10. A Clearer Look Into The Present
It was at the beginning of this century that a powerful intellectual endeavor arose among the German people and sought to penetrate the deepest secrets of world building through the power of human thought. An original science emerged that emancipated itself from all practical activity and, hovering in the highest spheres of idealism, sought only to satisfy the needs of the spirit. It was the deepest German trait, imbued with moral high-mindedness, that animated this striving,
If we look at German poetry from that time, we must say that it too is filled with that magical juice that flowed from the German thinkers' striving for the most intimate fraternization with the world spirit. In this respect, both research and artistic creation had a religious trait, because they fulfilled the first basic condition of religion, to lift man away from the everyday and the ordinary into a higher, purely spiritual region.
It was a break with old traditions, but it was a different kind of break from the almost simultaneous French Revolution. The Germans rebelled against the traditional, against the outdated forms of religion, art and science, because a new world was opening up within them, because the real, the inner truth, was replacing appearances. In the case of the French, it was nothing other than the clever mind, the emptiness of the Enlightenment, for whom the old was not enough, and that is precisely why the liberality of the French so easily turns into frivolity. This cultural height on which the Germans once stood seems to us today to be nothing more than a thing of the past; we disciples look back with melancholy on those better times; after all, we seem to have been left with almost nothing other than the less comforting task of being the gravediggers and monument-setters of those great spirits who brought about that mighty epoch.
What do we achieve that could even remotely compare with those achievements? The power to create something original seems to have long since vanished and our entire art consists of creating biographies of our great ancestors and commentaries on their works. Where is the German power that once gave birth to Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Jean Paul?
It could almost seem as if the mighty Germanic giant is sleeping in the midst of Europe. But on closer inspection, the gloomy picture gives way to a still highly pleasing one, and we gain the conviction that we need not despair of the present at all, but can in many respects rejoice in it.
When we look at the intellectual life of Europe, it resembles a system of threads that are intertwined in many ways, but no matter which of these threads we follow, we still come to Germany as the crossroads where they all meet. The scientific, artistic and economic-social life of Europe is a connection of forces that all have their center in Germany.
If we want to prove the truth of this sentence, we need only consider two different interests, one dominating the scientific and the other the economic and social aspirations of the present day.
By the first point we mean Darwinism, the scientific doctrine that all animal forms now living are only descendants of some or of a single basic form which has been perfected in the course of very long periods of time, and that man is only the most perfect, most developed animal form, that his ancestors are to be sought nowhere else than where those of the other mammals are to be found. This doctrine is of English origin. But as it emerged from the head of the Englishman Darwin around the middle of our century, it was a vague, inherently unclear view; neither the moral consequences had been drawn, nor was the necessary all-round scientific development available. In the middle was a number of observations, experiences and undoubted truths, but the beginning and end were completely shrouded in mist.
Then, at the beginning of the sixties, German scholars took hold of this view; German profundity, German thoroughness and deep moral seriousness struck like lightning into the tangled fabric. The whole was thought through and carried through to its final consequences with all the power of the mind, and under the care of German researchers a scientific structure soon emerged, firmly established and well-founded in all its parts. What the Englishman Darwin had begun, the German Haeckel completed in a wonderful, monumental way. What the latter created is a perfect edifice of the mind, executed in every detail with admirable ingenuity. A mysterious document of nature had been found in England, but there was a thick veil over it, then a German came and tore away the veil, and only now did the world know what was written on the mysterious document. But it did not stop there. The moral high-mindedness of the Germans also had to consider the necessary consequences of the new doctrine with regard to morality and public life. And numerous are the writings of German researchers who, with more or less luck, either want to show the harmony of Darwinism with a pure morality or the endangerment of the latter by the former. In doing so, they also recalled the pinnacle of German culture, German idealism and its greatest exponent: Goethe. There was a need to harmonize the ideas of this great genius with the new teachings. And it is not to be slight that the German is so imbued with that ideal world that any disharmony of new views with this world is embarrassing to him. The striving of German scholars to harmonize the results of the modern world view with Goetheanism is the reaction of the German conscience to the scientific fashion, the will of the German that only the ideal must find its way into life, finally the belief that idealism must be true.
It is a specifically German phenomenon that pessimism in its deepest form arises as a consequence of Darwinism. The number of sincere, thoroughly good and highly gifted souls who despair of the world and life because of the new doctrine is not small. One must have as deep a mind as the German has, one must be as far removed from every kind of frivolity and frivolity as he is, one must possess his striving for the divine, and one will not easily escape pessimism if one fully thinks through the nullity of man and his race, as it follows, if one accepts Darwinism in its full extent. This gives rise to a line of thought that could probably be continued for a long time, but we have seen that the most powerful force moving the scientific world today points us to Germany. The West has posed a problem, Germany is trying to solve it. And if redemption is ever to come from the spell of the immense one-sidedness of the modern world view, it can only come from Germany. It will be the power of the German spirit which will show what is true about Darwinism, and which will at the same time show that, applied beyond a certain degree, it is inwardly untrue, shallow and shallow; it will overcome it by limiting its sphere of power, by understanding it.
The second phenomenon we want to point out is the striving of the European peoples to find that form of state in which the moral dignity and freedom of each individual citizen is most fully realized. Again, it was the West, France and England, where this aspiration first asserted itself. Arbitrariness was to be replaced by the necessity of reason, privilege by equality, and bondage by freedom. But it is probably not too bold to claim that the first truly viable seeds for replacing the state, in which chance and subjective arbitrariness rule, with one in which reason reigns supreme, have just been laid in Germany. The state must ensure that the happiness of the individual does not depend on chance or arbitrariness, but that the whole, built according to the principles of reason, secures the welfare of the individual to such an extent that the latter can develop freely in physical and spiritual directions. The state cannot make men free, only education can do that; but the state must ensure that everyone finds the soil on which his freedom can flourish. The fact that today the watchword has been given for a development in this respect from the steps of the throne once occupied by Frederick the Great, that in Germany the leadership of the state is incumbent on a man who is deeply imbued with that mission of the state, will one day be recorded by history as one of the greatest of its political facts.
And now one more thing: there are Germans who are not called upon to participate in the great social work that the German people are accomplishing today. We are speaking to a large number of such Germans here. But we would not call it a misfortune that this is the case. For perhaps it is precisely to these Germans that the most insignificant part of the common cultural work of our people falls today. We accept the present conditions with unfeigned resignation and assert that it is highly desirable that it should be so. We must not forget that above the great economic problems of the present, the German people in the empire today have often lost the ideal impetus for higher spiritual matters; we must not ignore the fact that even the German youth, once the proven guardian of German idealism, forgets the latter over social reformist thoughts, and we will realize that the German essence in its most beautiful development needs a refuge precisely with those Germans who live outside the German fatherland.
This opens up a beautiful perspective for these latter German tribes. We know of a people who have always adhered to this principle and who are therefore on a par with all German tribes - and much ahead of many in culture and education: the Saxons in Transylvania! May this journal contribute to the continued growth of this culture and education, may it succeed in speaking to a German people in a non-German country in the sense indicated.