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August, 1923

N this letter to the readers of I should prefer not to discuss cultural and artistic matters in Austria, but to take another point of view, and from this look out over another and a broader mental surface. But this point of view will always remain that of an Austrian, that is, of an individual who shares the language and the intellectual concerns common to the German, without belonging to that great political entity which was established in 1871 and humbled in the world war: the German Empire. Perhaps it is well to remind American readers, who are accustomed to dealing with large, simple, and plainly demarcated political and economic units, that in Europe there are many millions of Germans outside the German Empire who take an active part in their nation's essential and ultimate destiny—by which I do not mean its political destiny. There are the German Swiss—and in numbers they constitute the strongest part of the Swiss Confederation—the Austrians, and the millions of Germans who are incorporated in the Czecho-Slovak state, not to speak of the smaller and yet very considerable minorities which are to be found in the other countries of eastern Europe, and even in France.

Now it might seem that it would not be worth the trouble to bother American heads with the complications and intimate details of Europe; especially if one is not a politician, and the American interested in such things would less likely turn to than to the distinguished review which was founded a year ago with the purpose of propagating knowledge of foreign politics in the United States under the guiding spirit, if I am not mistaken, of Professor Coolidge of Boston. But in this old and complicated Europe, intellectual, historical, and political matters have the strictest and the most indissoluble connexion with one another. And this bewildering but essentially quite consistent interplay gives rise to that mystery which, if I were to turn a meteorological phenomenon into a spiritual one, I should call the pan-European weather; and exactly as with the weather, it has its maximum and its minimum tempera-