War & Peace Quote by Walter Kohn

The sentence reads like a quiet rebuttal to the idea that genius lives above history. Kohn, a physicist who would later help reshape modern materials science, anchors his intellectual identity in a moral and physical refusal: he could not accept "his philosophy" while "Nazi barbarians and their collaborators" threatened the world. The phrasing is careful. "Barbarians" is moral indictment, but the sharper move is "collaborators" - a reminder that totalitarian power is rarely just a foreign contagion; it recruits neighbors, institutions, and ordinary incentives.

The line also stages a collision between thought and action. "Philosophy" isn't treated as an abstract debate but as something with consequences that demand a bodily answer. Yet Kohn doesn't romanticize the response. "After several earlier attempts" and "finally accepted" underscore bureaucracy, contingency, and the humiliating persistence required to be allowed to fight. In that, the heroism is deglamorized: history doesn't always meet your convictions with an open door.

Context does the real heavy lifting. Kohn was an Austrian Jewish refugee who escaped Nazi persecution and later lived through internment in Canada as an "enemy alien" before building a life there. That background makes the decision to join the Canadian Infantry Corps during the last year of WWII feel doubly charged: gratitude and allegiance, yes, but also a pointed insistence on agency after being categorized, displaced, and managed by states. The subtext is a life-long argument: neutrality is a luxury, and intellect is not an exemption.