Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
German and other German-language writers on peace and war
Walter Benjamin: Self-alienated mankind experiences its own destruction as aesthetic pleasure
Heinrich Böll: Every death in war is a murder – a murder for which someone is responsible
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: For its material and moral beneficiaries, war can look forward to a prosperous future
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: To hear the big fellows talk, they wage war from fear of God and for all things bright and beautiful
Bertolt Brecht: The upper classes sacrifice for the soldiers
Bertolt Brecht: War Song
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.
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
Bruno Frank: Mercenaries lay coffinless in their thousands; terribly easy for princes to carry on their wars
Stefan George: Monsters of lead and iron, tubes and rods escape their maker’s hand and rage unruly
Goethe: “O wisdom, thou speakest as a dove!”
Goethe: Withdraw hands from your swords
Gerhart Hauptmann: American politics and warships
Johann Gottfried Herder: Hardly dare name or write the terrible word “war”
Stefan Heym: Sure it’s a vicious circle, it’s war
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
Immanuel Kant: Prescription for perpetual peace
Hans Hellmut Kirst: Goose-Stepping for NATO
Karl Kraus: Selections on 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: The Warmakers
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: 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
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: Scandalous was the idea of winning happiness through war, of making profit out 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: This is how it happens in history. Soldiers become thieves, thieves become murderers.
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
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: All learning, all culture, all science is nothing but hideous mockery so long as mankind makes war
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: Peace?
Erich Maria Remarque: Their fighting and their dying have been coupled with murder and injustice and lies and might; they have been defrauded
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
Friedrich Schiller: Beauty, peace and reconciliation
Friedrich Schiller: The citizen is naught, the soldier all; rude hordes, lawless grown in lengthy war
Friedrich Schiller: Oh, blessed peace, may the day of grim War’s ruthless crew never dawn
Arthur Schnitzler: Cannot praise war in general and oppose individual wars
Arthur Schnitzler: Political reaction is the consequence of victorious wars; revolution the consequence of lost ones
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
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: War irrigates the soil with blood, fertilizes it with corpses
Ernst Toller: Corpses In The Woods
Georg Trakl: Night beckons to dying soldiers, the ghosts of the killed are sighing
Kurt Tucholsky: The White Spots
Kurt Tucholsky: The Trench
Kurt Tucholsky: Murder in disguise
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: Don’t you hear the roar of the bombers, the clatter of heavy machine guns that envelop the globe?
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: The costs of war are spiritual and moral desolation, economic catastrophes and political reaction
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
Arnold Zweig: Whole generation shed man’s blood, whole generation to be poured forth in vats of blood
Stefan Zweig: The fear of opposing military hysteria
Stefan Zweig: Romain Rolland and the campaign against hatred
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