"I thought the war would never end. And perhaps it never did, either"
About this Quote
George Grosz felt the First World War as a wound that outlived the armistice. A conscripted German who turned his horror into satire, he watched Berlin stumble from the trenches into street battles, political assassinations, and economic ruin. The line captures a recognition that dates and treaties can end combat, but not the habits of mind and power that created it. The machinery of war simply changed venues. Paramilitaries marched under new banners, profiteers fatted themselves in offices instead of depots, and militarists traded uniforms for suits while keeping the same contempt for human life.
Grosz forged the Berlin Dada style into a weapon against that continuity. His jagged caricatures and acid lines in the New Objectivity movement dissected a society still at war with itself: maimed veterans hawking trinkets, judges and pastors mouthing pieties over corpses, politicians lubricated by money and lies. The shock tactics were not bravura; they were reportage from a battlefield that had migrated into parliament, newspapers, and apartments. Trauma threaded through private life as well. The war lived on in nightmares, in broken bodies, in the fierce need to forget and the impossibility of doing so.
The sentence turns on the small word perhaps, a bitter acknowledgment that the expected return to normalcy was a mirage. It reads as prophecy from the vantage of the Weimar years, when unresolved violence culminated in the rise of Nazism and the plunge into a second catastrophe. Grosz emigrated to the United States in 1933, a move that confirmed his intuition: the conflict he thought would never end had merely assumed a new, more total form.
The thought is not only historical but ethical. War persists wherever fear, hierarchy, and profit rule daily life; peace requires more than silence of guns. Grosz challenges the reader to see the traces of organized violence in ordinary arrangements and to refuse the comfort of declaring an end that has not truly arrived.
Grosz forged the Berlin Dada style into a weapon against that continuity. His jagged caricatures and acid lines in the New Objectivity movement dissected a society still at war with itself: maimed veterans hawking trinkets, judges and pastors mouthing pieties over corpses, politicians lubricated by money and lies. The shock tactics were not bravura; they were reportage from a battlefield that had migrated into parliament, newspapers, and apartments. Trauma threaded through private life as well. The war lived on in nightmares, in broken bodies, in the fierce need to forget and the impossibility of doing so.
The sentence turns on the small word perhaps, a bitter acknowledgment that the expected return to normalcy was a mirage. It reads as prophecy from the vantage of the Weimar years, when unresolved violence culminated in the rise of Nazism and the plunge into a second catastrophe. Grosz emigrated to the United States in 1933, a move that confirmed his intuition: the conflict he thought would never end had merely assumed a new, more total form.
The thought is not only historical but ethical. War persists wherever fear, hierarchy, and profit rule daily life; peace requires more than silence of guns. Grosz challenges the reader to see the traces of organized violence in ordinary arrangements and to refuse the comfort of declaring an end that has not truly arrived.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|
More Quotes by George
Add to List
