Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

spoke to his people just weeks before his assassination on Good Friday, 1865,in his Second Inaugural Address as the re-elected President of the UnitedStates whose union he had done and suffered so much to save: “With malicetoward none, with charity for all . …”These were cosmopolitan souls who participated actively in a republicof free spirits in their time and recognized each other beyond thenarrow limits of political states and national languages and cultures. Thus,for example, Herman Grimm wrote to Emerson on April 5, 1856, in his veryfirst letter in a correspondence that continued until 1871, “Of all the writersof our day you seem to me to be the one who understands the geniusof the time most deeply and who most clearly feels the future. I am happyto be able to express this to you.” And, on October 25, 1860, Grimm wrote,“How fortunate the country who possesses such a man! When I think aboutAmerica, I think of you, and America appears to me to be first among thenations of the earth. You well know that I would not say this if it were not,in fact, my inmost conviction.”We need today such a spontaneous, free mutual recognition andadmiring respect in the cultural-spiritual sphere! What might it not signifyif, out of the West, there were to arise a heartfelt recognition of the greatnessof the new tasks dawning for Europe, beyond the daily struggle foreconomic and political stability, necessary as these are. And, vice versa,how much it could mean for America, and for the whole Western world, ifEurope participated with interest and heartfelt understanding in the West’sstruggle to find its own original identity, even if only accompanying thisstruggle in consciousness.At a time when spiritual freedom is once again dawning in MiddleEurope, and the rigid political and military controls begin to relax, Europeand the West should reflect upon their own true tasks and should respect andsupport their inherent differences. The West must find, in its own Westernway, a middle, heart sphere, just as Europe, in its own way, must achieve theWest within itself. Only when both fulfill their own tasks can one hope that,at some time, the brothers of the Far East and of the Southern Hemispheresmay take their places as members of a threefold social organism of humanity.It is for this reason that I feel it to be so urgently necessary that the mightycall of Eastern Europe for cultural-spiritual freedom and for the transformationof the outer political and economic forms should be answered by acall from the West, a call of Western humanity to itself to awake to its ownessential identity and to the tasks that await it in a cosmopolitan workingtogether on behalf of humanity as a whole.271