GA 19. Thoughts During the Time of War

Additional Documents Concerning
the Events of World War I
GA 19

Translated by Steiner Online Library

Thoughts during the time of the war
For Germans and those who do not believe they should hate them

[ 1 ] Inexpressible suffering and deep sorrow live in the souls of the people of today alongside the will to make the sacrifices of courage, bravery and love that this incomparable moment in world history demands. The warrior is steeled by the awareness that he is standing up for the most precious thing that the earth has to give to mankind. He looks death in the face with the feeling that his death is demanded by that life which, as higher than the individual human being, may also claim his death. Fathers, mothers and sons, wives, sisters and daughters must find themselves out of personal suffering in the idea that out of blood and death the development of humanity will rise to goals for which the sacrifices were necessary and which will justify them. The upward glance from the individual experience to the life of humanity, from the transient to that which lives in this transient as the imperishable: it is demanded by the experiences of this time. Confidence arises from the feeling of what is happening, that what is experienced will raise the dawn of a new age of humanity, whose powers this experience should mature.

[ 2 ] With the understanding that also seeks to comprehend human aberrations, one would like to look at the flames of hatred that are ignited. For some, the impression they receive is too strong when they compare what they are currently experiencing with what seemed to them to have already been achieved for the present through the development of humanity. People who knew how to speak about this achievement of mankind out of full sympathy found words for it, such as those spoken by the fine German art observer, Herman Grimm, who died in 1901. He compares the experience of man in earlier times with what the present brings to this experience. He says: "I sometimes feel as if I have been transported into a new existence and have only taken the most necessary spiritual hand luggage with me. As if completely changed living conditions force you to think in a completely new way. Because distance is no longer something that separates people. Our thoughts circle the circumference of the earth's surface with playful ease and fly from each individual to each other, wherever they may be. The discovery and utilization of new natural forces unites all peoples in unceasing joint work. New experiences, under the pressure of which our view of everything visible and invisible is constantly changing, also impose new ways of observing the history of human development." Before the outbreak of this war, every European man had such feelings in his soul. And now: What has been made of what inspired these feelings at the time of this war? Is it not as if mankind were to be shown what the world looks like when the effects of much that is the fruit of development cease? And yet, does not war show by its horrors what conflicts between nations must lead to when they are fought out with the means that the latest development has brought?

[ 3 ] The feelings that arise from these experiences can be confusing. From the presence of this confusion, one would like to understand why many people cannot understand that war itself brings horror and suffering to war, and why they decry the enemy as "barbarians" when a harsh necessity imposes on him the use of the means of combat that modern times have created.

[ 4 ] Words of hateful condemnation of German nature, now uttered by personalities who are leaders among the peoples with whom Germany is currently at war: how they sound to a soul that perceives as a true expression of German feeling what the aforementioned Herman Grimm characterized shortly before the beginning of this century as a fundamental trait in the conception of the will to live of modern humanity. He wrote: "The solidarity of the moral convictions of all people is today the church that unites us all. We are searching more passionately than ever for a visible expression of this community. All truly serious aspirations of the masses know only this one goal. The separation of nations no longer exists here. We feel that there is no national difference in the ethical view of the world. We would all sacrifice ourselves for our fatherland; but we are far from longing for or bringing about the moment when this could happen through war. The assurance that peace is our most sacred wish is not a lie. 'Peace on earth and good will to men' pervades us. The inhabitants of our planet, all conceived as one, are filled with an all-pervasive sensitivity ... Humans as a totality recognize themselves as subject to an invisible court of justice enthroned as if in the clouds, before which not they consider it a misfortune to be allowed to stand, and to whose judicial process they seek to adapt their inner disputes. With anxious endeavor they seek their rights here. How anxious are the French of today to present the war against Germany, which they intend to wage, as a moral demand, the recognition of which they demand from other peoples, indeed from the Germans themselves. " Herman Grimm's life's work is so deeply rooted in German intellectual life that one can say: When he expresses such a thought, it is as if he is imbued with the awareness that he is speaking on behalf of his people. He uses words with which he can be certain: If the German people as a whole could express itself, it would use such words to express its attitude about how it perceives its own will within the totality of humanity. Herman Grimm does not mean to say that what exists of such an attitude in the present life of mankind can prevent wars. He speaks of the fact that he must have the thought that the French want a war against Germany. But Herman Grimm must have been convinced that this sentiment would prove its strength even through wars when he expressed thoughts such as those mentioned. Opponents of the German people currently speak as if they thought it had been proven that the only cause of this war was that the Germans lacked the understanding for such an attitude. As if the result of this war must be that the Germans are forced to understand such an attitude. As if authoritative minds among the Germans had set themselves the task of eradicating this attitude among their people.

[ 5 ] Some names of German personalities are now being pronounced in a hateful manner. Not only from writers of the day, but also from spiritual leaders of nations at war with Germany. Indeed, such voices are also coming from countries with which Germany is not at war. Among these German personalities, for example, is the historian of the German people, Heinrich von Treitschke. Germans who reflect on the scientific significance and the nature of Treitschke's personality express a wide variety of value judgments about him. From which points of view these judgments are made, whether they are justified or unjustified, is not important at this moment; the voices of the opponents of the German essence are based on a completely different point of view. These opponents want to see in Treitschke a personality who had such an effect on the present German race that at present the German people consider themselves the most gifted of the peoples in all directions, who therefore want to force the others to subordinate themselves to their leadership, and who place the attainment of power above all right. If Treitschke were still alive, and if he heard the judgments of the opponents of the German essence about his person, he could remember words that he wrote down in 1861 as the expression of his deepest feelings in the treatise on "Freedom". There he spoke out about those people who immediately set a limit to their respect and tolerance of other people's opinions when they encounter something in such opinions that they do not like. According to Treitschke, thought is veiled by passion in such people, and he says that as long as such a way of putting the phrase born of passion in the place of judgment still lives, "so long does the fanatical spirit of those old zealots still live in us, even if in a milder form, who mentioned foreign opinions only to prove that their originators had acquired just claims to the pit of hell". A man who, as a Frenchman among Frenchmen, as an Italian among Italians, would have had the same effect as Treitschke as a German among Germans: he would not have appeared to the Germans as a seducer of the French or Italians. Treitschke was a historian and politician who gave all his judgments a sharp, effective character from a strong, decisive feeling. The judgments he made about the Germans out of love for his people also had such an imprint. But all these judgments were borne by the feeling that not only his soul spoke in this way, but also the course of German history. At the end of the preface to the fifth part of his "German History in the Nineteenth Century" are the words: "As surely as man only understands what he loves, just as surely can only a strong heart, which feels the fate of the fatherland as suffering and happiness experienced by itself, give the historical narrative its inner truth. In this power of the heart, and not only in the perfect form, lies the greatness of the historians of antiquity". Some of the judgments that Treitschke made about what the German people experienced at the hands of other peoples sound like harsh condemnations of these other peoples. How Treitschke's statements in this direction are to be understood can only be recognized by those who look at the harshness of the judgments with which Treitschke often judges what he finds reprehensible within his own people. Treitschke had the deepest love for his people, which was a noble fire in his soul; but he believed that there was no harm in judging most harshly where one loves most. It is conceivable that enemies of the German people could be found who would compile a collection of sayings from Treitschke's works, then take from these sayings the color of love that they have in Treitschke, and whitewash them with their color of hatred: they could thereby make weapons of words against the German people. Nor would these weapons of words be any worse than those with which they shoot at a distorted image of Treitschke in order to wound the German people. Herman Grimm, who appreciated Treitschke and was well acquainted with him and his personal nature, said of him some time after his death: "Few have been so loved, but also so hated as he. "Grimm grouped Treitschke together with the German history teachers Curtius and Ranke to form a trinity of German teachers, about whom he said: "They were friendly and confidential in their dealings. They sought to encourage their listeners. They recognized merit where they encountered it. They did not seek to suppress their opponents. They had no party and no party comrades. They spoke their minds. There was something exemplary in their demeanor. They saw science as the highest flowering of the German spirit. They stood up for its dignity. There is a detailed review of Treitschke's "German History" by Herman Grimm. Anyone who reads it must come to the conclusion that Herman Grimm counted Treitschke among those who thought no differently than he did about the relationship that the German people wanted to have with other peoples.

