America and Germany

A peace document has been created between America and Germany. It is a true reflection of the thoughts and feelings from which states today believe they can organize their relationships.

Wilson's thinking no longer lives in this document. It was the expression of a belief in unworldly intellectual considerations. It was admired in wide circles and dominated the convictions of many people until it was dashed by the facts. Wilson was seen as the man who wanted to give the world a new direction out of the spirit. But today one can talk about the spirit without the talk coming from the spirit. One can appear as an idealist without having ideas rooted in the real spirit. With such ideas one can arouse false enthusiasm; before the true tasks of contemporary life, they falter.

Wilson was a political romantic. This is how people who consider themselves true practitioners will now speak. And there will be many among them who, until recently, would have allowed what Wilson said as a minimum of idealism in the context of their “practical” convictions. They now stand in rapture before the peace document, which seeks to regulate economic relations from the perspective of sober reason, knowing how to keep away from political romanticism.

But this soberness is only the other side of what it regards as idealistic romanticism. It lives in the same illusion; it just does not know it because it looks at the unworldly ideas not from the front but from the back.

Wilson believed he could give laws to the world, but he did not understand that only those who trust each other can work together. Trust can only arise when souls meet with understanding. But this understanding must come from the spirit, which is experienced as a reality. Wilson's principles do not come from this spirit, but from abstractions of the intellect, divorced from reality. Yet he wanted to act out of the spirit; out of a spirit-alien sham spirit.

Now Wilson is being corrected by leaving out the spirit altogether and adhering to the business sense that is considered effective because it is soberly practical. And once again, those who believe that they can best manage together if they do not concern themselves with all spiritual and soul human relationships are allowed to feel how right they are.

This is the line of thought that more recent human development has followed until the terrible catastrophe of war occurred.

But haven't we done everything for a spiritual community? one might ask. Haven't we even exchanged professors who spoke from an American “mentality” in Europe and from a European “mentality” in America? Oh yes, we have done that. But these professors did not speak out of a world-view that comes from the living spirit. And so this spiritual community remained a decoration, from which economic interests were not affected. But humanity must be healed with spiritual reality; the spiritual decoration has brought it no help.

Only when this realization dawns will documents emerge in international relations that also make economic work possible.

With such a confession one encounters the superior smile of those who say: you may wait a long time for that, because humanity will only be ripe for such thinking after fifty years. Others say after a hundred; others choose an even larger number. The size of the number grows in proportion to the extent to which people feel compelled to smile at what they call impractical idealism.

Well, in this case, trial is likely to be better than prophecy. Humanity will become more accessible to the living spirit sooner than the practical people believe possible, if the urge for this spirit is no longer paralyzed by that seductive way of thinking that scents superstition, romanticism, and illogicality wherever a view of life based on spiritual experience is striven for. One must will the spirit if it is to become effective; and in order to will it, one has only to revel in the fruitless judgment that the waiting time will determine, after which it will come of its own accord. To such waiting souls one can reply: the spirit will not appear in fifty, a hundred, five hundred years if its appearance is not willed.

But it is absurd when we are told: “We don't want the spirit,” say the waiting souls. We want it just as much as you do. But no, you have to tell them. You don't want it; at most you wish for it. Because only the living spirit itself turns wishing into wanting. But it can only do that when people open the gates of the soul for it.

The body that has formed out of world economic interests needs the care of its soul. One should not wait for it to appear by itself. It is there; for every body has a soul. But it also wants to merge with its essence into the way people think in order to become effective.