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We "good Europeans," we too have hours when we allow ourselves a hearty feeling for our fatherland, a bump and relapse into old loves and narrow places - I just gave a sample of that - hours of national tumults, patriotic apprehensions, and all sorts of other floods of old-fashioned emotion. Slower moving spirits than we are might take a longer period of time to be done with things which with us last and have run their course in a matter of hours - some need half a year; others require half a human lifetime, each according to the speed and power with which they digest and "transform their stuff." In fact, I could think of some dull hesitant races who, even in our shrinking Europe, would require half a century in order to overcome such atavistic attacks of patriotism and attachment to their soil and to return to reason, that is to say, to "good Europeanness." And while I indulge myself excessively with this possibility, it so happens that I listen in on a conversation between two old "patriots." They both were obviously hard of hearing and so spoke all the louder. One said, "That man thinks about and understands philosophy as much as a farmer or a student in a fraternity. He is still innocent. But what does that matter these days! This is the age of the masses, who prostrate themselves before everything built on a massive scale. That's how it is in politics, as well. If a statesman piles up a new tower of Babel for them, anything at all that's immense in riches and power, they call him ‘great.' What does it matter that in the meantime those of us who are more cautious and more reserved still do not give up the old belief that only a great idea confers greatness on an act or a cause? What if a statesman brought his people into a situation where from that point on they had to practise ‘grand politics,' something for which they were by nature poorly adapted and prepared, so that it would be necessary for them to sacrifice their love of their old and certain virtues to a new and doubtful mediocrity - suppose that a statesman sentenced his people to a general ‘politicking,' although up to that point those same people had better things to do and think about and that in the depth of their souls they could not rid themselves of a cautious disgust with the anxiety, emptiness, blaring, and devilish squabbling of those peoples who were truly politicking - suppose such a statesman goaded the sleeping passions and desires of his people, and turned their earlier shyness and their pleasure in standing to one side into stains, their interaction with strangers and their secret boundlessness into a liability, devalued their most heartfelt inclinations, turned their conscience around, made their spirit narrow, their taste ‘national,' - well, would a statesman who did all those things which his people would have to atone for through all future time, in the event they had a future, would such a statesman be great?" "Undoubtedly," the other old patriot answered him vehemently, "otherwise he would have been incapable of doing it! Perhaps it was idiotic to want something like that? But perhaps every great thing was merely idiotic at the beginning!" "That's an abuse of words!" cried his conversational partner in response, "Strong! Strong! Strong and idiotic! Not great!" The old men had evidently worked themselves up, as they shouted their "truths" into each other's faces like this. But I, in my happiness and remoteness, thought about how a stronger man would soon become master over the strong, and also how there is a compensation for the spiritual flattening of one people, namely, the spiritual deepening of another people. -

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Now, let's call what we're looking for as the distinguishing mark of Europeans "civilization," or "humanizing," or "progress"; let's use a political formula and call it simply, without praise or blame, Europe's democratic movement. Behind all the moral and political foregrounds indicated with such labels, an immense physiological process is completing itself, something whose momentum is constantly growing - the process by which the Europeans are becoming more similar to each other, the growing detachment from the conditions under which arise races linked to a climate and class, their increasing independence from every distinct milieu which for centuries wanted to inscribe itself on body and soul with the same demands - thus, the slow emergence of an essentially supra-national and nomadic type of man, who, physiologically speaking, possesses as his characteristic mark a maximum of the art and power of adaptation. This process of the developing European, which can be held back by great relapses in tempo, but which for that very reason perhaps acquires and augments its vehemence and depth, the furious storm and stress of "national feeling" still raging today, belongs here, along with that anarchism which is just emerging - this process will probably rush ahead to conclusions which its naive proponents and advocates, the apostles of "modern ideas," are least likely to expect. The same new conditions which will, on average, create a situation in which men are homogenous and mediocre - useful, hard-working, practical in many tasks, clever men from an animal herd - are to the highest degree suitable for giving rise to exceptional men with the most dangerous and most attractive qualities. For while that power to adapt, which keeps testing constantly changing conditions and begins a new task with every generation, almost with every decade, by no means makes possible the power of the type, while the collective impression of such future Europeans probably will be one of many kinds of extremely useful chattering workers with little will power, men who will need a master, someone to give orders, as much as they need their daily bread, and while the democratizing of Europe thus moves towards the creation of a new type prepared for slavery in the most subtle sense, the strong man, in single and exceptional cases, will have to turn out stronger and richer than he has perhaps ever been before now - thanks to the absence of prejudice in his education, thanks to the immense multiplicity of practice, art, and mask. What I wanted to say is this: the democraticizing of Europe is at the same time an involuntary way of organizing for the breeding of tyrants - understanding that word in every sense, including the most spiritual.

