War & Peace Quote by Lukas Foss

Memory is supposed to be a refuge, the private museum you can carry back into a ruined city. Foss flips that expectation with a deadpan punch: after the catastrophe of World War II, his Berlin returns not as faces, streets, or family lore, but as retail. A shoe store. The detail lands with the weird precision of trauma, how the mind can misfile a whole childhood into something absurdly mundane because the rest is too complicated, too scorched, or simply gone.

Foss, a German-born Jewish composer who left Berlin as a child, is also quietly staging the afterlife of displacement. Postwar Berlin wasn’t just physically shattered; it was morally compromised and emotionally unrecognizable. By saying the shoe store is all he “really remembered,” he’s not offering a cute anecdote about consumer nostalgia. He’s confessing how exile edits you. Your personal history becomes less a continuous narrative than a handful of stubborn objects that survive the cutting room floor.

There’s a second, sharper subtext: shoes are what you leave in. They’re movement, escape, migration made tangible. In a city defined by what couldn’t be walked back from, the remembered shoe store reads like an unconscious memorial to departure itself. For a composer, the line also resonates as an aesthetic statement: the smallest motif can outlast the symphony. The grand story collapses; one oddly specific image remains, refusing to resolve.