[ 6 ] Whoever from enemy territory vilifies a German personality such as lived in Treitschke and brands him as a seducer of the younger generation, lacks a judgment of how a German who felt "the fate of the fatherland as suffering and happiness experienced by himself" had to speak to Germans who, in order to understand their own history, must look to experiences in the past, which Herman Grimm (in his book on Michelangelo, 16. For thirty years Germany, which as a nation of its own was unable to make the difference, was the battleground for the peoples surrounding us, and after the foreigners, who thus fought on our soil, finally made peace, the old indeterminate state returned." In Herman Grimm's book on Goethe, the following is written about these experiences in the same context: "the Thirty Years' War, this terrible disease brought to us from outside and artificially nourished", caused "all the young shoots of our further development to wither and die". How little time had passed since the German people had freed themselves from the effects of the suffering that Europe had brought them through the Thirty Years' War when, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the other fateful experience occurred, which coincided with a blossoming of German intellectual life. Were these the words of a man in whose heart the suffering of his people resounded "like suffering he had experienced himself", or were they the words of a popular seducer with which Treitschke spoke of the spirits whose work coincided with Germany's fateful experience at the beginning of the nineteenth century? He spoke of these spirits as follows: "They guarded the very essence of our people, the sacred fire of idealism, and it is primarily thanks to them that there was still a Germany when the German Empire had disappeared, that the Germans were still allowed to believe in themselves, in the immortality of the German essence, in the midst of hardship and servitude. Our political freedom and the independence of the German state emerged from the development of the free personality." Do the opponents of the German essence demand that Treitschke should have said that history teaches that the Germans "may believe in the immortality of the German essence" because they can be convinced for all the past and future that the French, English, Italians and Russians have never fought and will never fight for anything other than the "right and freedom" of the peoples? Should the other Germans, who are currently being called Germany's seducers, give the Germans the following advice: do not rely on what has brought you "justice and freedom" in hard wars; you will have "justice and freedom" because the sense of "justice and freedom of the people" shines brightly among those who surround you? You need not believe that you can think of your "right as a people" in any other way than in terms of what the peoples who surround you consider you entitled to. You must never call your "freedom as a people" anything other than what these peoples will show you by their behavior that you are "free as a people"?

[ 7 ] The author of this pamphlet would like to express the roots of the feelings that the members of "Europe's center" have in the current war. The facts he wishes to discuss are, in their general outline, certainly known to every reader. It is not the author's intention to speak in this direction about what is still unknown. He merely wishes to point out certain connections between what has long been known.

[ 8 ] If opponents of the German people were to read this little pamphlet, they would quite understandably say: "Thus speaks a German who naturally cannot understand the views of other peoples. Those who judge in this way do not realize that the ways in which the author of this reflection seeks to discuss the origins of this war are quite independent of how much he understands or does not understand about the nature of a non-German people. He wants to speak in such a way that, if the reasons he puts forward for his assertion are any good, his thoughts could be correct even if he were the pure fool with regard to an understanding of the nature and value of non-German peoples, insofar as they are supposed to be closed to a German. If, for example, he refers to what a Frenchman says about the war intentions of the French, and forms a judgment on this as to the origin of the war, this judgment could be correct, even if a Frenchman believed he had to deny any understanding of French peculiarity. When he passes judgment on the English political ideal, it is not a question of how the Englishman thinks or feels about himself, but of the actions in which this political ideal is lived out, and what the German in particular experiences through these actions. However, the author is convinced that there is no reason to judge the understanding he has for this or that non-German nationality in this little book.

[ 9 ] The author of this pamphlet believes that he can say what he, as a German, is allowed to say about the feeling of "Central Europe", because he spent the first three decades of his life in Austria, where he lived as an Austrian German by descent, ethnicity and upbringing; and he was allowed to work in Germany for the other - almost as long - period of this life.

[ 10 ] Perhaps some, who know one or the other of the author's writings, will seek "higher points of view" in the following remarks from someone who stands on the standpoint of spiritual science, as it is meant in these writings, than he finds them. In particular, those who expect to find something here about how the current events of war can be judged "on the basis of the eternal, highest truths of all being and life" will be dissatisfied. To such "disappointed ones", who will perhaps be found among the author's friends, he would like to say that the "highest eternal truths" naturally apply everywhere, including to the present events, but that this consideration was not undertaken with the intention of showing how one can bear witness to these "higher truths" with reference to these events, but rather with the intention of speaking of these events themselves. ^{1The author hopes to be able to provide more information about the present time and the peoples of Europe in a second booklet soon. The thoughts set down here are drawn from lectures which the author has given in several places in recent months.}

[ 11 ] Anyone who has allowed Fichte's way of thinking to take effect on him will subsequently feel that he has absorbed something into his soul that has a completely different effect than the ideas and words of this thinker. These ideas and words are transformed in the soul. They become a force that is much more than the memory of what Fichte directly received. A force that has something of the nature of living beings. It grows in the soul. And this feels in it a never-ending tonic. If one feels the peculiarity of Fichte in this way, one can never separate from this feeling the idea of the intimate beingness with which the German soul has spoken through Fichte. What one thinks of Fichte's world view is irrelevant. It is not the content, it is the power by which this world-view is created. You can feel it. Whoever wants to follow Fichte as a thinker must enter seemingly cold realms of ideas. Into areas where the power of thought must reject many things that are otherwise dear to it in order to find it possible for a person to relate to the world in the way that Fichte did. But if one follows Fichte in this way, then one feels how the power that flowed in his thinking flowed into the life-giving words with which he sought to inspire his people to worldly action in fateful times. The warmth in Fichte's "Speeches to the German Nation" is one with the light that shone for him in his energetic work of thought. And the combination of this light with this warmth appears in Fichte's personality as that which makes him one of the most genuine embodiments of the German essence. This German essence first had to make Fichte the thinker he was before it could speak through him in the forceful "Speeches to the Nation". But this German essence, having created such a thinker as Fichte, could not speak to the nation in any other way than it did in these speeches. Again, it is less important what Fichte said in these speeches than how Germanity presented itself to the consciousness of the people through them. A thinker whose world view is far removed from Fichte's train of thought, Robert Zimmermann, must speak the words: "As long as a heart beats in Germany that is capable of feeling the ignominy of foreign domination, the memory of the brave man will live on who, in the moment of deepest humiliation, ... in the midst of French-occupied Berlin, before the eyes and ears of the enemy, among spies and pretenders, to rebuild the strength of the German people, which had been bent from without by the sword, from within by the spirit, and at the very moment when the political existence of the same seemed to have been destroyed forever, undertook to recreate it in future generations through the enthusiastic idea of general education."

