the book originated in his experience as a soldier during world war i, through which he was forced to realize "that war was one thing to the soldiers of all nations and another thing to the people at home." his intention in writing, he says, is to "bequeath a lasting memory" of this experience to the next generations, with the design of overcoming a particular kind of inertia, a tendency to regard the sanity-shattering upheavals by which new epochs are initiated as though these only append a new chapter to the end of events that have passed. this tendency to analyze without sympathy the events even of one's own lifetime, rosenstock-huessy depicts as a willful and tragic forgetfulness. we must experience the rewriting of history in our lifetime, he said, because "the world's history is our own history"; otherwise, "it would be nothing but a hopeless library of dust".