Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

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sent copies of their ‘prospectus’ for the proposed association included the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the Russian symbolist Dimitri Mereskovsky, the German poet Richard Dehmel, Ezra Pound, Rudolf Eucken, the Nobel Prize winner Professor Charles Richet, the British physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, novelists H. G. Wells and Romain Rolland, Rabindranath Tagore, and the Dutch mathematician L.E.J. Brouwer.

Van Eeden proposed that they should rent a large house somewhere to which these “representative personalities of different nations” should be invited, “just as guests in a hotel or an English country house.” The opportunity would thus be created for them to meet and discuss freely with each other. There would be no formal programme. Rather:

The mode of life in the house during the months of the meeting must be entirely simple, but sufficient for all demands and without any hint of sectarian tendencies. The guests shall be invited only one season, but the invitation can be repeated every year. When these invitations, with strict observation of the principles of freedom and universality and without consideration of lower values, take place it will soon arrive that such an invitation shall be considered as a great distinction. And when once such an effect has been produced, then all that in those two months in the House was schemed, thought, said, and done, will obtain a world meaning and be capable of moving the rudder which the whole great ship of human culture obeys.?°

In retrospect, the attempts of Landauer, Gutkind, van Eeden and their associates to create an initiative that would lead to world peace on the eve of the war might seem pitiful and insignificant, if laudable. Likewise Mitrinovic’s hectic round of visits, letters and appeals to people throughout Europe during the early summer of 1914—whilst in his homeland the chain of events that were to lead to the “war to end all wars” had already started. On June 28th 1914 the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated at Sarajevo. A month later, on July 28th Austria-Hungary, supported by Germany, declared war on Serbia. Mitrinovic was placed in an awkward and potentially dangerous situation. Nominally he was an Austrian citizen, with an Austrian passport, and of an age that could render him liable to conscription. He was, however, also in possession of a Serbian passport. He was known to the secret police and the prospect of either conscription or of being found in possession of a passport issued by a hostile nation must have caused him considerable concern.

He wrote to Gutkind expressing his disquiet and worry about his personal position. Gutkind replied on July 30th, the day before Germany declared war on Russia. He advised Mitrinovi¢ to adopt an attitude of “Buddhist