War & Peace Quote by Gustav Stresemann

Stresemann is trying to domesticate a dangerous fuel: national memory. In post-World War I Germany, “struggles” and “heroes” weren’t neutral history; they were political explosives, endlessly invoked to justify revenge, rearmament, and the fantasy that humiliation could be reversed by force. He doesn’t ask people to forget. He grants the emotional legitimacy of pride and grief first, because scolding a wounded public into pacifism was never going to work.

The rhetorical trick is the hinge word “But.” It acknowledges that remembrance lives “in every man” (a universalizing move meant to pull memory out of party politics), then pivots to a claim that would have sounded, to hardliners, like surrender: peace can be desired without betraying the past. Stresemann is smuggling a new definition of patriotism into a culture addicted to old ones. Heroism, he implies, doesn’t have to mean charging forward again; it can mean restraint, reconstruction, and diplomatic stamina.

The subtext is both moral and tactical. Morally, he’s arguing that honoring sacrifice doesn’t require manufacturing new sacrifices. Tactically, he’s building cover for policies like reconciliation with former enemies and reintegration into Europe’s diplomatic order (the kind of work that made him a Nobel Peace Prize laureate). It’s a sentence designed to disarm the accusation that peace is cowardice: memory isn’t being erased; it’s being repurposed. In a society where myth was being weaponized, Stresemann offers a quieter weapon: continuity without catastrophe.