[ 12 ] There is no need to evoke sentimental feelings when describing the last hours of the thinker's life in order to characterize the way in which Fichte is connected with the deepest essence of being German. - Fichte's wife, who was not only truly worthy of him, but who was fully equal to his greatness, had spent five months on military hospital duty under the most difficult conditions and caught hospital fever in the process. His wife recovered. Fichte himself succumbed to the disease and died. The son described the manner of Fichte's death. The last news that the dying man received was that brought by his son of Blücher's crossing of the Rhine, of the advance of the allies against the French enemy. The thinker's soul, which had slipped away from his body, lived entirely in the heartfelt joy of these events; and when the dying man's earlier icy, sharp thinking turned into feverish fantasies, he felt himself to be in the midst of the fighting. How the image of the philosopher stands before the soul, who - even into the feverish fantasies that already clouded his consciousness - is like the manifesting essence of the will and activity of his people! And how, in Fichte, the German philosopher is one with every vital impulse of the whole human being. The Son hands the dying man a medicine. The latter gently pushes back what he has been given; he feels completely at one with the world-historical activity of his people. Feeling this way, he concludes his life with the words: I need no medicine; I feel that I am recovered. He was "recovered" in the feeling of experiencing the elevation of the German essence in his soul.

[ 13 ] One may draw the strength to speak about the German essence from looking at Fichte's personality. For his endeavor was to make this essence active as an effective force right down to the sources of its character. And it is clear from an examination of his personality that he felt his own intellectual work to be connected with the deepest roots of the German essence. However, he sought these roots himself in the reasons of the spiritual being, which he saw behind all external world activity accessible to the senses. He could not conceive of German activity without a connection between this activity and the spirituality that illuminates and warms the world. He saw the essence of Germanness in the springing forth of the life expressions of the people from the primordial source of the originally spiritual living. And what he himself understood as a worldview that emerges from this primordial source in the sense of the German way, he expressed himself thus: "It sees time and eternity and infinity - this worldview - in its emergence from the appearance and becoming visible of that One, which is in itself absolutely invisible, and is only grasped, correctly grasped, in this invisibility." - "All persistent existence that appears as non-spiritual life is only an empty shadow cast by vision, often mediated by nothingness, in contrast with which and through the recognition of which, as often mediated nothingness, vision itself should rise to the recognition of its own nothingness and to the recognition of the invisible as the only true one."

[ 14 ] In his "Speeches to the German Nation", Fichte seeks to grasp all truly German expressions of life from the source of spiritual life and to receive the words with which he speaks of these expressions of life from this source himself. - One will perhaps stop with special feelings at a passage of these "speeches" when one has imbued oneself with the feeling from the tone and intimacy of them: How this man stands there with his whole soul in the contemplation of the spiritual essence of the world! How is this being inside the spiritual world with his soul as direct a reality for him as being inside the material world through the senses is for the outer man! One may think whatever one likes about the characterization of his time, as Fichte develops it in the "Speeches"; when one hears of this characterization through his words, it cannot matter whether one agrees or disagrees with what is said, but rather what magic touch of the human way of thinking one feels. - Fichte speaks of the time which he would like to help bring about. He uses a comparison. And it is this comparison in which one's feelings are held in an implied sense. He says: "Time seems to me like an empty shadow, standing and lamenting over its corpse, from which an army of diseases has just driven it out, unable to tear its gaze away from the once so beloved shell, and desperately trying all means to get back into the dwelling of the plagues. It is true that the invigorating airs of the other world, into which the secluded one has entered, have already taken her in, and surround her with warm breaths of love; it is true that the secret voices of the sisters are already greeting her joyfully and welcoming her; it is true that it is already stirring and expanding in all directions within her to develop the more glorious form into which she is to grow: but as yet she has no feeling for these airs, or hearing for these voices, or if she had, she is absorbed in pain over her loss, with which she believes she has lost herself at the same time. "

[ 15 ] The question is obvious: how is a soul in tune that is driven to such a comparison when contemplating time and the change of times? Fichte is talking about the existence of the human soul after its separation from the body through death, just as a person would otherwise talk about a material process that takes place before his senses. Certainly, Fichte uses a comparison. And a comparison must not be exploited in such a way that one wants to prove something through it for a meaningful view of the person who expresses the comparison. But the comparison points to an idea that lives in the soul of the person making the comparison with regard to an object or process. Here with regard to the experience of the human soul after death. Without wishing to claim anything about how Fichte would have expressed himself about the validity of such an idea if he had done so in the context of his worldview, one can nevertheless visualize this idea. Fichte speaks of the human soul as a being so independent of the body that in death this being separates itself from the corporeal and is able to look consciously at the separated body as man in the world of the senses looks at an object or process with his eyes. In addition to this looking at the abandoned body, there is also an indication of the new environment into which the soul enters when it has separated from the body. The newer form of spiritual science, which speaks about these things on the basis of certain experiences of the soul, may find something significant in this Fichtean comparison. What this spiritual science strives for is a knowledge of the spiritual worlds entirely in the sense of the kind of knowledge that is recognized as justified by the newer natural science of the natural world. It is true that this form of spiritual science is currently still regarded by many as a reverie, as wild fantasy; but this was also the case for a long time with the view of the earth's orbit around the sun, which contradicts the senses. It is essential that this spiritual science has a real recognizability of the spiritual world as its basis. A recognizability which is not based on imaginary concepts, but on real experiences of the human soul. Just as he cannot know anything about the properties of hydrogen who only knows water in which hydrogen is contained, so he cannot know anything about the true nature of the human soul who only experiences it as it is in connection with the body. But spiritual science leads to the spiritual-soul detaching itself from the physical-bodily for its own perception, just as hydrogen can be detached from water by the methods of the chemist. Such detachment of the soul does not occur through false mystical fantasy, but through a strictly healthy, intensified inner experience of certain soul faculties which are always present in every soul, but which remain unnoticed and unconsidered in ordinary life and in ordinary science. Through such strengthening and enlivening of soul powers, the human soul can come to an inner experience in which it sees a spiritual world, just as it sees the material world with its senses. It then indeed knows itself to be "outside the connection with the body" and equipped with what one can call - to use Goethean expressions - "spiritual eyes" and "spiritual ears". Spiritual science does not speak of these things in a false mystical sense, but in such a way that the progression from the ordinary contemplation of the sense world to the contemplation of the spiritual world becomes a certain process inherent in the essence of human nature, which one must, however, bring about through one's own inner experience, through a certain directed self-activation of the soul. But even with regard to this, spiritual science can feel in harmony with Fichte. When he presented his "Doctrine" to an audience in the autumn of 1813 as the mature fruit of his spiritual striving, he began by saying the following: "This doctrine presupposes a completely new inner sensory tool, through which a new world is given that does not exist for the ordinary person." By this Fichte does not mean an "organ" that is only available to "exquisite", not "ordinary people", but an "organ" that everyone can acquire, but which does not come to consciousness for the ordinary cognition and perception of man. With such an "organ", man is now really in a spiritual world and is able to speak about life in this world as if through his senses about material processes. Whoever puts himself in this position, it becomes natural for him to speak about the life of the soul, as happens in the Fichtean comparison cited. Fichte does not make the comparison out of a general belief, but through an experienced standing within the spiritual world. One must feel in Fichte a personality which, in every vital impulse, consciously feels itself to be at one with the workings of a spiritual world, and which sees itself standing within this world as the sensory man does in the material world. Fichte clearly states that this is the mood of the soul which he owes to the German fundamental trait of his world view. He says: "The true philosophy that has come to an end in itself and has truly penetrated beyond appearance to its core ... proceeds from the one, pure, divine life - as life itself, which it also remains for all eternity, and therein always one, but not as of this or that life; and it sees how only in the appearance of this life infinitely continues to close and open again, and only according to this law does it come to a being, and to a something at all. It gives rise to being, which that (Fichte here means the un-German philosophy) allows to be predetermined. And so this philosophy (Fichte means the one he professes) is really only German, i.e. original; and conversely, if someone were only a true German, he would not be able to philosophize otherwise than in this way."

