237

Seven Short Maxims About Women

How the longest boredom flees - when man crawls to us on his knees!

Old age, alas, and science, too, give strength to even weak virtue.

Dressed in black and speaking never - every woman then looks clever.

When things go well, my gratitude goes - to God and the woman who cuts my clothes.

When young, a flowery cavern home - when old, a dragon on the roam.

A noble name, legs are fine - a man as well - would he were mine!

Brief in speech, the sense quite nice - a female ass on treacherous ice!

237a

Up to now women have been treated by men like birds which have strayed down to them from some high place or other, like something finer, more sensitive, wilder, stranger, sweeter, and with more soul - but like something which man must lock up so that it does not fly away.

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To grasp incorrectly the basic problem of "man and woman," to deny the most profound antagonism here and the necessity of an eternally hostile tension, perhaps in this matter to dream about equal rights, equal education, equal entitlements and duties - that's a typical sign of superficial thinking. And a thinker who has shown that he's shallow in this dangerous place - shallow in his instincts! - may in general be considered suspicious or, even worse, betrayed and exposed. Presumably he'll be too "short" for all the basic questions of life and of life in the future, and he'll be incapable of any profundity. By contrast, a man who does have profundity in his spirit and in his desires as well, together with that profundity of good will capable of severity and hardness and easily confused with them, can think about woman only in an oriental way: he has to grasp woman as a possession, as a property which he can lock up, as something predetermined for service and reaching her perfection in that service. In this matter he must take a stand on the immense reasoning of Asia, on the instinctual superiority of Asia: just as the Greeks did in earlier times, the best heirs and students of Asia, who, as is well known, from Homer to the time of Pericles, as they advanced in culture and in the extent of their power, also became step by step stricter against women, in short, more oriental. How necessary, how logical, even how humanly desirable this was: that's something we'd do well to think about!

239

In no age has the weak sex been treated with such respect on the part of men as in our time - that's part of the tendency and basic taste of democracy, just like the disrespect for old age. Is it any wonder that this respect immediately leads to abuse? People want more; people learn to make demands. They finally find this toll of respect almost sickening and would prefer a competition for rights, in fact, a completely genuine fight. Briefly put, woman is losing her shame. Let's add to that at once that she is also losing her taste. She is forgetting to be afraid of man. But the woman who "forgets fear" abandons her most womanly instincts. The fact that woman dares to come out when that part of men which inspires fear - let's say it more clearly - when the man in men - is no longer wanted and widely cultivated - is reasonable enough, even understandable enough. What's more difficult to grasp is that in this very process - woman degenerates. That's happening today: let's not deceive ourselves about it! Wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military and aristocratic spirit, woman now strives for the economic and legal independence of a shop assistant: "woman as clerk" stands out on the door of the modern society which is now developing. As she thus empowers herself with new rights and strives to become "master" and writes the "progress" of woman on her banners and little flags, it becomes terribly clear that the opposite is taking place: woman is regressing. Since the French Revolution the influence of woman in Europe has grown smaller in proportion to the increase in her rights and demands, and the "Emancipation of Woman," to the extent that that is desired and demanded by women themselves (and not just by superficial men), has, as a result, produced a peculiar symptom of the growing weakening and deadening of the most feminine instincts. There is stupidity in this development, an almost masculine stupidity, about which a successful woman - who is always an intelligent woman - would have to feel thoroughly ashamed. To lose the instinct for the ground on which one is surest to gain victory, to neglect to practice the art of one's own true weapons, to allow oneself to let go before men, perhaps even "to produce a book," where previously one used discipline and a refined cunning humility, to work with a virtuous audacity against man's faith in a fundamentally different ideal concealed in woman, some eternally and necessarily feminine, with constant chatter to talk men emphatically out of the idea that woman, like a delicate, strangely wild, and often pleasing domestic animal, must be maintained, cared for, protected, and looked after, the awkward and indignant gathering up of everything slavish and serf-like, which has inherently belonged to the position of women in the social order up to this point and which still does (as if slavery were a counter-argument and not rather a condition of every higher culture, every enhancement in culture) - what does all this mean, if not a crumbling away of feminine instinct, a loss of femininity? Of course, there are enough idiotic friends of women and corruptors of women among the scholarly asses of the male sex who counsel woman to defeminize herself in this manner and to imitate all the foolish things which make the "man" in Europe and European "manliness" sick - people who want to bring woman down to the level of a "common education," perhaps even to reading the newspapers and discussing politics. Here and there they want even to make women into free spirits and literati: as if a woman without piety were not something totally repulsive or ridiculous to a profound and godless man. Almost everywhere people ruin woman's nerves with the most sickly and most dangerous of all forms of music (our most recent German music) and make her more hysterical every day and more incapable of her first and last vocation, giving birth to strong children. They want to make her in general even more "cultivated" and, as they say, make the "weak sex" strong through culture, as if history didn't teach us as emphatically as possible that "cultivating" human beings and making them weak - that is, enfeebling, fracturing, making the power of the will sick - always go hand in hand and that the most powerful and most influential women of the world (in most recent times even Napoleon's mother) can thank the power of their own particular wills - and not their school masters! - for their power and superiority over men. The thing in woman that arouses respect and often enough fear is her nature, which is "more natural" than man's nature, her genuine predatory and cunning adaptability, her tiger's claws under the glove, the naivete of her egotism, her ineducable nature and inner wildness, the incomprehensibility, breadth, and roaming of her desires and virtues. . . . With all this fear, what creates sympathy for this dangerous and beautiful cat "woman" is that she appears to suffer more, to be more vulnerable and in need of love, and to be condemned to suffer disappointment more than any animal. Fear and pity: with these feelings man has stood before woman up to this point, always with one foot already in tragedy, which tears to pieces while it delights. How's that? And is this now to come to an end? Is the magic spell of woman now in the process of being broken? Is the process of making woman boring slowly coming about? O Europe! Europe! We know the horned animal which has always been most attractive to you. Its danger still constantly threatens you! Your old fable could still at some point become "history" - once again a monstrous stupidity could gain mastery of you and drag you away from it! And no god is hiding underneath it, no, only an "idea," a "modern idea"! . . .

