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.
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