[ 16 ] It would be wrong to cite these words of Fichte to characterize the mood of his soul without also recalling the others that he spoke in the same context: "Whatever believes in the spirituality and freedom of this spirituality and wants the eternal development of this spirituality through freedom, wherever it is born and in whatever language it speaks, is of our race, it belongs to us and it will join us." - At the time when Fichte saw the German people threatened by Western foreign domination, he felt the need to confess that he perceived the essential nature of his world view as a gift bestowed on him by the German national spirit. And he expressed unreservedly that this feeling had led him to recognize the tasks that he could assign to the German people within the development of humanity in the sense that the German could derive his right and his calling for everything that he intended and accomplished in the context of the people from the recognition of these tasks. That in this knowledge he may seek the source from which flows the strength to intervene as a German with his own in this development.

[ 17 ] Whoever has absorbed Fichte's mood of soul into the life of his own soul at the present time will find in this thinker's worldview a force that will not allow him to stop at this worldview. It will lead him in his striving for spirituality to a point of view that shows the connections of man with the world in a different way than Fichte presented them. He will be able to gain from Fichte the ability to see the world differently than Fichte saw it. And he will experience this way of striving in a Fichtean way as an intimate kinship with this thinker. Such a person will certainly also count the educational plan that Fichte characterized in his "Speeches to the German Nation" as the one that seemed salutary to him as one of the ideals that he absolutely wants to advocate. And so it is with much of what Fichte wanted to emphasize as the content of his views. Like a spring still flowing in full freshness, however, the mood of the soul works, which communicates itself from him to the soul that can come together with him. His world view strives for the strongest tension of the powers of thought that the soul can find within itself in order to discover in the human being that which, as a "higher human being", shows his essence in connection with the spiritual basis of the world that lies beyond all sensory experience. Certainly, this is the nature of any worldview that does not seek to see the foundation of all being in the sensory world itself. But Fichte's peculiarity lies in the power that he wants to give to thought from the depths of the human being. So that this thought finds through itself the firmness that gives it weight in the spiritual world. A weight that sustains it in the realms of the soul's life, in which the soul can feel the eternity of its experience, indeed can will it in such a way that this willing may know itself to be connected with the eternal spiritual life.

[ 18 ] So Fichte strives for "pure humanity" in his worldview. In this striving, he can know himself to be one with all humanity, wherever and however it appears on earth. And at a fateful time, Fichte uttered the words: "If only someone were a true German, he would not be able to philosophize in any other way than this." And through everything he says in the "Speeches to the German Nation", this expansion of thought resounds like a keynote: If only someone is a true German, he will find the way out of his Germanness on which an understanding of all human reality can mature. For Fichte does not think that he may only see the world view in the light of this thought. Because he is a thinker, he gives as an example what kind of thinker he had to become through his Germanness. But he is of the opinion that this basic essence of Germanness must express itself in every German, wherever he has his place in life.

[ 19 ] The right to speak about Germanness in the way that Fichte did is something that the passion of war wants to deny the Germans. Personalities from countries at war with the Germans, who occupy a high position in the intellectual life of these countries, also speak out of this passion. Philosophers use the power of their thinking to substantiate - in accordance with the opinion of the day - the judgment that the German nation itself has become alienated from the will that lived in personalities of the kind of Fichte, and has fallen into what is described by the popular word "barbarism". And if the German expresses the thought that this nationality has produced people of this kind, then the expression of such a thought is probably described as highly superfluous. For one might well reply that there is no question of all this. That the Germans have had Goethe, Fichte, Schiller and so on in their midst is to be appreciated; but their spirit does not speak from what the Germans accomplish in the present. And so the passionate critics of the German essence will probably even be able to find the words: Why should not dreamers still be found today out of the dreamy nature of the Germans - which we have always correctly assessed - who respond to the words with which we confront what the German weapons do to us with a characterization of the German nature that their Fichte gave them in a past lost to them; and which characterization, however, he himself would probably change if he saw what the German nature is like today.

[ 20 ] Times will come that will gain a calm judgment as to whether the condemnation of German will spoken out of passion does not correspond to blind intoxication, which in its reality value equates itself to dream, and whether the "reverie" that still speaks in Fichte's manner about contemporary German will does not mean that waking state that does not interpose between itself and events the passions hostile to reality that put judgment to sleep.

[ 21] From no other spirit than that in whose name Fichte spoke can the will appear to the German which the German people must develop in the struggle which the enemies of Germany have forced upon them. As in a vast fortress, the enemies hold the body enclosed, which is the expression of what Fichte characterized as the German spirit. That spirit for which the German warrior feels himself to be a fighter, whether he does so in conscious realization of this spirit or whether he engages in battle out of the subconscious forces of his soul.

[ 22 ] "Who wanted this war?" was a question put to the Germans by many of their opponents, who assumed as a matter of course that the Germans had wanted it. But such a question cannot be answered with passion. Neither should the judgment that only wants to draw conclusions from the facts that preceded the war in the very last days. What happened in this very last time is deeply rooted in the currents of European will impulses. And the answer to the above question can only be sought in the impulses that have long been opposed to Germanness.

[ 23 ] Only such impulses shall be pointed out here, which, according to their general nature, are so well known that it may seem completely superfluous to talk about them if one wants to say something about the causes of the present war. There are, however, two points of view from which the seemingly superfluous may appear desirable. The first arises when one considers that forming a judgment about important facts cannot only be a matter of knowing something, but of from what basis one forms the judgment. One is led to the second point of view when considering the impulses of peoples, if one wishes to recognize in what way they are rooted in the life of peoples. Insight into this nature gives rise to a sense of the strength with which these impulses live on in time and come into effect at a favorable moment.

[ 24 ] Ernest Renan is one of the leading minds of France in the second half of the nineteenth century. This author of a "Life of Jesus" and the "Apostles" wrote in a public letter during the war in 1870 to the German author of a "Life of Jesus", David Friedrich Strauss: "I was in the seminary at St. Sulpice, around the year 1843, when I began to get to know Germany through the writings of Goethe and Herder. I thought I was stepping into a temple, and from that moment on, everything that I had hitherto considered to be a splendor worthy of the deity only gave me the impression of withered and yellowed paper flowers." The Frenchman writes further in the same letter: "in Germany" one of the "most beautiful spiritual developments known to history has been taking place for a century, a development which, if I may venture the expression, has added a step to the depth and expansion of the human spirit, so that those who have remained untouched by this new development relate to those who have gone through it as one who knows only elementary mathematics relates to those who are versed in differential calculus". And in the same letter, this leading Frenchman clearly expresses what this Germany, whose intellectual life "everything that" he had "until then considered to be a splendor worthy of the deity, only made the impression of withered and yellowed paper flowers", had to expect from the French if it did not conclude the war at that time with a peace agreeable to Renan's compatriots. He writes: "The hour is solemn. There are two currents of opinion in France. The one judges thus: Let us put an end to this odious bargain as quickly as possible; let us cede everything, Alsace, Lorraine; let us sign the peace; but then hatred of death, preparations without rest, alliance with whom it meets, unlimited yielding to all Russian insolence; a single aim, a single mainspring for life: War of extermination against the Germanic race. Others say: let us save France's integrity, let us develop constitutional institutions, let us make amends for our mistakes, not by dreaming of revenge for a war in which we were the unjust aggressors, but by concluding an alliance with Germany and England, the effect of which will be to carry the farther along the path of free morality." Renan himself points out that France was the unjust aggressor in that war. And so it is not necessary to bring forward the easily provable historical fact that Germany had to wage that war in order to show the constant disturber of the peace of its work its limits. One can now disregard the extent to which Germany aspired to Alsace-Lorraine as a territory of related tribes; one need only emphasize the necessity in which Germany was placed by the fact that it could only obtain peace from the French if, with the Alsace-Lorraine territory, it deprived its neighbor of the possibility of disturbing this peace in the future as easily as it had often done before. This, however, was a stumbling block for the second current in France, of which Renan speaks; it was not this current that had any prospect of achieving its goal of "leading the world forward on the path of free morality", but the other, whose "only goal, only driving force" for life was: "the struggle for extermination against the Germanic race". There were people who thought they recognized signs in many things that had happened since the war of 1870 that it was possible to bridge the differences by peaceful means. Many voices with this tone have been heard in recent years. But the impulse directed against the German people lived on, and the driving force remained alive: "Alliance with whom it meets, unlimited compliance against all Russian insolence;... . The struggle for extermination against the Germanic race." It is from the same spirit that many a leading French mind is currently resounding again. Renan continues his consideration of the two currents in the French people described above with the words: "Germany will decide whether France will choose this or that policy; at the same time, it will decide the future of morality." This sentence really needs to be translated into German to be fully appreciated. It says: France has shown itself to be an unjust aggressor in the war; if Germany, after a victory over France, does not conclude a peace that leaves France unhindered in the position of becoming such an unjust aggressor again as soon as it pleases, then Germany is deciding against the morality of the future. What emerges from such a view for "hatred of death, preparations without rest, alliance with whom it meets, unlimited compliance against all Russian usurpations", what emerges for the "only driving force for life: Extermination struggle against the Germanic race", that and nothing else provides the basis for an answer to the question: "Who wanted this war?"

