84. The “Post” as an Advocate of Germanism

A gentleman who conceals his name has written a reply in the "Post" of September 23 to my article about Mr. Bartels, the literary historian, published with his full name. The gentleman also omits my name. His omissions are characteristic of the way members of a certain press view their journalistic duties. Either this gentleman is so uneducated that he cannot understand a simple train of thought, or he understands his journalistic duty to mean that he does not need to read an article he opposes properly. Because his reply is nothing more than a series of distortions of what I said. I claimed that Mr. Bartels was merely judging from his personal point of view and decreeing this point of view to be a "Germanic" one. There is something untrue in that. And that would be dangerous for Mr. Bartels because it would lead him to narrow-mindedness and injustice. The "Post" claims that I attacked Mr. Bartels because of his Germanic point of view. It is clear to any reasonable person that I was just trying to prove that Mr. Bartels is wrong to call his point of view a "Germanic" one. It would be useless to fight with people who are not fighting against what you have said, but against the distortions they have created. The critic of the "Post" is not intelligent enough to tell him that - according to my explanations - I would have exactly the same thing to say if another literary historian were to judge from his personal point of view and then claim that he had judged from a "Jewish" point of view.

How the author of the "Post" article reads is clear from another passage. He says that I accused Mr. Bartels of wanting to find something un-Germanic in Schiller's poetry. In the relevant passage of my essay, I am not talking about Schiller's poetry, but about his drama.