The Use and Abuse of History
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Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Next page restless, and completely less healthy than the first. Modern man finally drags a huge crowd of indigestible rocks of knowledge around inside him, which then occasionally audibly bang around in his body, as it says in fairy tales. Through this noise the most characteristic property of this modern man reveals itself: the remarkable conflict on the inside, to which nothing on the outside corresponds, and an outside to which nothing inside corresponds, a conflict of which ancient peoples were ignorant. Knowledge, taken up to excess without hunger, even in opposition to any need, now works no longer as something which reorganizes, a motivation driving outwards. It stays hidden in a certain chaotic inner world, which that modern man describes with a strange pride as an "Inwardness" peculiar to him. Thus, people say that we have the content and that only the form is lacking. But with respect to everything alive this is a totally improper contradiction. For our modern culture is not alive, simply because it does let itself be understood without that contradiction; that is, it is really no true culture, but only a way of knowing about culture. There remain in it thoughts of culture, feelings of culture, but no cultural imperatives come from it. In contrast to this, what really motivates and moves outward into action then often amounts to not much more than a trivial convention, a pathetic imitation, or even a raw grimace. At that point the inner feeling is probably asleep, like the snake which has swallowed an entire rabbit and then lies down contentedly still in the sunlight and avoids all movements other than the most essential. The inner process, that is now the entire business, that essentially is "Culture." And everyone who wanders by has only one wish, that such a culture does not collapse from indigestion. Think, for example, of a Greek going past such a culture. He would perceive that for more recent people "educated" and "historically educated" appear to be mentioned very closely together, as if they are one and the same and are distinguished only by the number of words. If he talked of his own principle that it is possible for an individual to be very educated and nevertheless not to be historically educated at all, then people would think they had not heard him correctly and shake their heads. That famous people of a not too distant past, I mean those very Greeks, had in the period of their greatest power an unhistorical sense tried and tested in rough times. A contemporary man magically taken back into that world would presumably find the Greeks very uneducated. In that reaction, of course, the secret of modern education, so painstakingly disguised, would be exposed to public laughter. For we modern people have nothing at all which comes from us. Only because we fill and overfill ourselves with foreign ages, customs, arts, philosophies, religions, and discoveries do we become something worthy of consideration, that is, like wandering encyclopaedias, as some ancient Greek lost our time would put it. However, people come across all the value of encyclopaedias only in what is inside, in the contents, not in what is on the outside or in the binding and on the cover. Thus, all modern education is essentially inner. The bookbinder has printed on the outside something to this effect: Handbook of inner education for external barbarians. In fact, this contrast between inner and outer makes the outer even more barbaric than it would have to be, if a rough people were evolving out of it only according to their basic needs. For what means does nature still have at its disposal to deal with the super-abundance forcing itself outward? Only one means, to take it as lightly as possible in order to shove it aside again quickly and dispose of it. From that arises a habit of not taking real things seriously any more. From that arises the "weak personality," as a result of which reality and existence make only an insignificant impression. Finally people become constantly more venial and more comfortable and widen the disturbing gulf between content and form until they are insensitive to the barbarism, so long as the memory is always newly stimulated, so long as constantly new things worthy of knowledge flow by, which can be neatly packaged in the compartments of memory. The culture of a people, in contrast to that barbarism, was once described (and correctly so, in my view) as a unity of the artistic style in all expressions of the life of the people. This description must not be misunderstood, as if the issue were an opposition between barbarism and a beautiful style. The people to whom we ascribe a culture should be only in a really vital unity and not so miserably split apart into inner and outer, into content and form. Anyone who wants to strive after and foster the culture of a people strives after and fosters this higher unity and, for the sake of a true education, works to destroy the modern notion of being educated. He dares to consider how the health of a people which has been disturbed by history could be restored, how the people could find their instinct once again and with that their integrity. Now I want to speak directly about us Germans of the present day. It is our lot to suffer more than any other people from this weakness of the personality and from the contradiction between content and form. Form is commonly accepted by us Germans as a convention, as a disguise and a pretence, and is thus, when not hated, then at any rate not particularly loved. It would be even more just to say that we have an extraordinary anxiety with the word convention and also with the fact of convention. In this anxiety, the German abandoned the French school, for he wanted to become more natural and thereby more German. Now, however, he appears to have included in this "thereby" a