Historical ideals
Every individuality is composed of a number of qualities; it is precisely the nature of these qualities and the way in which they are grouped according to one inclination or another that form an individuality. If one can describe a comparative overview of all of the unalterable qualities of a people as a cross section of its character, then a summarizing overview of the host of men who have superbly developed and exemplified these same qualities in the course of history can be regarded as a longitudinal section of precisely this individuality of a people. The cross section is theoretical in nature, the longitudinal section is practical in nature; it represents, figuratively speaking, the hall of ancestors of this particular spirit of a people. Every quality of the latter finds here one or more chief representative; the virtues as well as the faults of a people become flesh in the course of history. – So, too, among the Germans. “The Germans are honest people,” Shakespeare already said: Luther’s as well as Bismarck’s qualities rest on this honesty. The Germans have been considered brave since time immemorial: Winkelried and Frederick the Great attest to it; likewise, their thinking is embodied in Leibniz and Kant, their poetry in Walther von der Vogelweide and Goethe, their singing in Bach and Mozart. Other traits of the nation’s character have concentrated themselves in other men; all of them together, finally, make up the spiritual physiognomy of the people. And it is this that one must probe if one wishes to discover something about a people’s duties and responsibilities and predetermined fates. Needless to say, the answer will be very different, depending on time and circumstances; of course, sometimes one quality will have to be considered the leading one, sometimes another. But it will always be the look back into the past, into a past filled by men of action, that can serve as the norm for the future. A people will be educated for a healthy future by its past; and the present is to determine and convey the proper relationship between the two. This is the scale on which one measures a people.
This much is clear: Germany cannot relinquish its ideals without relinquishing itself. In and of itself, the historicizing and scientific direction of our present time does not stand in opposition to this – for it would be a very superficial judgment if one were to assume that a Weltanschauung that is grounded in reality could or had to forego deeper, spiritual content. Education itself never marches backwards; like a tree, it always lays down new rings that incorporate the old ones: this is called growth. Accordingly, the Germans of today, whose grandfathers possessed an idealistic and whose fathers an historical education, must add up the educational results of the two previous generations by choosing for themselves – historical ideals. These ideals are the heroes of the spirit, ancestors of the Volk, representatives of its character traits that are destined, at the present and in the time immediately at hand, to emerge on the surface of history. “There is only one bliss, and that is to reform oneself and to be wise enough to be completely noble,” says the much-underrated Grabbe; and those spirits can help the German attain such bliss. They are the reflections of his own, most beautiful existence; against them, the Volk may measure its accomplishments and its powers and goals; in them it honors itself. They serve as the crystallization points for the spiritual development of a Volk at any given time; they form the high school for which it must prepare itself for its future fates; in short, they are the educators of their Volk.
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