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

36 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

The new way will only begin when these exceptional people unite and form a community. In a new atmosphere of loving confidence, freedom of spirit, wisdom, devotion and self-discipline a new unity will flourish . . . Only unity among the Kingly can bring freedom and self-sustainment to the people, so that they also may be able to come together in love. They will lose their fetters without losing their balance. The few will then have laid the foundations on which many more can build and around which order can be founded.2°

Mitrinovic was, of course, in the summer of 1914, by no means the first person whose involvement as a member of the Blut-bund was sought. According to Upton Sinclair, van Eeden and Gutkind “were on fire with a plan to form a band of chosen spirits to lead mankind out of the wilderness of materialism” as early as 1912.3! Writing in the third person, Sinclair went on to observe that he “brought tears into the young rhapsodists’ eyes by the brutality of his insistence that the sacred band would have to decide the problem of social revolution first.”32 Sinclair also accompanied the “two thapsodists” on one of their early recruiting drives. The target was Walter Rathenau, the son of the founder of the giant German electrical company AEG. A hint of some of the tensions that were to mar the history of the Blut-bund was detected by the American novelist at that early meeting.

Thyrsis (Sinclair) was invited to meet Walter Rathenau. He had never heard the name, but his friends explained that this was the young heir to the great German electrical trust who went in for social reform and wrote bold books

They united in finding him genial but a trifle overconfident—an attitude that accompanies the possession of vast sums of money and the necessity of making final decisions upon great issues. Van Eeden was a much older man who had made himself a reputation in many different fields—yet he did not feel so certain about anything as he found this young master of electricity and finance. However, there is this to be added: it is the men who know what they think who are capable of action.3

Larger gatherings of Blut-bund members took place at the summer residence of the Gutkind family at Potsdam. At one such meeting in June 1914 those recorded as being present included the Swedish psychiatrist Paul Bjerre, the German anarchist Gustay Landauer, Martin Buber, Gutkind, Theodor Daubler, Florens Christian Rang, and the Dutchmen Henri Borel and van Eeden. The purpose of the gathering, according to Landauer, was “to represent the uniting of the peoples of humanity, and bring this to authoritative expression at a critical hour.”>4 Other people to whom van Eeden and Gutkind