Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/334/en

What from Rosicrucianism could have become ground-breaking for the seventeenth century — spiritual impulses that grasped the effective spirit in nature and in social life with equal reach — was brought to nothing by the tremendous catastrophe of the Thirty Years' War and its aftermath. This war devastated Central Europe by the strategy of the scorched earth. Many villages were permanently turned into wasteland; forty percent of the rural population and thirty-three percent of the urban population had fallen victim to the horrors of famine, plague and the conduct of war. Seed-grain and bread-grain stores were plundered repeatedly or destroyed by pillage and burning; livestock was driven off by marching armies; wells were poisoned by the carcasses of animals thrown into them. Right up to the end of the century — fifty years after the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 — famines prevailed in many places. The Thirty Years' War broke, physically, the backbone of the inherited agrarian culture of Central Europe. Much folk wisdom was lost, and only with great difficulty could the organism principle in the villages and individual farms be roused again to new life, drawing on what remained of practical experience. The Dottenfelderhof, for example — ten kilometres from the city centre of Frankfurt am Main, belonging as a dairy farm to the Premonstratensian monastery of Ilbenstadt — was razed to the ground. Not until 1707 did the rebuilding of the main house with its living quarters and granary begin, and in 1742, nearly a hundred years after the war, the complex of buildings was finally restored as a hermetically self-contained fortified farm.