philosophers and the doctors, the economists and historians, and above all the poets, thinkers, and writers spread betrayal in all they said and wrote; they made haste to say what was not, and to deny what was, callow and ignorant, bloated with pride, making not the faintest effort to find out the facts before they blew their trumpets.
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