Ernst Toller

Discussion in 'World War 1' started by liverpool annie, Jan 2, 2009.

  1. liverpool annie

    liverpool annie New Member

    Disillusioned ... and in despair .... in spite of being very lucky ..... how very sad !

    Ernst Toller, the son of Mendel Toller, a successful Jewish wholesale grain merchant, was born in Samotschin in 1893. At the age of twelve Toller was sent to boarding school in Bromberg. Later Toller described it as a "school of miseducation and militarization". He was not a good student but while there managed to have several of his articles published in the local newspaper, the Ostdeutsche Rundschau.

    In 1914 Toller moved to France where he studied at the University of Grenoble. Six months after arriving, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. When Germany declared war on Russia, Toller headed back home and was in one of the last trains to be allowed out of France before the border was closed.

    Toller, like most Germans, accepted that it was his duty to join the German Army and defend the Fatherland. He immediately enlisted in the First Bavarian Foot Artillery Regiment. In March 1915, he was sent to the Western Front. When he heard the news he wrote in his diary: "How happy I am to go to the front at last. To do my bit. To prove with my life what I think I feel."

    After six months working as an observer with an artillery unit, Toller asked to transferred to the front-line trenches. The reason for this request was that because he felt he was being victimized by his platoon commander. Like at school, Toller believed he was being persecuted because he was Jewish.

    Toller served at Bois-le-Pretre and then at Verdun. Appalled by the physical slaughter that he witnessed in the trenches, Toller began to question the nationalistic propaganda that he had experienced since his schooldays. He wrote in one letter: "Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother? Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth."

    In May 1916 Toller became very ill. Taken to a hospital in Strasbourg, his doctor diagnosed him as suffering from "physical exhaustion and a complete nervous breakdown". After being transferred to a hospital near Mainz, he was discharged from the German Army as "unfit for active service".

    http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWtoller.htm
     

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