[ 25 ] Whether the "alliance" would be found was also answered by people who were able to grasp the impulses directed against Germanness even then, when Renan spoke out in the sense indicated. One man, Carl Vogt, who sought a glimpse into the future of Europe from the present, wrote during the war of 1870: "It is possible that even if the territory is spared, France will seize the opportunity offered to wipe the slate clean; it is probable that if it does not annex, it will have enough to do with its internal affairs and will think all the less of another war, as a powerful current of peace must take hold in the minds; it is certain that it will set aside every consideration if annexation should take place. What chance should the statesman now choose? - It is easy to see that the answer to this question also depends on one's view of the impending European conflicts. On its own, France will not dare to fight Germany again for a long time, the blows have been too important and thorough for that - but as soon as another enemy arises, it will be able to ask itself whether it is capable of taking sides and on whose side. - As for me now, I am not for a moment in doubt that a conflict between the Germanic and Slavic worlds is imminent ... and that Russia will take the lead on one side in it. This power is already preparing for the eventuality; the national-Russian press is spitting fire and flames against Germany The German press is already sounding its warning cries. A long time has elapsed since Russia rallied after the Crimean War, and it seems that Petersburg now finds it expedient to take up the Oriental question once more. If the Mediterranean was once to become, according to the more pompous than true expression, a 'French lake', Russia has the even more positive intention of turning the Black Sea into a Russian lake and the Sea of Marmara into a Russian pond. That Constantinople must become a Russian city ... is a fixed goal of 'Russian policy', which finds its 'lever of support' in 'Pansiavism'." (Carl Vogt's Political Letters. Biel, 1870.) To these judgments of Carl Vogt about what he foresees for Europe could be added those of no less a number of other personalities, which are derived from the observation of European volitions. They would make what is to be pointed out here more emphatic and yet speak of the same fact: that an observer of these trends would have to point to Eastern Europe as early as 1870 if he wanted to answer the question: Who, sooner or later, will want to wage war against Central Europe? And his gaze had to fall on France when he asked: Who will want to wage this war against Germany together with Russia? Vogt's voice is particularly relevant because in the letter in which he speaks in this way he says many unfriendly things about Germany. He certainly cannot be accused of being biased in favor of Germany. But his words are proof that the question: Who will want this war? was answered by the facts long before those causes took effect which Germany's opponents would so like to hear as an answer by raising the question: Who wanted this war? The fact that it took over forty years from then until the outbreak of war is not to France's credit

[ 26 ] In the Russian intellectual life of the nineteenth century, schools of thought emerge that bear the same face as the will to war that is currently being unleashed from the East against Central Europe. The extent to which those people are right who claim that the reference to such schools of thought is inappropriate can also be known by those who see such a reference as the right way to understand the events in question. What is usually called the "causes" of these events can certainly not be sought in such schools of thought of individual people - even those who are no longer alive today. With regard to these causes, those who will show that these causes lie with a number of people, to whom they will then point, will certainly meet with some approval. No objection should be made to this way of looking at the matter, nor should its full justification be denied. But another, no less justified, is the recognition of the forces and driving forces at work in historical development. The directions of thought pointed to here are not these driving forces; but these driving forces show themselves in and through the directions of thought. He who recognizes the directions of thought holds in his knowledge the entities lying in the forces of the people. Nor can it be objected that many people rightly claim that the schools of thought in question are no longer alive. What is alive in the East flared up in the souls of thinkers, formed itself then into thoughts and lives today - in a different form - in the will to war.

[ 27 ] What flared up there is the idea of the special mission of the Russian people. What is important is the way in which this idea is brought to bear. In it lives the belief that Western European spiritual life has entered a state of senility, of decline, and that the Russian national spirit is called upon to bring about a complete renewal, a rejuvenation of this spiritual life. This idea of rejuvenation develops into the opinion that all historical development in the future coincides with the mission of the Russian people. As early as the first half of the nineteenth century, Khomiakov developed this idea into a comprehensive body of doctrine. This doctrinal structure can be found in a work that was only published after his death. It is based on the belief that the development of the Western European spirit was never fundamentally designed to find the path to true humanity. And that the Russian people must first find this path. Khomiakov sees this Western European spiritual development in his way. According to this view, the Roman essence first flowed into it. This was never able to reveal inner humanity in the deeds of the world. On the contrary, it imposed the forms of external human statutes on the human inner being, and it thought in an intellectual-materialistic way what should be grasped in the inner weaving of the soul. According to Khomiakov, this outwardness in grasping life continued in the Christianity of the Western European peoples. Their Christianity lived in the head, not in the innermost part of the soul. According to Khomiakov's belief, what Western Europe now has as a spiritual life, the modern "barbarians" have made from Romanism and Christianity - in their own way externalizing again what should live inwardly. Internalization would have to be brought about by the Russian people according to the higher mission incorporated into them by the spiritual world. - In such a doctrinal edifice rumble sentiments whose complete interpretation required a detailed characterization of the Russian national soul. Such a characterization would have to point to forces that lie within this national soul, and which will one day cause it to adapt for itself out of its inner strength that which prevails in Western European spiritual life and which will only then give the Russian people what it can mature into in the course of history. What the other peoples will make fruitful for themselves from the result of this maturing of the Russian people, the Russian people should leave to these peoples. Otherwise it might fall into the sad misunderstanding of regarding a task which it has to fulfill for itself as a world task, and thus deprive it of its most essential aspect. - Since it is a question of the rumbling of feelings about such a misunderstood task, the very idea in question was all too often combined in the minds in which it appeared with political schools of thought which prove that in these minds this idea is the expression of the same driving forces which in other people from the East laid the seed for the present will to war. Even if it can be said of the amiable, poetically high-minded Khomiakov on the one hand that he expected the fulfillment of Russia's mission from a peaceful current of thought, it must also be remembered that in his soul this expectation coincided with what Russia would like to achieve as a belligerent opponent of Europe. For one would certainly not be doing him an injustice if one were to say that he took part in the Turkish War as a volunteer hussar in 1829 because he perceived in what Russia was doing at the time the first glimmerings of its world-historical mission. - What often rumbled in the amiable Khomiakov in poetic transfiguration; it continued to rumble; and in a book Danilevsky's "Russia and Europe", which towards the end of the nineteenth century was regarded by a number of personalities as a gospel about the task of Russia, the driving forces are expressed which thought the "spiritual task of the Russian people" merged into complete unity with a far-reaching will to conquer. One need only look at the expression that this fusion of spiritual will with the intention to attack the whole world has found, and one will find clear symptoms of what initially mattered to many of those who wanted to derive Russia's mission from the nature of the spiritual world. This mission is brought together with the conquest of Constantinople, and it is demanded of the will, which is thus shown its direction, that it should, without feeling "love and hatred", blunt itself against all feeling towards "Reds or Whites, towards demagogues or despots, towards legitimate or revolutionaries, towards Germans, French, English or Italians...", that it should regard as "true allies" only those who support Russia in its endeavors. It is said that what Russia must want is particularly pernicious, "in Europe the balance of political forces", and that "every violation of this balance" must be encouraged, "from whatever side it may come". "It is incumbent on us to reject any alliance with European interests forever".

