 Scheler has little interest in merely remaining a spectator to the crisis and his writing offers the means to overcome it. While he analyzes the main factors responsible for the crisis of modernity, Scheler’s suggestions for overcoming it change dramatically. His first and most troublesome response to the crisis was war. During his time earning a living as a freelance writer, Scheler worked for the state’s office of propaganda during the year leading up to and immediately following the outbreak of World War I. Like many intellectuals at the time, Scheler was a vociferous defender of German aggression and thought that the war could function as a means to awaken the German people from cultural slumber and value blindness. In his major work on the war, Der Genius des Krieges und der deutsche Krieg (The Genius of War and the German War) Scheler distinguishes three different levels on which war functions as a cultural renewal.