donderdag 14 maart 2024

COLOFON AND LIST OF CONTENTS

This publication contains an annotated English translation of the two Memoranda that Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), founder of anthroposophy, submitted in July 1917 to the German and Austrian-Hungarian governments as a Central-European initiative to end World War I on the basis of the idea of the threefold social organism or social organics. This marked the inauguration of a new constitutional principle of civilization that culminated in the refoundation of the Anthroposophical Society by Rudolf Steiner and some 700-800 anthroposophists from around the world during the so-called Christmas Conference in Dornach, Switzerland in 1923/24, but it has as such not been recognized, let alone instituted.

The first edition of this publication was presented as study material during an international, trilingual Pentecost conference entitled “The New Knowledge Christianity – The Christmas Conference as Emergence into the 6th Cultural Age and What Has Become of It” that took place on May 27, 28 and 29, 2022 in the Elisabeth Vreede House in The Hague.

The original German versions of these Memoranda are in Aufsätze über die Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus und zur Zeitlage 1913-1921 by Rudolf Steiner, Dornach 1961.

Translated, introduced, and annotated by Robert J. Kelder and published as a manuscript by the Willehalm Institute for Anthroposophy as Grail Research, Royal Art and Social Organics in Amsterdam that has also organized the above-mentioned conference as well as an exhibition of the paintings by Jan de Kok and the texts from the book The Virtues - Seasons of the Soul by Herbert Witzenmann that opened on May 23 and will last to June 3.


LIST OF CONTENTS


I – FOREWORD – The Putin Doctrine as a Consequence of the Failure of Rudolf Steiner’s Memoranda to be Heeded

II – INTRODUCTION – The Path from Trias Politica to Trias Organica

III - SOCIAL ORGANICS IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF RUDOLF STEINER’S SOCIAL IMPULSE

IV - “THE EGG OF COLUMBUS”- The Inaugural Phase of the Macro-social Form of Social Organics in 1917

V. - THE FIRST MEMORANDUM - Addressed to the German Government

THE SECOND MEMORANDUM – Addressed to the Austria-Hungarian Government

THE SECOND MEMORANDUM (first version of July 22, 1917) 

VI - The Second Phase in the Development of the Macro-social Form of the New Constitutional Principle of Civilization from 1919 to 1922

VII - The Third Phase of the Macro-social Form of the New Principle of Civilization from 1922 to the Present

VIII - The Fourth Phase - the Meso-social Form of the New Constitutional Principle of Civilization

IX - TOWARDS A WORLD PEACE UNION OF OASES OF HUMANITY


APPENDICES

I - An Award-winning Scientific Work on the History of the Outbreak of the First World War – Book review by Rudolf Steiner

II - PREFACE BY RUDOLF STEINER FROM 1919 TO THE BOOK 

The Entente - Freemasonry and the World War by Karl Heise

IV - CRISIS AND ALTERNATIVE - Contextual Justice and Judicious Context in Rudolf Steiner’s Social Organics, by Herbert Witzenmann

V - "THE CREATION OF AN OVERWORLD –Social Aesthetics Is the Science of the Future", by Herbert Witzenmann

VI. FOUNDING STATUTES OF THE GENERAL ANTHROPOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

VI. Images of the FIRST and SECOND GOETHEANUM

BACK PAGE  

Image of THE REPRESENTATIVE OF HUMANITY



donderdag 26 mei 2022

I. FOREWORD BY THE TRANSLATOR - The Putin Doctrine as a Consequence of the Failure of Rudolf Steiner’s Memoranda to be Heeded

This publication is an update of my essay entitled “Rudolf Steiner’s Idea of Social Organics – A New Constitutional Principle of Civilization[1], which formed the basis for a lecture given at a closed social-scientific conference "After the End of the Revolution: Constitutional Order Amid the Crisis of Democracy" co-organized by the New York Telos-Paul Piccone Institute and the National Research University/ Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow held there from September 1 and 2 in 2017. In this essay, the idea was presented that Rudolf Steiner, beginning with the two Memoranda, inaugurated and developed the idea of the threefold order of the social organism, in short, social organics, as a new constitutional principle of civilization in four phases from 1917 to 1923.

       One of the participants of this conference whom I met there was Prof. Sergey Karaganov from the Faculty of the HSE, who served as a presidential advisor in the Kremlin both under Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin and is still considered close to Russia’s president and foreign minister Sergey Lavrov. Recently he sent me an interview given to an Italian newspaper on April 8, 2022, entitled «We are at war with the West. The European security order is illegitimate». [2] Prof. Karaganov is introduced in this interview with the following words: “His recent proposals on Russian-speaking minorities in the ‘near abroad’ are known as ‘Putin doctrine’ and Professor Karaganov, who is honorary chair of the Moscow think tank the Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, was first to come out publicly about an all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2019”.

              This publication attempts firstly to show that Putin’s declared goal to protect the suppressed Russian minorities in the states of the former USSR and to restore its former glory can only be achieved peacefully on the basis of what Rudolf Steiner attempted to remind the world already more than a 100 years ago. For the underlying, still unresolved structural causes of not only the outbreak of the tragic conflict in Ukraine, but of all previous conflicts of this sort originate of necessity in centralized states from the suppression, ethnic cleansing or even downright murder of their minorities clamoring for freedom. As World War I was prompted by the unresolved so-called Serbian question on the southern border of the Austrian-Hungarian empire, this is now the case, e.g. with the ethnic Russians living in the eastern part of Ukraine that were deprived of their cultural and human rights, for if this border conflict is not contained and does not remain limited to the actual combatants. it could escalate and lead to WW III.

            Secondly, the task of this publication is to show how calamities of this sort can be prevented in the near future by the orientation on and guidance of the new constitutional principle of civilization or social organics inaugurated by Rudolf Steiner in the first quarter of the previous century, which however he, unfortunately, was not able to develop further due to his premature death on March 30, 1925, due to poisoning. One of his greatest students, who did carry his work further, is the German philosopher, poet and writer Herbert Witzenmann, who served from 1963 until his death in 1988 as the head of the Sections of Social Sciences and that of Young People at the Goetheanum, Free School of Spiritual Science, instituted by Rudolf Steiner as the R &D center of the General Anthroposophical Society. The various texts and links to his writing in this publication may serve to support this statement. 

            After having read this essay, the attentive and unbiased reader should be in a position to lend credence to the thought that the fateful absence of this new principle of civilization is the greatest threat to world peace, and more specifically that the tragic failure of the Central Powers to adopt the peace proposal offered by Rudolf Steiner in the form of his two Memoranda to end World War I, and instead to embrace the so-called 14 points by the American president Wilson with its abstract principle of national self-determination, has not led only to the self-destruction of Central Europe and the destruction of Europe (Herbert Witzenmann), but also directly to the Putin doctrine.

            It is thus to be hoped for the good and even survival of humanity and the earth that at least now Europe, especially Germany, will not make the same mistake again and adopt and develop the new constitutional principle of civilization as the basis for a just negotiated peace settlement not only between Russia and Ukraine, but for the sake of all places on our planet Earth where ethnic minorities continue to be suppressed and deprived of their cultural and human rights. Since the chances this will happen in the near future are slight, an alternative in the form of the founding of "oases of humanity", start-ups for a new society also suggested by Rudolf Steiner and further developed by Herbert Witzenmann, has been added at the conclusion of this publication.

                                                                                                                                       May 25, 2022

Robert J. Kelder [3]

Dir. Willehalm Institute for Anthroposophy as
Grail Research, Royal Art and Social Organics
Kerkstraat 386A, 1017 JB, Amsterdam, The Netherlands


[1] The Appendix includes a list of the speaker and topics. One of the speakers was Alexander Shchipkov (Moscow Patriarchate), who spoke on “Image of the Future and Social Tradition” as a policy for Russia which was also the title of a book presented to all participants.

[2] The interview by Federico Fubini was published by “Corriere della Sera” in both English and Italian. The English version is available here

[3] The author, born in The Hague in 1939, is a senior member of the Dutch branch of the Social Science Section of the Goetheanum. He is the founding director of the Willehalm Institute Press Foundation in Amsterdam, which aims to further the work of Rudolf Steiner, founder of anthroposophy and that of his students (a.o.) Herbert Witzenmann, Valentin Tomberg and Werner Greub.

II. INTRODUCTION - From Trias Politica to Trias Organica

Rudolf Steiner first brought the idea of the new constitutional principle of civilization or social organics to the fore in 1917 with his (unsolicited and internal) Memoranda to the governments of the German and Austrian-Hungarian emperors as a Central-European peace initiative to end the wars between the Central Powers against Russia and the West. It contained a radical yet practical proposal to finally realize the ideals of the French revolution by extending the trias politica, i.e. the separation of powers of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, to the trias organica, i.e.  the three branches of the social organism: freedom in the cultural life (science, art and religion), equality in the rights sphere (of the state and politics) and brotherhood in the economic life (production, distribution and consumption of goods and services), thereby not weakening but rather strengthening the domain of the constitutional state proper, the sphere of rights. To insure a harmonious function between the three relatively independent powers would then be the task of a sort of senate with chosen representative from all three spheres.   

            Apart from large sections in my article “Rudolf Steiner’s Idea of Social Organics”, these Memoranda have hardly become known in English and it was from translating a sentence in the First Memorandum that the idea arose to give this publication the subtitle Powers to the People and thereby resurrect with new life and meaning the old slogan Power to the People (now Powers in plural) from my American hippy, singer/songwriter and anti-Vietnam war days in the late sixties and early seventies of the previous century, before going to the village of Dornach, Switzerland, where the seat of the General Anthroposophical Society is located , to find out why we never heard anything about this in these revolutionary days that without a guiding principle degenerated into mere drugs, sex and rock-n-roll. This particular sentence from the end of the First Memorandum reads as follows:  It is conceived as the expression of what the peoples of Central Europe would do, when from the part of the governments the task would be set to recognize and release the powers of the people (German: Völkerkräfte).  This in effect means that the powers of the (centralized) nation state are through general consent to be reduced to the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, and that it is to release its control of and interference with the two other powers constituting the social body, namely the cultural-spiritual life, on the one hand, and the economic life, on the other hand. It may be obvious that more than 100 years later this now refers to the liberation of all people on this planet clamoring for freedom.