[ 28 ] The position taken by the subtle Russian philosopher Wladimir Solowieff towards these schools of thought and sentiment is particularly characteristic. Solowieff can be regarded as one of the most important embodiments of Russian intellectuality. Beautiful philosophical power, noble spiritual insight and mystical depth live in his works. However, he too had long been imbued with the idea of the high mission of Russianness that was rumbling in the minds of his compatriots. This idea also found its way into his mind, together with the other idea of the staleness of Western Europe. For him, the reason why Western Europe had not been able to help the world to reveal the fullest inner humanity was that this Western Europe had expected salvation from the development of man's inherent powers. But Solowieff could only see in such striving out of man's own powers an unspiritual aberration, from which mankind must be redeemed by the fact that, without human intervention, spiritual power poured down to earth from other worlds by a miracle and that the people chosen to receive this power would become the savior of erring mankind. In the nature of the Russian people he saw that which was prepared to receive such extra-human power and therefore to be the savior of true humanity. Solowieff's intertwining with the Russian essence meant that the rumbling of the Russian ideal in his soul could for a time look benevolently at others who were likewise possessed by this rumbling. But this could only be until his soul, filled with genuine idealism, awoke to the feeling that this rumbling was based on the misunderstood conception of a future ideal for the Russian people's own development. He made the discovery that many others did not speak of the ideal which the Russian people were striving to attain for their own salvation, but that they themselves made the Russian people, as it is at present, into an idol. And through this discovery Solowieff became the harshest critic of those who, under the banner of a mission of the Russian people, introduced the aggressor instincts directed against Western Europe into the will of the nation as salutary driving forces of distant spiritual development. From the teachings of Danilevsky's book "Russia and Europe", Solowieff stared at the question: Why must Europe look with apprehension at what is taking place within Russia's borders? And in the soul of the Russian, this question takes the form: "Why doesn't Europe love us?" And Solowieff, who saw the Russian aggressor instincts in the guise of the ideas of Russia's world-historical mission particularly expressed in Danilewsky's book, found the answer to this question in his own way in a review of this book (1888). Danilevsky had said that "Europe fears us as the new and higher type of culture, which is called upon to replace the antiquity of the Romano-Germanic civilization". Solowieff cites this as Danilewsky's belief. And to this he replies: "Nevertheless, both the content of Danilevsky's book and his later concessions and those of his like-minded friend - meaning Strakhov, who advocated Danilevsky's ideas after his death - lead to a different answer: Europe looks at us with hostility and fear, because dark and unclear elementary forces live in the Russian people, because its spiritual and cultural powers are poor and insufficient, but its claims are evident and sharply defined. The cries of what the Russian people want as a nation, that they want to destroy Turkey and Austria, to defeat Germany, to seize Constantinople and, if possible, India as well, are ringing out to Europe. And when we are asked what we want to do to make mankind happy in place of what we have torn and destroyed, what spiritual and cultural rejuvenation we want to bring to world development, then we must either remain silent or babble meaningless phrases. And if Danilevsky's bitter confession that Russia is beginning to fall ill is justified, then instead of asking the question: Why doesn't Europe love us? we should rather be concerned with another question, one that is closer and more important to us: Why and why are we ill? Physically, Russia is still quite strong, as was shown in the last Russian war; so our suffering is moral. According to the words of an old writer, we are burdened by the sins hidden in the character of the people and which we are not aware of - and so it is above all necessary to bring these up into the light of bright consciousness. As long as we are spiritually bound and paralyzed, all our elementary instincts must only serve to harm us. The essential, indeed the only essential question for true patriotism is not the question of strength and vocation, but of the sins of Russia."

[ 29 ] If one wants to speak of effective forces in the will of the aggressors of this East, one will have to point to these directions of will emerging in Eastern Europe; what has been expressed by Tolstoy represents ineffective forces.

[ 30 ] This doctrine of the "mission of Russia" can be illuminated by considering alongside it an example of the way in which such a mission of a people is perceived within the intellectual life which the speakers of this mission look down upon as one condemned to senility. Schiller was particularly close to Fichte in his intellectual life when, in his "Letters Concerning the Aesthetic Education of Man", he searched for an outlook that would allow man to see the "higher", the "true man" within himself. If we allow ourselves to enter into the mood of the soul that prevails in Schiller's aesthetic letters, we will find in them a culmination of German feeling. Schiller is of the opinion that man can become unfree on two sides in his life. He is unfree when he confronts the world in such a way that he allows things to affect him only through the necessity of the senses; then the world of the senses dominates him and his spirituality is subordinated to it. But even if man obeys only the necessity that rules his reason, he is unfree. Reason has its own demands, and man cannot experience the free reign of his will in the rigid necessity of reason if he submits to these demands. Through them he lives in a spiritual way, but spirituality subjugates the life of the senses. Man becomes free when he can experience that which affects the senses in such a way that a spiritual is revealed in the sensual, and when he experiences the spiritual itself in such a way that it can be as pleasing to him as the sensually effective. This is the case when man confronts the work of art, when the sensory impression becomes spiritual enjoyment, when the spiritually experienced, transfiguring the sensory impression, is felt. In this way, the human being becomes "fully human". We will not go into the many perspectives that arise from this type of conception here. Only one thing should be pointed out, which is the aim of this Schillerian view. It seeks one of the ways in which man finds the "higher man" within himself through his relationship to the world. This path is sought from the contemplation of the human being. One only really has to place alongside this way of thinking, which wants to speak humanly with man himself in man, the other way, which believes that the Russian national way is the one which, in contrast to other national ways, must lead the world to true humanity.

[ 31 ] Fichte seeks to characterize this way of thinking, which lies in the essence of German sentiment, in his "Speeches to the German Nation" with the words: "There are peoples who, by retaining their own peculiarity and wishing to have it honored, also concede their own to other peoples, and grant and allow them theirs; to these the Germans undoubtedly belong, and this trait is so deeply rooted in their entire past and present world life that they are very often, in order to be just, both against their contemporaneous foreign countries and against antiquity, unjust against themselves. There are other peoples, on the other hand, to whom their self, closely knit into itself, never allows them the freedom to separate themselves from the cold and calm contemplation of the foreign, and who are therefore compelled to believe that there is only one possible way of existing as an educated man, and that this is always the one which some chance has thrown at them at this particular time; all other men in the world have no other destiny than to become as they are, and they would have to render them the greatest thanks if they would take the trouble to educate them thus. Between peoples of the first kind there is an interaction of mutual education and upbringing that is highly beneficial to the education of man in general, and an interpenetration in which each, with the good will of the other, nevertheless remains the same as itself. Peoples of the second kind are not able to form anything, for they are not able to touch anything in its existing being; they only want to destroy everything that exists and produce an empty place outside themselves everywhere, in which they can only ever repeat their own form; even their initial seeming to enter into foreign customs is only the good-natured condescension of the educator to the now still weak but hopeful apprentice; even the forms of the perfected pre-world do not please them until they have clothed them in their robes, and they would, if they could, rouse them from their graves to educate them after their own fashion. " Thus Fichte judges some national characteristics; but this judgment is immediately followed by a sentence that seeks to remove all coloring of national arrogance from this judgment: "Far be it from me to accuse any existing nation as a whole and without exception of such narrow-mindedness. Let us rather assume that even here those who do not express themselves are the better ones."

