5. The World War
What had depressed me more than anything as a young madcap in my most high-spirited years was that I had been born into an age which evidently would build its temples of fame only for tradesmen or civil servants. The billows of history seemed to have calmed down so much that the future did indeed belong only to “peaceful competition of people,” i. e. to quiet mutual swindling, abandoning violent methods of resistance. The individual states began more and more to resemble enterprises which mutually undercut one another, steal customers and orders, and try to outwit one another in every way—all amid an outcry as loud as it is harmless. This development not only seemed to continue, but (it was generally hoped) would some day transform the world into one huge department store, in whose vestibule the busts of the adroitest manipulators and most chuckle-headed executives were to be stored up for immortality. The English could then furnish the merchants, the Germans the administrative officials, while no doubt the Jews would have to immolate themselves as proprietors, since by their own admission they never make a profit, but only “keep paying” forever, and speak the most languages besides.
Why could I not have been born a hundred years sooner? Say at the time of the Wars of Liberation, when a man really had some value, even apart from “business.”
I had often been annoyed that my earthly journey was begun, as I thought, too late, and had regarded the age of “peace and good order” ahead of me as an undeserved meanness of Fate. For even as a boy I was no “pacificist,” and every attempt to train me in that direction was a fizzle.
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