Facs
Transcript
of Marx’s analysis. His analysis shows structures in which everybody is involved, but in which also saving elements can be discovered, and he saw them in an almost Christ-like character of the proletariat of the 19th century – a phenomenon which you don’t know because it doesn't exist in this way in this country, but it certainly did exist in the middle of the 19th century in England and Europe. There he saw the saving possibilities and gave an analysis so convincing of the inescapable structure within the capitalist system that it changed the surface of the world in all sections of the world, as the 20th century has shown.
Now this is the other side of the rediscovery of the demonic: structures of destruction which we cannot escape.
Now this sounds again very much pessimistic-Lutheran-negativistic, and seems to exhort us to look up and not forward. But this was not our attitude. We said: No, there is a special demon, which we know. It is one special, only – others will follow. But this, we have to fight. This is the way in which the presence of the divine power in the world must express itself, in fighting a concrete demonic force. We saw it first mostly in the capitalism of the 19th century, then more in the nationalism of the early 20th century, which led to Nazism where we had a fully developed unambiguous expression of the demonic.
Now all this meant something which we find mythologically expressed in the last book of the Bible. There we find that the fight of the angelic powers against the demonic powers leads to