Part Eight

Peoples and Fatherlands

240

I heard once again for the first time Richard Wagner's Overture to the Meistersinger: it is a splendid, overloaded, difficult, and late art, which prides itself on the fact that, in order to understand it, one has to assume that two centuries of music is still vital. It is to the Germans' credit that such a pride did not make an error! What juices and forces, what seasons and heavenly strokes are intermingled here! It impresses us sometimes as old fashioned, sometimes as strange, dry, and too young; it is as arbitrary as it is conventionally grandiose, if not infrequently mischievous, still more frequently tough and coarse - it has fire and courage and, at the same time, the loose dun-coloured skin of fruits which become ripe too late. It streams out wide and full, and suddenly a moment of inexplicable hesitation, a gap, as it were, springs up between cause and effect, a pressure which makes us dream, almost a nightmare - but already the old stream of contentment is spreading and widening once more, the stream of contentment, of manifold contentment, of old and new happiness, which very much includes the happiness of the artist with himself, something he will not conceal, his amazed and happily shared knowledge of the mastery of the means he has used here, new and newly acquired artistic means, so far untried, as he seems to inform us. All in all, no beauty, nothing of the south, nothing of the fine southern brightness of heaven, nothing of grace, no dance, scarcely any will for logic, indeed a certain awkwardness that is even emphasized, as if the artist wanted to tell us, "That is part of my purpose," a ponderous drapery, something arbitrarily barbaric and ceremonial, a shimmy of scholarly and reverend treasures and fine points; something German, in the best and worst senses of the word, something manifold, formless, and inexhaustible in the German way, a certain German power and spiritual excess, which has no fear of hiding under the refinements of decay - and which perhaps feels at its best only there, a truly authentic landmark of the German soul, young and obsolete both at the same time, over-rotten and still over-rich for the future. This kind of music expresses best what I think of the Germans: they belong to the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow - but they still have no today.