Observations on "the spiritual situation of the age"

"With the consent of Siegfried Unseld and Gunther Busch, I sent a letter in the middle of 1978 to approximately fifty critics, writers, and social scientists; it read as follows: Dear Friends and Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen: Volume 1,000 of the Goschen Collection [of the de Gruyter Publishing Company] was published in 1931 under the title Die geistige Situation der Zeit [The Spiritual Situation of the Age]; it had one author: Karl Jaspers."