Motherhood Quote by Ernst Toller

Cruelty, Toller suggests, isn’t powered by monster psychology so much as by a mundane failure of mental reach. “Most people have no imagination” lands as an insult, but it’s also a political diagnosis: the imagination here isn’t artistry, it’s the basic faculty of entering someone else’s pain. Without it, suffering becomes abstract, sortable, even administrable. With it, the machinery jams.

The line’s engine is conditional logic: if people could imagine, they would not. Toller isn’t claiming humans are naturally kind; he’s arguing that violence often depends on distance, on the deliberate throttling of empathy. That’s why the question “What separated a German mother from a French mother?” hits harder than a moral lecture. It collapses the nationalist story that turns neighbors into destiny-marked enemies. Mothers are the rhetorical shorthand for intimate vulnerability and ordinary love, a deliberate choice from a playwright who knows how to make an audience feel the obscene banality of war propaganda.

Context matters: Toller was a German Jewish expressionist dramatist, a revolutionary associated with the Bavarian Soviet Republic, and a witness to World War I’s industrial slaughter and the nationalist fever that followed. His era specialized in converting private grief into public fuel. The subtext is an accusation aimed not only at generals and ideologues but at the compliant middle, the people who let slogans do their imagining for them. The quote pressures the reader to admit how easily “enemy” is built from nothing but narrative.