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I am pleased to hear that our sun is caught up in a rapid movement towards the constellation Hercules, and I hope that men on this earth act like the sun in this respect. And we first, we good Europeans!

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There was a time when people were accustomed to designate the Germans with the label "profound." Now, when the most successful type of the new Germanism craves completely different honours and perhaps finds "briskness" lacking in everything profound, it is almost timely and patriotic to doubt whether we were not deceiving ourselves previously with that praise: in short, whether German profundity is not basically something else, something worse - and something which, thank God, we are about to succeed in removing. So let's make the attempt to learn to think differently about German profundity. For that we don't have to do anything except a little vivisection on the German soul. The German soul is, above all, multifaceted, with different origins, more cobbled together and layered than truly constructed. That comes from how it emerged. A German who wished the audacity to claim "Alas, two souls live inside my breast"¹ would be seriously violating the truth, or, putting the matter more correctly, would lag behind the truth by several souls. As a people of the most monstrous mixing and stirring together of races, perhaps even with an excess of pre-Aryan elements, as "a people in the middle" in every sense, the Germans are more incomprehensible, more extensive, more contradictory, more unknown, more unpredictable, more surprising, and more terrifying to themselves than other people are to themselves - they elude definition and for that reason alone are the despair of the French. It's typical of the Germans that with them the question "What is German?" never dies away. Kotzebue certainly knew his Germans well enough: "We have been acknowledged," they cheered to him - but Sand also thought he knew them. John Paul knew what he was doing when he expressed his anger over Fichte's false but patriotic flatteries and exaggerations - but is it likely that Goethe's thinking about the Germans was any different from Jean Paul's, even if he thought he was right in his opinion about Fichte?² What did Goethe really think about the Germans? - But he never spoke clearly about many things around him, and all his life he knew how to keep a delicate silence - he probably had good reasons for that. What's certain is that "the wars of liberation" did not make him look up in a happier mood, any more than the French Revolution.³ The event which made him rethink his Faust and, indeed, the entire problem of "man" was the appearance of Napoleon. There are words of Goethe in which, as if from a foreign country, he denies with an impatient heart what the Germans reckon as something they can be proud of: the famous German disposition he once defined as "leniency with the weaknesses of strangers and with their own." Was he wrong in that? It's a characteristic of the Germans that one is rarely completely wrong about them. The German soul has within it lanes and connecting paths; in it there are high points, hiding places, dungeons. Its lack of order has a great deal of the charm of something full of secrets. On the secret routes to chaos, the German knows what he is doing. And just as everything loves its own metaphorical likeness, so the German loves the clouds and everything associated with a lack of clarity, with becoming, with twilight, with dampness: any kind of uncertainty, shapelessness, shifting around, or developing he senses as something "profound." In himself, the German man is nothing - he is becoming something, he "is developing himself." Hence, "developing" is the essential German discovery and invention in the great realm of philosophical formulas - a governing idea which, along with German beer and German music, is working to Germanize all Europe. Foreigners stand there amazed at and attracted to the riddles which the contradictory nature underlying the German soul present to them (something Hegel organized into a system and Richard Wagner finally even set to music). "Good natured and treacherous"- such a juxtaposition, a contradiction if applied to any other people, unfortunately justifies itself too often in Germany. Just live for a while among the Swabians!⁴ The ponderousness of the German scholar, his social tastelessness, gets on alarmingly well with an inner agility in dancing on a tightrope and with a light impudence, faced with which all the gods have by now learned about fear. If people want an ad oculos [visual] demonstration of "the German soul," let them only look into German taste, into German arts and customs: what a boorish indifference to "taste"! See how there the noblest and the meanest stand next to each other! How disorderly and rich this entire spiritual household is! The German drags his soul along; he drags along everything he experiences. He digests his experiences badly - he's never "finished" with them. German profundity is often only a difficult and hesitant "digestion." And just as all the habitual invalids, all the dyspeptics, have an inclination for comfort, so the German loves "openness" and "conventional probity": how comfortable it is to be open and conventional! - Today that is perhaps the most dangerous and most successful disguise which the German knows - this trusting, cooperative, cards-on-the-table nature of German honesty. It is his true Mephistophelean art; with it he can "still go far!" The German lets himself go, as he gazes with true, blue, empty German eyes - and foreigners immediately confuse him with his nightgown! What I wanted to say is this - let "German profundity" be what it will - when we are entirely among ourselves perhaps we'll allow ourselves to laugh about it? - we'll do well to hold its appearance and its good name in honour in future and not to dispose of our old reputation as people of profundity too cheaply for Prussian "boldness" and Berlin wit and sand. It's clever for a people to make itself and let others think it profound, clumsy, good natured, honest, unwise. That could even be - profound! Finally one should be a credit to one's name - not for nothing are we called the "tiusche" people, the deceiving people . . .

