The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 05

Centuries have passed since you have been convened as you are today—in such numbers, in so great, so insistent, so mutual an interest, so absolutely as a nation and as Germans. Never again will you be so bidden. If you do not listen now and examine yourselves, if you again let these addresses pass you by as an empty tickling of the ears or as a strange prodigy, no human being will longer take account of you. Hear at last for once; for once at last reflect! Only do not go this time from the spot without having made a firm resolve; let every one who hears this voice make this resolution within himself and for himself, even as though he were alone and must do everything alone. If very many individuals think thus, there will soon be a great whole uniting into a single, close-knit power. If, on the contrary, each one, excluding himself, relies on the rest and relinquishes the affair to others, then there are no others at all, for, even though combined, all remain just as they were before. Make it on the spot—this resolution! Do not say, "Yet a little more sleep, a little more slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep," until, perchance, improvement shall come of itself. It will never come of itself. He who has once missed the opportunity of yesterday, when clear perception would have been easier, will not be able to make up his mind today, and will certainly be even less able to do so tomorrow. Every delay only makes us still more inert and but lulls us more and more into gentle acquiescence to our wretched plight. Neither could the external stimulations to reflection ever be stronger and more insistent, for surely he whom these present conditions do not arouse has lost all feeling. You have been called together to make a last, determined resolution and decision—not by any means to give commands and mandates to others, or to depute others to do the work for you. No, my purpose is to urge you to do the work yourself. In this connection that idle passing of resolutions, the will to will, some time or other, are not sufficient, nor is it enough to remain sluggishly satisfied until self-improvement sets in of its own accord. On the contrary, from you is demanded a determination which is identical with action and with life itself, and which will continue and control, unwavering and unchilled, until it gains its goal.

Or is perchance the root, from which alone can grow a tenacity of purpose which takes hold upon life, utterly eradicated and vanished within you? Or is your whole being actually rarefied into a hollow shade, devoid of sap and blood and of individual power of movement, or dissolved to a dream in which, indeed, a motley array of faces arise and busily cross one another, but the body lies stiff and dead? Long since it has been openly proclaimed to our generation and repeated under every guise, that this is very nearly its condition. Its spokesmen have believed that this was declared merely in insult, and have regarded themselves as challenged to return the insults, thinking that thus the affair would resume its natural course. As for the rest, there was not the slightest trace of change or of improvement. If you have heard this, and if it was capable of rousing your indignation—well then, through your very actions, give the lie to those who thus think and speak of you. Once show yourselves to be different before the eyes of all the world, and before the eyes of all the world they will be convicted of their falsehood. It may be that they have spoken thus harshly of you with the precise intention of forcing this refutation from you, and because they despaired of any other means of arousing you. How much better, then, would have been their intentions toward you than were the purposes of those who flattered you that you might be kept in sluggish calm and in careless thoughtlessness!

However weak and powerless you may be, during this period clear and calm reflection has been vouchsafed you as never before. What really plunged us into confusion regarding our position, into thoughtlessness, into a blind way of letting things go, was our sweet complacency with ourselves and our mode of existence. Things had thus gone on hitherto, and so they continued and would continue to go. If any one challenged us to reflect, we triumphantly showed him, instead of any other refutation, our continued existence which went on without any thought or effort on our part; yet things flowed along simply because we were not put to the test. Since that time we have passed through the ordeal and it might be supposed that the deceptions, the delusions, and the false consolations with which we all misguided one another would have collapsed! The innate prejudices which, without proceeding from this point or from that, spread over all like a natural cloud and wrapped all in the same mist, ought surely, by this time, to have utterly vanished! That twilight no longer obscures our eyes, and can therefore no longer serve for an excuse. Now we stand, naked and bare, stripped of all alien coverings and draperies, simply as ourselves. Now it must appear what each self is, or is not.

