Did you not sense how tragedy turned into farce, an operetta fusing innovative trash with anachronistic conventions, one of those repulsive modern operettas whose libretto is an insult and orchestration sheer torture? And did you not sense how the most insignificant of your orders, even the most trivial consequence of your most insignificant order — say, the idiocy that made it difficult to register a change of address, unleashed the various war surveillance departments against one another, causing intense confusion? Your passport offices, passport directive offices, passport modification offices, border crossing permit offices, registration authorities, border protection agencies — did you not sense that the most insignificant measure resulting from those crazy controls would stamp an indelible mark of infamy on human dignity? And you overlooked the fact that when you had dressed everyone up in uniform, they would all have to salute each other continuously. And you didn’t notice that one day, all of a sudden, this gesture was no more than the tapping of one’s forehead to signify doubts as to the other’s sanity. And that the disabled were twitching and shaking their heads at you, and you alone? And still you continued your pursuit of the doomed glory that was bleeding the world dry!
And you there who were slaughtered, why did you not rise from the grave to protest against this regime? Against this murderous system, this war economy that condemned all future life to “holding out to the bitter end”, blocking all prospects and sacrificing the pursuit of even the slightest happiness to the hatred of nations. Guilty of the absurd ravages of war, and of senseless ravages against each and everyone under the pretext of war! This system spread monstrous poverty, starvation, and ignominy among refugees and natives alike, confining and constricting one and all, wherever they may be. Was it not the duty of statesmen, in times of precipitous decline, to restrain man’s bestial urges? Yet it was those statesmen who unleashed them! Contempt for life, tolerating peacetime violence against animals and children, has cravenly seized upon the war machine to lay waste all that grows. Hysteria, under the mantle of technology, overwhelms nature, newsprint mobilizes weapons. The rotary press made cripples of us all before we succumbed to cannon fire.
Were not all the realms of imagination evacuated when that famous manifesto declared war on all the peoples of the world? At the end was — the Word. Having killed the spirit, the printed word had no alternative but to bring forth the Deed. Weaklings gained the strength to crush us under the wheels of progress. It was the newspaper press that achieved this, the press above all — the harlot that corrupted the world! Not that the press set the engines of death in motion — but that it hollowed out our heart and made us incapable of imagining what it would be like: that is its war guilt! From the wine of her fornication all nations have drunk, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her. And the apocalyptic rider found favour with her, the apocalyptic rider whom I once saw, long before it came to pass, storm through the German Reich. A decade has passed since I saw his task fulfilled. “There he goes, charging full tilt! His moustache stretches from the rising to the setting of the sun, from north to south. ‘And power was given unto him who sat thereon to take peace from the earth, so that they should slay one another.’” And I pictured the Kaiser as the beast with 10 horns and seven heads and his mouth as the mouth of a lion. “And they worshipped the beast, saying Who is like unto the beast? And who is able to make war with him? And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things.” And through him we fell, and through the Whore of Babylon, who in the tongues of all the peoples persuaded us we were enemies and must wage war!
And you, the victims, why did you not rise up against that strategy — against the compulsion to die with the option of becoming murderous fire-raisers? Against the diabolical plan that clothed the conquest of the textile market in the sacrificial colours of a moral crusade! Manipulating reverence for God in order to obtain approval for profits sealed in blood! All sovereign rights and essential values traded away for a single Idea — materialism. The child in its mother’s womb subjected to the imperative of hate, and the image of fighting manhood, and even of caring womanhood, swathed in armour and gas masks, a horde of mythical creatures created to make posterity’s flesh creep. Shooting at the faithful with shells recast from church bells and unrepentant before altars made of shrapnel! So that was what constituted Glory and Fatherland! Oh yes, you discovered what Fatherland meant even before you died for it! Fatherland began the moment you had to wait in death’s departure hall, naked amid the stench of sweat and beer, while they examined men’s bodies and extorted from their souls a godless oath of loyalty. Naked you were, as before God and your beloved, facing a draft board of swinish tormentors. Shame, shame for your body, shame for your soul should have compelled you to reject the call of patriotism. We have all seen it, this Fatherland, and the final glimpse of it for those fortunate enough to have escaped was the insolent border guard. We saw it in the protean lust for power of the liberated slave and the affable blackmailer greedy for his perks. Except that we noncombatants did not experience it in the shape of the enemy — the real enemy, who used friendly fire to make you face the foe’s machine guns.
Truly, we would have wished to call time on this bloodstained bordello even if we’d only seen it in the portraits of those monstrous generals, profiled like high-class prostitutes in the theatrical scandal sheets as symbols of a world where fornication was outstripped by slaughter! How could you, poor mangled dupes, not rise again to denounce their perfidy? How could you tolerate the freedom and the frolics of those press strategists, parasites, and buffoons, while enduring your own misery under orders? You knew that they were awarded medals for what you suffered. Why did you not spit their glory in their face? You lay in hospital trains which those scoundrels were permitted to portray. Why did you not break out, desert, and join the holy war to liberate us at home from our mortal enemy, who bombarded our brains day after day with their lies? And you died for this business? You lived out the horror and thereby prolonged the agony for those of us struggling for breath, caught between loan sharks and penury, tortured by the contrast between well-fed insolence and consumptive silence. Alas, you felt less for us than we for you, for we strove to reclaim a hundredfold each hour of those long years that they tore from your lives, with a single question on our lips: What will you look like if you survive such torments? If you avoid the crowning glory: that the hyenas become tourist guides and your graves tourist attractions! Stricken, impoverished, demoralized, lice-infested, starving, snuffed out, sacrificed for the tourist industry — must this be our shared destiny?
They sold your skins on the world market, while their cunning created wallets out of ours. You had weapons — yet you did not invade this hinterland? You did not turn from the field of shame to launch the most just of wars, to save both us and yourselves. And you do not rise from your final foxholes to call the whole base breed to account, to haunt their sleep with your distorted grimace as you breathed your last, your eyes clouded in heroic anticipation, the unforgettable expression of doomed youth — doomed by orchestrated insanity! Arise and confront them with your heroic death, so that those cowards who lay down life’s laws face the truth at last, their gaze transfixed forever by your death! Jolt them from sleep with your agonized death rattle! Spoil their sensual pleasures with the vision of your suffering! That they were capable of enjoying women’s embraces during the night after the day they had you strangled! Save us from them, save us from a peace that brings us near to their pestilential presence! Spare us the pain of having to shake hands with those who once handed out death sentences in military tribunals, or meeting hangmen on their return to civilian life. For the conscience of those inflicting such uninhibited vile cruelty — their imagination having been stultified simply by sheer mechanistic repetitiveness rather than any particular passion — will adapt to the daily grind just as quickly as it once resorted to murder to escape the banality of the past.