Die Europäischen Revolutionen

While serving as an officer before Verdun in 1917, Rosenstock-Huessy had a great vision of the unity over time of the separate histories of Europe’s peoples: that every European nation had developed its distinguishing characteristics in a great revolutionary upheaval like the World War, and that the upheavals which molded the spiritual and cultural outlook of the separate nations were part of a single, vast process. He saw the unity of a millennium of connected revolutions running from 1076, when the Pope declared the church’s independence from the Holy Roman Emperor (beginning the tradition of separating church and state) to the “marriage of war and revolution” he saw before his eyes in 1917. He saw the Russian Revolution as an overture to the two World Wars which, taken together as a single historical event, did what Communism could not do–create a global society in which the peoples of the world became dependent on one another. For a further description of the ideas, see Out of Revolution.

Die Europäischen Revolutionen is the book on which Out of Revolution was based, but the English-language edition is not a translation. With the help of American friends, Rosenstock-Huessy re-wrote the book for Americans, reversing the order of its chapters to make recent history the point of entry to the sequence of revolutions that forged Europe. This German original is chronologically organized and has quite a different text.

Paperback, 584 pages.