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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
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
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Arthur Schnitzler
From Some Day Peace Will Return (Und einmal wird der Friede wiederkommen)
Translated by Robert O. Weiss
1916
So long as there is on this earth a single person who, without any perceptible danger to himself, sees a possibility of obtaining an advantage for himself, even at the price of a hundred thousand corpses and cripples, and so long as this same person possesses the power and influence to bring about a war, just so long mankind must not consider itself safe from the danger of war…What, then, is the problem? To remold the structure of government in such a way that the very existence of such an individual (to whom war can give an advantage and who has the power to unleash it) becomes absolutely impossible.
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It is quite obvious that the friends of world peace cannot forge ahead with their work so long as there are not only people who look upon war as something rooted in the order of the universe, as something that can never be eliminated, but also those who praise war as something exalted, something beautiful, something beneficial to the development of mankind as a whole. These people would have to be silenced as completely and permanently as, for example, lunatics who consider the plague as something rooted in the order of the universe, as something generally beneficial to mankind, and who would therefore refuse to collaborate in the decontamination of regions infested by the plague, to stamp out the focuses of the plague – or who would even, from some perverted aesthetic enjoyment, distribute cultures of the plague bacillus all over the world.
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Let us assume a few people really become morally better through their personal wartime experiences and that a few neurasthenics are even cured through them. That seems to be somewhat too high a price to pay for the sacrifices imposed upon all the others.
They say that a nation attains its highest potential only after a war. This is not true. People in general have certainly not become better or more talented after a war. There are only the infinite number of those who are worse off economically and a few who are better off economically.
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Now all of you bewail in desperation the insanity of war. Well, do not all of you, or almost all of you, share in the guilt? By having looked in peacetime upon war – which today you consider insanity – as something quite rational, by having talked about it as if it were something rational? Did you not place war within the economy of our thinking, not among the insane and criminal types of action but among the just and rational ones? You really did speak of war as of politics continued by different means; as of something that had as legitimate a right to existence as negotiations – even as peace itself. You spoke of it as something that could be considered permissible even by decent people of sound mind – often enough, as a matter of fact, as something exalted or even something inevitable.
And you who went cheering to the battlefield and wrote enthusiastic letters home – you who today, if you have not been killed and become crippled or insane, long for the end and shout your disgust to the world, your horror, your boundless anger at the senseless slaughter of human beings – did you really not know at the time, when you went to the battlefield so enthusiastically, what war was? Did you not know that the word war, like a transparent and fragile bowl, contains all those other words – murder, mutilation, robbery, pillage, pestilence, lice, poisoning, being burned alive, suffocation, dying of thirst, as well as a hundred more of the like – that now, since the bowl is finally broken, fly through the air like evil insects, darkening the atmosphere?
And all of you who are now about to sigh and moan and curse and look for the guilty ones and want to hang the culprits – are you not all guilty since, after all, you did base your entire existence, the education of your children, your everyday life, your whole philosophy on the premise that war was something permissible, indeed something rational, indeed something necessary; that – you can no longer believe it today, yet it is true, and you could have heard and read it a thousand times – it was even something beautiful, something exalted and purifying. Did you not make of the history of the world a history of battles, of combat, rather than a history of the human spirit?
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