Some one among you might come forward and ask me "What gives you in particular, the only one among all German men and authors, the special task, vocation, and prerogative of convening us and inveighing against us? Would not any one among the thousands of the writers of Germany have exactly the same right to do this as you have? None of them does it; you alone push yourself forward." I answer that each one would, indeed, have had the same right as I, and that I do it for the very reason that no one among them has done it before me; that I would be silent if any one else had spoken previous to me. This was the first step toward the goal of a radical amelioration, and some one must take it. I seemed to be the first vividly to perceive this—accordingly, it was I who first took it. After this, a second step will be taken, and thereto every one has now the same right; but, as a matter of fact, it, in its turn, will be taken by but one individual. One man must always be the first, and let him be he who can!

Without anxiety regarding this circumstance, let your attention rest for an instant on the consideration to which we have previously led you—in how enviable a position Germany and the world would be if the former had known how to utilize the good fortune of her position and to recognize her advantage. Let your eyes rest upon what they both are now, and let your minds be penetrated by the pain and indignation which, in this reflection, must lay hold upon every noble soul. Then examine yourselves and see that it is you who can release the age from the errors of ancient times, and that, if only you will permit it, your own eyes can be cleared of the mist that covers them; learn, too, that it has been vouchsafed to you, as to no generation before you, to undo what has been done and to efface the dishonorable interval from the annals of the German nation.

Let the various conditions among which you must choose pass before you. If you drift along in your torpor and your heedlessness, all the evils of slavery await you—deprivations, humiliations, the scorn and arrogance of the conqueror; you will be pushed about from pillar to post, because you have never found your proper niche, until, through the sacrifice of your nationality and of your language, you slip into some subordinate place where your nation shall sink its identity. If, on the other hand, you rouse yourselves, you will find, first of all, an enduring and honorable existence, and will behold a flourishing generation which promises to you and to the Germans the most glorious and lasting memory. Through the instrumentality of this new generation you will see in spirit the German name exalted to the most glorious among all nations; you will discern in this nation the regenerator and restorer of the world.

It depends upon you whether you will be the last of a dishonorable race, even more surely despised by posterity than it deserves, and in whose history—if there can be any history in the barbarism which will then begin—succeeding generations will rejoice when it perishes and will praise fate that it is just; or whether you will be the beginning and the point of development of a new age which will be glorious beyond all your expectations, and become those from whom posterity will date the year of their salvation. Bethink yourselves that you are the last in whose power this great change lies. You have heard the Germans called a unit; you have still a visible sign of their unity—an Empire and an Imperial League—or you have heard of it; among you even yet, from time to time, voices have been audible which were inspired by this higher patriotism. After you become accustomed to other concepts and will accept alien forms and a different course of occupation and of life—how long will it then be before no one longer lives who has seen Germans or who has heard of them?

What is demanded of you is not much. You should only keep before you the necessity of pulling yourselves together for a little time and of reflecting upon what lies immediately and obviously before your eyes. You should merely form for yourselves a fixed opinion regarding this situation, remain true to it, and utter and express it in your immediate surroundings. It is the presupposition, yea, it is our firm conviction, that this reflection will lead to the same result in all of you; that, if you only seriously consider, and do not continue in your previous heedlessness, you will think in harmony; and that, if you can bring your intelligence to bear, and if only you do not continue to vegetate, unanimity and unity of spirit will come of themselves. If, however, matters once reach this point, all else that we need will result automatically.

This reflection is, moreover, demanded from each one of you who can still consider for himself something lying obviously before his eyes. You have time for this; events will not take you unawares; the records of the negotiations conducted with you will remain before your eyes. Lay them not from your hands until you are in unity with your selves. Neither let, oh, let not yourselves be made supine by reliance upon others or upon anything whatsoever that lies outside yourselves, nor yet through the unintelligent belief of our time that the epochs of history are made by the agency of some unknown power without any aid from man. These addresses have never wearied in impressing upon you that absolutely nothing can help you but yourselves, and they find it necessary to repeat this to the last moment. Rain and dew, fruitful or unfruitful years, may indeed be made by a power which is unknown to us and is not under our control; but only men themselves—and absolutely no power outside them—give to each epoch its particular stamp. Only when they are all equally blind and ignorant do they fall the victims of this hidden power, though it is within their own control not to be blind and ignorant. It is true that to whatever degree, greater or less, things may go ill with us, in part depends upon that unknown power; but far more is it dependent upon the intelligence and the good will of those to whom we are subjected. Whether, on the other hand, it will ever again be well with us depends wholly upon ourselves; and surely nevermore will any welfare whatsoever come to us unless we ourselves acquire it for ourselves—especially unless each individual among us toils and labors in his own way as though he were alone and as though the salvation of future generations depended solely upon him.

