Germany and the Germans

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Already I have somehow slipped into the complex world of German psychology with the remark about the combination of expansiveness and seclusiveness, of cosmopolitanism and provincialism in the German character. I believe this observation, dating from my early youth, is correct. A trip out of the Reich, say across Lake Constance, into Switzerland, was a trip out of the provincial into the world—no matter how strange it may appear to regard the tiny country of Switzerland as “world” in comparison to the large and powerful German Reich with its gigantic cities. Still it was perfectly true: Switzerland, neutral, multilingual, under French influence, breathing Western air—notwithstanding its miniature format—was actually far more European, far more “world,” than the political colossus to the north, where the word “international” had long since been considered an insult and where arrogant provincialism had tainted the atmosphere and made it stagnant.

This was the modern nationalistic form of the old German world-seclusiveness and melancholy world-unfitness, which, along with a sort of philistine universalism, cosmopolitanism in a nightcap, so to speak, had made up the German picture. This state of the mind, this unworldly, provincial German cosmopolitanism, always had something scurrilously spooky, something hiddenly uncanny about it, a quality of secret demonism that I was particularly able to perceive on account of my personal origin. I think back of that corner of the German world that constituted the first frame of my existence, and from which the dream-wave of life swept me here: it was the ancient city of Luebeck, near the Baltic Sea, once the threshold of the Hanseatic League, founded before the middle of the twelfth century, and raised to the rank of a free imperial city by Barbarossa in the thirteenth. The exceptionally beautiful City Hall, which my father, as a senator, frequented, was completed in the very year in which Martin Luther posted his Theses on the portal of the Castle Church at Wittenberg, the beginning of the modern era. But just as Luther, the Reformer, had a good deal of the mediaeval man about him and wrestled with the Devil all his life, so we who lived in the Protestant city of Luebeck, even the Luebeck that had become a Republican member of Bismarck’s Reich, moved in an atmosphere of the Gothic Middle Ages—and I am thinking not only of the sky line with its pointed towers, gates, and walls, of the humorously macabre thrills that emanated from the Dance of Death frescoes in St. Mary’s Church, of the crooked, haunted-looking alleys that were frequently named after the old guilds, the Bellfounders, the Butchers, and of the picturesque burgher houses. No, in the atmosphere itself something had clung of the state of mind of, let’s say, the final decades of the fifteenth century, the hysteria of the dying Middle Ages, something of latent spiritual epidemic. It’s a strange thing to say about a sensibly sober, modern commercial city, but it was conceivable that a Children’s Crusade might suddenly erupt there, a St. Vitus Dance, an outbreak of religious fanaticism coupled with mystic processions of the people, or the like—in short, an anciently neurotic substratum was perceptible, an arcane spiritual state that was outwardly evidenced by the many “characters” to be found in such a city, eccentrics and harmless lunatics who live within its walls and who, in a sense, belong to its scene as much as the ancient buildings. There was, for example, a certain type of old woman with bleary eyes and a crutch, who was half-humorously rumored to be a witch; a man, retired on a small income, with a scarlet, warty nose and some sort of nervous tic, with ludicrous habits, such as a stereotyped, involuntary bird-cry; a female with an absurd hair-do roaming through the streets in a trailing dress of obsolete style, with an air of insane superciliousness, and followed by a retinue of pug dogs and cats. And the children, the street urchins, are a part of the picture, trailing these characters, mocking them, and running away in superstitious panic when they turn around.

I really don’t know why I am conjuring up these early memories here and now. Is it because I first experienced “Germany,” visually and spiritually, in the form of this quaintly venerable city scene, and because I am trying to suggest a secret union of the German spirit with the demonic, a thesis which is, indeed, part of my inner experience, but not easily defensible? The hero of our greatest literary work, Goethe’s Faust, is a man who stands at the dividing line between the Middle Ages and Humanism, a man of God who, out of a presumptuous urge for knowledge, surrenders to magic, to the Devil. Wherever arrogance of the intellect mates with the spiritual obsolete and archaic, there is the Devil’s domain. And the Devil, Luther’s Devil, Faust’s Devil, strikes me as a very German figure, and the pact with him, the Satanic covenant, to win all treasures and power on earth for a time at the cost of the soul’s salvation, strikes me as something exceedingly typical of German nature. A lonely thinker and searcher, a theologian and philosopher in his cell who, in his desire for world enjoyment and world domination, barters his soul to the Devil—isn’t this the right moment to see Germany in this picture, the moment in which Germany is literally being carried off by the Devil?

