Thoughts During the Time of War
GA 19
When Rudolf Steiner spoke retrospectively about the First World War as a “war catastrophe”, he repeatedly pointed out that he had already warned of a “cultural carcinoma” in a lecture to members in Vienna on April 14, 1914, which would arise from the unhealthy processes of the economy and would have terrible consequences: (Inneres Wesen des Menschen, GA 153, 6. Lecture, S. 174f.): “Today, therefore, production is carried out for the market without regard to consumption, not in the sense of what has been explained in my essay "Spiritual Science and the Social Question, but everything that is produced is piled up in the warehouses and through the money markets, and then one waits to see how much is bought. This tendency will become ever greater until it [...] destroys itself. The fact that this kind of production occurs in social life creates exactly the same thing in the social context of people on earth that occurs in the organism when a carcinoma develops. Exactly the same, a cancer formation, a carcinoma formation, cultural cancer, cultural carcinoma! A person who has a spiritual insight into social life sees such a cancerous formation; he sees how terrible predispositions to social ulcerations sprout up everywhere. This is the great cultural worry that arises for those who see through existence. This is the dreadful thing that has such an oppressive effect, and which, even if one could otherwise suppress all enthusiasm for spiritual science, if one could suppress that which can open the mouth for spiritual science, leads one to cry out to the world, as it were, the remedy for that which is already so strongly in the offing and which will become ever stronger and stronger. What must be in his field in the dissemination of spiritual truths in a sphere that creates like nature becomes cancerous when it enters culture in the manner described.” He often quoted this statement in lectures and also in his book Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage (GA 23).
Thoughts during the Time of War
This is the first and most essential essay in this volume in which Steiner's main concern was to absolve Germany of the accusation that it was solely to blame for World War I.
Translated by Daniel Hafner.
Additional Articles on the Events of World War I
These previously untranslated articles contain the remaining contents of this volume.
Gedanken Während der Zeit des Krieges
This new volume within the Rudolf Steiner Complete Edition Thoughts during the Time of War, GA 19, takes account of the fact that Rudolf Steiner's writing of 1915 is an independent work for which the volume number 19 has been assigned in accordance with the chronology in the planning of the Complete Edition since 1961. In the course of the necessary revision of Aufsätze über die Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus, GA 24, in which the work was previously contained, the opportunity arose to separate this work from GA 24 together with the entire section on the events of the World War and to transfer it to the newly created volume GA 19. GA 24 is now named after the independent work Ausführung der Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus from 1920, the volume of essays on the threefold structure edited by Rudolf Steiner himself, which forms the first part of this volume, followed by further texts on the social threefold structure in chronological order. The new volume GA 19, on the other hand, contains not only the thoughts in Part II but also the three memoranda from 1917, in which the idea of threefolding was outlined for the first time as a way out of the war, as well as other texts on the subject of the First World War.