             But this internal attempt failed and thus Rudolf Steiner went public in 1919 with his Appeal to the German People and the Civilized World, here included in the Appendix, followed by his book The Threefold Social Order – Basic Issues of the Social Question[1], out of which grew a popular movement with branches in several European countries.

            After also this second phase of development failed to break through due to (violent) opposition from left to right and too little support from anthroposophists, who failed to understand that implementation of social organics would also cure the huge financial crisis, Rudolf Steiner developed in 1922 in his Course on a Science of World Economy[2] a new social organic form of thinking and language.

            In order to further develop and globally represent this new paradigm Rudolf Steiner and his followers reconstituted on a social organic basis in 1923 the Anthroposophical Society in Dornach, Switzerland, which now has many branches throughout the world, all designed to bring this new principle of civilization to fruition for the benefit of mankind and the earth.

With this sentence, I ended Section 1 of my essay from 2017. However, it must be said that this fourth  phase suffered the same fate as the previous ones. It was, with few notable exceptions, not understood, neither represented let alone realized by those that in the first instance were meant to do so, namely the Executive-councils of the General Anthroposophical Society and its branches around the world as well as the leadership of the Goetheanum.[3] The essay “The Gradual Loss of Social-Esthetic Qualification in the General Anthroposophical Society”[4] by Reto Andrea Savoldelli, a close co-worker of Herbert Witzenmann, the no-holds-barred essay “Can Anthroposophy Still Be Saved in the General Anthroposophical Society”[5] by Friedrich Sprich, former head of the finance department at the administration of the Goetheanum, an extensive, almost three hours long video by Dutch anthroposophists Patrick Steensma and Michiel Klinkhamer, on the nature and workings of the Deep State or Cabal and on the authors’ energetic earth cleansing[6], as well as my yearly motion and requests to the General Assemblies of the General Anthroposophical Society since 2018 and other articles[7], all from different angles, but all primarily based on anthroposophy as science of the Grail, shed further light on what must be regarded as a policy, even sometimes with the best of intentions, of prevention, suppression and infiltration by forces aiming to destroy the Anthroposophical Society and the Christian Community, the Movement for Religious Renewal , something that Rudolf Steiner warned about in his lectures for the First Class of the School for Spiritual Science in 1924 (GA 270).[8]

            This publication ends with a textual contribution by Herbert Witzenmann  to the advice by Rudolf Steiner given  to young people during his course of bio-dynamic farming in 1924, namely to start oases of humanity, which was taken up in 1945 by Albert Steffen, the Swiss poet and author, who after Rudolf Steiner’s death in 1925 became his successor as president of the General Anthroposophical Society and by Herbert Witzenmann, who has made frequent references in his work to this ideal stating that the founding of such oases could offer a prospective on a World Peace Union.

            The Appendices include an annotated version of the Founding Statutes, later called Principles of what was designed to be a world-wide “Union of People” called General Anthroposophical Society, also translated by the author, which are based on the meso-social form of the new constitutional principle, and other documents and images, such as the wooden sculpture of “The Representative of Humanity” by Rudolf Steiner, which are to substantiate what this publication is offering for critical appraisal, namely a hitherto practically unknown overview of a unified theory of the macro- and mesosocial form of social organics as the  new constitutional principle of civilization for the structural liberation of mankind, a “Charter of Humanity”[9].

            The lack of knowledge and implementation of these four objective dynamic laws of mankind, I repeat what was said in the Foreword, is the greatest threat to world peace. This will now be developed in more detail with reference to sources and literature for further study. Immanent criticism is as always more than welcome.



[3] A notable exception seems to be the standing conference on Associative Economics within the Social Science Section at the Goetheanum instituted already some time ago and led by the English economist Dr. Christopher H. Budd. But for some strange reason the thought is not put forward here that with the Course on World Economy Rudolf Steiner presented a new paradigm not on associative economics but on the more encompassing idea of the threefold nature of the social organism. And from the notion that the constitution of the newly refounded Anthroposophical Society is based on a meso-social form of the threefold idea, as may be gathered from this publication, nothing has (yet) to my knowledge emanated from this group.

[5]  Partially translated from the German by Richard Cooper and posted on the FB site “The Christmas Conference – Emergence into the 6th Cultural Age” 

[7] See my video request in 2021 to the General Assembly of the General Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum in Dornach which contains links to previous efforts and articles, until now mostly ignored or side-tracked by the Council, for which an explanation is given by the essay of Sprich   

[8] Some thirty years later the American President Eisenhower on the occasion of leaving his office warned of the danger of what he called “the military-industrial complex” as a state within a state, of which also President Kennedy warned, before he became in all likelihood himself a fatal victim of “the deep state”. Also former President Trump mentioned it often, for which he was often enough ridiculed as a conspiracy theorist by the MSM, as is anyone who comes out into the open with this accusation.  

[9] See: Charter of Humanity – The Principles of the General Anthroposophical Society as a Basis of Life and Path of Training by Herbert Witzenmann (http://Charter-of-Humanity.blogspot.nl)

III. Social Organics in the Historical Context of Rudolf Steiner’s Social Impulse

Rudolf Steiner’s idea of the Threefold Order of the Social organism, the Threefold Commonwealth or Triformation of the Social Organism as it has also been called, was preceded by three other basic constitutional elements of human society.

            The first one he formulated in 1898 as The Fundamental Sociological Law:During the earliest stages of civilization humanity strove towards the development of social groupings. The interests of the individual were sacrificed to the interests of the group; subsequent development led to the liberation of the individual from the interests of the groups and to the free unfolding of the needs and forces of the individual.[1] I.e. During the course of human evolution the relationship between the individual and the collective was turned upside down; instead of sacrificing oneself to the interests of the clan, the tribe, the nation etc., now it has become a matter of liberating oneself from these bonds. This universally applicable rule leads to the Right to Individuality[2] and a such can serve as a criterion for determining whether a nation state or union of states is either furthering or holding back the just course of human evolution.

            The second constitutional element of human society that Rudolf Steiner formulated in an essay in 1906 is The Fundamental Social Law and reads as follows: “The well-being of a community of people working together will be the greater, the less the individual claims for himself the proceeds of his work, i.e. the more of these proceeds he makes over to his fellow-workers, the more his own needs are satisfied, not out of his own work but out of the work done by others”.

            His  commentary on it was (partially) as follows: “Every arrangement in a community that is contrary to this law will inevitably engender somewhere after a while distress and want. It is a fundamental law, which holds good for all social life with the same absoluteness and necessity as any law of nature within a particular field of natural causation. It must not be supposed, however, that it is sufficient to acknowledge this law as one for general moral conduct, or to try to interpret it into the sentiment that everyone should work in the service of his fellow men. No, this law only lives in reality as it should when a community of people succeeds in creating arrangements such that no one can ever claim the fruits of his own labor for himself, but that these go wholly to the benefit of the community. And he must himself be supported in return by the labors of his fellow men. The important point is, therefore, that working for one's fellow men and obtaining an income must be kept apart, as two separate things.[3]

            This dynamic reciprocal law has been realized to a great extent in the world-wide division of labour, where in contradiction to the middle ages, practically no one, except the farmers, works for himself anymore. It postulates in short: the more altruism, the more well-being; the more selfishness the more suffering, need and ultimately war. It is the exact counterpoint to the liberal or neo-liberal creed based on the false assumption that unbridled egoism leads to societal well-being.

            The third constitutional element of human society Rudolf Steiner called in his lecture ”Social and Anti-Social Forces in the Human Being in 1918 The Archetypal Social Phenomenon: “If one human being faces another, then one person is always trying to put the other one to sleep and the other one is constantly trying to stay awake. Yet, to speak in Goethe’s sense, this is the archetypal social phenomenon of social science.”[4]

            On the basis of this archetypal social phenomenon the groundwork for a new science and art of communication has been laid by anthroposophical researchers in the field of human dialogue and discourse that can lead to a veritable spiritual union, an exchange–of–being between the participants involved  in which the one can experience and relate to the other  “I am who you are” and the other replying “You are who I am”.[5]

            The final and fourth element in this domain is the idea of the threefold order of the social organism, which is here abbreviated with the term social organics. This term was never actually used by Rudolf Steiner, but was coined by Herbert Witzenmann, the former leader of the Social Science Section of the Goetheanum, School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, Switzerland originally founded by Rudolf Steiner as the R&D Center of the Anthroposophical Society, to denote the macro- as well as the meso-social form of the threefold social order. This unifying theory of social organics will now be further elaborated.



[1] Published in the article “Freiheit und Gesellschaft“ (Freedom and Society)  in Magazin für Literatur 1898, Vol. 67, Nr. 29 and 30. Not translated. See The Mysteries of Social Encounters – The Anthroposophical Impulse. In this book, first published in German in 1984 by Dutch Prof. Dr. Dieter Brüll, all four laws constituting this impulse, i.e. the Fundamental Sociological Law, the Fundamental Social Law, the Archetypal Social Phenomenon and the Idea of the Threefold Social Organism, were for the first time compiled and elaborated. Not covered in this overview by the author’s own admission, however, is the concept social organism and the new way of thinking and language that Rudolf Steiner developed in his Course on World Economy in 1922 for henceforth presenting the idea of the threefold organism nor is the meso-social form dealt with that it took in the constitution of the newly founded Anthroposophical Society during the so-called Christmas Conference in Dornach, Switzerland in 1923/24. These missing elements were subsequently published in the publications by Herbert Witzenmann mentioned in the Introduction.  See also his book The Virtues – Seasons of the Soul, especially its preface “On the Origin of The Virtues”, which is, even though it is nowhere mentioned as such by name,  a masterly exposition of the archetypal social phenomenon. 

[2] See Herbert Witzenmann, Das Recht auf Individualtät – Weltpolitisische Ausblicke  (The Right To Individuality – Global Political Perspectives) an essay from Verzweifelung und Zuversicht – Zur sozialen un kulturellen Lage der Zeit (Despair and Trust – On the Social and Cultural Situation of Out Times), Dornach 1982, not translated.

