246

What a torture are books written in German for the man who has a third ear! How reluctantly he stands beside the slowly revolving swamp of sounds without melody, of rhythms without dance, what among Germans is called a "book!" And as for the German who reads books! How lazily, how reluctantly, how badly he reads! How many Germans know and demand from themselves the knowledge that there is art in every good sentence, art which must be correctly grasped if the sentence is to be understood! With a misunderstanding about its tempo, for example, the sentence itself is misunderstood! That one must not be in doubt about the rhythmically decisive syllables, that one must feel the break in the extremely strict symmetry as intentional and charming, that one must lend a refined and patient ear to every staccato and every rubato, that one sorts out the sense in the series of vowels and diphthongs, how softly and richly they can colour and re-colour each other as they follow in their sequence - who among our book-reading Germans has enough good will to recognize these sorts of duties and demands and to listen for so much art and intentionality in the language? In the end we just "don't have the ear for that." And thus the most pronounced contrasts in style are not heard and the most refined artistry is wasted, as if on deaf people. These were my thoughts as I observed how crudely and naively people confused two masters of the art of prose with each other - one whose words drip down, hesitant and cold, as if from the roof of a damp cavern - he's relying on their dull sound and echo - and the other who handles his language like a flexible sword and feels from his arm down to his toes the dangerous joy in the excessively sharp, shimmering blade that wants to bite, hiss, and cut.-

247

Just how little German style concerns itself with sound and with the ear is demonstrated in the fact that even our good musicians write badly. The German does not read aloud, not for the ear, but merely with his eyes. In the process he has put his ears away in a drawer. In antiquity a man read, when he read - and that happened rarely enough - to himself aloud and in a loud voice. People were amazed if someone read quietly, and they secretly asked themselves why. With a loud voice - that is to say, with all the swellings, inflections, changes in tone, and shifts in tempo which the ancient public world enjoyed. At that time the principles of writing style were the same as those for the speaking style, and these principles depended in part on the astonishing development and the sophisticated needs of the ear and larynx and in part on the strength, endurance, and power of the ancient lungs. A syntactic period is, as the ancients understood it, above all a physiological totality, insofar as it is held together by a single breath. Such periods, as they manifest themselves in Demosthenes and Cicero, swelling up twice and sinking down twice, all within the single breath - that's what ancient men enjoyed.¹⁰ From their own schooling they knew how to value the virtue in such periods - how rare and difficult it was to deliver them. We really have no right to the great syntactical period, we moderns, we short-winded people in every sense! These ancient people were, in fact, themselves collectively dilettantes in public speaking - and as a result connoisseurs and thus critics. Hence, they drove their speakers to the utmost limits. In a similar way in the last century, once all Italian men and women understood how to sing, among them virtuoso singing (and with that the art of melody as well) reached its high point. But in Germany (right up until very recent times, when a sort of platform eloquence started flapping its young wings timidly and crudely enough) there was really only one form of public speaking which came close to being artistic: what came from the pulpit. In Germany only the preacher understood what a syllable or what a word weighs, how a sentence strikes, leaps, falls, runs, and ends; only he had a conscience in his ears, often enough a bad conscience. For there is no shortage of reasons why it's precisely the German who rarely, and almost always too late, achieves a proficiency in speaking. It is appropriate therefore that the masterwork of German prose is the masterwork of its greatest preacher: up to this point, the Bible has been the best German book. In comparison with Luther's Bible, almost everything else is mere "literature" - something that did not grow in Germany and hence also did not grow and does not grow into German hearts, as the Bible has.

248

There are two kinds of genius: one which above all breeds and desires to breed, and another which is happy to let itself be fertilized and give birth. In just the same way, there are among peoples of genius those to whom the female problem of pregnancy and the secret task of shaping, maturing, and perfecting have been assigned - the Greeks, for example, were a people of this kind, like the French - and there are others who have to fertilize and become the origin of new orders of life - like the Jews, the Romans, and, one could ask in all modesty, the Germans? - People tormented and enchanted by unknown fevers and irresistibly driven outside themselves, in love with and lusting after foreign races (after those who "let themselves be fertilized"-) and thus obsessed with mastery, like everything which has a knowledge of itself as full of procreative power and thus "by the grace of God." These two types of genius seek each other out, like man and woman, but they also misunderstand each other - like man and woman.

249

Every people has its characteristic Tartufferie [hypocrisy] and calls it its virtues.- The best that man is he does not know - he cannot know.

250

What does Europe owe the Jews?- All sorts of things, good and bad, and above all one that is at the same time among the best and the worst: the grand style in morality, the terror and majesty of infinite demands, infinite meanings, the whole romanticism and grandeur of morally questionable things [moralischen Fragwürdigkeiten] - and as a result precisely the most attractive, most awkward, and most exquisite parts of those plays of colours and enticements to life, whose afterglow these days makes the sky of our European culture glow in its evening light - perhaps as it burns itself out. Among the spectators and philosophers, we artists are grateful to the Jews for that.