The International Crisis

Abstract

The author of this book belongs to the generation which in its youth saw the sunset glow of that long and glorious sunny day of the western world, which lasted from the Congress of Vienna until August 1914, and of which those who have only lived in the present arctic night of history can have no adequate conception. His experience has therefore been similar to that of so many of his contemporaries in all those countries which were drawn into the whirlpool of the first world war. Like other Germans, Englishmen, Frenchmen and Belgians he knew as a young man the horrors of the gigantic battles on the plains of France. This experience became a determinant factor for the rest of his life as it did for his contemporaries. At the most impressionable age for such influences, he received a shock which suddenly caused him to see many things which his upbringing had up to then kept hidden from him. Never again were the pictures of those days to forsake him, nor the ideas which from that time on made him a fervent hater of war, of brutal and stupid national pride, of the greed for domination and of every collective outrage against ethics. He made a solemn promise, that if he should escape from that inferno, the main purpose of his life from then on could only consist in his devoting himself to the task of helping to prevent a recurrence of this disaster, and in reaching out beyond the narrow confines of his own nation to join forces with all other fellow-workers in the same cause. Thousands and thousands of his contemporaries and fellow-sufferers within and beyond the frontiers of his country had come to the same conclusion.