Yet Bach’s spirit, the German spirit, stepped forth from the sanctuary of divinest Music, the place of its new-birth. When Goethe’s “Götz” appeared, its joyous cry went up: “That’s German!” And, beholding his likeness, the German also knew to shew himself, to shew the world, what Shakespeare is, whom his own people did not understand. These deeds the German spirit brought forth of itself, from its inmost longing to grow conscious of itself. And this consciousness told it – what it was the first to publish to the world – that the Beautiful and Noble came not into the world for sake of profit, nay, not for sake of even fame and recognition. And everything done in the sense of this teaching is “deutsch”; and therefore is the German great; and only what is done in that sense, can lead Germany to greatness.
To the nurture of the German Spirit, the greatness of the German Folk, nothing can lead, then, save its veritable understanding by the rulers. The German Folk arrived at its rebirth, at unfolding of its highest faculties, through its conservative temper, its inward cleaving to itself, to its own idiosyncrasy: once it shed its life’s blood for the preservation of its Princes. ’Tis now for them to shew the German Folk that they belong to it; and where the German spirit achieved its deed of rebearing the Folk, there is the realm whereon the Princes, too, have first to found their new alliance with the Folk. It is highest time the Princes turned to this re-baptism: the danger that menaces the whole of German public life, I have already pointed out. Woe to us and the world, if the nation itself were this time saved, but the German spirit vanished from the world!* –
[ . . . ]
“Democracy” in Germany is purely a translated thing. It exists merely in the “Press”; and what this German Press is, one must find out for oneself. But untowardly enough, this translated Franco-Judaico-German Democracy could really borrow a handle, a pretext and deceptive cloak, from the misprised and maltreated spirit of the German Folk. To secure a following among the people, “Democracy” aped a German mien; and “Deutschthum,” “German spirit,” “German honesty,” “German freedom,” “German morals,” became catchwords disgusting no one more than him who had true German culture, who had to stand in sorrow and watch the singular comedy of agitators from a non-German people pleading for him without letting their client so much as get a word in edgewise. The astounding unsuccessfulness of the so loud-mouthed movement of 1848 is easily explained by the curious circumstance that the genuine German found himself, and found his name, so suddenly represented by a race of men quite alien to him. Whilst Goethe and Schiller had shed the German spirit on the world, without so much as talking of the “German” spirit, these Democratic speculators fill every book- and print-shop, every so-called “Volks-,” i.e. joint-stock theatre, with vulgar, utterly vapid dummies, forever plastered with the puff of “deutsch,” and “deutsch” again, to decoy the easygoing crowd. And really we have got so far, that we presently shall see the German Folk quite turned to gabies by it: the national propensity to sloth and phlegma is being lured into fantastic satisfaction with itself; already the German people is taking a large part, itself, in the playing of the shameful comedy; and not without a shudder can the thoughtful German spirit look upon those foolish festive gatherings, with their theatrical processions, their silly speeches, and the cheerless empty songs wherewith one tries to make the German Folk imagine it is something special and does not need to first endeavour to become it. –
* Cf. Die Meistersinger, act iii: “Habt Acht! Uns drohen üble Streich’:– zerfällt erst deutsches Volk und Reich, in falscher wälscher Majestät kein Fürst bald mehr sein Volk versteht; und wälschen Dunst mit wälschem Tand sie pflanzen uns in’s deutsche Land,”–TR.
print version
return to list
previous document