[402] First World War^a we believed, in Europe, that now the kairos, the right time, has arrived for the breaking of the eternal into the temporal--I will speak about this whole thing when we come to the social and economic realm--but it was only a break through the clouds, and the clouds became thicker and thicker, and toward the end of the twenties, before Hitler^b came, I often anticipated the total destruction of Germany^c--as it then happened, actually, on the basis of the reactionary

powers which destroyed the possibility of the breaking in of the new at that time. Then it happened that the movement of the two volcanoes (to repeat my symbol) of the 19th century--which were probably most volcanic of all--namely Marx^d and Nietzsche^e, produced systems in the 20th century which were just the opposite of that for which they were fighting. Nietzsche, although not directly responsible, has INdirectly helped to give to Nazism^f and Fascism ideological foundations. And Marx, although not directly responsible either, has helped, very much helped, to give rise to the dehumanizing system which we today call the Communistic East. Now these developments are amongst the most tragic things because both of these men tried to liberate the human mind--and indirectly religion^g--from the bondage of objectivation^h and dehumanization, and mechanization. And what they created, in the dialectics of world

historyⁱ, was almost 100% the opposite: they produced the most dehumanizing systems AGAINST their will, by the tragic of world history. This is a partial answer. Today we are in the same situation, and we don’t know whether the same development will take place, that that which was thought as an onslaught against the structure of industrial society, will be used finally by the leaders