The Failure of technology was written during a few short months in the spring and early summer of 1939. For this reason, it seems to have the freshness and intensity of an improvisation. But the reader will sense that it was the foreboding of impending disaster rather than the happiness of a strong inspiration which drove on the author. He knew he had to use the short time left before the storm finally broke. Thus it mattered little to him, one it was written, that the manuscript had to be hidden from those heedless slaves of soulless materialism, the Nazis, and could only see the light of day six years after it was written.