Texts against war: Our loneliness has never been more helpless

Never have I felt the moral atmosphere more poisonous and suffocating than now, never have our loneliness felt more helpless, our words more meaningless.” Stefan Zweig wrote these pessimistic lines on February 8, 1921 to his friend and fellow writer Romain Rolland. During the First World War, the two pacifists were among the few intellectual voices who opposed nationalism, militarism and enthusiasm for war in Germany and France. After the end of the mass killings, they hoped, there would be a major movement against all wars. But as early as 1921, Zweig was horrified to discover that the nationalists who had led Germany into the war continued to spew their nationalist poison and that they still had supporters.

Bookmaking commendably documents texts that took a position against militarism and war. The majority of them were published in the “Weltbühne”, an important forum for the non-party left during the Weimar period. Several articles come from Carl von Ossietzky and Kurt Tucholsky, others from Kurt Hiller and Erich Kästner, but also from authors who are little known today such as Alfons Goldschmidt or Kurt Kersten. Unfortunately, there are only a few contributions by women, although there were committed women campaigners for peace and international understanding such as Anita Augspurg, Minna Cauer and Margarethe Selenka. But that shouldn’t diminish the merits of the East German editor with the alias name Max Michaelis.

The texts are particularly important at a time when the declared goal of German politics is to become “war-ready” again and warning voices are drowned out. It is a special kind of reading book. We learn a lot about the militarism debates at the time. Quarrels within the pacifist movement are also not left out. Kurt Hiller is expelled from the German Peace Society when he discloses money payments to it that were supposed to come from Czech and Polish sources. Ossietzky, on the other hand, defends society: It is sometimes difficult to afford the rent for the office and activities. At the same time he condemns Hiller’s exclusion.

We learn that Tucholsky criticized Erich Remarque’s famous novel “Nothing New in the West” as “pacifist war propaganda” but also condemned the state ban on the film in 1929. The authorities bowed to a Nazi march in front of the cinemas showing the anti-war drama. Tucholsky clairvoyantly recognized that institutions that cannot defend even a film from the fascists will not be a bulwark against them. The SPD’s ideas of democratizing the Reichswehr from within were also criticized. «The military program of the Social Democrats, as it now exists, is a much worse declaration of bankruptcy of active socialism than was the approval of war loans on August 4, 1914. Because here the war loans and much more are already approved in peacetime,” wrote Jakob Links.

When you read these articles, essays and appeals, you sometimes think they were only written now. Smart people recognized early on that German imperialism was preparing a new war. It’s all the more depressing that they couldn’t prevent it.

Max Michaelis: Antiwar between the wars. A reading book. The Bookmaking Shop, 650 p., hardcover, €24.