3 CONFERENCES AT PRAGUE AND BERGEN AND THE LOOMING WAR 261l’éthique et la guerre (1934).^73 A Viennese disciple of Sigmund Freud,
Waelder had prepared his letter in November 1933, ‘denouncing’ in
it, as Bonnet later observed, ‘the paranoia at the moment when it was
acceding to power.’^74 Waelder’s work was well known in Geneva and
Paris and his new study was keenly awaited in both capitals. Upon receiv-
ing a copy of the study in February 1939, the GRC’s head of publica-
tions wrote to Whitton’s replacement as director of the centre, namely,
Carl F. Remer, declaring the following:
We have got..to go far deeper into these problems than we have gone
heretofore. The conventional explanations will no longer answer the
extraordinary phenomena now taking place in the world. Deeper than all
the more obvious problems such as territorial aspirations, commercial pol-
icies and the like, lie the causes which are behind them and which give rise
to one type of demand and now to another. It is certainly a psychological
and emotional unsteadiness and unrest in the world which predominantly
brings into being and explains some of otherwise inexplicable things that
are happening. There must be, and indeed is, a considerable degree of psy-
chological explanation for certain extraordinary individuals who are hold-
ing great power today and for great masses of people who follow them
almost blindly.^75Leon Steinig was a functionary at the Social Questions and Opium
Trafficking Section of the League Secretariat. With the collaboration of
Bonnet, he had invested much effort in persuading Einstein to partic-
ipate in an exchange of letters with Freud on the question of war, an
exchange which was published in English, French and German by
the IIIC in March 1933 under the respective headings of Why War?;
(^73) Robert Waelder, ‘L’Étiologie et l’évolution des Psychoses collectives,’ in L’esprit,
l’éthique et la guerre: Lettres de Johann Bojer, J. Huizinga, Aldous Huxley, André Maurois
and Robert Waelder (Paris: Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, 1934).
The first volume in the open letters series was the following: League of Nations, A League
of Minds: An International Series of Open Letters 1 (Paris: International Institute of
Intellectual Cooperation, 1933). This volume was published in French with the following
title: Pour une société des esprits.
(^74) Henri Bonnet, ‘La Société des Nations et la Coopération Intellectuelle,’ Journal of
World History 10, no. 1 (1966): 198–209, 204. See also Waelder, ‘L’Étiologie et l’évolu-
tion des Psychoses collectives,’ 91.
(^75) Head of Publications, Geneva Research Centre, to Remer, 23 February 1939, AG
1-IICI-B-V-10, UA.