In late 1917, with the war having taken its grim toll on the student population drawn to the service of the Fatherland, after the collapse of General von Falkenhayn’s intended breakthrough at Verdun and the equally calamitous struggle on the Somme in 1916, with an increasingly deteriorating economic situation at the home front, resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, and entry of the United States into the war, Edmund Husserl delivered three lectures on “Fichte’s Ideal of Humanity” at the University of Freiburg. The initiative for these lectures – “emergency wartime seminars” – came directly from the military High Command, most likely at the personal request of General Erich von Gündell, who had studied under Husserl in Göttingen before the war and was Commander General of the Reserve Corps (Fifth Army), in which Husserl’s two sons fought.

On August 25, 1914, three weeks after the invasion of Belgium (August 4) and two months after the fateful assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo (June 28), German troops entered the city of Leuven and destroyed its celebrated university library. Some 300,000 books and more than a thousand irreplaceable Medieval manuscripts were burnt along with the torching of 2,000 buildings and the killing of 248 civilians. The devastation was so intense that Dietrich Mahnke, a student of Edmund Husserl’s serving in the 75th Reserve Infantry Regiment, could still observe the city burning on August 27 as his company marched through the village of Korbeek-Lo a few kilometers northwest of Leuven. Outrage among intellectuals, politicians, and the public in Allied nations was swift.