War & Peace Quote by George Grosz

Disappointment, in Grosz's hands, is never private; it’s an accusation. He refuses the consolations that typically follow catastrophe - the noble defeat, the tragic necessity, the “we did our best.” Losing the war isn’t the injury. The injury is endurance: a society’s ability to normalize industrial killing for years, to keep paying, cheering, and obeying long after the moral math has gone bankrupt.

The phrase “our people” is doing double work. It’s intimate enough to sting - he’s not speaking about faceless elites alone - yet it also implicates the crowd, the compliant neighbor, the patriotic coworker. Grosz, forged in the furnace of World War I and the rancid aftermath of Weimar, had watched militarism turn into a kind of mass style: uniforms, slogans, parades, the aesthetic of belonging. As an artist, he understood how violence recruits through images before it recruits through orders. “Mass insanity” isn’t a medical metaphor so much as a diagnosis of collective mood: a trance sustained by propaganda, boredom, fear, and the narcotic comfort of being on the “right side.”

Then he spotlights “the few voices of protest,” a line that honors dissent while exposing how lonely it was. The subtext is brutal: most people didn’t lack information; they lacked refusal. Grosz isn’t asking why the war happened. He’s asking why it kept happening, day after day, with millions deciding - actively or by surrendering attention - that slaughter was tolerable. That’s the real scandal he can’t forgive.