This is what you have to do; and these addresses adjure you to do this without delay.

They adjure you, young men! I, who have long since ceased to belong to you, maintain—and I have also expressed my conviction in these addresses—that you are yet more capable of every thought transcending the commonplace, and are more easily aroused to all that is good and great, because your time of life still lies closer to the years of childish innocence and of nature. Very differently does the majority of the older generation regard this fundamental trait in you. It accuses you of arrogance, of a rash, presumptuous judgment which soars beyond your strength, of obstinacy, and of desire of innovation; yet it merely smiles good-naturedly at these, your errors. All this, it thinks, is based simply on your lack of knowledge of the world, that is, of universal human corruption, since it has eyes for nothing else on earth. You are now supposed to have courage only because you hope to find help-mates like-minded with yourselves and because you do not know the grim and stubborn resistance which will be opposed to your projects of improvement. When the youthful fire of your imagination shall once have vanished, when you shall have perceived the universal selfishness, idleness, and horror of work, when you yourselves shall once rightly have tasted the sweetness of plodding on in the customary rut—then the desire to be better and wiser than all others will soon fade away. They do not by any chance entertain these good expectations of you in imagination alone; they have found them confirmed in their own persons. They must confess that in the days of their foolish youth they dreamed of improving the world, exactly as you dream today; yet with increasing maturity they have become tame and quiet as you see them now. I believe them; in my own experience, which has not been very protracted, I have seen that young men who at first roused different hopes nevertheless, later, exactly fulfilled the kind expectations of mature age. Do this no longer, young men, for how else could a better generation ever begin? The bloom of youth will indeed fall from you, and the flame of imagination will cease to be nourished from itself; but feed this flame and brighten it through clear thought, make this way of thinking your own, and as an additional gift you will gain character, the fairest adornment of man. Through this clear thinking you will preserve the fountain of eternal youth; however your bodies grow old or your knees become feeble, your spirit will be reborn in freshness ever renewed, and your character will stand firm and unchangeable. Seize at once the opportunity here offered you; reflect clearly upon the theme presented for your deliberation; and the clarity which has dawned for you in one point will gradually spread over all others as well.

These addresses adjure you, old men! You are regarded as you have just heard, and you are told so to your faces; and for his own past the speaker frankly adds that—excluding the exceptions which, it must be admitted, not infrequently occur, and which are all the more admirable—the world is perfectly right with regard to the great majority among you. Go through the history of the last two or three decades; everything except yourselves agrees—and even you yourselves agree, each one in the specialty that does not immediately concern him—that (always excluding the exceptions, and regarding only the majority) the greatest uselessness and selfishness are found in advanced years in all branches, in science as well as in practical occupations. The whole world has witnessed that every one who desired the better and the more perfect still had to wage the bitterest battle with you in addition to the battle with his own uncertainty and with his other surroundings; that you were firmly resolved that nothing must thrive which you had not done and known in the same way; that you regarded every impulse of thought as an insult to your intelligence; and that you left no power unutilized to conquer in this battle against improvement—and in fact you generally did prevail. Thus you were the impeding power against all the improvements which kindly nature offered us from her ever—youthful womb until you were gathered to the dust which you were before, and until the succeeding generations, which were at war with you, had become like unto you and had adopted your attitude. Now, also, you need only conduct yourselves as you have previously acted in case of all propositions for amelioration; you need only again prefer to the general weal your empty honor in order that there may be nothing between heaven and earth that you have not already fathomed; then, through this last battle, you are relieved from all further battle; no improvement will accrue, but deterioration will follow in the footsteps of deterioration, and thus there will be much satisfaction in reserve for you.

