war, and above all, the mentality and the attitude of the youth who are fully concerned in such crises. These young men do not see in the war any single sharply outlined historical event, but they look upon it as the climax of material and intellectual developments during the five or six preceding decades, or even the summing up, the symbolic and, one might say, the picturesque accomplishment of the whole nineteenth century. Their attitude after such a catastrophe is in every way entirely different from that of the young Russian men and women when they saw themselves in a similar situation after the collapse of the first Russian attempt at revolution in the years 1906-7. Among the young Russians at that time, there followed after a short but very acute exertion—for that revolution was a liberal one, carried on by the highest intellectual classes, and it was finally stifled by czarism with the help of the lower classes, the same people who are now Bolshevist—after a short period of activity, I say, there followed a complete relaxation of the nerves and of the will, a sinking back into melancholic apathy or into sensuality. In some of his novels which have obtained a passing fame, Artzibashev has described these circumstances. If I had to sum up in a word the effect of the great catastrophe of 1918 on the younger Germans, it would be the exact counter-concept of relaxation: namely, the most intense exertion, an exertion of a political nature, to a great extent—but I should like to omit here entirely the purely political. Exertion, then, of the mind, exertion of all mental exactions, exertion of the feeling of responsibility, and exertion of the consciousness, and of the sense of fate and the cosmos.
This young generation finds itself on the ruins of a world; not only the political world is a heap of ruins to them, but also the world of the intellect. The rationalism in which the nineteenth century thought that its world-outlook was organized indestructibly for all times, has collapsed. The first great act of the young generation was to dethrone rationalism, and subordinate it to the irrational. They abandoned the conceptions which the nineteenth century respected most: the conception of complete individual freedom, and the conception of evolution by which all the mysteries of existence have been more obscured than clarified. The conception of authority rose higher and purer, when all the actual bearers of authority had fallen. The effort was made as profoundly as possible to give the strongest possible foundation to the conception of authority in feeling and thinking (for when we are young we strive
