When the book on Der Untergang des Abendlandes121 appeared, it excited a sensation and arrogant defense. Then came Hitler, the accelerator of the downfall. But it was not the West that went down, but the German Reich and Prussia, and therewith the backbone of Europe. Silesia stopped existing, which had been hotly fought over between Austria and Prussia, and East Prussia, once the cradle of Prussia, nurtured with Slavic mother’s milk, and Pomerania, the province by the sea, binding Sweden and Germany, and the Baltic states and Bohemia, the land of Mozart and Kafka and Goethe, Caspar David Friedrich, and Prague, as a German-Slavic symbiosis, disappeared, and Poland was pushed where it did not want to go. But how can France be happy when Poland is unhappy, and how can England laugh when Prague cries, and how can we wish to understand Kant when one does not know that he wrote in German, in Königsberg? The Kleists from Pomerania. Culture of the century, Menzel122 from Breslau and Gerhart Hauptmann123 from Silesia, is that sentimentality? That is the situation before the re-entry of East Europe into a union with the depleted world-continent ripe for its downfall in its democratic cultural abuse. This new situation creates a new hope and demands exercise of strength and another historical greatness. It will all depend on how far the eastern part of Europe will have the strength to defy the western dangers, resist many enticements essentially, when it frees itself from its deadly hardenings. Many western attacks have already been defeated by the primordial character of the eastern spirit. The western danger of self-destructive tendencies is deceptively strong, but, in spite of many self-blockades of the East and lack of freedom of the political system, this reunification of Eastern and Western Europe can, after the removal of these, still be a last chance. For, after the obliteration of Prussia, western enticement and eastern strengths stand before not yet exploited foundations of thought and feeling. Perhaps the East will awaken to a new awareness of a clever symbiosis and the West has, at the right moment, the right people to lead back those things that were driven away to a happy union beyond thoughts of a national border as the cultural basis of all politics, just as there are people in the West to open up the East. The wealth of Eastern Europe is not what it became through Socialistic accomplishments, but what it remained, what Marxism left out through rejection and incompetence.