No one will suppose that I despise and depreciate old age as old age. If only the source of primitive life and of its continuance is absorbed into life through freedom, then clarity—and strength with it—increases so long as life endures. Such a life is easier to live; the dross of earthly origin falls away more and ever more; it is ennobled to the life eternal and strives toward it. The experience of such an old age is irreconcilable with evil, and it only makes the means clearer and the skill more adroit victoriously to battle against wickedness. Deterioration through increasing age is simply the fault of our time, and it necessarily results in every place where society is much corrupted. It is not nature which corrupts us—she produces us in innocence; it is society. He who has once surrendered to the influence of society must naturally become ever worse and worse the longer he is exposed to this influence. It would be worth the trouble to investigate the history of other extremely corrupt generations in this regard, and to see whether—for example, under the rule of the Roman emperors—what was once bad did not continually become worse with increasing age.

First of all, therefore, these addresses adjure you, old men and experienced—you who form the exception! Confirm, strengthen, counsel in this matter the younger generation, which reverently looks up to you. And the rest of you also, who are average souls, they adjure! If you are not to help, at least do not interfere, this time; do not again—as always hitherto—put yourselves in the way with your wisdom and with your thousand hesitations. This thing, like every rational thing in the world, is not complicated, but simple; and it also belongs among the thousand matters which you know not. If your wisdom could save, it would surely have saved us before; for it is you who have counseled us thus far. Now, like everything else, all this is forgiven you, and you should no longer be reproached with it. Only learn at last once to know yourselves, and be silent.

These addresses adjure you men of affairs! With few exceptions you have thus far been cordially hostile to abstract thought and to all learning which desired to be something for itself, even though you demeaned yourselves as if you merely haughtily despised all this. As far as you possibly could, you held from you the men who did such things as well as their propositions; the reproach of lunacy, or the advice that they be sent to the mad-house, was the thanks from you on which they might usually count. They, in their turn, did not venture to express themselves regarding you with the same frankness, since they were dependent upon you; but their innermost thought was this, that, with a few exceptions, you were shallow babblers and inflated braggarts, dilettante who have only passed through school, blind gropers and creepers in the old rut who had neither wish nor ability for aught else. Give them the lie through your deeds, and to this end grasp the opportunity now offered you; lay aside that contempt for profound thought and learning; let yourselves be advised and hear and learn what you do not know, or else your accusers win their case.

These addresses adjure you, thinkers, scholars, and authors who are still worthy of this name! In a certain sense that reproach of the men of affairs was not unjust. You often proceeded too unconcerned in the realm of abstract thought, without troubling yourselves about the actual world and without considering how the one might be connected with the other; you circumscribed your own world for yourselves, and let the real world lie to one side, disdained and despised. Every regulation and every formation of actual life must, it is true, proceed from the higher regulating concept, and progress in the customary rut is insufficient for it; this is an eternal truth, and, in God's name, it crushes with undisguised contempt every one who is so bold as to busy himself with affairs without knowing this. Yet between the concept and the introduction of it into any individual life there is a great gulf fixed. The filling of this gulf is the task both of the men of affairs—who, however, must already first have learned enough to understand you—and also of yourselves, who should not forget life on account of the world of thought. Here you both meet. Instead of regarding each other askance and depreciating each other across the gulf, endeavor rather to fill it, each on his own side, and thus seek to construct the road to union. At last, I beg you, realize that you both are as mutually necessary to each other as head and arm are indispensable the one to the other.

