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

2 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

The movement made a direct appeal to those who yearned for a new social order to take responsibility upon themselves for its creation in their everyday lives. One of the early manifestos concluded:

To wait for leaders is to evade responsibilities ... Those who wish to save themselves from drifting into a state of war—a war of all against all, must make themselves responsible to each for all, and find others who will join them in Overcoming all that stands in the way of a NEW ORDER:!

From the first issue of New Britain there was evidence that this was not a conventional political movement, in the form of 10 articles entitled “World Affairs” written by M. M. Cosmoi. These were written in an apocalyptic style, ranging over the whole world panorama and touching on different aspects of human life. This was the same M. M. Cosmoi who had contributed a long series of articles under the same title of “World Affairs” to A. R. Orage’s weekly The New Age between 1920 and 1921. The main theme of these articles had been the notion of the world and humanity as a developing organism; within this framework he had attempted to sketch what he called “the psychological layout of the world,” assessing the contribution and relative function of each race and nation in an organic world order.

Few of those who read the articles in The New Age and later in New Britain knew the identity of M. M. Cosmoi. His name was Dimitrije Mitrinovi¢. He was born in Hercegovina in 1887. As a young student he had taken a prominent part in his country’s struggle against the Austrian regime and became one of the leading young lights in the literary world there through his involvement with the radical literary review Bosanska Vila. In 1914 while studying at Munich he became associated with Wassily Kandinsky. The artist introduced him to a group of distinguished thinkers from different countries who were trying to create a strong cultural influence on behalf of international harmony. They called themselves the Blut-bund. Amongst the figures associated with the initiative were Erich Gutkind and Frederik yan Eeden who were the moving spirits, Gustay Landauer, Martin Buber, Florence Christian Rang and Theodore Daubler—whilst Romain Rolland and Walter Rathenau were also peripherally involved. The outbreak of World War I frustrated their plans and Mitrinovi¢ fled to England where he sought work with the Serbian Legation.

In London he was intoduced to A. R. Orage and became part of the circle of writers and thinkers associated with The New Age, one of the most important journals at the time for radical political thought in its support