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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 . . .