[3] This is because human labor cannot be paid, it is as such not aware that can be bought or sold; only the product made by labor has economic value and can be remunerated.  See http://wn.rsarchive.org/Articles/FuSoLa_index.html  

[4] See http://wn.rsarchive.org/GA/GA0186/19181212p01.html

[5] See Brüll, D. The Mysteries of Social Encounters: The Anthroposophical Social Impulse. AWSNA Publications, Chatham, NY 12037, 2002

IV. - “THE EGG OF COLUMBUS”- The Inaugural Phase of the Macro-social Form of Social Organics in 1917

 In the early summer of 1917 towards the end of WW I, the Central Powers consisting of the German, Austrian-Hungarian and Turkish Ottoman empires were engaged in a protracted, bloody and devastating war on two fronts against the Russian empire, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the Allies consisting of the British and Japanese empires, France, Italy and soon also The United States.

            In this for Germany increasingly hopeless situation with the threat of violent upheavals and revolution, a German count named Otto Lerchenfeld with diplomatic connections high up in the imperial German government asked Rudolf Steiner in Berlin, “Who can still save us from this dead end street? Who can come up with a way out?[1]

            As an answer to this desperate plea for help, Rudolf Steiner came up with an idea that he called the threefold order of the social organism and that he formulated in the first Memorandum addressed to the government of the German emperor Wilhelm II and a little later in a second one addressed to his Austrian counterpart emperor Charles I. Count Lerchenfeld found the first Memorandum to be “The Egg of Columbus” and did everything he could to get it into the hands of the German diplomats. It did indeed reach the office of the German Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Richard von Kühlman, who became the political head of the German delegation to the peace negotiations with a defeated Russia in Brest-Litowsk on the Polish border with Ukraine in 1918. However, he failed  to stand up against the harsh demands of the German supreme military command under General Ludendorff and instead of putting the Memoranda on the negotiation table as the peace program for the Central Powers as a counter proposition to the parodies of national self-determination proclaimed by the American president Wilson and backed also by the Bolshevist Lenin, he left the Memorandum in his diplomatic attaché-case. Had he put them on the bargain table and had they been accepted, which is not altogether unlikely, the course of events would, according to Rudolf Steiner, have taken a very different turn: “The whole of Eastern Europe would have understood this – everybody knows this who is aware of the forces in Eastern Europe - , to let Tsarism be replaced by the threefold social order. Then would have happened, what actually should have happened.[2] Instead, Von Kühlman helped Lenin and is cohorts financially come to power – and against “the intentions of the Russian folk soul” (Rudolf Steiner), the Russian people had to suffer the communist yoke of Marxist-Leninism for some 70 years. More on that later.

            In July of 1917 the second Memorandum, related to the conditions of revolutionary turmoil  in the Austro-Hungarian empire, came through the efforts of Austrian Count Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz under the attention of emperor Charles I, who, after supposedly reading it with interest had it deposited in the state archives and only came back to it, when it was already too late, for a day later he was forced to abdicate and the violent path towards the disintegration of this once mighty empire took its inexorable course.[3]

            A similar fate befell the first Memorandum at the hands of the German crown prince Max von Baden, who, after three personal meetings with Rudolf Steiner at the beginning of 1918 had expressed an interest in it as a possible central European peace initiative to end the war with the Allies. However, in his inaugural address as imperial Chancellor on October 3, 1918 he miserably failed to mention them and instead fell in line with the so-called 14 points proclaimed by American president Wilson with its main proposal for national self-determination under a centralized state, a proposal that Rudolf Steiner from the outset considered totally inadequate for solving the thorny nationalities question of e.g. the 13 different peoples living inside and outside the borders of the Austrian-Hungarian empire, which could only be solved by granting them complete cultural autonomy as part of a threefold state, by undertaking what he called “the other action”.  

            And how right he was, the subsequent turn of events has shown up until this very day. Because this question remained unsolved, mankind had to live through the horrors of a Second World War, followed by many communist inspired so-called wars of national liberation that instead more often than not turned into brutal dictatorships. Not to mention  the well-grounded fear, already referred to, that a third World War is actually possible in view of the fact that the real underlying causes of the two World wars have not been recognized, let alone done away with.                

            But before moving on to the second phase of the development of social organics, let us have a closer look at these Memoranda to see what they contain. They have in the 100 years of their existence often been referred to in the English-speaking world, but have never been completely translated.[4] After reading some paragraphs from them, especially the one containing the sentence: “Under the false flag of national liberation, it ]WW I] is a war for the oppression of the German people, in a broader sense for the suppression of all independent national life in Central Europe,” one may understand why, for they are after all totally politically incorrect and, on the face of it, reek of conspiracy theory avant la lettre. They make painfully clear that, parallel to the military clashes on the bloody battlefields, a fierce diplomatic, even spiritual warfare was going on behind the scenes between the opposing camps, personified above all in the persons of American president Wilson, his “strange” bed-fellow Lenin[5] and Rudolf Steiner, about the future balance of power in the world and the direction that the constitutional order of humanity would take.


[1] See Boos, R. Rudolf Steiner im ersten Weltkrieg, Dornach 1933, p. 58.

[2] See Steiner, Rudolf Spiritual-Scientific Consideration of Social and Pedagogic Questions - Prelude to the Threefold Commonwealth, lecture in Stuttgart April 21 1919. Quoted by M. Osterrieder  in his tome of more than 1700 p. Welt im Umbruch – Nationalitäten-frage, Ordnungspläne und Rudolf Steiners Haltung im Ersten Weltkrieg, Stuttgart 2014.(The World in Upheaval – The Nationalities Question, World Order Plans, and Rudolf  Steiner’s Stance in the First World War).  „The best book yet on the causes of the First World War“ according to the website of English writer and historian Terry Boardman, who has translated its list of contents. It also includes the comment “The Egg of Columbus” by Count Lerchenfeld (p.1366) and more background information on the financing by Von Kühlman of Lenin. See also the biographies by the Swiss publicist and publisher Thomas Meyer of historical figures of that time, such as the German general Helmuth Moltke and the Austrian Count Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz.

[3] See Kühn, H. Dreigliederungs-Zeit – Rudolf Steiners Kampf für die Gesellschaftsordnung der Zukunft, Dornach, 1978, p.18.

[4] For a French translation see https://www.triarticulation.fr/EltsHisto/Memos.html. In 2017 appeared a Dutch translation Het lichtbaken van 1917 published by Via Liba in Antwerpen, from which some notes have been taken.

[5] “Strange” because contrary to what one might think, Wilson allowed Lenin to be funded and facilitated for his anti-capitalistic, revolutionary plans, which were not meant to bring the working class to power but to destroy the middle class. See Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution by A. Sutton. It thus so happened that the Allies and their opponents the Central European Powers both financed their future deadly enemy.

V THE MEMORANDA

THE FIRST MEMORANDUM -  Addressed to the German Government [1]

 Introduction – The Narrative of the Entente and the Missing Retort

The spokesmen of the Entente advance among the reasons why they must continue the war the notion that they have been attacked by Germany. They maintain that they must therefore bring Germany to its knees so that from then onwards every possibility of it ever mounting an attack again would be taken away. All the other causes of this war are nebulously submerged in this sort of moral accusation against Germany.

            Undoubtedly, this accusation places Germany in the necessary position to show in an unadorned fashion how it was driven into the war. Instead, there have only been doctrinal clashes about the causes of the war, which seem like the conclusions of a professor who does not tell what he has seen, but outlines from documentary sources what occurred to him about distant events. Then in this way have all the statements by the Reich Chancellor been made about the events during the outbreak of the war. Such explanations, however, are not suitable for making any impression. They are simply rejected by opposing them with other unjustified or justified viewpoints.         

Analysis of the Events According to Rudolf Steiner

If, on the contrary, the facts were simply told, the following would result:

            1. Germany was in the summer of 1914 not prepared to take the initiative for starting a war [2];

            2. Austria-Hungary was for a long time put in the necessary position to do something against the increasing danger of losing part of her territory through the combined action of the Southern Slavs under the leadership of the non-Austrian South-eastern Slavs. It is easy to admit that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand[3] and the whole history of the ultimatum was only an occasion. Had this occasion not been seized, another would have had to be taken at the earliest opportunity. Austria could not have remained Austria, if it did not do something to secure its southeastern provinces, or by means of a generous other action that could resolve the Slavic question. Austrian politics, however, has since 1879 bled to death from this other action. Or rather, she bled to death  due to the fact that this other action could not be found. One could simply not master the Slavic question. In so far as for the outbreak of the war Austria-Hungary is concerned (and thereby also Germany that became involved because it could not leave Austria-Hungary without the fear that after a few years it would be opposed by the Entente without the Austrian Confederation) in so far it must be recognized that the Slavic question contains the ground for the outbreak of this war. The "other action" is therefore the international solution to the Slavic question. It is demanded from Austria, not from Russia. For Russia will always be able to throw her basic Slavic character into the balance of the solution. Austria-Hungary can only counter this weight by the liberation of the Western Slavs. This liberation can only proceed from the viewpoint of the autonomisation of all branches of the life of the people which concern its national existence and everything that is connected to it. One should not shrink away from complete freedom in the sense of the autonomisation and federalization of national life. This federalization is prefigured in the German federal states that, to a certain extent, is the historically prefigured model for that which must be continued to the point of a completely federalist-libertarian configuration of all those living conditions that have their source in the human being itself, i.e. that are not directly dependent, such as the military-political establishment, on the geographical conditions, and, such as the economic sphere, dependent on the geographical-opportunistic conditions. The configuration of these conditions will only then come about in a healthy manner, if nationality is dispensed from freedom and not freedom dispensed from nationality. If instead of the latter one strives for the former, then one places oneself within the course of world history. If one wants the former, then one works against this evolution and lays the groundwork for new conflicts and wars.

            To demand that the leaders of Austria should therefore have omitted the ultimatum to Serbia, would mean demanding from them that they should have acted against the interest of their country. Theorists of any kind can make such a demand. A person who reckons with the facts available ought not to speak seriously at all of such things. For if the Southern Slavs had reached what the leading advocates of Greater Serbia wanted, then Austria, through the actions of the other Austrian Slavs, would not have remained in the form that she existed. One could still imagine that Austria would then have assumed a different form. Can one, however, suggest that a leading Austrian statesman patiently resign himself to such an outcome? It would seem so, if only one were of the opinion that it is part of the absolute requirements of an Austrian statesman to be a pacifist and fatalistically await the fate of the empire. Under any other condition one must understand the step that Austria took with regard to the ultimatum.

            3. Once Austria had made the ultimatum, the further course of events could only to be halted if Russia were to remain passive. As soon as Russia took an aggressive step, nothing could have stopped the consequences.

