How the “Present” Quickly Turns into “History” Today

In the previous essay, with reference to Herman Grimm's thoughts, I drew attention to the fact that today people are going through the transition from directly experienced “present” to “history” more intensely than in many other ages. This can be particularly noticeable when one looks at the description that Herman Grimm gives in his Goethe lectures of Goethe's entry into Rome. In observing the feelings that arise in Goethe's soul when he enters the “capital of the world” - in his own expression - a great world-historical perspective stands before Herman Grimm's mind. He traces the inner course of the human spirit back, from the present into the past. He finds that the man of the present can only reach back with full inner understanding to the time of Roman development. The Roman doers, the Roman thinkers and artists can still be understood in this way. For their expressions of life arise from a state of soul that, despite the development that has been undergone, has an inner affinity with the present one. But if one goes further back, there is a gulf before what has been handed down historically. The Greek personalities act out of impulses that are foreign to the present souls. When their story is told, one feels more in a fairytale mood than in the atmosphere of the rough reality that begins with Roman times and in which present-day people still breathe.

Alkibiades or Solon are in their historical element the pure fairytale figures in contrast to Caesar or Brutus, who are felt to be very down-to-earth.

Herman Grimm wrote a book about Homer's Iliad. He wanted to use the style and tone of the entire book to lead the reader into a realm that can be entered without hesitation, leaving the earthly ground and using the wings of fantasy. For in the life of the earth, according to Herman Grimm's opinion, today one no longer has the prerequisites for coming to this distant Greek land. One would become a greater fantasist if one wanted to reach Achilles or Agamemnon with ideas that are “really” called today than on the paths of the world-replicating imagination.

Herman Grimm wrote books about Michelangelo and Raphael. In them, he attempts to use the ideas that people in contemporary life have acquired to penetrate to the historical circles in which the Renaissance artists live. Grimm even takes an orientation that is gained from the present day as far back as Giotto and Dante. Yes, he goes back as far as Augustine; and it would have been natural for him to do so if he had spoken of the events of the Roman Republic. He stops at Greek history. There the spiritual ground on which Romanism has been led into the present must be abandoned; there one must enter into a fairy-tale mood.

With such sentiments, Herman Grimm looks to Goethe as he enters Rome. He believes that Goethe perceived Rome as the “capital of the world” because in this place he found most intensely expressed what the Roman era brought to humanity. This age, which was preceded by the age of Greek fairy tales and will be followed by the one that present humanity is just entering. Herman Grimm, in his own way, very strongly emphasizes how he feels himself at the dawn of this new age and how he judges Goethe's premonition of it. But here we come to the point where we feel quite clearly that we cannot carry Herman Grimm's thoughts into the present any more, any more than we could a short time ago. He believed he was touching on Goethe's feelings in Rome when he spoke of his own in the Goethe lectures as follows: “I myself believed I was still allowed to experience a very last glimmer of the sunset in which Goethe saw Rome.” “The Romans... are completely lacking in the fairytale-like. They have no trace of mythical descent and are understandable from the first moment as politicians, legal scholars, soldiers, officials, merchants. Their virtues and vices are openly displayed and without poetic gloss.” In contrast to this, Herman Grimm describes his feelings towards the Greeks as follows: “No matter how close Homer and Plato, even Aristotle and Thucydides, or Phidias and Pindar may appear to us, a small moon in the nail reminds us of something like ichor, the blood of the gods, of which a last drop flowed into the veins of the Greeks.”

But more powerfully than all this, which Herman Grimm says as if it were also a decisive statement about Goethe, his own words penetrate the soul today. Goethe looks at the artistic works that are accessible to him in Italy. Through them he seems to feel the essence of Greek art. And he expresses his belief that he has come upon the secret of this art by seeing how the Greeks, in creating their works of art, followed the same laws that nature itself follows, and which he wanted to follow. There is no urge in Goethe to move from the level of Roman earthly reality to a Greek fairy-tale world. Rather, there is the completely different urge to work one's way through the contemplation of Greek works of art to a higher, truer reality, to a spiritual reality of which even the fairy-tale-creating imagination is only a daughter.

Herman Grimm did not want to penetrate to this reality. Where he felt that he no longer had earthly reality under his feet, he wanted to float away into the realm of creative fantasy.

One feels: today one can no longer go along with this. One must enter into spiritual reality with soul forces that can be experienced as precisely as those that penetrate into the realm of natural existence. In doing so, one may quote Goethe's thoughts as if they were spoken in the present. Herman Grimm also spoke about Goethe in the way that the time was allowed to speak when it still believed that without a real spiritual vision it could bring humanity to recognize the mere ideas of the spirit. Herman Grimm was one of those who dreamt this dream most beautifully. He wanted to get by saying: “Everything Greek, right up to the most firmly established historical times, retains something fairytale-like for our gaze... Alkibiades is the pure prince of fairytales, compared to Caesar.” Today, we are no longer allowed to speak in this way. Reality on earth has become so harsh that anything spiritual, which we only see in fairy tales, is immediately consumed by it. Today we must recognize the essence of man in such depth that Alcibiades does not appear as a “fairytale prince”, but as real as Caesar, even if he comes from a different reality.

In a subsequent essay, I would like to elaborate on the idea that personalities like Herman Grimm remain alive for human observation precisely because they are viewed in the light of the “present” at the right moment and in that of “history”.