November
Cities are so far away, humans live there.
The knot chokes at your throat, a gray
horror caresses your limbs. Who will freedom behold?
When, at last, will the grubs rise up?
poem by Ernst Toller
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Soldiers and peasants lived together on friendly terms; they knew each other and their everyday routines, and trusted each other; they shook their heads together over the war.
quote by Ernst Toller
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We revolutionaries acknowledge the right to revolution when we see that the situation is no longer tolerable, that it has become a frozen. Then we have the right to overthrow it.
quote by Ernst Toller
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Nightmare
The people's conscience squats
on a worm-eaten pole.
Around the pole dance the bones of three children.
From the young mother's belly it ruptures forth:
the sheep's pulse bleats baa baa.
poem by Ernst Toller
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And suddenly, like light in darkness, the real truth broke in upon me; the simple fact of Man, which I had forgotten, which had lain deep buried and out of sight; the idea of community, of unity.
quote by Ernst Toller
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We thrust our fingers into our ears to stop its moan; but it was no good; the cry cut like a drill into our heads, dragging minutes into hours, hours into years. We withered and grew old between those cries.
quote by Ernst Toller
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As a boy I used to go to the Chamber of Horrors at the annual fair, to look at the wax figures of Emperors and Kings, of heroes and murderers of the day. The dead now had that same unreality, which shocks without arousing pity.
quote by Ernst Toller
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After that I could never pass a dead man without stopping to gaze on his face, stripped by death of that earthly patina which masks the living soul. And I would ask, who were you? Where was your home? Who is mourning for you now?
quote by Ernst Toller
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At that moment of realization I knew that I had been blind because I had wished not to see; it was only then that I realised, at last, that all these dead men, French and Germans, were brothers, and I was the brother of them all.
quote by Ernst Toller
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For the Dead of the Revolution
Death-prone, the bodies
forked in mutiny
against the collar
of the uncooked plague,
your destiny cleansed
with the dark gesture.
By whom the paths are prepared,
to sink upon the grill,
death pitches forward still
before him, in reverence.
poem by Ernst Toller
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