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

48 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

All my life I have worked for the downfall of this social system, this society founded on lies and betrayals, on this beggaring and suppression of human beings; and I know now that this downfall is imminent—perhaps tomorrow, perhaps in a year’s time. And I have the right to reserve my strength until that moment. When the hour strikes I shall be ready.2°

His moment came in November 1918 when the soldiers and workers of Munich proclaimed the independent Republic of Bavaria. Encouraged by Landauer they proclaimed themselves a Soviet Republic in April 1919, shortly before they were overwhelmed by a 100,000 strong force under the command of General von Oven. Landauer was brutally murdered, along with 700 others, as the central power of the German state was re-established.

Isolated to a large degree from the intrigues, personality clashes, and rival nationalistic feelings that marred the history of the Blut-bund Mitrinovic, in the early years of the war, kept faith with his original commitment and continued his efforts to recruit “bearers of culture who are seeking tomorrow.” He attempted to establish contact with H. G. Wells and with Kropotkin who was living in Brighton at that time. Towards the end of 1915 he travelled to Paris on a Serbian passport where he remained until late February 1916, staying at 6 Avenue Montaigne. His official business was to help with the arrangements for the staging of the Mestrovic exhibition in the French capital. He took advantage of his visit, however, to try and arouse interest in the Blutbund project amongst such figures as Edouard Schuré, Anatole France, Charles Richet, Romain Rolland, and Henri Bergson. In a letter to Schuré he described the Blutbund as “a spiritual alliance of all the principal men and of all the institutions and movements worthy to think and act for the reconstruction and divine birth of Europe.”

He also tried to persuade Schuré to collaborate in the production of the proposed yearbook which he described as “an Almanac of Cosmopolitan Pacifism” and which would be published in French and English and contain “the contributions of prominent persons who believe in a spiritual Serbia and in a federated Europe of social harmony and synthetic culture.” Despite the apparent fact that the war was to drag on longer than he, and many others, had anticipated, and the failure of his plan to go to America, Mitrinovié’s spiritual optimism sustained his commitment to the vision of the seed of a new order emerging out of the remains of the old, war-torn age. To Schuré he wrote:

It is in the races that the gods are incarnated in history and even in our cataclysm: and if races, as people believe today, are all dead because they are absolutely all impure it remains only to invoke new gods, the God of Humanity without