Leadership Quote by Gustav Stresemann

The line reads like a polite disclaimer, but it’s really a calibrated piece of postwar jiu-jitsu. Stresemann asks permission to state the obvious “without being accused of bias,” a phrase that anticipates exactly the suspicion hanging over any German politician after 1918: that talk of peace is just camouflage for revisionism. By foregrounding the accusation, he neutralizes it. He performs reasonableness, then slips in the charge.

The asymmetry he names is moral as well as material. “Easier for the victor” isn’t just about having intact factories and full cupboards; it’s about having the luxury of principle. Winners can preach reconciliation while their terms are already locked in. Losers are asked to endorse a settlement that feels less like peace than a continuing punishment, and they’re expected to do so in the language of lofty ideals. Stresemann’s subtext is that postwar “peace advocacy” is not an even playing field; it’s a demand made downward.

Context does the heavy lifting. Stresemann, a Weimar statesman navigating Versailles, reparations, occupation, and domestic radicalism, needed to sell a strategy of accommodation to a furious electorate without looking submissive abroad. This sentence does both: it signals to the Allies that he understands the rhetoric of peace, while telling Germans their resentment is not proof of barbarism but a predictable consequence of power. It’s an argument for empathy as realpolitik: if you want stable peace, stop treating the defeated like permanent suspects.