It is a grave error on the part of legend and story not to connect Faust with music. He should have been musical, he should have been a musician. Music is a demonic realm; Kierkegaard, a great Christian, proved that most convincingly in his painfully enthusiastic essay on Mozart’s Don Juan. Music is Christian art with a negative prefix. Music is calculated order and chaos-breeding irrationality at once, rich in conjuring, incantatory gestures, in magic of numbers, the most unrealistic and yet the most impassioned of arts, mystical and abstract. If Faust is to be the representative of the German soul, he would have to be musical, for the relation of the German to the world is abstract and mystical, that is, musical—the relation of a professor with a touch of demonism, awkward and at the same time filled with arrogant knowledge that he surpasses the world in “depth.”

What constitutes this depth? Simply the musicality of the German soul, that which we call its inwardness, its subjectivity, the divorce of the speculative from the socio-political element of human energy, and the complete predominance of the former over the latter. Europe always felt it and understood its monstrous and unfortunate aspects. In 1839 Balzac wrote: “If the Germans do not know how to play the great instruments of liberty, still they know naturally how to play all instruments of music.” That is a good observation, and it is not the only striking remark of this kind that the great novelist made. In “Cousin Pons” he says of the German musician Schmucke, a wonderful figure: “Schmucke, who, like all Germans, was very strong in harmony, orchestrated the scores, while Pons supplied the melody.” Correct, the Germans are primarily musicians of the vertical, not of the horizontal, greater masters of harmony, with which Balzac includes counterpoint, than of melody; they are instrumentalists rather than glorifiers of the human voice, far more inclined towards the learned and the spiritual in music than towards the melodically happy-making. They have given the Western world perhaps not its most beautiful, socially uniting, but certainly its deepest, most significant music, and the world has not withheld its thanks and praise. At the same time it has felt and feels more strongly than ever today that such musicality of soul is paid for dearly in another sphere—the political, the sphere of human companionship.

Martin Luther, a gigantic incarnation of the German spirit, was exceptionally musical. I frankly confess that I do not love him. Germanism in its unalloyed state, the Separatist, anti-Roman, anti-European, shocks me and frightens me, even when it appears in the guise of evangelical freedom and spiritual emancipation; and the specifically Lutheran, the choleric coarseness, the invective, the fuming and raging, the extravagant rudeness coupled with tender depth of feeling and with the most clumsy superstition and belief in demons, incubi, and changelings, arouses my instinctive antipathy. I should not have liked to be Luther’s dinner guest; I should probably have felt as comfortable as in the cozy home of an ogre, and I am convinced that I would have gotten along much better with Leo X, Giovanni de’Medici, the amiable humanist, whom Luther called “The Devil’s sow, the Pope.” Moreover, I do not even accept the necessity of the contrast of popular robustness and good manners, the antithesis of Luther and the refined pedant Erasmus. Goethe has outgrown this contrast and reconciles it. He represents well-mannered, civilized strength and popular robustness, urbane Demonism, spirit and blood at once, namely, art. With him Germany made a tremendous stride in human culture—or should have made it, for in reality she was always closer to Luther than to Goethe. And no one can deny that Luther was a tremendously great man, great in the most German manner, great and German even in his duality as a liberating and also a reactionary force, a conservative revolutionary. He not only reconstituted the church; he actually saved Christianity. Europeans are in the habit of accusing the German nature of irreligiousness, of heathenism. That is very disputable. Germany certainly took Christianity more seriously than any other country. In the German Luther, Christianity took itself childlikely and rustically seriously at a time when it did not take itself seriously at all elsewhere. Luther’s revolution preserved Christianity—in about the same way in which the New Deal is intended to preserve capitalistic economics—even if capitalism refuses to understand it.

