War & Peace Quote by Janet Flanner

Flanner’s line is a scalpel disguised as a tour guide’s patter: look left, ruins; look right, men in a dock. The pivot from “result” to “causes” is the point. Nuremberg’s bombed-out architecture can be explained away as the messy arithmetic of total war, the kind of devastation that invites abstraction and tragic shrugging. Flanner refuses that comfort. She drags causality back into human scale and pins it to faces.

The phrasing “on view” is doing quiet, cutting work. It makes the courtroom sound like an exhibit, a civic spectacle staged for history’s consumption. That’s not mere cynicism; it’s an alert to the trial’s dual purpose: justice, yes, but also pedagogy. The Allies weren’t only punishing; they were narrating. Nuremberg was an argument about responsibility in an era that had perfected bureaucratic alibis.

Then there’s the number: 22. Specific enough to feel concrete, small enough to feel inadequate. Flanner’s subtext is that these defendants are both emblem and convenience. They stand in for an entire system of collaboration, profiteering, and ideological buy-in that cannot be neatly seated behind a railing. Calling them “causes” pushes against the soothing myth that war “happens” like weather. It insists that catastrophe has authors, that policy becomes rubble, that ideology is not a mood but a machine.

Written by a journalist who understood how nations launder meaning through ceremonies, the sentence captures Nuremberg’s central tension: the need to individualize guilt without pretending guilt was only individual.