What follows is not a personal creed. I doubt that in my case such a self-important profession, even if I could offer it in good faith, would make sense to my fellow beings. I doubt even more that this is the job of a philosopher in the Socratic tradition. What I want to try instead is a first formulation of certain ideas which have become increasingly important to me. They were sparked by experiences of my childhood during the First World War in my native Alsace, then on the German side of the battlelines. They have grown in me since my adolescence in response to the circumstances into which I found myself born and which I have encountered in my later life, including the expulsion as a German from Alsace, now French again, the rejection by Nazi Germany because of racial "impurity", and the admission as an immigrant to the United States in 1938 on the French quota because of my birthplace in what was retroactively considered France. For these ideas I have found no real support in past and present philosophy and too little in recent existential thought. I believe that they contain the most relevant insights I can offer to my fellow humans at this time. Hence I no longer feel the right to withhold them, while still hoping for a chance to develop them more adequately, and particularly to put the proper phenomenological foundations under them.