No aspersions against Luther’s greatness! It was his momentous translation of the Bible that really first created the German language, which Goethe and Nietzsche finally perfected; and it was also he who, through the breaking of the scholastic fetters and the renovation of the conscience, tremendously promoted the freedom of research, of criticism, and of philosophic speculation. By the establishment of the direct relationship of man to his God he advanced the cause of European democracy; for “every man his own priest,” that is democracy. German idealistic philosophy, the refinement of psychology by pietistic examination of the individual conscience, finally the self-conquest of Christian morality for reasons of morality—for that was Nietzsche’s deed or misdeed—all of that comes from Luther. He was a liberating hero—but in the German style, for he knew nothing of liberty. I am not speaking now of the liberty of the Christian but of political liberty, the liberty of the citizen—this liberty not only left him cold, but its impulses and demands were deeply repugnant to him. Four hundred years after his time, the first President of the German Republic, a Social Democrat, spoke the words: “I hate revolution like sin.” That was genuinely Lutheran, genuinely German. In the same way, Luther hated the peasant revolt which, evangelically inspired as it was, if successful, would have given a happier turn to German history, a turn towards liberty. Luther, however, saw in it nothing but a distortion of his work of spiritual liberation, and therefore he fumed and raged against it as only he could do. The peasants, he said, should be killed like mad dogs, and he told the princes that they could now gain the kingdom of heaven by slaughtering the peasant beasts. Luther, the German man of the people, bears a good share of responsibility for the sad ending of this first attempt at a German revolution, for the victory of the princes, and for all its consequences.

At that time, there lived in Germany a man who has my special sympathy, Tilman Riemenschneider, a master of religious art, a sculptor and wood-carver, widely famous for the faithful and expressive excellence of his works, his profound altar painting and chaste reliefs, which ornamented the places of worship all over Germany. The master had won high regard, both as a man and as a citizen, in his immediate environs, the city of Wuerzburg, where he was a member of the Council. He never expected to take a hand in politics, in world affairs—the thought lay far from his natural modesty and from his love for his free and peaceful work. There was nothing of the demagogue about him. But his heart, which beat warmly for the poor and oppressed, forced him to take the part of the peasants, whose cause he recognized as just and pleasing in the sight of God, against the lords, the bishops and princes, whose favor he could easily have retained. Moved by the great and fundamental contrasts of the time, he felt compelled to emerge from his sphere of purely spiritual and aesthetic artistic life and to become a fighter for liberty and justice. He sacrificed his own liberty for the cause that he held higher than art and the dignified calm of his existence. It was his influence, chiefly, that determined the city of Wuerzburg to refuse military service to the “Burg,” the Prince-Prelate, and, in general, to assume a revolutionary attitude against him. Riemenschneider paid dearly for it. For after the crushing of the peasant revolt, the victorious powers whom he had opposed took cruel revenge upon him; they subjected him to prison and torture, and he emerged from the ordeal as a broken man, incapable of awakening the beauties in wood and stone.

Such men we had in Germany, at all times. But they are not the specifically and monumentally German type. That type is represented by Luther, the musical theologian. In the political realm, he advanced only to the point of deciding that both parties, the princes and the peasants, were wrong, an attitude which soon led him to inveigh with berserk fury only against the peasants. His inwardness was in full agreement with St.

Paul’s admonition, “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.” But these words referred to the authority of the Roman world empire, which was the prerequisite and the political realm for the Christian world religion, while in Luther’s case it was a question of the reactionary, petty authority of German princes. His anti-political servility, the product of musical-German inwardness and unworldliness, was not only responsible for the centuries-old, obsequious attitude of the Germans towards their princes and towards the power of the state, it not only partly created and partly fostered the German dualism of boldest speculation, on the one hand, and political immaturity, on the other. But it is also and chiefly typical in a monumental and defiant manner of the purely German sundering of the national impulse and the ideal of political liberty. For the Reformation, like the later uprising against Napoleon, was a nationalistic movement for liberty.

Let us speak for a moment of liberty: the peculiar perversion which this concept has suffered, and suffers to this day, at the hands of a people as important as the Germans, is food for serious thought. How was it possible that even National Socialism, now ended in disgrace, could adopt the name of a “German liberation movement,” when, according to universal opinion, such an abomination cannot possibly have anything to do with liberty? This appellation was the expression not only of defiant insolence but also of a fundamental misinterpretation of the concept of liberty, that had its effects in German history again and again. Liberty, in a political sense, is primarily a matter of internal political morality. A people that is not internally free and responsible to itself does not deserve external liberty; it cannot sit in the councils of freedom, and when it uses the sonorous word, the application is wrong. The German concept of liberty was always directed outward; it meant the right to be German, only German and nothing else and nothing beyond that. It was a concept of protest, of self-centered defense against everything that tended to limit and restrict national egotism, to tame it and to direct it towards service to the world community, service to humanity. Stubborn individualism outwardly, in its relations to the world, to Europe, to civilization, this German concept of liberty behaved internally with an astonishing degree of lack of freedom, of immaturity, of dull servility. It was a militant slave mentality, and National Socialism went so far in its exaggeration of this incongruity between the external and internal desire for liberty as to think of world enslavement by a people themselves enslaved at home.

