"Now and again I have expressed the opinion that every nation, and every person, would do better, instead of rocking himself to sleep with political catchwords about war-guilt, to ask himself how far his own faults and negligences and evil tendencies are guilty of the war and all the other wrongs of the world, and that there lies the only possible means of avoiding the next war."
Steppenwolf
Hermann Hesse
(i like those words all the more for having come from a german-born author during the interwar period. was WWII that inevitable already when this was written in 1927 germany? anyone? sk)