The insights that lead to an understanding of the great catastrophe that befell the world must be sought in the most diverse areas of the life of nations and people. The area which until now has been regarded as the realm of politics is only one of the currents which have come together to create this destructive event. In the thoughts, which drove July 1914 into a period of confusion, flowed through long periods many other forces that divided humanity. This book also describes only one of the currents under discussion. To what extent it is important to investigate this current, the reader may decide for himself, who in what follows will be presented with a considerable arsenal of factual material that can substantiate how certain secret societies of the Entente countries and their lodges placed an original and essentially good and necessary cause in the service of popular egoism and the selfish interests of individual human groups. A cause which should serve the whole of humanity without racial and specific differences turns from a good into a bad one if it is made into the basis of power of individual human groups. The foundations of certain views were turned by secret societies of the Entente countries into motives for the global catastrophe preparing political convictions and for influencing world events. Of course, one would be guilty of one-sidedness who does not take into account that from the places where such beliefs and influences originated, many other causes have emerged. The book that is herewith presented to the public does not want to speak comprehensively about the "question of guilt of the World War"; but wants to draw attention to things into which he who wants to find this "guilt" must also look. Such a person will have to reconcile a few things with what he finds here. But from the account of the facts presented, the conclusion should surely follow that the seeker of this "guilt," which it would be better to call a search for the driving causes, is leaving out an important point of view if he does not direct his attention to the following.
Zurich, October 10, 1918
Map of Europe from the book by Karl Heise
Above this map, the following
was written: "The future division of Europe as the outcome of a world war,
as it was proposed in secret circles of the English speaking world. (No
indications seem to have been made about the division of the North
[Scandinavia] and about the more precise division of the Romance
regions.)"
Area independent of England but under its sphere of influence [Refers to the marked West European coastal areas, including all of Holland].
Translation of the inscriptions on the map: "The area left for the Germans (Rhine, Danube)" - "After the predicted world war, the Danube-Balkan Confederation (Danube) emerged" - "From the dissolution of the Russian state from Czechoslovaks, Poles, Russians etc. emerged Slav-Confederation (Weichsel)."
Note by the translator: The brother Arthur of Count Ludwig Polzer Hoditz, also mentioned here, wrote the following about this map in his book Kaiser Karl (Zürich-Leipzig-Vienna, 1928, p. 19, footnote): "I abstract from the fact that the destruction of the Hapsburg monarchy had already for some time been a foregone conclusion of those politicians who - casually said - after the collapse of the Central Powers divided the main roles of world politics among themselves. In this regard, reference should be made to the map of the division of Europe, which the Englishman Labouchère published in the satirical magazine Truth in the year 1990 - thus twenty-four years before the outbreak of the World War. That map is almost identical to today's map of Europe: Austria has disappeared as a monarchy and has made way for a League of Nations republic. Böhmen is an independent state in the casual guise of Czechoslovakia, Germany has been forced into its current narrow borders and dissolved into republican states. Above the space of Russia is the word 'desert', 'states for socialist experiments'."
Although these last words
about the aims of these Western brotherhoods for Eastern Europe do not appear
on the map reproduced here, this is precisely what Rudolf Steiner was referring
to in his preface to Heise's book with the somewhat veiled sentence "The
foundations of certain insights were turned by secret societies of the countries of the Entente into motives political
convictions for preparing the global catastrophe and for influencing world
events." He explained this in more detail in one of his lectures on
December 4, 1916 on the background of World War I, The Karma Of Untruthfulness Secret Societies, the Media, and
Preparations for the Great War, Volume 1, which Karl Heise must have heard in
Dornach: "I pointed out to you [already in 1916] that in certain occult
brotherhoods of the West, demonstrably to me in the 1890s, there was already
talk of the present world war and that at that time the pupils of these occult
brotherhoods were taught by maps, on which was indicated how Europe was to be
changed by this world war. In particular, English occult brotherhoods pointed
to a war that was to come, that they were formally bringing closer, that they
were preparing."[1]
In his lecture on December 17, 1916 in Dornach, Rudolf
Steiner elaborated on this without, however, mentioning concrete names of
English occultists. (Before his words are quoted here, perhaps a brief note on
the word "sub-race" is not superfluous. This neutral term is by no
means intended to be racist and refers to the fact that in the past the human
race was divided into races, which in the course of time, however, will more
and more change into cultural differences. Anthroposophy, which in the 1990s
was, and still sporadically is, unjustly associated with racism and
discrimination, is, as an conscious awareness of the general human condition,
able to overcome the very thing it was accused of): "And that [i.e., the
planned world war] must result in the East being used to make certain
provisions - in the same way that the Papacy made its provisions in Europe.
Now, of course, one sub-race has advanced [i.e., from the fourth Greco-Roman
cultural age to the present fifth] and while during the Papacy one founded
ecclesiastical institutions in all sorts of ways - so the Western Papacy, which
has developed out of Western 'Briticism', has the task of carrying out very definite economic experiments in the East. That is, it
has the task of setting up a certain form of economic society in the most
socially possible way, which it is assumed is not yet feasible to implement in
the West, since there is the fifth and not the sixth [still far in the future
to come to full fruition Slavic] subrace. But the East must be used
experimentally for such future experiments to begin with - political, spiritual
and economic experiments must be carried out."[2]
It later turned out, as already pointed out in a footnote to the Memoranda, that he was relying on the English Catholic occultist George Harrison, who in his book The Transcendental Universe - Six Lectures on Occultism, Theosophy and the Catholic Faith (London 1884) on the future fate of the Slavic peoples, especially in the Russian empire, wrote: "We need not follow the theme any further than to say that the national character will enable them to carry out experiments in socialism of a political and economic nature, which in Western Europe would involve numerous difficulties."
[1] There has been a great deal of
controversy recently, especially in Germany, as to whether Rudolf Steiner had
been a Freemason or not, and if so of which section. There is some information
on this in his autobiography The Story of
My Life(Ch. 36) and From the
History and Contents of the First Section of the Esoteric School, 1904–1914.
This shows that in his efforts to renew the comprehensive wisdom of the ancient
mystery schools in a Christian way by reuniting the disintegrated fields of
science, art, and religion, he also joined formally - but not substantively -
an ancient Egyptian branch of the completely ossified Freemasonry (Misraim
Rite), and established a working group Mystica aeterna in it. At the outbreak
of World War I, however, he immediately ended this relationship for good, and
tore up all the relevant documents.
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