Why must the German urge for liberty always be tantamount to inner enslavement? Why did it finally have to culminate in an attack upon the liberty of all others, upon liberty itself? The reason is that Germany has never had a revolution and has never learned to combine the concept of the nation with the concept of liberty. The “nation” was born in the French Revolution; it is a revolutionary and liberal concept that includes the humanitarian; internally it meant liberty, externally it meant Europe. All the ingratiating qualities of the French political spirit are based upon this fortunate unity; all the constricting and depressing qualities of German patriotic enthusiasm rest upon the fact that this unity was never achieved. It might be said that the very concept of the “nation” in its historical affinity with that of liberty is foreign to Germany. It might be regarded as a mistake to call the Germans a nation, no matter whether they or others do it. It is wrong to use the word “nationalism” for their patriotic fervor—it is a misuse of a French idea and creates misunderstandings. One should not apply the same name to two different things. The German idea of liberty is racial and anti-European; it is always very near the barbaric if it does not actually erupt into open and declared barbarism, as in our days. The aesthetically repulsive and rude qualities that cling to its bearers and champions as early as the Wars of Liberation, to the student unions and to such types as Jahn and Massmann, are evidence of its unfortunate character. Goethe was certainly no stranger to popular culture; he wrote not only the classicistic “Iphigenie” but also such ultra-German things as “Faust I,” “Goetz,” and the “Aphorisms in Rhyme.” Yet, to the exasperation of all patriots, his attitude towards the wars against Napoleon was one of complete coldness—not only out of loyalty to his peer, the great Emperor, but also because he felt repelled by the barbaric-racial element in this uprising. The loneliness of this great man, who approved everything of a broad and generous nature, the super-national, world Germanism, world literature—his painful loneliness in the patriotically, “liberally” excited Germany of his day cannot be overemphasized. The determining and dominant concepts around which everything revolved for him, were culture and barbarism—and it was his lot to belong to a people whose idea of liberty turns into barbarism, because it is only directed outward, against Europe.

This is a misfortune, a curse, a perpetual tragedy, that finds added expression in the fact that even Goethe’s disavowing attitude towards political Protestantism served only as a confirmation and a deepening of the Lutheran dualism of spiritual and political liberty throughout the nation and particularly among the intellectual leaders so that they were prevented from accepting the political element in their concept of culture. It is difficult to determine to what extent great men put their imprint upon the character of a people and mold its form—and to what extent they themselves are its personification, its expression. This much is certain, that the German relation to politics is a negative one, a lack of qualification. Historical evidence lies in the fact that all German revolutions failed, that of 1525, of 1813, that of 1848 which was wrecked upon the rocks of the political impotency of the German bourgeois, and finally that of 1918. Further evidence also lies in the clumsy and sinister misconstruction that the Germans so easily place on the idea of politics whenever ambition drives them to engage in politics.

Politics has been called the “art of the possible,” and it actually is a realm akin to art in so far as, like art, it occupies a creatively mediating position between the spirit and life, the idea and reality, the desirable and the necessary, conscience and deed, morality and power. It embraces much that is hard, necessary, a-moral, much of expediency and concession to facts, much of human weakness and much of the vulgar. It would be hard to find a politician, a statesman, who accomplished great things without having to ask himself afterwards whether he could still regard himself as a decent individual. And yet, just as man does not belong solely to the animal kingdom, so politics does not belong solely to the realm of evil. Without degenerating into something devilish and destructive, without being distorted into an enemy of mankind and perverting its concessive creativity into disgraceful and criminal sterility, it can never completely renounce its ideal and spiritual components, never deny the moral and humanly decent part of its nature, and reduce itself entirely to the immoral and vulgar, to lying, murder, deceit, and force. That would no longer be art and creatively mediating and actuating irony but blind, inhuman nonsense that can never produce anything genuine, that achieves only transitory, terrifying success, and after even a brief span has a world-destroying, nihilistic, and finally self-destroying effect; for the totally immoral is by nature unfit to survive.