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The "good old" days are gone. In Mozart they sang themselves out: - how lucky we are that his rococo still speaks to us, that his "good society," his loving raptures, his childish delight in Chinese effects and curlicues, the civility in his heart, his desire for delicacy, lovers, dancers, those with blissful tears, his faith in the south can still appeal to some remnant in us! Alas, at some point it will be gone! - But who can doubt that the understanding of and taste for Beethoven will be gone even earlier! - He was, in fact, only the final chords of a stylistic transition, a break in style, and not, like Mozart, the final notes of a great centuries-long European taste.⁵ Beethoven is something that happens between an old crumbling soul which is constantly breaking up and a very young soul of the future which is constantly coming. In his music there lies that half light of eternal loss and of eternally indulgent hoping - that same light in which Europe was bathed when it dreamed with Rousseau, when it danced around the freedom tree of revolution and finally almost worshipped before Napoleon. But how quickly now this very feeling fades. Nowadays how difficult it has already become to know this feeling - how foreign to our ears sounds the talk of Rousseau, Schiller, Shelley, and Byron, in whom collectively the same European fate found a way in words which it knew how to sing in Beethoven!⁶ What has come in German music since then belongs to the Romantic period, that is, historically considered, to an even shorter, even more fleeting, even more superficial movement than was that great interlude, that transition in Europe from Rousseau to Napoleon and to the arrival of democracy. There's Weber: but what are Freischutz and Oberon these days for us! Or Marschner's Hans Heiling and Vampyr! Or even Wagner's Tannhauser! That music has faded, even if it has not yet been forgotten.⁷ In addition, all this Romantic music was not sufficiently noble, not sufficiently musical, to justify itself anywhere other than in the theatre and in front of crowds. Right from the start it was second-rate music, of little interest among true musicians. The situation was different with Felix Mendelssohn, that halcyon master, who won rapid admiration for his lighter, purer, and happier soul and then was forgotten just as quickly, as the lovely intermission in German music.⁸ But in the case of Robert Schumann, who took his work seriously and from the beginning was also taken seriously - he was the last one who founded a school - nowadays don't we count it as good luck, as a relief, and as a liberation that this very Schumann-style Romanticism has been overthrown? Schumann ran off into the "Saxon Switzerland" of his soul, half like Werther, half like Jean-Paul, but certainly nothing like Beethoven, certainly nothing like Byron! - the music of his Manfred is an error in judgment and a misunderstanding to the point of injustice.⁹ - Schumann with his taste, which was basically a petty taste (that is, a dangerous tendency, doubly dangerous among the Germans, toward quiet lyricism and a drunken intoxication of feeling), always going off to the side, shyly withdrawing himself and pulling back, a nobly tender soul, who wallowed in nothing but anonymous happiness and sorrow, from the start a sort of young maiden and noli me tangere [do not touch me]: this Schumann was already merely a German event in music, no longer something European, as Beethoven was, and, to an even greater extent, Mozart. With him German music was threatened by its greatest danger, the loss of the voice for the soul of Europe and its descent to something dealing merely with the fatherland.