Motherhood Quote by Conrad Veidt

Deadpan is doing the heavy lifting here. Veidt opens his life story by denying it any world-historical sparkle: no trembling empire, no domestic revolution, just a tidy inventory of reactions. For an actor who would later loom large in German cinema and Hollywood, the joke lands as a quiet refusal of mythmaking. He frames his own origin as administratively unremarkable, and the understatement is the point: charisma, fame, and cultural impact are treated as something that arrives later, not as destiny stamped at birth.

The line also slips in a miniature sociology of family roles. Mother is allowed uncomplicated pleasure. Father gets pride, but only “a certain amount,” as if masculinity has to meter its emotions. The older brother’s “usual” jealousy is the sharpest word in the sentence: sibling rivalry isn’t a dramatic twist; it’s a default setting. Veidt’s comedy comes from compressing a whole domestic ecosystem into a few cool clauses, like a stage manager calling cues.

Context matters. Born in 1893, Veidt enters a Germany still confident in itself, a society that would soon be unrecognizable after World War I. By invoking the “German Empire” in the first breath, he winks at the grand narratives that swallow individual lives. His birth didn’t shake the empire, but the empire would go on to shake him: war, Weimar artistry, Nazi pressure, exile. The subtext is a modesty that reads less like humility than control - an artist setting the tone, keeping sentimentality at bay, and letting irony carry the autobiographical weight.