The peoples born and qualified for politics instinctively know how to guard the unity of conscience and action, of spirit and power, at least subjectively. They pursue politics as an art of life and of power that cannot be entirely freed from a strain of vitally useful evil, but that never quite loses sight of the higher, the idea, human decency, and morality: in this regard they feel politically, and they get along with themselves and with the world in this fashion. Such getting-along with life, founded on compromise, the German regards as hypocrisy. He was not born to get along with life, and he proves his lack of qualification for politics by misunderstanding it in a clumsily sincere manner. Not at all wicked by nature but with a flair for the spiritual and the ideal, he regards politics as nothing but falsehood, murder, deceit, and violence, as something completely and one-sidedly filthy, and if worldly ambition prompts him to take up politics, he pursues it in the light of this philosophy. When the German takes up politics he thinks he has to act in a fashion to dumfound humanity, that’s what he regards as politics. Since he thinks it is unalloyed evil, he believes he has to be a devil to pursue it.

We have seen it. Crimes were perpetrated that no psychology can excuse, and they are least of all excusable on the ground that they were superfluous. For they were superfluous; they were not essential and Nazi Germany could have got along without them. She could have carried out her plans of power and conquest without their aid. In a world which knows trusts, cartels, and exploitation the idea of monopolistic spoliation of all other nations by the Goering Works wasn’t anything new and strange. The embarrassing thing about it was that it compromised the ruling system too greatly by clumsy exaggeration. Moreover, as an idea, it came a little too late—today when mankind is striving for economic democracy, struggling for a higher degree of social maturity. The Germans are always too late. They are late, like music which is always the last of the arts to express a world condition—when that world condition is already in its final stages. They are abstract and mystical, too, like this, their dearest art—both to the point of criminality. Their crimes, I repeat, were not a necessary factor of their belated embarkment upon exploitation; they were a luxury in which they indulged from a theoretical predisposition, in honor of an ideology, the phantasm of race. If it did not sound like a detestable condonation, it might be said that they committed their crimes for dreamy idealism.

At times, particularly when contemplating German history, one has the impression that the world was not the sole creation of God but a co-operative work with someone else. One would like to ascribe to God the merciful fact that good can come from evil. But that evil so often comes from good is obviously the contribution of the other fellow. The Germans might well ask why their good, in particular, so often turns to evil, becomes evil in their hands. Take, for example, their fundamental universalism and cosmopolitanism, their inner boundlessness, which may be regarded as a spiritual accessory of their ancient supernational realm, the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. This is a highly valuable, positive trait which, however, was transformed into evil by a sort of dialectic inversion. The Germans yielded to the temptation of basing upon their innate cosmopolitanism a claim to European hegemony, even to world domination, whereby this trait became its exact opposite, namely, the most presumptuous and menacing nationalism and imperialism. At the same time, they noticed that they were too late again with their nationalism because it had outlived its time. Therefore they substituted something newer, more modern, for it, the racial idol, which promptly led them to monstrous crimes and plunged them into the depths of distress.

Or take that quality of the Germans which is perhaps their most notable one, designated as “inwardness,” a word that is most difficult to define: tenderness, depth of feeling, unworldly reverie, love of nature, purest sincerity of thought and conscience, in short, all the characteristics of high lyricism are mingled in it; and even today the world cannot forget what it owes to German inwardness: German metaphysics, German music, especially the miracle of the German Lied—a nationally unique and incomparable product—these are the fruits of German inwardness. The great historical deed of German inwardness was Luther’s Reformation—we called it a mighty deed of liberation, and as such it was obviously something good. But it is evident that the Devil had his hand even in that deed. The Reformation brought about the religious schism of the Occident, a definite misfortune, and for Germany it brought the Thirty Years’ War, which depopulated it, fatally retarded its culture, and, by means of vice and epidemics probably made German blood into something different and something worse than it had been in the Middle Ages. Erasmus of Rotterdam, who wrote the “Praise of Folly,” a skeptical humanist with very little inwardness, was well aware of the implications of the Reformation. “When you see terrible cataclysms arising in the world,” he said, “then remember that Erasmus predicted it.” But the venerable Lout of Wittenberg, tremendously charged with inwardness, was no pacifist; he was filled with true German acceptance of the tragic, and declared himself ready to take the blood that would flow, “on his neck.”

