"I stood up as best I could to their disgusting stupidity and brutality, but I did not, of course, manage to beat them at their own game. It was a fight to the bitter end, one in which I was not defending ideals or beliefs but simply my own self"
About this Quote
An artist with an acid line and a sharpened moral sense faces a world run by thugs and philistines. George Grosz spent the Weimar years exposing the cruelty, hypocrisy, and mindless swagger of officers, clergy, businessmen, and street brawlers. His drawings mocked militarism and greed so unsparingly that he was repeatedly hauled into court for blasphemy and obscenity. The targets hit back not with wit but with fists and laws; he knew firsthand that satire cannot outpunch a truncheon.
The admission of not beating them at their own game is not resignation but clarity. Authoritarian movements thrive on violence, propaganda, and intimidation. To answer with the same tools is to abandon the very sensibility that makes resistance meaningful. Grosz belonged to Dada and later to the New Objectivity, movements that prized clear seeing over consoling illusions. He had flirted with the Communist Party, then recoiled from ideology as it hardened into new orthodoxies. The fight becomes narrower and starker: not a banner for some grand doctrine, but a stubborn insistence on remaining a person who sees, judges, and refuses to bow.
That is the tone of his autobiography, A Small Yes and a Big No, written after exile in 1933, when the Nazi rise made his targets unimaginably powerful. Bitter end names the collapse of Weimar and the dissolution of liberal hope, but also the private attrition of arrests, trials, and threats. To defend the self here is not petty self-interest; it is the defense of conscience, imagination, and the capacity to speak plainly in a society that rewards cruelty and stupidity. Grosz insists that integrity is the last redoubt. He could not defeat brutality on its chosen field, but he would not let it capture his gaze, his hand, or his voice. That refusal was his victory and his cost.
The admission of not beating them at their own game is not resignation but clarity. Authoritarian movements thrive on violence, propaganda, and intimidation. To answer with the same tools is to abandon the very sensibility that makes resistance meaningful. Grosz belonged to Dada and later to the New Objectivity, movements that prized clear seeing over consoling illusions. He had flirted with the Communist Party, then recoiled from ideology as it hardened into new orthodoxies. The fight becomes narrower and starker: not a banner for some grand doctrine, but a stubborn insistence on remaining a person who sees, judges, and refuses to bow.
That is the tone of his autobiography, A Small Yes and a Big No, written after exile in 1933, when the Nazi rise made his targets unimaginably powerful. Bitter end names the collapse of Weimar and the dissolution of liberal hope, but also the private attrition of arrests, trials, and threats. To defend the self here is not petty self-interest; it is the defense of conscience, imagination, and the capacity to speak plainly in a society that rewards cruelty and stupidity. Grosz insists that integrity is the last redoubt. He could not defeat brutality on its chosen field, but he would not let it capture his gaze, his hand, or his voice. That refusal was his victory and his cost.
Quote Details
| Topic | Resilience |
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