[ 32 ] These considerations are not intended to answer the question from such a mood of mind: Who wanted this war?", as some personalities of the countries at war with Central Europe do. They want to let the conditions of the events speak for themselves. The author of these observations asked the Russians whether they had wanted a war against Central Europe. - To him, what Renan predicted in 1870 seems to lead to a safer path than what is currently being judged by passion. It seems to him to be a path to the only area of judgment that can and should be entered into in the face of war by those who have ideas about which judgments of thought are superfluous and inappropriate when the weapons have to decide the fate of nations out of blood and death.

[ 33 ] It is certain that driving forces that push towards war can be forced into a life of peace by other forces until they have weakened themselves to such an extent that they become ineffective. And whoever has to suffer as a result of this effectiveness will endeavor to create these forces that maintain peace. The course of history shows that for years Germany has made this effort in the face of the forces of will flowing from the West and the East. Everything else that can be said with regard to the present war in the direction of France's and Russia's driving forces weighs less than the simple, obvious fact that these driving forces were sufficiently deeply rooted in the will of the two countries to defy everything that wanted to hold them down. Whoever states this fact does not necessarily have to be counted among those personalities who judge this or that people on the basis of a predetermined liking or dislike of this or that nation, which was of course quite understandable at the time. Contempt, hatred or the like need have nothing to do with such judgments. How one loves or dislikes such things, how one assesses them emotionally, is something quite different from stating the simple fact. It also has nothing to do with how one loves or does not love the French, how one values their spirit, if one believes to have reasons for the opinion that driving forces to be found in France are intertwined in the present war entanglements. What is said about such impulses existing among nations may be kept free from what falls within the sphere of accusation or recrimination in the ordinary sense.

[ 34 ] One will look in vain among the Germans for such driving forces as were bound to lead to the present war in a similar way to those characterized by Solowieff among the Russians and foretold by Renan for the French. The Germans could foresee that this war would one day be waged against them. It was their duty to prepare for it. What they did to fulfill this duty is called by their opponents the cultivation of their militarism.

[ 35 ] What the Germans have to accomplish for their own sake and in order to fulfill the tasks imposed on them by far-reaching historical necessities would have been possible for them to accomplish without this war, if these accomplishments were as agreeable to others as they were necessary. It did not at all depend on the Germans how the other peoples took up the fulfillment of the world-historical tasks that were added to the German material culture in recent times. The Germans were able to have the confidence that they could gain from the way in which their intellectual work was received by other peoples. For if one looks at the German way, one realizes that there is nothing in it which would have made it necessary for the German to bring to bear on the world what he has to accomplish in his present work in a different way from what has happened in his purely intellectual achievements.

[ 36 ] It is not necessary for the German himself to attempt to characterize the significance of the German way of thinking and intellectual achievement for mankind. He can, if he wishes to make judgments as to the significance of this type and achievement for non-German humanity, seek the answers from this non-German humanity. One may listen to the words of a personality who belongs to the leading figures in the field of the English language, to those of the great American orator, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his reflection on Goethe, he gives a characterization of the German way of thinking and intellectual achievement in its relation to the formation of the world.^{2Emerson's sentences are here translated from Hermann Grimm's translation. Cf. his book: Fifteen Essays.} He says: "One quality above all, which Goethe has in common with his whole nation, makes him an excellent phenomenon in the eyes of the French and English public: that everything in him is based only on inner truth. In England and America one respects talent, but one is satisfied when it works for or against a party of one's conviction. In France, people are delighted when they see brilliant thoughts, no matter where they go. In all these countries, however, talented men write as far as their gifts reach. If what they put forward stimulates the intelligent reader and contains nothing that offends good taste, it is considered sufficient. So many columns, so many pleasant and useful hours spent. The German mind possesses neither the French vivacity, nor the acute understanding of the English for the practical, nor, finally, the American way of entering into indefinite situations, but what it does possess is a certain probity which never stops at the outward appearance of things, but always comes back to the main question: "Where is it going?" The German public demands of a writer that he should stand above things and simply speak about them. Intellectual activity is present: so what does it stand for? What is the man's opinion? Whence? - whence has he got all these thoughts?" And at another point in this contemplation of Goethe, Emerson coined the words: "The deep seriousness with which they - Emerson means the men educated in Germany - pursue their studies puts them in a position to see through men who are far more gifted than themselves. For this reason, the terms of distinction used in higher conversation are all of German origin. While the English and French, who are distinguished for their acumen and erudition, regard their studies and their point of view with a certain superficiality, because their personal character is not too deeply connected with what they have grasped and with the way in which they express themselves about it, Goethe, the head and substance of the German nation, speaks, not because he has talent, but because the truth concentrates its rays in his soul and shines out of it. He is wise in the highest degree, even if his wisdom is often veiled by his talent. However excellent what he says is, he has something in mind that is even better. He has that fearsome independence which springs from intercourse with the truth. Listen to his words or turn away your ear: the fact remains as he said it."

[ 37 ] A few of Emerson's thoughts should be added, which will certainly be allowed to stand here; after all, an English-American spoke them about the Germans. "The Germans think for Europe ... The English see only the individual and do not know how to conceive of mankind as a whole according to higher laws ... The English do not realize the depth of the German spirit." Emerson knew the impact that German intellectual work could have on humanity.

[ 38 ] In the sentences quoted, Emerson speaks of the "vivacity of the French" and the "keen understanding of the English for the practical". If one wanted to continue in his sense with reference to the Russians, one could perhaps say: the German does not possess the Russian impulse to seek a mystical power for all their expressions of life, even for the practical ones, by which they justify themselves.

[ 39 ] And in these relations of the spirits of these peoples there is something which is quite similar to the antagonisms of war which are at present at work. In the motive power which led from the French to the war with Germany, their temperament is at work, what Emerson means by their vivacity. In this temperament lies the mysterious power which expresses itself so effervescently in Renan's words: "Hatred of death, preparations without rest, alliance with whom it meets." The fact that France was armed before the war with an army almost as large as Germany's, but more than one and a half times as large in relation to its population, is a result of this mysterious power, over which the phrase "German militarism" is intended to be drawn as a concealing veil. - In Russia's will to war, mystical faith is still at work even where it finds only instinctive expression. In order to characterize the contrasts which are at work today between the French and Russians on the one hand, and the Germans on the other, it will be necessary to observe the moods of the souls. - The war antagonism between the British and the Germans, on the other hand, is such that the Germans see themselves confronted only by impulses "sharpened for practical purposes". The ideal of English policy is, in accordance with the nature of the country, entirely geared to practical aims. To emphasize: in accordance with the nature of the country. What its inhabitants reveal of this nature in their behavior is itself an effect of this nature, but not the basis of the English political ideal. The pursuit of this ideal has created in the Briton the habit of accepting as the guiding principle of this pursuit that which he deems to be in accordance with his personal interests in life. The existence of such a guiding principle is not contradicted by the fact that it asserts itself in social life as a definite rule to be strictly obeyed if one wishes to have a way of life. Nor does it contradict the fact that the guiding principle is regarded as something quite different from what it is. All this only applies to the Briton in so far as he is integrated into the world of his political ideal. And it is through this that a war antagonism is created between England and Germany.

[ 40 ] For the time must come when, in the spiritual realm, the world view of the German being, which is based on the spiritual, will have to conquer its world standing - of course only through a battle of wits - against the world view of the German being, which in Mill, Spencer, the pragmatist Schiller, in Locke and Huxley and others has its representatives from the English essence: for this the fact of the present war may be a reminder. But this has nothing directly to do with this war.

