The war in which we had refused to believe broke out

The expression “The war in which we had refused to believe broke out” condenses a historical shock into a contradiction: what people could not accept as possible nevertheless happened. The book uses it to explain the exceptional traumatic impact of World War I.

Context

The phrase is attributed to Freud’s 1915 essay “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” It describes the outbreak of war in 1914 as the arrival of an event that had been refused in advance—not merely feared, but treated as unthinkable.

Meaning and Significance

The expression links collective disbelief to trauma. The shock lies in the collapse of the boundary between what people could believe and what history made real. In the book’s comparison, this rupture accounts for World War I’s traumatic impact surpassing even that of World War II.