            4. Just as true as all this is, it is equally true that everyone, who had reckoned with the facts, had a vague feeling in Germany:  If the implied complications were to enter a critical phase, then there would be war. One would not be able to escape this war. And responsible persons held the opinion that, if necessary, one would have to fight this war with all one’s might. To fight a war out of one’s own initiative was certainly not the intention of any responsible person in Germany. One can prove to the Entente that they had not the slightest reason to believe in a war of aggression on the part of Germany. They can be compelled to admit that they held the belief that Germany would become so powerful without a war that this power would jeopardize the powers now united in the Entente. But such political evidence will have to be put forward quite differently from what has hitherto been the case; because the latter is not a political argument, but only the deployment of political assertions, which the others may deign to find brutal. On the part of the powers of the Entente  it was believed that if things were to continue in this way, one could not know what else was still to become of Germany; therefore a war with Germany was inevitable. Germany could take the view: we do not need to go to war; but without war we shall attain what the states of the Entente will not allow without going to war; therefore we must be prepared for this war and, when it is threatening, deal with it in such a way that we cannot be harmed by it. This also applies to the Serbian question and to Austria. In 1914, Austria could no longer cope with Serbia without going to war, at least that had to be the conviction of its statesmen. But if the Entente had decided that Austria-Hungary  could be let alone to cope with Serbia, there would not have been any world war. The true reason for the war must therefore not be sought by the Central Powers, but by the fact that the Entente did not want to leave these powers as they were in their balance of  power after 1914. If, however, the above-mentioned "other action" had been taken before 1914, then the Serbs would not have developed an international opposition to Austria-Hungary, and neither the ultimatum nor the interference by Russia could have occurred. And if Russia had at any time, for pure reasons of conquest, turned against Central Europe, then England could not have been at her side. Since the submarine was until the war a pure means of warfare, and since America had absolutely not been able to enter into war with the European Central Powers without this means of warfare, only England needs to be taken into account regarding the question of peace in the sense indicated.

            5. What should now be communicated to the world is:

            (a) that Germany, as far as the persons concerned who were responsible for deciding to go to war, was completely surprised by the events of July 1914 that no one had foreseen. This is especially true of the attitude of Russia;

            (b) that the responsible persons in Germany could not help but assume that if Russia were to attack, France would do the same;

            (c) that in this case Germany had for years been preparing its war on two fronts and that in the face of the precipitating events could do no more than to put it into effect, if did not obtain from the West a definite guarantee that France would not attack. This guarantee could only come from England;

            (d) that if England had given this guarantee, Germany would have only gone to war against Russia;

            (e) that the German diplomacy had believed that Britain would act in the sense of such a guarantee as a result of the relationship which it had established with England in the last few years;

            (f) that the German diplomacy has completely deceived itself with regard to the forthcoming policy of England, and that under the impression of this deception the march through Belgium was put into operation, which would not have been done  had England given the indicated guarantee.  It must be proclaimed in a very unambiguous way to the world that the invasion of Belgium was only put into operation when the German diplomacy had been surprised by the news from the King of England, that it was deceiving itself if it were to wait for a guarantee on the part of England. It is incomprehensible why the German government does not unambiguously do what it can: to prove that it would not have carried out the invasion of Belgium if the decisive telegram from the King of England had been different. The whole further course of the war really depended on this decisive turn of events, and nothing has been undertaken by Germany to bring this decisive fact to the general knowledge of the world. If this fact was known correctly, one would have to say that the English policy was indeed wrongly judged at decisive positions of power in Germany, but one could not ignore the fact that England was the determining factor in the Belgian question. One difficulty, however, would pose such a language by Germany with respect to Russia, because it would make her see what she owed England for this war. This difficulty could only be remedied if Germany could succeed in showing Russia that she has less to expect from a friendship with England than from one with Germany. This, of course, cannot be done without Germany developing at the present moment a generous policy, in accord with Austria-Hungary, by which the program of Wilson, which has been put into the world without knowledge of the European situation, will be thrown out.

Causes of the war

It may seem practical to say that it is not worthwhile today to talk about the causes of the war. This is, however, considering the actual circumstances the most impractical thing to do. For in fact, the Entente with its portrayal of the causes of war has long been waging war. The situation which it has created for itself is due to the circumstance that its portrayal is believed thanks to the fact that something effective has not yet been launched against it by Germany. While Germany could show that it had contributed nothing to the outbreak of the war, that it was driven to violate the neutrality against Belgium only by the conduct of England, the official statements of Germany are so far still held to the effect that no human being living outside Germany is hindered to form the judgment that it was in Germany's hand not to begin the war. It is not sufficient that the documents are compiled in the way that they were. For this compilation produces something which can be doubted by everyone, whereas the unvarnished account of the facts would indeed result in Germany's innocence. One who understands such things can know that such speeches as are held by those responsible in Germany are not at all understood by the hearts and minds of the people in the hostile countries, nor even in the neutral ones, and are therefore only taken as veils of the truth. One would only have a right to say that it was of no use to speak differently against the hatred of enemies, if one had only made an attempt to really speak differently. This hatred should not be brought to bear at all, because this is simply naive; for this hate is only the drapery of the war, is only the clearing of slime of those who want to or must accompany the unspeakably sad events with their speeches, or those who seek in the inflammation of this hatred an effective means of achieving this and that. The war is waged from well-known causes on the part of France and Russia. And it is waged by England only as an economic war; but as an economic war, which is a result of all that has been prepared in England for a long time. To speak in the face of the realities of the English policy of encirclement by King Edward, and similar trifles, is as if one saw a boy run away from a peg which afterwards falls down, and then says that the boy had caused the peg to fall because he had shaken it a little, while the peg had indeed been so severely damaged, that the boy only needed to give it a little push to finally cause the fall. The truth is that for many years England knows how to pursue  a policy orientated on the real conditions in Europe in a sense that seemed to be to its advantage, which was like a natural scientific exploitation of the powers inherent in existing peoples and states. Nowhere else than in England did politics assume a completely objective, coherent character. Take the volatile forces of the people of the Balkans, add to that what was playing in Austria, and look from there at what political formulas were present in initiated circles in England. These formulas always contained: this and that is going to happen in the Balkans; England has to react to it in this way. And as the events moved in the direction indicated, English politics moved parallel to it. It was possible to find sentences like these in England enclosed in such formulas: The Russian Empire will fall in its present form, so that the Russian people can live. And the conditions of this country are such that it is possible to carry out socialist experiments there for which there is no possibility in Western Europe. Whoever follows the policy of England can see that it has always been carried out on a grand scale so as to turn all such and many other points of view into the interests of England. And in doing so, it benefited from the fact that it was the only one in Europe proceeding from such  points of view, just thereby enabling it to gain its diplomatic advantages. Its policy always worked in the sense of what the real national and state forces were, and its endeavor was in this sense to utilize these forces to its economic advantage. It worked to its advantage. Others do this as well, of course. But England worked furthermore in the direction of what might be realized by the forces lying within it, while others would not get involved in observing such forces, and indeed would only have had a gentle smile if one would have mentioned such forces.  England's entire state structure is completely geared to such truly practical work. Others will only then be able to develop something to match this English statesmanship, when the fore-going will no longer be an English secret, but when it has become common property. Just imagine how infinitely naive it was to have believed that Germany was able to get its way with the Baghdad railway problem[4], since from that point on the problem was handled as if it were only necessary to proceed to something like the construction of a street that had been agreed to with its neighbors. Or, in order to speak of something still further away, how was Austria planning to straighten out its relation with the Balkans without bringing powers to bear which, viewed from the national and political forces of the Balkans, could paralyze the trumps of England? England, at a given time, did not only do this and that, but directed the forces internationally in such a way that they were moving at the right moment in its direction. In order to do this, one must first get to know these forces, and secondly, to develop these forces in oneself. Austria-Hungary, therefore, should at the right time have carried out an action which, in the sense of the Southern Slavic forces, would have brought these in the Austrian direction, and Germany should have, in the sense of the economic-opportunistic powers, brought the Baghdad railway interests in its direction, instead of the former having diverted to the Russian and thereby the Russian-English line and the latter to the English line.

            The war must lead in Central Europe to an understanding about what exists within the national, political, and economic life. Only then can England be compelled not to continue behaving towards the other states by means of a superior diplomacy, but to allow itself to be treated on an equal footing about what is to be negotiated between European human communities. Without fulfilling this condition, all imitation of English parliamentarianism in Central Europe is nothing more than a means for throwing sand in one’s eyes. In England, a few people will otherwise always find ways and means to have their realpolitik pushed through by parliament, while a German and Austrian action is, after all, not only bound to fail by the fact that, instead of a few statesmen before an assembly, 500 members of parliament will decide on it. One can scarcely think of anything more unfortunate than the superstition that it will create wonders when, in addition to the rest that one has put up with from England, one now lets also the democratic stereotype be forced upon by it. This is not to say that Central Europe should not develop further in the sense of an internal political formation, only this must not be an imitation of West-European so-called democratism, but it must bring to bear precisely what this democratism in Central Europe, because of its special conditions, would prevent. This so-called democratism is namely only suited to make the people of Central Europe a part of the Anglo-American global hegemony and if, in addition to that, one were get involved in the so-called intergovernmental organization of the present internationalists, one would have as a Central European the beautiful prospect of always being overridden in this intergovernmental  organization.      

What it comes down to

What it comes down to is to show the real intrinsic impulses from the life of Central European, and from which the Western adversaries, when these impulses are demonstrated, will see that they will have to bleed to death from them during a continuation of the war. Against pretensions of power the opponents can pitch their power and will do so, as long as it remains by pretensions. Against real power they will lay down their arms. Wilson's so effective narratives must be countered by what in Central Europe can really be done for the liberation of the life of the people, whereas his words cannot give nothing but Anglo-American global hegemony. The consensus with Russia need not be sought by a Central European program rooted in reality; because this will come about by itself. Such a Central European program must not contain anything that is of internal concern of the state, but only something that concerns external relationships. But, of course, the view in this direction this must be objective, for whether a human being can think well is certainly a matter of his internal organism, but whether he works outwardly in this or that direction through this good thinking is not an internal matter.