[ 41 ] The guiding principle for England's political ideal was in Goethe's mind when he, who counted Shakespeare among the spirits who exerted the greatest influence on him, spoke the words: "But while the Germans torment themselves with the solution of philosophical problems, the English laugh at us with their great practical intellect and win the world. Every one knows their declamations against the slave trade, and, while they would have us know what humane maxims underlie such proceedings, it is now discovered that the true motive is a real object, without which, as is well known, the English never do it, and which ought to have been known." - Goethe says of Byron, who became the model for Euphorion in the second part of Faust: "Byron is to be regarded as a man, as an Englishman and as a great talent. His good qualities are to be derived chiefly from man; his bad ones, that he was an Englishman ... was ... All Englishmen are as such without real reflection; distraction and party spirit do not allow them to attain a calm education. But they are great as practical men."

[ 42 ] These Goethean judgments also do not apply to the Englishman as such, but only to that which reveals itself as the "total being of England" when this total being reveals itself as the bearer of its political ideal.

[ 43 ] The aforementioned political ideal has developed the habit of setting aside as much of the earth as possible for England's use according to the designated guideline. Towards this space England appears like a person who furnishes her house according to her convenience, and who accustoms herself to refuse even her neighbors to do anything that makes the habitability of the house less pleasant than one wishes.

[ 44 ] England believed that the habit of continuing to live in this way was threatened by the development that Germany had to strive for in recent times. It is therefore understandable that it did not want to allow a military conflict to arise between Russia-France on the one hand and Germany-Austria on the other without doing everything it could to remove the alp of threat that Germany's cultural work posed to it. But that was to join Germany's opponents. A purely political "mind sharpened for the practical" calculated what danger could arise for England from a Germany victorious against Russia and France. - This calculation has as little to do with mere moral indignation at the "Belgian violation of neutrality" as it has much to do with the "reason sharpened for practical purposes", which sees the Germans in England's sphere of interests when they enter Belgium.

[ 45 ] What this "for the practical pointed" will, in conjunction with other forces directed against Germany, would have to bring to bear in the course of time, could arise for a German feeling when the question was asked: How did the political ideal of England always work when a European land power had to find it necessary to extend its activities across the seas? One had only to look at what this political ideal had done to Spain and Portugal, Holland, France, when they developed their activities at sea. And one could remember that this political ideal always "focused on the practical" and knew how to calculate how the European wills, which were directed against the countries in which a young naval activity was developing, could be brought into a balance of power in such a way that there was a prospect that England would be freed from its competitor.

[ 46 ] What the people of Germany must have felt about the European situation before the war can be seen by observing the forces directed at them from the surrounding area. From England, the "ideal" of this country "sharpened for the practical". From Russia, the wills that contradicted the tasks that Germany and Austria-Hungary had set themselves for the "center of Europe". From France, national forces whose essence could not be perceived by the Germans in any other way than in the words Moltke once coined with regard to France's relationship with Germany: "Napoleon was a passing phenomenon. France remained. We had to deal with France centuries ago, we will have to deal with it for centuries to come ... (The younger generation in France is being brought up to believe that it has a sacred right to the Rhine and a mission to make it the border of France at the first opportunity. The Rhine border must become a truth, that is the issue for the future of France."

[ 47 ] Against these three wills, world-historical necessity had forged Germany and Austria-Hungary into "Europe's center". There have always been people who have grown up with the culture of this European center, who felt how tasks would arise for this European center, which would reveal themselves to them as tasks to be solved jointly by the peoples of this center. One who carried the ideals of "Europe's center" deep in his soul, in which they were warmed by the power of Goethe, from which he allowed his entire world view and the innermost impulses of his life to be carried. This refers to the Austrian literary and linguistic researcher Karl Juijus Schröer. A man who was all too little known and appreciated by his contemporaries in his essence and significance. The writer of these reflections counts him among those personalities to whom he owes immeasurable gratitude in life. In his book on "German Poetry" in 1875, Schröer wrote the following words as an expression of the feelings that the events of 1870/1871 had aroused for the formation of an ideal of "Europe's center": "We in Austria find ourselves in a peculiar situation at this important turning point. If the free movement of our national life has removed the dividing wall that separated us from Germany until recently, if we have now ... been given the means to work our way up to a common cultural life with the other Germans, then the situation has arisen just now that we should not participate in a great act of our people ... In German intellectual life, this could not create a dividing wall. Its roots are not political, but cultural-historical in nature. This unbreakable unity of German intellectual life ... we want to keep in mind ... In the German Empire, let our heavy cultural task be appreciated and honored, and let the past not be attributed to us, which is our fate, not our fault." From what feelings would such a sentient soul speak if it were still among the living and saw how the Austrian, in full unity with the Germans of Germany, performed an "act of their people"?

[ 48 ] "Europe's center" is formed by "fate"; the souls who feel that they belong to this center with an understanding share leave it to the spirit of history to judge what in the past - and also in the present and future - is their "fate, not their fault".

[ 49 ] And if you want to judge the understanding that the ideas of a common will of the "center of Europe" have found in Hungary, read voices from Hungary, such as one in the article on "the genesis of the defensive alliance" by Emerich von Halasz in the March 1911 issue of "Jungungarn". It contains the words: "If we ... ... that Andrassy resigned from the leadership more than thirty years ago and Bismarck more than twenty-one years ago, and that this great work of peace still exists in full force and promises to continue for a long time to come, we need not indulge in gloomy pessimism ... Bismarck and Andrassy have joined forces to find an impressive solution to the Central European problem and have thus accomplished a work of civilization that will hopefully last for several generations ... In the history of alliances, we search in vain for an entity of such duration and of such powerful conception."

[ 50 ] As soon as the identified tendencies, which were directed towards the "center of Europe", had come together to exert a common pressure, it was inevitable that this "pressure" would determine the feelings that were formed within the Central European peoples about the course of world events. And when the facts of the summer of 1914 occurred, they struck Europe in a world-historical situation in which the forces at work in the life of nations intervene in the course of events in such a way that they remove the decision about what will happen from the realm of ordinary human judgment and place it in that of a higher order, an order through which world-historical necessity acts within the course of human development. He who feels the essence of such worldly moments also lifts his judgment out of the realm in which questions of the kind nest, "What would have happened if, in a fateful hour, this or that suggestion of this or that personality had had more effect than it did? In moments of world-historical change, people experience forces in their decisions that can only be judged correctly if one endeavors - to recall Emerson's words - not only to "see the individual", but to "see humanity as a whole according to higher laws". How should human decisions be judged according to the laws of ordinary life if they cannot be made on the basis of these laws, because the spirit is at work in them, which can only be seen in the world-historical necessities. - Natural laws belong to the natural order; above them are the laws that belong to the order of ordinary human coexistence; and above them are the spiritually effective laws of world-historical becoming, which belong to a still different order, that through which people and nations solve tasks and undergo developments that lie outside the realm of ordinary human coexistence.

[ 51 ] Subsequent remark: The above thoughts contain what the author of the pamphlet expressed in lectures given before Italy's military entry into the present struggle between nations. One will find it understandable from this fact that the pamphlet contains nothing about the driving forces that have become the will to war from this side against "Central Europe". A pamphlet to be published at a later date will hopefully be able to provide an addition in this regard.

Berlin, July 5, 1915

The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Additional Documents Concerningthe Events of World War IGA 19

Thoughts during the time of the war For Germans and those who do not believe they should hate them

Additional Documents Concerning
the Events of World War I
GA 19

Thoughts during the time of the war
For Germans and those who do not believe they should hate them