In other respects as well, these addresses adjure you, thinkers, scholars, and authors who are still worthy of this name! Your laments over the general shallowness, thoughtlessness, and superficiality, over self-conceit and inexhaustible babble, over the contempt for seriousness and profundity in all classes, may be true, even as they actually are. Yet what class is it, pray, that has educated all these classes, that has transformed everything pertaining to science into a jest for them, and that has trained them from their earliest youth in that self-conceit and that babble? Who is it, pray, who still continues to educate the generations that have outgrown the schools? The most obvious source of the torpor of the age is that it has read itself torpid in the writings which you have written. Why are you, nevertheless, so continually solicitous to amuse this idle people, despite the fact that you know that they have learned nothing and wish to learn nothing? Why do you call them "the Public," flatter them as your judge, stir them up against your rivals, and seek by every means to win this blind and confused mob over to your side? Finally, in your literary reviews and in your magazines, why do you yourselves furnish them with material and example for rash judgments by yourselves judging as unconnectedly, as carelessly, as recklessly, and, for the most part, as tastelessly as even the least of your readers could? If you do not all think thus, and if among you there are still some animated by better sentiments, why, then, do not these latter unite to put an end to the evil? As to those men of affairs, in particular they have passed through your schools—you say so yourselves. Why, then, did you not at least make use of this transit of theirs to inspire in them some silent respect for learning, and especially to break betimes the self-conceit of the young aristocrat and to show him that birth and station are of no assistance in the realm of thought? If, perchance, even at that time you flattered him and exalted him unduly, now endure that for which you yourselves are responsible.

These addresses desire to excuse you on the supposition that you had not grasped the importance of your occupation; they adjure you that, from this hour, you make yourselves acquainted with this importance, and that you no longer ply your occupation as a mere trade. Learn to respect yourselves, and by your actions show that you do so, and the world will respect you. You will give the first proof of this through the amount of influence which you assume in regard to the resolution that is proposed, and through the manner in which you conduct yourselves regarding it.

These addresses adjure you, princes of Germany! Those who act toward you as though no man dared say aught to you, or had aught to say, are despicable flatterers, are base slanderers of you yourselves. Drive them far from you! The truth is that you were born exactly as ignorant as all the rest of us, and that, exactly like ourselves, you must hear and learn if you are to escape from this natural ignorance. Your share in bringing about the fate which has befallen you simultaneously with your peoples is here set forth in the mildest way and, as we believe, in the way which is alone right and just; and in case you wish to hear only flattery, and never the truth, you cannot complain regarding these addresses. Let all this be forgotten, even as all the rest of us also desire that our share in the guilt may be forgotten. Now begins a new life as well for yourselves as for all of us. May this voice penetrate to you through all the surroundings which normally make you inaccessible! With proud self-reliance it dares to say to you: You rule nations, faithful, plastic, and worthy of good fortune, such as princes of no time and of no nation have ruled. They have a feeling for freedom and are capable of it; but, because you so willed, they have followed you into sanguinary war against that which to them seemed freedom. Some among you have later willed otherwise, and, again because you so willed, they have followed you into that which to them must seem a war of annihilation against one of the last remnants of German independence. Since that time they have endured and have borne the oppressive burden of common woes; yet they do not cease to be faithful to you, to cling to you with inward devotion, and to love you as their divinely appointed guardians. Yet may you notice them, unobserved by them; set free from surroundings which do not invariably present to you the fairest aspect of humanity, may you be able to descend into the house of the citizen, into the peasant's cottage, and may you be able attentively to follow the still and hidden life of these classes, in which the fidelity and the probity which have become more rare in the higher classes seem to have sought refuge! Surely, oh, surely, you will resolve to reflect more seriously than ever how they may be helped! These addresses have proposed to you a means of assistance which they believe to be sure, thorough, and decisive. Let your councillors deliberate whether they also find it so or whether they know a better means, provided only that it be equally decisive. But the conviction that something must be done and must be done immediately, that this something must be radical and final, and that the time for half-measures and procrastination is past—this conviction these addresses would fain produce, if they could, in you personally, as they still cherish the utmost confidence in your integrity.