            Therefore, only a Central European program can defeat the Wilsonian one that is rooted in reality, e.g. not emphasizing this and that as desirable, but simply a description of what Central Europe can, because it has the forces within itself to do this. This includes:

            1. That it be realized: The object of a democratic parliament as the representative body of  the people can only be the purely political,  military and national security (police) affairs. These are only possible due to the historically formed background. If represented as such in a parliament and administered in a civil service responsible to parliament, these affairs will develop necessarily in a conservative direction. An external proof of this is that since the outbreak of war even the Social Democratic party has become conservative in these matters. And it will become even more so, the more it is compelled to think sensibly and appropriately by the fact that only political, military, and police affairs can be the object in parliament as the representative body of the people. Within such an institution, German individualism can also unfold itself with its federal system, which is no coincidence, but inherent to the German national character.

            2. All economic matters are to be regulated in a special economic parliament. If this institution is relieved of all political and military affairs, then it will develop its affairs purely in such a way that is solely appropriate to it, namely opportunistically. The administrative civil service of these economic affairs, in the area of which also the whole customs legislation is situated, is directly responsible only to the economic parliament.

            3. All judicial, pedagogical, cultural and spiritual affairs are left to the freedom of the people. The state has in this domain only the right to police, not the initiative. What is meant here only seems radical. In reality, only those can find fault with this who cannot see the facts squarely in the eye. The state leaves it up to the professional, business and national corporations, to set up their own law courts, schools, churches etc. and it leaves it up to the individual to choose his own school, his church and his judge. Of course not from case to case, but for a certain time. In the beginning, this will probably have to be restricted to territorial boundaries, but it includes the possibility to reconcile national opposites – and others – peacefully. It even includes the possibility of creating something real in stead of the shadowy national court of arbitration. National or other agitators will thereby lose their powers completely. No Italian in Trieste would find supporters in this city, if everyone could develop their national identity in it, while nevertheless, for obvious opportunistic reasons, his economic interests are arranged in Vienna, and his gendarme is nevertheless paid for by Vienna.

            The political structures of Europe could thus develop on this basis a healthy conservatism, which can never be concerned with the dismemberment of Austria, but at most with its expansion.

            The economic structures can develop in an opportunistically healthy manner; for no one can wish to have Trieste in an economic structure in which it must perish economically if this economic structure does not hinder anyone from freely pursuing  ecclesiastical and national, matters and so on. Cultural concerns are freed from the pressures exerted by them on economic and political matters, and they cease to exert pressure on them. All these cultural concerns are sustained in a healthy movement.

            A sort senate, chosen from the three corporate bodies, with the task of regulating the political-military, economic and judicial-pedagogical affairs takes care of the common affairs including e.g. the common finances.

            No one who really thinks out of the circumstances as they are in Central Europe will doubt the feasibility of what is shown in this account. For here nothing at all is demanded which is to be carried out, but only something is shown that wants be carried out, and which will succeed the moment it is given free rein.

The war is a false flag operation     

If this is recognized, it becomes above all clear why we have this war and why, under the false flag of national liberation, it is a war for the oppression of the German people, in a broader sense for the suppression of all independent national life in Central Europe. If one dismantles Wilson's program, which has emerged as the most recent description of the cover-up programs of the Entente, one realizes that its execution would mean nothing else than the destruction of this Central European freedom. This does not prevent Wilson from talking about the freedom of nations; for the world is not concerned with words but with facts which follow from the realization of these words. Central Europe needs real freedom, but Wilson does not speak about real freedom. The whole Western world has absolutely no concept of this real freedom necessary for Central Europe. One speaks of freedom of the people, and does not mean thereby the real freedom of the human beings, but a chimerical collective freedom of human connections as has been developed in the Western European states and in America. According to the particular conditions of Central Europe, this collective freedom cannot arise out of international conditions, thus it must never ever be the subject of an international agreement as the basis of a peace accord. In Central Europe the collective freedom of the peoples must arise from general human freedom, and this will come about if the separation of all spheres of life that are not part of the  purely political, military, and economic spheres is therefore given free rein.

            It is only natural that those who always only reckon with their ideas and not with reality, raise such objections to such a disentanglement as are found in a book just published, namely, Krieck's Die deutsche Staatsidee (The German Idea of the State) on p.167: "Sometimes in the past, an economic parliament alongside a parliament of the people  has been demanded, among others by E. von Hartmann. This idea lies entirely in the direction of economic and social development. But apart from the fact that a new big wheel would increase the already awkwardness and friction of the machine, the jurisdiction of both parliaments would be impossible to separate from each other."

            It is noteworthy here that it must be admitted that this idea  of disentanglement comes forth from the real course of evolution. It must therefore be carried out and may not be rejected against the evolution, because its realization is found to be difficult. If one resigns in the face of such difficulties in reality, one creates implications, which are later violently discharged. And ultimately this war with the peculiar course it is taken is the discharge of difficulties, which should have been gotten rid of in other ways properly, as long as there was still time.

            The Wilsonian program aims to make it impossible for the Central European states to realize their legitimate task and living conditions in the world. It must be countered by showing what would happen in Central Europe, if this is not prevented from happening by the violent destruction of Central European life. The Entente  must be shown what can only be done by Central Europe here on the basis of what has become historical, provided it does not side with the Entente, which can have no interest at all in directing Central Europe to its natural development.

            As things stand today, Germany and Austria have only the choice between the following three things:

            1. Under all circumstances to wait for a victory of their arms, and by that means hope that they can carry out their Central European task.

            2. To negotiate a peace with the Entente on the basis of the latter’s present program and thus to secure their own destruction.

            3. To say what they will regard as a consequence of a peace based on realistic conditions, and thus to present the world with the possibility to let the people, after a clear insight into the conditions and will of Central Europe, choose between a factual program bringing real freedom to the European man or woman and along with that, as a matter of course, freedom to the people, or the illusionary programs of the West and America that speak of freedom, but in fact make life impossible for the whole of Europe.

German Militarism?

We in Central Europe give for the time being the impression as if we were afraid of telling the Western powers what we must want, while these powers are all but overwhelming us with demonstrations of what they want. This makes it appear as if only the West wants something for the salvation of mankind, and that we are only anxious to disturb these laudable endeavors by all kinds of things such as militarism. But our militarism is in effect a creation of the West, which for a long time has been preparing and will even further plan to do so to turn us into shadows of ourselves. Granted, these and similar things have often been said before, but that is not the point. What matters is that they really become the leitmotiv of Central European action, and that the world learns to recognize that it can expect no action from Central Europe other than that it must reach for the sword when the others force this sword into its hands.  

            What the Western nations now call German militarism is something they have forged during centuries of development, and it is only up to them, not to Germany, to withdraw the reason of this militarism for Central Europe. It is up to Central Europe, however, to clearly put forward its willingness for freedom, a willingness which cannot be built in Wilson's sense on programs, but on the reality of human existence.

The Central European Peace Program versus Wilson’s Program

There is for Central Europe thus only one peace program and that is: to let the world know that peace is immediately possible, if the Entente replaces its current, untrue peace program with a true one which does not lead to the downfall of Central Europe, but instead makes life possible. All other questions that may become the subject of peace efforts are solved, if they are tackled on the basis of these pre-conditions . On the basis of what is now offered to us by the Entente, and which has been taken up by Wilson, peace is impossible. If nothing else were to take its place, the German people could only be brought to adopt this program by force, and the further development of European history would prove the correctness of what has been said here, for the realization of Wilson's program will result in the ruin of the European peoples.

            One has in Central Europe to look without any illusion at what those personalities have held for many years as their belief and what they view from their vantage point as the law of the evolution of the world: that the future of the world’s evolution belongs to the Anglo-American race, and that they are to take over the legacy of the Latin-Roman race and the education of the Russian people. In the introduction of this world political formula by an Englishman or an American, deeming himself to be initiated, it is always remarked that the German element must have no say in shaping the constitutional order of the world because of its insignificance in world-political matters, that the Romanic element need not be considered because it is dying out anyways and that the Russian element is possessed by the one who makes himself its world-historical educator. One could think not much of such a creed, if it lived in the heads of a few men prone to political fantasies or utopias, but English policy used innumerable ways to make this program practically the object of its global realpolitik, and from England’s point of view the current coalition in which it finds itself cannot be more favorable than it is when this program were to be implemented. There is, however, nothing with which Central Europe can oppose it, other than a program of truly human liberation, which can come into effect at any moment, if human will is committed to its realization.

Possible Objections

It may perhaps be thought that peace will be long delayed, even if the program which is meant here is introduced to the European nations, since it can after all not be carried out during the war. Moreover, it would be described by the Entente in such a way that the leaders of Central Europe had merely set it up to deceive the nations, while after the war the terrible things described by the leaders of the Entente, which they had for moral reasons to eradicate in a “Fight for freedom and justice of the peoples”, would simply reoccur again.

            But whoever judges the world correctly according to the facts, not according to his favorite opinions, can know that everything that corresponds to realities has a completely different power of persuasion than that coming from mere arbitrariness. And one can quietly wait and see what will happen to those who will realize that with the program of Central Europe the nations of the Entente will only lose the opportunity to destroy Central Europe, but that it contains nothing that would in any way be incompatible with any real living impulse of the nations of the Entente. As long as one moves in the field of masked endeavors, an understanding will be excluded; as soon as the realities behind the masks not only militarily but also politically are shown, a completely different configuration of the present events will begin. The world has become acquainted with the armies of Central Europe for the sake of this Central Europe; the political will, as far as Central Europe is concerned, is for the world a book with seven seals. Instead, the world receives every day a steady stream of horror pictures, describing what a terrible, destructive thing this Central Europe is. And it seems to the world as if Central Europe has only to keep silent about these horror pictures, which of course must appear to the world as if this implies tacit agreement.   

            It is a matter of course that countless objections will arise by everyone wanting to think about how what is implied here is to be carried out in detail. However, such doubts are only to be considered if the matter at hand were to be conceived as a program, the realization of which was left to an individual or a society. But this is not the case, it would indeed –contradict itself, were it so conceived.

