If the authorities in the Tsarist territories and a few other countries attributed danger to the young language and accordingly erected barriers to its dissemination and slandered its devotees, for most people this probably came as a great surprise. They had difficulty understanding why interest in Esperanto would encounter such hostility, and why the poten- tial overthrow of governments could possibly be imputed to it. Those who learned Esperanto were simply following Zamenhof's call for peace among all humankind; they merely wanted to contribute to the idea that everyone, without taking away anything from anyone else, should make use of a neutral means of communication. It was the old dream of a united humanity in a new form—one not so far from reality, given the scientific and technological developments of the early years of the cen- tury, which seemed to increase awareness of the need for an international language. But, regardless of the modest gains so far in the realization of this dream, apparently Esperanto had already violated taboos.
Esperanto at the League of Nations
Zamenhof died in April 1917. Five years earlier, during the Eighth Congress in Krakow, he put aside his role as the 'official head' of the movement, announcing that he would regard himself from then on as an ordinary Esperantist.[146] He wanted freedom to continue developing his ideas for uniting humanity not only through language but in other ways as well.
In parallel with the Tenth Congress, set to take place in Paris in August 1914,[147] Zamenhof was planning 'a congress on a neutrally human religion'.[148] In 1913, in pursuit of this goal, he published (no longer anonymously) a new version of his 'political-religious faith', a pamphlet entitled Deklaracio pri Homaranismo,[149] in which he called for 'free faith' members of different religious groups to come together in 'a commu- nity free of ethnicity and doctrine'.9 [150] He explained that, to eliminate interreligious hatred 'we can leave everyone fully free to enjoy the faith or ethical system that they have had up to now, but we must unite them through a common externality .[151]
However, faced with strong opposition from the French leadership, Zamenhof had to abandon his plan. Between them, the French intel- lectuals, and him, the Eastern European Jew, lay an unbridgeable divide. Nor was this changed by the reality that in Zamenhof's final years the universalist element in his thought had almost completely subordinated the Zionist inheritance. In 1914 he refused membership in a planned Hebrew Esperanto Association on the grounds that he had no wish to align himself with nationalism, even if, on this occasion, it was the more than pardonable nationalism of an oppressed people.[152]
The hesitant response that greeted his religious ideas[153] may have con- tributed to Zamenhof's increasing warnings about the dangers of nation- alism and his emphasis on moral and political principles.[154] This tendency was already evident in a memorandum, 'Peoples and an International Language' (Gentoj kaj Lingvo Intemacia), submitted in 1911 to the Universal Races Congress.)0 Later, during the war, in a 'Call to the Diplomats' (Alvoko al la diplomatoj) 1915) Zamenhof insistently advo- cated the principle that every country 'morally and materially, and with fully equal rights, belongs to all its offspring'. He stressed that peace could not be expected to come from territorial changes but required the erasure of national chauvinism.[155] Zamenhof, who had long stressed the religious roots of anti-Jewish persecution,62 finally understood that 'the true barrier dividing contemporary humanity is not so much language or religion, as in the past, but blind devotion to nationhood'.[156]
Zamenhof's pleas, predictably, fell on deaf ears. At the end of his life he was not only obliged to listen to the admonitions of a Russophile newspaper in Warsaw to the effect that he was a 'dangerous interna- tionalist'[157] but also to endure the heart-rending realization that even the
Esperantists were infected by chauvinistic fever. The French, Germans and Italians all distributed leaflets in Esperanto defending the positions of their warring governments. Even the British Esperantists, until 1912 model internationalists, bowed to the trends of the moment, accusing the Germans of 'misusing' Esperanto for propaganda purposes—'that uni- versal auxiliary language, offered to us by our big ally Russia, cradled by our friend France'.[158] In Germany, Wilhelm Ostwald drastically redefined his position: instead of pleading for an international auxiliary language, in 1915 he publicly supported work on a simplified German language, 'Weltdeutsch', to be taught in countries occupied by German troops.[159]
Still, the Universal Esperanto Association succeeded in resisting the waves of nationalism. Exploiting the location of its headquarters in neu- tral Switzerland, UEA used its system of local representatives to organize extensive relief work during the war, conveying correspondence between citizens of hostile countries and delivering food, clothing and medicine.[160]In parallel with this practical demonstration of international solidarity, Hector Hodler, UEA's founder and director, continued his efforts to for- mulate a set of basic principles for the Esperanto movement. His idealism, based on knowledge and of developments in international politics, was, unlike Zamenhof's, entirely free of even the appearance of mysticism. From July 1915 to February 1917, Hodler published a series of articles in Esperanto, UEA's monthly journal, under the title 'The Problem of Peace: New Directions' ('La pacproblemo: Novaj vojoj'), in which he sketched out his ideas for the restructuring of the postwar world. Primarily because of these articles, directed against 'interstate anarchy', Esperanto was barred, as of 1916, from importation into France; the military censor- ship attributed to the journal 'an unfavorable influence on those fighting at the front'.[161]
Hodler anticipated a further growth in collectivist tendencies after the war, a sharpening of class warfare and a greater readiness of governments to consider proposals for supranational cooperation and arms control.[162]In this formation of the future international order Esperanto would have a new role. He labeled as an illusion the belief that governments would accept the language on any kind of moral grounds. He saw clearly that the language would have no chance of general application without cer- tain basic preconditions: not just an armistice, but a strong desire for internationalism. The Esperantists 'should be the embryo of these future elites' who could build on the ruins of nations a new, international dwell- ing.[163] 'National freedom, democratic rule, an international league among states'—these were the needs of the present/ [164] Thus Hodler in certain respects anticipated the principles that American president Woodrow Wilson would later present to a broader public.[165]