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LEBENSHRAUM

                                             January 15, 2009

                                               THE_ZEPPELINS_PASSENGER

A character in "The Zeppelin's Passenger"
discusses the causes of WWI:

          "You see, the world is governed by great natural
          laws. As a snowball grows larger with rolling, so it
          takes up more room. As a child grows out of its infant
          clothes, it needs the vestments of a youth and then a
          man. And so with Germany. She grew and grew until the
          country could not hold her children, until her banks
          could not contain her money, until she stretched her
          arms out on every side and felt herself
          stifled. Germany came late into the world and found it
          parcelled out, but had she not a right to her place?
          She made herself great. She needed space."

          "Well," Philippa observed, "you couldn't suppose that
          other nations were going to give up what they had, just
          because she wanted their possessions, could you?"

          "Perhaps not," he admitted. "And yet, you see, the
          immutable law comes in here. The stronger must
          possess--not only the stronger by arms, mind, but by
          intellect, by learning, by proficiency in science, by
          utilitarianism. The really cruel part, the part I was
          thinking of then, as I looked out across the sea, is
          that this crude and miserable resort to arms should be
          necessary."

                "The Zeppelin's Passenger" (1918), Chapter VIII
                by E Phillips Oppenheim
                Lessingham to Philippa






                                Bernhard von Bülow speech from 1889:
                                http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/03/bernhard-von-b%C3%BClow-1899-hammer-and-anvil-reichstag-speech.html




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