Powers to the People

It is conceived as the expression of what the nations of Central Europe will do, if the governments on their part will set themselves the task of recognizing and releasing the powers of the people. What will be done in detail is shown in such things whenever they enter onto the path of realization. For they are not rules of what has to be done, but predictions of what will happen, if one lets things go to their way prescribed by their own reality. And this reality prescribes that all religious and spiritual-cultural matters, including the question of nationality, are to be administrated by corporations, to which the individual person freely choses to adhere to, and which are administered as corporations in his parliament, so that this parliament has only to do with the corporation in question, but never with the corporation's relationship with the individual person. And never must a corporation have anything to do with a person belonging to another corporation under the same point of view. Such corporations are included in the domain of parliament when they unite a certain number of persons. Until then, they remain a matter of privacy, in which no authority or representational body has to interfere. For whom it is a sour apple, that from such points of view all spiritual matters of culture must in the future be without privileging, will have no choice but to bite into this sour apple for the salvation of the common good. Through the ever-growing habituation to this privileging, it is difficult to see in many circles that one has to return from the privileging of especially the cultural-spiritual professions to the good old, ancient principle of free corporation. It is true that a corporation is to make a person proficient in his profession, but the exercise of this profession is not to be privileged but left to free competition and free human choice. This will be difficult to see for all those who are fond of saying that people are not ripe for this and that. In reality, this objection will not be taken into account, since, with the exception of the necessary liberal professions, the corporation will decide on the choice of petitioners. Neither will insurmountable difficulties crop up with regard to the political and economic spheres during the realization of what is intended here. How, for example, educational institutions must come into being which in their guidelines affect, apart from the actual pedagogy, the two [political and economic] representations, is the responsibility of the superior senate.



[1] The original German Memoranda are in “Aufsätze über die Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus und zur Zeitlage 1913-1921“. Dornach 1961. This first one was reportedly written between July 13 and 17, 1917..

[2] Rudolf Steiner bases this statement also on an award-winning scientific article, published in the above collection of essays, about the history of the outbreak of the war,  based on official documents from the government of the United Kingdom, by Dr. J. Rüchti from the Seminar for History of the University of Bern, Switzerland in April, which lays the blame for the outbreak squarely on the shoulders of the imperialist English statesmen. For a translation of this review by Rudolf Steiner, see Appendix 1

[3] The assassination of Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914 in Sarajevo triggered the outbreak of WW I, but as Rudolf Steiner makes clear, it was not the cause. . 

[4] The construction beginning in 1899 of a railroad track from Asia Minor via Baghdad to the Persian Gulf with a strong German involvement led to political tensions due to the fear of German influence in the Middle East.  


THE SECOND MEMORANDUM - Addressed to the Austrian-Hungarian Government (Second version) 

"No people must be forced under a sovereignty under which it does not wish to live. No territory must change hands except for the purpose of securing those who inhabit it a fair change of life and liberty. No indemnities must be insisted on except those that constitute payment for manifest wrong done. No readjustments of power must be made except such as will tend to secure the future peace of the world and the future welfare  and happiness of its peoples […] And then the free peoples of the world must draw together […] in a common covenant, some genuine and practical cooperation that will in effect combine their force to secure power and justice in the dealings of nations with one another. The brotherhood of mankind must no longer be a fair but empty phrase: it must be a structure of force and reality.”[1] 

That is how Mr. W. Wilson describes what is to become reality through America entering the war. Captivating words they are, with which every reasonable human being would wholeheartedly agree. If they were written down by a literary humanitarian for the edification of a reading circle, one could stand still by their self-evident recognition. With the gesture of a moralist one could also assert that whoever wants to object to this could not be a friend of progress and freedom. Voices can even be heard today emphasizing that this war has taught us:  Only those acknowledging such or similar ideals and acting accordingly are shaping advanced, contemporary policy.

            All talk about “views” and that this or that view would have to be represented because one believes in them never leads to a basis for practical action. The only thing that suffices for that purpose is to sharply envisage reality. For the citizens of the Central European states a discourse about the "universal human" justification of the goals the Entente pursues, as it were about their "beauty," can be of no value, but only the knowledge of their balance of power in the life of the peoples. This is why, in the following, the focus is on the actual form of the aims of the Entente as they affect Europe, regardless of the fact that what is said here cannot sound pleasant to the leaders of the Entente. Only through such objective thinking can one come to practical impulses. Things will have to be spelled out somewhat sharply due to the reasons given. It should be pointed out explicitly that existing sentiments are not to play any role in this formulation, but only the sober observation of the facts in recent decades. To understand what the Entente will, must become the basis for the guidelines of Central Europe; to be blinded by what it says leads to the worst possible mistakes.

            It is, in any case, an ungrateful task to be compelled to turn against ideas which seem to have won over to a high degree the hearts and minds of the people. Which ideas, in addition, appear to be the result of the "true historical development of mankind to most noble democracy." And yet the following must be built on the basis that the acknowledgment of Wilson's will must be a logical burden not only for the citizens of the Central and Eastern European nations, but also to the effect that each and every action and measure taken during this war and thereafter must be taken in such a way that the will of Wilson and the Entente must break in the face of the health and fertility of these measures and actions.

            The Entente aspires to hide the true nature of its war goals; in the way that Mr. Wilson has expressed his will, they are mixed in a questionable manner. We are dealing with the former at the same time when we are concerned with the latter. The time has not come for a conceptual refutation – no matter how brilliant – of Wilson's "program". It is at present not a matter of disputes to decide who is right or wrong. The only thing that counts here is what is happening or what carries the seed of what is happening. And thoughts which are conceived and spoken in Central Europe as seeds for the action of today and tomorrow are only of value if they are held in this sense.

            Wilson's words are not those of a literary friend. They are the flag covering the deeds for which the Americans are arming, and which the Entente has undertaken for three years against Central Europe. The facts are such that Central Europe has to fight against that which claims to march into battle behind this flag for the salvation of mankind, for the peoples’ liberation. The Entente and Wilson say what they claim to be fighting for. Their words have persuasive power. Their propaganda is getting more and more questionable. There are people in Central Europe who certainly do not want to admit to be repeating Wilson, yet whose ideas are not unlike his words.

            Whoever knows the origin of this war in a deeper sense can do nothing else but stress the necessity that the Entente-Wilson program be sharply rejected by Central Europe on the basis of facts. For the real prospect of this program, in addition to its moral blinding, is that it wants to use the instincts of the Central and Eastern European nations to bring these peoples into economic dependence on Anglo-Americanism by morally and politically overpowering them. The spiritual dependency would then only be the necessary real consequence. Whoever knows that in English initiated circles[2] since the last century the term "the coming world war" has been referred to as the event which must bring the Anglo-American race to a position of world domination, cannot attach any value to the claim made by the leaders of the Entente that this war had taken them by surprise, or that they had wanted to prevent it, even if these assurances were to have subjective truth among those who are presently speaking. For those who spoke of “the coming world war" as an inevitable event reckoned with the real historical and national forces of Europe. They reckoned with the instincts of the European, especially the Slavic peoples. And they wanted to direct and use the ideals of these Slavic peoples in such a way that they could be of service to the national egoism of Anglo-Americanism. They reckoned furthermore with the decline of Romanity, on whose ruins they would spread out. They thus reckoned with generous, historical and nationalistic points of view which they intended to place at their service. And these goals lead, even though this is still so strongly denied on the part of the Entente, to the purpose of crushing the Central European states.

            The right thing is to emphasize quite soberly that the goal of the Entente leaders is to crush Central Europe, for only the emphasis on this goal can be the answer to the so effective statements of the Entente; but an answer which in a certain sense is negative, because it wants to disprove what is said by the Entente, has no value. Therefore, the following answer should be positive, that is, to point out the facts with which Central Europe confronts the Entente.

A Positive Answer of Central Europe

It is only the realization that this is so that Central Europe can bring the impulses to bear that lead out of the present chaos. The Central European states can only take the view that the Entente program is to be rendered ineffective by its own measures. This Entente program, whether more or less pronounced or unpronounced, rests on three assumptions:

            (1) that the historically developed Central European state structures may not – from the standpoint of the Entente – be recognized as having the responsibility to resolve the European nationality problems;

            (2) that these Central European states must not be economically competitive, but instead dependent on Anglo-Americanism;

            (3) that the cultural (spiritual) relations of Central and Eastern Europe are to be organized in the sense of the national egoism of Anglo-Americanism.

            Only he who is able to recognize that Wilson’s letter to the Russians is the translation of these three points into the language of the Entente comprehends what it is about.

            It could also be that, forced by the course of events, we are going to get a peace in the near future. Perhaps when England sees that it can no longer sustain itself without giving its consent to end the war. This does not change in essence anything on the part of Anglo-Americanism. If this Anglo-Americanism finds it possible to continue the war, then it will further clothe the three above-mentioned points into the formula of Wilson's letter: "For these things we can afford to pour our blood and money. For these are the things we have always professed to desire, and unless we pour out blood and treasure now and succeed we may never be able to unite or show conquering force again in the great cause of human liberty." If the leading powers of England are forced in the near future to let the war draw to a close, then the future policy, shaped according to the three above-mentioned points, will be encapsulated in the formula: “For the sake of the liberation of mankind we have been willing  to sacrifice money and blood  and have also done so to a high degree, while the Central European powers were only concerned about the opposite. Our goal stands undiminished before our eyes, because it is the goal of mankind.”      

            What actually lies behind these intentions will only really be met by acting practically in Central Europe according to the realization: In the West the rule of Anglo-Americanism is called liberation of mankind and democracy. And because this is done, one creates the appearance of wanting to be a real liberator of mankind. Effective against the consequences of this monstrous deception, against the consequences of a self-evident racial egoism in the garb of an impossible morality can only be the attitude of Central Europe towards the whole truth of the facts. And this truth is:

            1. When the objectives of the Entente with regard to the Central European state structures are attained, real European freedom will be lost. For they can realize these state structures, because it is in the interest of these state structures themselves, and states cannot act otherwise than in their own interests. Anglo-Americanism cannot realize this national freedom because, as soon as it exists, it acts against the interests of the Anglo-American states, so long as these interests are such as they are now, and as this war has marked them with actual necessity. The Anglo-American states have to recognize that they must respect besides them the interests of the Central European states, and that they must leave the constitutional order of Central European national freedom up to the Central European states, which can see their real national interest only in the promotion of this freedom.

            2. From the Central European point of view this war is towards the east a war between nations, towards the west – against England and America – an economic war. The war of revenge against France was only made possible by the combination of the revenge idea with the Anglo-American economic interests and the Russian-Slavic national ideals.

            3. National liberation is possible. But it can only be the result, not the basis of human liberation. Once human beings are liberated, then through them the nations will become liberated.