German Romanticism, what is it but an expression of this finest German quality, German inwardness? Much that is longingly pensive, fantastically spectral, and deeply scurrilous, a high artistic refinement and all-pervading irony combine in the concept of Romanticism. But these are not the things I think of primarily when I speak of Romanticism. It is rather a certain dark richness and piousness—I might say, antiquarianism—of soul that feels very close to the chthonian, irrational, and demonic forces of life, that is to say, the true sources of life; and it resists the purely rationalistic approach on the ground of its deeper knowledge, its deeper alliance with the holy. The Germans are the people of the romantic counter-revolution against the philosophical intellectualism and rationalism of enlightenment—a revolt of music against literature, of mysticism against clarity. Romanticism is anything but feeble sentimentalism; it is depth, conscious of its own strength and fulness. It is pessimism of sincerity that stands on the side of everything existing, real, historical against both criticism and meliorism, in short, on the side of power against the spirit, and it thinks very little of all rhetorical virtuousness and idealistic disguising of the world. Herein lies the union of Romanticism with the Realism and Machiavellianism that celebrated its triumphs over Europe in the person of Bismarck, the only political genius that Germany ever produced. The German desire for unity and empire, directed by Bismarck into Prussian paths, was misunderstood if it was interpreted according to the usual pattern as a movement for unification of national-democratic character. It tried to be just that at one time, around the year 1848, although even the Pan-German discussions of the St. Paul’s Parliament had a tinge of mediaeval imperialism, reminiscences of the Holy Roman Empire. But it developed that the customary European, national-democratic road to unity was not the German road. Fundamentally, Bismarck’s empire had nothing in common with “nation” in the democratic sense of the word. It was purely a power structure aiming towards the hegemony of Europe, and notwithstanding its modernity, the empire of 1871 clung to memories of mediaeval glory, the time of the Saxon and Swabian rulers. This very thing was the characteristic and menacing factor: the mixture of robust timeliness, efficient modernness, on the one hand, and dreams of the past, on the other—in a word, highly technological Romanticism. Born of wars, the Unholy German Empire of the Prussian nation could never be anything but a war empire. As such it lived, a thorn in the side of the world, and as such it is now destroyed.

In the history of ideas the merits of the German Romantic counter-revolution are invaluable. Hegel himself has a tremendous share in them by the fact that his dialectic philosophy bridged the gulf that rationalistic enlightenment and the French Revolution had opened between reason and history. His reconciliation of the reasonable with the real gave a mighty impetus to historical thinking and actually created the science of history, which had scarcely existed before that time. Romanticism is essentially submersion, especially submersion in the past; it is longing for the past, and at the same time it is realistic appreciation of everything truly past in its own right, with its local color and atmosphere. No wonder that Romanticism was particularly favorable to the writing of history and actually inaugurated history in its modern form.

The contributions of Romanticism to the realm of the beautiful, as a science, as an aesthetic doctrine, are rich and fascinating. Positivism and intellectualistic enlightenment have no inkling of the nature of poetry; Romanticism alone imparted it to a world that was dying of boredom in virtuous academicism. Romanticism poetized ethics by proclaiming the right of individuality and of spontaneous passion. It raised the treasures of song and story from the depths of folk culture of the past; Romanticism was the genial patroness of the science of folk lore that appears in its motley colors as a variety of exoticism. The priority over the rational which it grants to the emotional, even in its arcane forms of mystic ecstasy and Dionysiac intoxication, brings it into a peculiar and psychologically highly fruitful relationship to sickness; the late-Romanticist Nietzsche, for example, himself a spirit raised by illness to heights of fatal genius, was profuse in his praise of sickness as a medium of knowledge. In this sense, even psychoanalysis, which represents a great advance towards the understanding of man from the side of illness, is a branch of Romanticism.

