I thought the war would never end. And perhaps it never did, either.

I had grown up in a humanist atmosphere, and war to me was never anything but horror, mutilation and senseless destruction, and I knew that many great and wise people felt the same way about it.

Very little changed fundamentally, except that the proud German soldier had turned into a defeated bundle of misery and the great German army had disintegrated.

What can I say about the First World War, a war in which I served as an infantryman, a war I hated at the start and to which I never warmed as it proceeded?

In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.

The bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie have armed themselves against the rising proletariat with, among other things, culture. It's an old ploy of the bourgeoisie. They keep a standing art to defend their collapsing culture.

The cult of individuality and personality, which promotes painters and poets only to promote itself, is really a business. The greater the 'genius' of the personage, the greater the profit.