running away from the school of convention. Now he lets himself go how and where he has the mere desire to go, and basically imitates nervously whatever he wants in semi-forgetfulness of what in earlier times he imitated painstakingly and often happily. Thus, measured against earlier times, people still live according to a slipshod, incorrect French convention, as all our moving, standing, conversing, clothing, and dwelling demonstrate. While people believe they are escaping back to the natural, they only think about letting themselves go, about comfort, and about the smallest possible amount of self-control. Wander through a German city: everything is conventional, compared to the particular national characteristics of foreign cities. This shows itself in negatives: all is colourless, worn out, badly copied, apathetic. Each man goes about as he wishes, but not with a forceful desire rich in ideas, but following the laws which the general haste, along with the general desire for comfort, establishes for the time being. A piece of clothing, whose invention required no brain power, whose manufacture took no time, one derived from foreigners and imitated as casually as possible, instantly counts among the Germans as a contribution to German national dress. The sense of form is disavowed with complete irony, for people have indeed the sense of the content. After all, they are the renowned people of the inward life. However, there is a well known danger with this inwardness: the content itself, which people assume they cannot see at all from the outside, may one day happen to disappear. From the outside people would not notice either its absence or its earlier presence. But even if people think that, in any case, the German people are as far as possible from this danger; the foreigner will always have a certain justification when he levels the accusation at us that our inner life is too weak and unorganized to be effective on the outside and to give itself a shape. This inward life can to a rare degree prove delicately sensitive, serious, strong, and sincere, and perhaps even richer than the inward lives of other peoples. But as a totality it remains weak, because all the beautiful threads are not tied together into a powerful knot. Thus, the visible act is not the total action and self-revelation of this inner life, but only a weak or crude attempt of a few strands or other to will something whose appearance might pass muster as the totality. Thus, one cannot judge the German according to a single action. As an individual he is still completely hidden after the action. As is well known, he must be measured by his thoughts and feelings, and they speak out nowadays in his books. If only these books did not awaken, in recent times more than ever, a doubt about whether the famous inner life is really still sitting in its inaccessible little temple. It would be a horrible idea that one day it may have disappeared and now the only thing left behind is the externality, that arrogant, clumsy, and respectfully unkempt German externality. Almost as terrible as if that inner life, without people being able to see it, sat inside, counterfeit, coloured, painted over, and had become an actress, if not something worse, as, for example, Grillparzer, who stood on the sidelines as a quiet observer, appears to assume about his experience as a dramatist in the theatre: "We feel with abstractions," he says, "we hardly know any more how feeling expresses itself among our contemporaries. We let our feelings jump about in ways they do not affect us any more. Shakespeare has destroyed everything new for us." This is a single example, perhaps too quickly generalized. But how fearful would his justified generalization be if the individual cases should force themselves upon the observer far too frequently, how despairingly the statement would echo: We Germans feel abstractedly; we have all been corrupted by history. This statement would destroy at the root every hope for a future national culture. For that kind of hope grows out of the faith in the authenticity and the immediacy of German feeling, from the belief in the undamaged inner life. What is there still to be hoped for or to be believed, if the inner life has learned to leap about, to dance, to put on make up, and to express itself outwardly with abstraction and calculation and gradually to lose itself! And how is the great productive spirit to maintain himself among a people no longer sure of its unified inner life, which falls apart into sections, with a miseducated and seduced inner life among the cultured, and an inadequate inner life among the uneducated? How is he to keep going if the unity of the people's feeling gets lost, if, in addition, he knows that the very part which calls itself the educated portion of the people and which arrogates to itself the national artistic spirit is false and biased. Here and there the judgment and taste of individuals may themselves have become finer and more sublimated, but that is no compensation for him. It pains the productive spirit to have to speak, as it were, to one class and no longer to be necessary within his own people. Perhaps he would sooner bury his treasure, since it disgusts him to be exquisitely patronized by one class, while his heart is full of pity for all. The instinct of the people no longer comes to meet him. It is useless to stretch out one's arms toward it in yearning. What still remains for him, other than to turn his enthusiastic hate against that restricting prohibition, against the barriers erected in the so-called education of his people, in order at least, as a judge, to condemn what for him, the living and the producer of life, is destruction and degradation? Thus, he exchanges the deep understanding of his own fate for the divine pleasure of the creator and helper and finishes up a lonely philosopher, a supersaturated wise man. It is the most painful spectacle. Generally whoever sees it