Josef Hromadka was a man of controversy his whole life long. A quarter of a century ago, as the second world war was nearing its end, a refugee from his native land and a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary in the U.S.A., he published a testament and a prophecy for Western bourgeois civilization under the title Doom and Resurrection. The world had reason to be cautiously optimistic in these last days of 1944. The first atomic bomb had not yet exploded. The wartime partnership between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies was in full emotional swing; "cold war" and "iron curtain" were still unknown concepts. D-Day was a fact; the Nazi armies were in retreat; the United Nations had been conceived, if not yet born. Against the terrible darkness of the previous years, the future gave promise of a new and better world.