Goethe laconically defined the Classical as the healthy, the Romantic as the morbid. A painful definition for one who loves Romanticism down to its sins and vices. But it cannot be denied that even in its loveliest, most ethereal aspects where the popular mates with the sublime it bears in its heart the germ of morbidity, as the rose bears the worm; its innermost character is seduction, seduction to death. This is its confusing paradox: while it is the revolutionary representative of the irrational forces of life against abstract reason and dull humanitarianism, it possesses a deep affinity to death by virtue of its very surrender to the irrational and to the past. In Germany, its true home, it has most strongly preserved this iridescent dualism, as glorification of the vital in contrast to the purely moral, and likewise as kinship to death. As the German spirit, as Romantic counter-revolution, it has contributed deep and vitalizing impulses to European thought; but, on the other hand, its life-and-death pride has disdained to accept any correcting instruction from Europe, from the spirit of the European religion of humanity, from European democracy. In its realistic power-political guise, as Bismarckianism, as German victory over France, over civilization, and by the erection of the German power empire, apparently blooming in the most robust health, it elicited the astonishment of the world, simultaneously confusing and depressing it. And as soon as the genius himself no longer stood at the helm of this empire it kept the world in a constant state of unrest.

Besides, the united power realm was a cultural disappointment. No intellectual greatness came from Germany that had once been the teacher of the world. It was only strong. But in this strength and in all its organized efficiency, the Romantic germ of illness and death lived and worked. Historical misfortune, the suffering and humiliation of a lost war, were its nourishment. And, reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism, into a spree and a paroxysm of arrogance and crime, which now finds its horrible end in a national catastrophe, a physical and psychic collapse without parallel.

The story I have told here in brief outline is the story of German “inwardness.” It is a melancholy story—I call it that, instead of “tragic,” because misfortune should not boast. This story should convince us of one thing: that there are not two Germanys, a good one and a bad one, but only one, whose best turned into evil through devilish cunning. Wicked Germany is merely good Germany gone astray, good Germany in misfortune, in guilt, and in ruin. For that reason it is quite impossible for one born there simply to renounce the wicked, guilty Germany and to declare: “I am the good, the noble, the just Germany in the white robe; I leave it to you to exterminate the wicked one.” Not a word of all that I have just said about Germany, or tried to indicate, came out of alien, cool, objective knowledge; it is all within me, I have been through it all.

In other words, what I have tried to give here within these limits was a piece of German self-criticism; and truly, nothing could have been more faithful to German tradition. The tendency towards self-criticism, often to the point of self-disgust and self-execration, is thoroughly German; and it is eternally incomprehensible how a people so inclined towards self-analysis could ever conceive the idea of world domination. The quality most necessary for world domination is naïveness, a happy limitation and even purposelessness, but certainly not an extreme social life, like the German, in which arrogance is coupled with contrition. Nothing that a Frenchman, an Englishman, or an American ever said openly about his people can remotely be compared to the pitiless truths that great Germans, Hoelderlin, Goethe, Nietzsche, have uttered about Germany. In conversation, at least, Goethe went so far as to wish for a German Diaspora. “Like the Jews,” he said, “the Germans must be transplanted and scattered over the world!” And he added: “in order to develop the good that lies in them, fully and to the benefit of the nations.”

This great good really exists, but it could not come to fruition in the traditional form of the national state. The immigration laws of the other states will probably categorically prevent that dispersion throughout the world which Goethe wished for the Germans and for which they will now have a strong inclination. But despite all drastic warnings against excessive expectations, that we have had from the vast performance of power politics, may we not cherish the hope that after this catastrophe the first experimental steps may be taken in the direction of a world condition in which the national individualism of the nineteenth century will dissolve and finally vanish, and which will afford happier opportunities for the development of the “good” in the German character than the untenable old conditions? Should it not be possible, after all, that the liquidation of Nazism may pave the way for a social world reform which would offer the greatest prospect of happiness to Germany’s very inclinations and needs? A world economy, the minimizing of political boundaries, a certain de-politization of states in general, the awakening of mankind to a realization of their practical unity, their first thoughts about a world state—how could all this social humanitarianism—the true object of the great struggle—which far exceeds the bounds of bourgeois democracy, be foreign and repugnant to the German character? In the seclusiveness of the German, there was always so much longing for companionship; indeed at the bottom of the very loneliness that made him wicked lay always the wish to love, the wish to be loved. In the end the German misfortune is only the paradigm of the tragedy of human life. And the grace that Germany so sorely needs all of us need.