            If it is willing do so, Central Europe can act in the sense of these three basic principles. And its action will be a factual program; it will act accordingly by pitting an objective program for the liberation of mankind against the program of Wilson and the Entente that speaks without any knowledge of the Central European nations about something that has no basis in fact, but only exists in the aspirations of Anglo-American racism. The program that is deemed right for Central Europe is not radical in the sense that radicalism is feared by many circles. Rather, it is only an expression of the facts which are to be realized on their own accord in Central Europe. They should be realized fully consciously and not be kept secret so as to yet strive in the mist of the Entente and Wilson’s objectives against their realization on their own accord, thereby become corrupted and becoming the impetus and pretext for warlike complications.

            The proper implementation will never happen, if what Central Europe must be willing to do is concealed by the unnatural mixture of political, economic and general human interests.

            For the political conditions, if they are to flourish, demand a healthy conservatism in the sense of the preservation and expansion of the historically established state structures. The economic and general human interests will only be at odds with this conservatism, which is a living condition for Central Europe, as long as they have to suffer from their intermingling with it. And the political conservatism, when it is concerned with its true interests, has not the slightest reason to let itself continually be interfered with in dealing with its legitimate sphere by the merger with economic and general human interests. If this mixture ceases, the economic and general human conditions are reconciled with the political conservatism, and the latter can quietly develop according to its own nature.

            The economic conditions demand, if they are to prosper, a sense of opportunism, which brings about its order solely according to its own nature. It must lead to conflicts, if the economic measures are related to political and general human requirements other than in the context resulting in their own laws and administrations required by the self-evident contexts of life itself. What is meant here are not merely domestic conflicts, but predominantly those which are discharged outwards in political difficulties and military explosions.

            The general human conditions and the related questions of national liberation demand as a basis for their realization the freedom of the individual, now and in the future. On this point, one will not even begin to hold an objective view, as long as one believes that freedom of the people or national liberation can be spoken of without building upon the individual freedom of human beings and as long as one does not also realize that this real individual liberation necessarily gives rise to national liberation, because the latter must come about naturally as a result of the former. The individual human being must be able to connect himself with a people, a nation, with a religions community, with every sort of cultural context which results from his general human aspirations, without him being prevented from making this choice by a political or economic connection through the structure of the state.

            It is important to understand that all forms of state structures are historically capable of realizing human liberation, if it is shown to them that this is in their own interests. This is eminently the case with the Central European states. A parliamentary arrangement of these states may be regarded as necessary for reasons of the development of the times we live in and public sentiment. Only the characterized tripartite of the state structure can cope with the questions that in the face of these vicissitudes of war  must now be thrown into the public arena. The mere question of parliamentarism does not alter the conditions that have led to the present chaos. The western nations speak so much about this, because they do not understand the conditions of the Central European countries, and believe that what is right for them must serve as a model for the whole world. For Central Europe, even if parliamentarism is to prevail, applies a form in which the political, economic, and the general human conditions unfold independently in legislation and administration, thus mutually supporting each other, instead of becoming entangled in their external effects and erupting in disputes. Central Europe frees itself and the world from such conflict material, if it excludes the implied mutual interference of the three human forms of life in its state structures. No Entente objectives and no Wilsonian goals can come up against the force exhibited by Central Europe when it presents to the world what it alone can do and what no one else can accomplish. The liberation of mankind, and thus that of the nations will be placed before the world as a necessary part of the Central European states and peoples' instincts when, as indicated here, they are thrown into the present events as a fact-provoking impulse.

            What is stated here is not to be presented as an Utopian program and shall not eradicate any historical rights and legal structures. It represents for the person carefully studying it something that, with complete respect for all historical justifications and acknowledgement of the real conditions, can grow without any reservations out of the current state structures. It is, therefore, a matter of course that  what is to be carried out here does not enter into any details. Such details emerge with really practically conceived impulses only in the execution. Only an utopist can conceive in detail, therefor his propositions sprung from abstract thinking, cannot be carried out. What is said here can only occur in general guidelines. These guidelines, however, have not been devised, but gleaned from the living conditions in Central Europe. This guarantees that they will prove themselves precisely when they are put into practice. What is said here is to a certain extent already present as a necessity of life. It is only a matter of serving these necessities. And that is why it is now unnecessary to speak about the details, because this is an internal matter of the Central European states. At this moment, it is necessary to assert only as much of this matter before the world as is of significance outwardly. What is important is to show what impulses really live in Central Europe and to show that in such a way that the Western adversaries see that by continuing the war they must find themselves confronted by these indestructible impulses. The leaders of the Entente are thereby confronted with something, not merely held to account, with which they have until now not been confronted and which they cannot conquer on their part by any war program. When such a factual discourse as is meant here, is brought before the world, it must have consequences.

            The accommodation with Russia at the present moment does not need to be sought for in this context, for this accommodation must in the course of events result by itself. And the insight that such a result must occur will give impulses to the Russian leaders, which can only have favorable outcomes.

            With all this in mind, it must always be taken into consideration what the implied remarks mean, not so much an internal affair, but rather an outward manifestation for putting an end to the present global conflict, especially in the political struggle with the manifestations of the Entente leaders and Wilson. In this case, the internal affairs are in a similar sense taken into consideration as the actual effects of a man's thinking are a reality for other people, even though his way of thinking  is only an internal matter of his organism. But he only needs to discuss the effect of his thinking with others, not the constitution of his inner being.

            To recognize and accept in legislation, administration, and social structure, the separation of the political, economic, and general human spheres as the goal of the aspirations of Central Europe – that is what paralyzes the forces of the Western powers. This compels them beside the European Central powers and the Eastern powers which are associated with the latter under such conditions, to conceive a relation in which the Western powers are limited to giving themselves in the sphere of their national instincts the structure appropriate to them (as state structures) and to let the Central and Eastern European peoples live out their commonalities in the sense of real human liberation also within the space which is naturally allotted to them, without the disturbance that was the cause of this war. This in contrast to the current situation in which the Western powers believe it is only their will which can be proclaimed as the paramount factor in the global conflict.

            It all comes down to understand how different the relations between states and peoples and also individuals develop when these relations are based on the external effect that follows from the separation of the three factors of life than when in this external effect the conflicts are embroiled which result from their mixture. In future, the history of this war will namely be written in such a way that it will be shown how the war has been the result of the unfortunate mutual disturbance of the three spheres of life in international relations.

            Upon their separation, the external power of one life sphere harmonizes the others; in particular the economic interests balance out conflicts arising on political grounds, and the general human interests can unfold their power of international integration, whereas especially this power is rendered entirely ineffective when it must act outwardly while burdened with political and economic conflicts. In recent times, nothing has been the subject of greater illusions than this last point. It was not understood that general human relations can only unfold their true power externally, if they are built up internally on the basis of free corporations.  They are then active in conjunction with the economic interests in such a way that as a result thereof something is developed in a natural, living manner what is now to be given a dubious future through the creation of utopian supranational organizations: utopian courts of arbitration, a Wilsonian “League of Nations”, which can lead to nothing else but the continual majorization of Central Europe by the other states. Such things suffer from the mistake from which suffers everything that is imposed on the facts by wishful thinking, while with what is meant here a development  is given free rein that from the facts itself aspires to be realized, and which can therefore also be realized.

The following as in the First Memorandum from the paragraph starting with "If this is recognized..”. to  the paragraph ending with, “as if this implied tacit agreement.” "The conclusion of the Second Memorandum reads:

:... It is quite natural that innumerable misgivings will arise for many against what is presented here.  But such reservations would only come into consideration if what is presented here were intended as a program, the realization of which should be undertaken by an individual or a society.  But it is not conceived in this way; indeed, it refutes itself if it were conceived in this way. It is meant as an expression of what the peoples of Central Europe will do when governments set themselves the task of recognizing and releasing the forces of the people.  What will happen in detail is always revealed in such things when they set out on the path of realization.  For they are not prescriptions about something that has to happen, but predictions of what will happen if one lets things go on their course demanded by their own reality.  And this own reality prescribes with regard to all religious and spiritual-cultural matters, to which the national also belongs: administration by corporations to which the individual person professes to belong of his own free will and which are administered in their parliaments as corporations, so that this parliament has to do only with the corporation in question, but never with the relationship of this corporation to the individual person.  And never may a corporation deal with a person belonging to another corporation from the same point of view.   Such corporations are admitted to the parliamentary circle when they unite a certain number of persons. Until then, they remain private matters in which no authority or representation has to interfere. For whom it is a sour apple that from such points of view all intellectual cultural affairs must in future be deprived of privileges, he will have to bite into this sour apple for the salvation of the people's existence.  As people become more and more accustomed to this privileging, it will be difficult to understand in wide circles that we must return from the privileging of the intellectual professions to the good old, age-old principle of free corporation, and that the corporation should indeed make a man capable in his profession, but that the exercise of this profession must not be privileged, but left to free competition and free human choice, this will be difficult to understand for all those who like to talk about people not being ready for this or that.  In reality, this objection will not come into consideration anyway, because, with the exception of the necessarily free professions, the corporations will decide on the choice of the petitioners. Nor can difficulties arise in the political and economic spheres that cannot be remedied in real terms in the realization of what is intended.  How, for example, pedagogical institutions must come into being, which in their guidelines touch the two representations not including the actual pedagogy in themselves, that is a matter for the superior senate. All individual institutions, as they are conceived here, can be achieved by expanding the historically given factors, which need not be eliminated or radically replaced by others in any country of Central Europe. In the existing, the points can be found everywhere, which, pursued in the direction indicated, result in the liberation of peoples on the basis of the liberation of man.  To "prove" here that what has been said is "correct" would be absurd; for this correctness must result from the fact of its realization.  The next realization would be the confession of these impulses in an authoritative place. No one need be afraid that even this open avowal will have a tremendous effect favorable to the Central European states.  On the contrary, one can calmly wait and see what the Entente leaders will do (not say) when they are confronted with this open avowal.  They will have to reckon with it in a different way than they have reckoned with everything that has so far emanated from Central Europe.  Up to now, they only had to reckon with Central Europe's success in arms; they should also reckon with its political will. Whoever thinks of what is indicated here in a really practical sense, that is, in harmony with the actual conditions, will find that a basis has been created on which even such complicated questions as the Austrian language question - including the state and lingua franca - and the German colonial questions can rest.  For what has been thought of here avoids the mistake that has always been made up to now, namely, that one thought of a solution to such questions before one had created the factual foundations on which a solution could be built.  Up to now, one always proceeded to build the first floor of a house without thinking about the ground floor.  

