War & Peace Quote by George Grosz

“I thought the war would never end. And perhaps it never did, either” lands like a dry cough after the smoke clears: not a cry of grief, but a grim diagnosis. Coming from George Grosz - the Weimar-era artist who drew Germany’s ruling class as bloated, brutal caricatures - the line isn’t poetic ambiguity so much as a moral verdict. He’s refusing the comforting calendar fiction that wars have neat endpoints. Armistices get signed; the war keeps living in institutions, in bodies, in appetites.

The first sentence carries the psychology of endurance: a mind trapped in permanent emergency, waiting for normal life to resume. The second sentence twists the knife. “Perhaps” performs a kind of sarcastic restraint, as if he’s offering history the benefit of the doubt while knowing it doesn’t deserve it. Grosz watched World War I mutate into something more corrosive: street violence, economic collapse, political extremism, a culture that learned to monetize trauma and call it patriotism. In that context, “never did” doesn’t just mean shell shock. It means the war’s values - dehumanization, hierarchy, spectacle, permission to harm - staying in circulation long after the trenches were refilled.

It also reads like an artist’s statement about representation: Grosz’s drawings insist that the real battlefield is social. His intent isn’t nostalgia for a lost peace; it’s a warning that modernity can keep a war going without uniforms, by turning civilian life into a continuation of combat by other means.