will recognize a holy need here. He tells himself: here it is necessary to give assistance; that higher unity in the nature and soul of a people must be established once more; that gulf between the inner and the outer must disappear again under the hammer blows of need. What means should he now reach for? What remains for him now other than his deep understanding? By speaking out on this and spreading awareness of it, by sowing from his full hands, he hopes to plant a need. And out of the strong need will one day arise the strong deed. And so that I leave no doubt where I derive the example of that need, that necessity, that knowledge, here my testimony should stand, that it is German unity in that highest sense which we are striving for and more passionately for that than for political reunification, the unity of the German spirit and life after the destruction of the opposition of form and content, of the inner life and convention. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In five ways the supersaturation of an age in history seems to me hostile and dangerous. Through such an excess, first, that hitherto mentioned contrast between inner and outer is produced; second, the personality is weakened; an age is caught up in the fantasy that it possesses the rarest virtue, righteousness, in a higher degree than any other time; third, the instincts of a people are disrupted, and the individual no less than the totality is hindered from developing maturely; fourth, through this excess the always dangerous belief in the old age of humanity takes root, the belief that we are late arrivals and epigones; fifth, an age attains the dangerous mood of irony about itself and, beyond that, an even more dangerous cynicism. In this, however, it increasingly ripens towards a cleverly egotistical practice, through which the forces of life are crippled and finally destroyed. And now back to our first statement: modern man suffers from a weakened personality. Just as the Roman in the time of the Caesars became un-Roman with regard to the area of the earth standing at his disposal, as he lost himself among the foreigners streaming in and degenerated with the cosmopolitan carnival of gods, customs, and arts, so matters must go with the modern person who continually allows his historical artists to prepare the celebration of a world market fair. He has become a spectator, enjoying and wandering around, converted into a condition in which even great wars and huge revolutions are hardly able to change anything momentarily. The war has not yet ended, and already it is transformed on printed paper a hundred thousand times over; soon it will be promoted as the newest stimulant for the palate of those greedy for history. It appears almost impossible that a strong and full tone will be produced by the most powerful plucking of the strings. As soon as the sound appears again, already in the next moment it dies away, softly evaporating without force into history. To state the matter in moral terms: you do not manage to hold onto what is noble any more; your deeds are sudden bangs, not rolling thunder. If the very greatest and most wonderful thing is accomplished, it must nevertheless move to Hades without any fuss. For art runs away, when you instantly throw over your actions the roof of the historical marquee. The person there who wants to understand immediately, to calculate and grasp, where he should in an enduring oscillation hang onto the unknowable as something sublime, may be called intelligent, but only in the sense in which Schiller speaks of the understanding of the intelligent person: he does not see some things which even the child sees; he does not hear some things which the child hears; these "some things" are precisely the most important thing. Because he does not understand this, his understanding is more childish than the child's and more simplistic than simple mindedness, in spite of the many shrewd wrinkles on his parchment-like features and the virtuoso practice of his fingers unraveling all complexities. This amounts to the fact that he has destroyed and lost his instinct. Now he can no longer let the reins hang loose, trusting the "divine animal," when his understanding wavers and his road leads through deserts. Thus, individuality becomes timid and unsure and can no longer believe in itself. It sinks into itself, into the inner life. That means here only into the piled up mass of scholarly data which does not work towards the outside, instruction which does not become living. If we look for a moment out to the exterior, then we notice how the expulsion of instinct by history has converted people almost into nothing but abstractis [abstraction] and shadows. A man no longer gambles his identity on that instinct. Instead he masks himself as educated man, as scholar, as poet, as politician. If we seize such masks because we believe the matter is something serious and not merely a marionette play (for they all paper themselves over with seriousness), then we suddenly have only rags and bright patches in our hands. Therefore, we should no longer allow ourselves to be deceived and should shout out, "Strip off your jackets or be what you seem." No longer should each serious person turn into a Don Quixote, for he has something better to do than to keep getting into fights with such illusory realities. In any case, however, he must keenly inspect each mask, cry "Halt! Who goes there?" and pull the mask down onto their necks. Strange! We should have thought that history encouraged human beings above all to be honest, even if only an honest fool. This has always been its effect. But nowadays it is no longer that! Historical education and the common uniform of the middle class together both rule. While never before has there been such sonorous talk of the "free personality," we never once see personalities, to say nothing of free people, but only anxiously |
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