Power and realistic politics, once freed from universalistic (i.e. ultimately ethical) motives, could too easily degenerate into a hybrid politics of violence. Naturally we knew this even then, and we found the example of it in Napoleon; but we consoled ourselves by looking at all the positive things that had come from his action. This state of mind resembled the confident hope in the genius of the West – which always returned to assert itself by saving – ...
But these accents began to shift for me due to and after the world war. I saw a horrible degeneration of realistic politics in those strata of the German people who had hitherto represented their civilization. The hope that the defeat would serve as a lesson to them was in vain. And I saw the hybris, perhaps even worse, of the Peace of Versailles. But when I later wanted to explain to my Danish friend Aage Friis the disturbance in the mentality of the German people as due to the treatment meted out to them by the Peace of Versailles, he asked: «If Germany had won, would it have imposed a more moderate peace ?".
My disappointment did not make me fall to the opposite extreme, of declaring power itself evil, as Burckhardt does. It is only a tempter who wants to induce evil. But from that moment on I felt the demonism of power in a completely different and more acute way than before the war.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Power and realistic politics, once freed from universalistic (i.e. ultimately ethical) motives, could too easily degenerate into a hybrid politics of violence. Naturally we knew this even then, and we found the example of it in Napoleon; but we consoled ourselves by looking at all the positive things that had come from his action. This state of mind resembled the confident hope in the genius of the West – which always returned to assert itself by saving – ...
But these accents began to shift for me due to and after the world war. I saw a horrible degeneration of realistic politics in those strata of the German people who had hitherto represented their civilization. The hope that the defeat would serve as a lesson to them was in vain. And I saw the hybris, perhaps even worse, of the Peace of Versailles. But when I later wanted to explain to my Danish friend Aage Friis the disturbance in the mentality of the German people as due to the treatment meted out to them by the Peace of Versailles, he asked: «If Germany had won, would it have imposed a more moderate peace ?".
My disappointment did not make me fall to the opposite extreme, of declaring power itself evil, as Burckhardt does. It is only a tempter who wants to induce evil. But from that moment on I felt the demonism of power in a completely different and more acute way than before the war." in the context of "pp. 317-318" to mean that wisdom is timeless.