If the War Goes On . . . by Hermann Hesse

Author:Hermann Hesse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2015-05-23T16:00:00+00:00

Letter to a Young German

1919

YOU WRITE ME that you are in despair and do not know what to believe, what to hope. You do not know whether or not there is a God. You do not know whether or not life has any meaning, whether or not love of country has a meaning, whether, in the wretched condition of the world, it is better to strive for spiritual goods or merely to fill your belly.

I believe your state of mind and soul to be the right one. Not to know whether there is a God, not to know whether there is good and evil, is far better than to know for sure. Five years ago, if you remember, I should say you were pretty well convinced there was a God, and above all you had no doubt as to what was good and what was evil. Naturally you did what you thought was good and marched off to war. For five years now, the best years of your youth, you have kept on doing “good”: you have fired a gun, gone over the top, lounged about in barracks and mud holes, buried comrades or bandaged their wounds. And little by little you began to doubt the good, to suspect that the good and glorious occupation you were engaged in was fundamentally evil, or at the very least stupid and absurd.

And so it was. Evidently the good you were so sure of at the time was not the right good, the good that is indestructible and timeless; and evidently the God you knew in those days was not the right God. Presumably he was the national God of our consistories and war poets, the awesome God whose props and footstool are cannon and whose favorite colors are black, white, and red. A God he assuredly was, a mighty, gigantic God, greater than any Jehovah; hundreds of thousands of bloody battle sacrifices were offered up to him, and in his honor hundreds of thousands of bellies were slit open, hundreds of thousands of lungs torn to pieces; he was more bloodthirsty and brutal than any idol, and during the bloody sacrifice the priests at home, our theologians, intoned their well-paid paeans of praise to him. The last vestige of religion we possessed in our impoverished souls and so impoverished, soul-less churches was lost. Has anyone stopped to consider, and to wonder at the fact, that in those four years of war our theologians buried their own religion, their own Christianity? Committed to the service of love, they preached hatred; committed to the service of mankind, they mistook for mankind the authorities who paid them. They proved (not all of course, but the spokesmen) with guile and many words that war and Christianity were perfectly compatible, that a man could be the best of Christians and yet shoot and stab to perfection. But that is not true, and if our national Churches had not been national Churches in the service of Throne and

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