            This ground floor, however, is for the Central European states the recognition of their naturally necessary structure in conservative-historical-political representation and administration, separated from the organization of the opportunistic-economic and the spiritual-cultural element.  If one stands firm on this ground, then only on this basis one can speak of parliamentarism, democratism and the like. For these things do not become different in themselves, whether they are the expression of a mixture of the political, economic and spiritual-cultural elements, which is impossible in Central Europe in the long run, or that of the natural division of these elements.  - It is precisely by the effect which an open avowal in this sense would produce on the leaders of the Entente that one could see, when this effect occurs, how one stands on the real ground of the facts with this avowal.* No one who thinks out of the real conditions of Central Europe will doubt the practicability of what is given in this presentation.  For here nothing is demanded "as a program," but it is only shown what wants to be carried out, and what succeeds at the very moment when it is given a free course. If the Entente-Wilson peace formula were replaced by that which is the essence of this formula without a mask, the following would come out: "We Anglo-Americans want the world to be as we wish it. Central Europe must submit to this wish."  This unmasked peace formula shows that Central Europe had to be driven into war.  If the Entente were to win, Central Europe's development would be extinguished.     

            If Central Europe adds to the invincibility of its weapons, as an offer of peace to the world, the most unconditional intention to realize what only Central Europe can realize in Europe, the liberation of peoples through the liberation of people, then this Central Europe can counter the talk of "the rights and freedom of peoples" with the real, true word: "We fight for our rights and freedom, and the realization of these goods of humanity, which we cannot and will not allow to be taken from us, does not by its very nature impair any real right and freedom of another.  For what we will want will carry the guarantee of it in itself. 

If you Western peoples can come to an understanding with us on this basis, and if you Eastern peoples see that we want nothing other than you yourselves, if only you understand yourselves, then tomorrow peace will be possible."



[1] Message to the provisional government of Russia dated June 9, 1917 (President Wilsons Foreign Policy, New York, p, 320).

[2]  Rudolf Steiner refers here to the English occultist C.G. Harrison, who held in 1893 a series of lectures under the title The Transcendental Universe: Six Lecture on Occult Science, Theosophy and the Catholic Faith. Delivered before the Berean Society (London, 1894), in which on p. 99 he said: “We need not pursue the subject further than to say that the national character [of the Slavic people] will enable them to carry out experiments in Socialism, political and economical, which would present innumerable difficulties in Western Europe.” And this is exactly what happened. See for more details Ostenrieder, M, Welt im Umbruch, Stuttgart, 2010, p. 919-924. How the balance of this occult power structure was gradually transferred and came to the fore after WWI in the US see the research done by Dr. Anthony C. Sutton, especially what he considers his main work America’s Secret Establishment – Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones, available online. This thoroughly researched academic work, which cannot simply be brushed off as conspiracy theory,  is historically interesting  for showing how Hegel’s logic has been misused for evil cosmopolitical ends towards global hegemony .i.e. thesis communism, anti-thesis Nazism, synthesis New World Order, but philosophically less so, because the interpretation of Hegel’s idea of the state as so-called God is faulty; in Prussia the state was by no means all-powerful but contained  ample  room for free corporations. Rudolf Steiner voices it thus in lecture IX of his cycle Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms: It was not yet the trend of that time, particularly in the area where Hegel lived, to worship the state as much as was the case later on. Therefore, it is incorrect to view the concept of the state appearing in Hegel's writing in the same light as must be done in regard to later times. Within his structure of the state, for example, Hegel still acknowledged free corporations, a corporate life. All the antihuman elements that made their appearance later in the Prussian realm were not yet in evidence when Hegel, one might say, deified the idea of the state in Prussia of all places; but this grew out of his attempt to see at work in the world that reason which he had wrested from Ahriman through his logic.” See also the book written and edited by Kris Millegan Fleshing Out Skull and Bones – Investigations into America’s Most Powerful Secret Establishment, Walterville, OR 2003.


THE SECOND MEMORANDUM (First version of July 22, 1917)

NoteThe beginning agrees with the second version printed above, only the paragraphs, beginning with “All talk about ‘ views’” and the one beginning with “The right thing is to emphasize quite soberly” occur only in the second version. The conclusion of the first version reads:

Central Europe can, if it wants, act in the sense of these three foundations, and its action will be a program of facts.  It will act in this way if it opposes a factual program of the liberation of humanity to the Entente-Wilson dazzle program.  Such a program is not radical in the sense in which one is frightened by any radicalism in certain circles. It is rather only an expression of the facts which want to be realized by their own force in Central Europe.   They should be realized with full consciousness, not kept hidden, in order to strive nevertheless in the fog of the Entente-Wilson goals towards their realization by their own nature and thereby be corrupted.

            The realization will never happen if what Central Europe must want remains concealed by the unnatural mixture of political, economic and general human interests.

            For the political conditions, if they are to prosper, demand conservatism in the sense of the preservation and construction of the state structures which have become historical.  

        Economic and general human interests resist this conservatism only as long as they have to suffer from it. When this suffering ceases, they reconcile themselves to it, because they learn to see its necessity.

            Economic conditions demand for their prosperity opportunism, which brings about their order only according to their own nature.  Conflicts must arise when economic measures are connected with political or general human requirements and this connection is such that it thwarts economic development.

            The general human conditions and the conditions of the peoples demand the individual freedom of man in the sense of the present and the future.  Man must be able to profess his allegiance to a nation, to a religious community, to some other context connected with his general human aspirations, without being held back in this profession from his political or economic context by the structure of the state.

            It is important to realize that all forms of state structure, as historically evolved, are capable of carrying out the liberation of mankind, if they are dependent on it by their own interest not to serve merely racial egoism.  A parliamentary representation of a people may be desirable for reasons of the development of the times, but it does not change the conditions which have led to the present chaos, if in this parliament the political, the economic and the general human conditions continually interfere with each other.  And Central Europe, by its very nature, strives to exclude such disturbances. No entente, no Wilsonian aims can arise in the face of the power that lies in the realization of the European instincts for freedom through Central Europe.  For these instincts for freedom are the germ of the European national freedoms, not the Wilsonian ideas.

            To recognize and accept the legislation, administration and social structure, the separation of the political, economic, general-human as the goal of the Central European aspirations, that paralyzes the Western powers, that forces them, alongside the European Central Powers, in their union with Eastern Europe, to profess peace. This allows these Western powers to limit themselves to seeking the social structure appropriate to them in the area of their national instincts, and to let the Central and Eastern Europeans live out their national commonalities in the sense of the real liberation of humanity also within the space which has become historical for them.

            The parliamentarism which is necessary for Central Europe will come about when one no longer regards it as the first priority, but as the consequence, as it must come about when one recognizes as the first priority  the division [of the social organism]  into the political-military sphere ,which orders its relation to other states according to its nature just as much as to the internal national structure, into the economic sphere, which is ordered opportunistically according to its own nature, i.e. is represented and administered legislatively in this sense, and into the general-human sphere, which is built upon the corporations to which man professes himself in the sense of his own free sentiment.

            The abstract League of Nations with its Utopian courts of arbitration could lead to nothing else than the continuous majorization of Central Europe by the other states. The ordering of the relations in Central Europe in the sense of the separation of powers  leads to the continuing balance of the interests of mankind anchored in the peoples.  With the Wilsonian League of Nations institutions ae created which must suffer from the catastrophe which is always the case when human  wishful thinking is imposed on the facts; one does not create such institutions with what the whole nature of the Central and Eastern European peoples is urging, but one liberates therewith what liberates in the sense of peaceful development, but if remaining unliberated must lead to warlike conflicts.  A future state of mankind cannot be created by institutions, as Wilson and the Entente want, but it will come about if one gives the facts free rein through which it can come about.

            If the Entente-Wilson peace formula were replaced by what is the essence of this formula without its mask, the following would come out: "We Anglo-Americans want the world to become as we wish to see it; Central Europe must submit to this wish."  - This unmasked peace formula shows that Central Europe had to be driven into war.

            If the Entente were to win, Central Europe's development would be destroyed. If Central Europe adds to the invincibility of its weapons, as an offer of peace to the world, the most unconditional intention to realize what only Central Europe can realize in Europe, national liberation through human liberation, then this Central Europe can counter the talk of "the rights and freedom of peoples" with the real true words:

            "We fight for our rights and our freedom.  And the realization of these goods of humanity, which we cannot and will not let ourselves be deprived of, does not, by its very nature, interfere with any real right and freedom of the other; for what we will want will carry the guarantee of it in itself.

             If you Western peoples can come to an understanding with us on this basis, and if you Eastern peoples see that we want nothing other than you yourselves, if you understand yourselves but rightly - then tomorrow peace is possible."

* * *

But alas, it was not to be. Rudolf Steiner’s attempt to head a public relations bureau in Zürich as the official representative of the Central Powers to make this peace proposal widely known, had earlier already been turned down by the German Military High Command because of the fact that he was not a German, but an Austrian citizen, and the politicians lacked the willpower and insight to adopt and implement this nation-saving humanitarian idea. Rudolf Steiner’s proposal to send a threefold delegation, representing the political, economic and cultural spheres in Germany, to the negotiation table at the coming peace conference of Versailles in 1919 and his literary efforts to show that in no way Germany was alone responsible for the outbreak of the war all came to naught.[1] Instead, Germany lost part of its territory and was saddled with huge reparations, which only served to arouse the anger and resentment of the populace and set the stage for a Second World War. So now he turned this attention to bringing this idea into the open on his own steam.

____________________ ___________

[1] “This question [concerning who was guilty for the outbreak of the war] is at this moment more important than the action for the threefold impulse”, he remarked. See  Dreigliederungszeit - Rudolf Steiners Kampf für die Gesellschaftsordnung der Zukunft, Dornach, 1978 by Hans Kühn, a close associate at that time of Rudolf Steiner (The Threefold Commonwealth Period – Rudolf Steiner’s Struggle for the Social Order of the Future, not translated).

 

COLOFON AND LIST OF CONTENTS

This publication contains an annotated English translation of the two Memoranda that Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), founder of anthroposophy, s...