The Human Soul, Fate and Death

GA 70a — 15 February 1915, Stuttgart

3. Why are the People of Schiller and Fichte called “Barbarians”?

Dear attendees, for some time now, I have had the honor of speaking here in this city about topics in the humanities. Since our friends have also requested such reflections this year, I will try to offer such reflections here in these fateful times. But it will be understandable, dear attendees, that at least today's introductory reflection is directly related to what is happening in our fateful times, which touches our soul and our heart so deeply. In our time, we do not want to avert our attention from all the immense sacrifices that have to be made, the duties and the high demands that this time places on us. We do not want to say a word that cannot be spoken with this nuance of feeling and that can be spoken with certainty to those those who are fighting on the fields, where today it is not spoken by words, where it is spoken by actions, by suffering and blood, by the commitment of the whole person, one would not want to speak a word that is not spoken to those in spirit who have to stand up in these fields for the great events of the present!

For today's lecture, I have chosen a question, esteemed attendees, that may arise when one allows oneself to be influenced by the many things that confront the Central European people today from all sides, one might say not only from Europe but from the world: The question is raised: Why do they call the people of Schiller and Fichte a “barbarian people”?

But – and this is the point of my remarks – my concern is not so much to answer this question in front of you here in great detail, but rather to show how this question arises in our present day; or rather, how it is possible that this question arises. For it may be [made] clear from my remarks that it is not up to us here in the middle of Europe to answer this question, but it is very much up to us to feel this question so deeply, for coming times, like a warning to history, to feel it from the core of our Central European being.

It is said of the great battles fought by the ancestors of the Central European peoples and the peoples of antiquity that the peoples went into battle singing, which were meant for the great ancestors, [who] were therefore meant for the great ancestors because these peoples had the deep-seated conviction that the spirit of the ancestors was directly present in the atmosphere in which the peoples breathed. In such a way, wherever human feeling was originally incorporated into the world view, the question of inheritance, which is now so much discussed in material science, was always understood in the spiritual sense. If one speaks of heredity in materialistic science as if only the characteristics of living beings were inherited by their physical descendants through physical means, then one must, where the great moral and spiritual events take place in the course of human development, one must speak of the fact that not only are the qualities of the ancestors present in the following times, but that the spiritual and moral aspects are also alive and well among the descendants, and that what has been passed down from the ancestors to the culture of the descendants is something that the later generations have to do.

Of course, we cannot talk here about all the ancestors, including those of our own time, who come into consideration when we are dealing with German, Central European nature. We would like to highlight two spiritual ancestors of German development, Schiller and Fichte.

One of these personalities comes directly from the country in which we find ourselves here; the other connects original German intellectual life from more northern regions, also in personal and human friendship, with what the great Württemberger Schiller achieved; the other personality we want to choose today to let their impulses work on us a little more sensitively, is Johann Gottlieb Fichte. And, dear honored attendees, I have not chosen this starting point to stir up sentimental feelings, that is far from my mind, but because I believe that there is indeed something like a spiritual magic that emanates from the last moments of the earthly lives of these two spiritual heroes. For this reason, not for sentimental reasons, we can look back on the last moments of Schiller and Fichte's earthly lives through the intimate way of contemplating German spirit, and I would say with such familiarity, especially with these two personalities, who spent their soul in the physical human body.

The younger Voß tells us what Schiller's last days and last moments were like. There he stands before us, this death of Schiller, this death of which we are convinced when we look at the course of Schiller's life, that despite having occurred early, it occurred so late only because Schiller's strong soul, because his powerful spiritual impulses wrested this death from the decaying body over the years! And we can follow him from the descriptions we have - this Schiller - of how he is still present in the last days, even spiritually and emotionally, how his body already bears the marks of death. We follow him into this hour of death according to the descriptions of Voß and with deeply moved hearts we follow how Schiller's spirit, fighting with the darkening forces of the body, repeatedly looks through the once so fiery eyes; how he then let himself be - Schiller - his youngest young child, how he, from the depths of his soul, through his spirited eyes that have now died in death, turns his last glance to this little child, as if he had something important to say to him; how he then returns the child, turns away, turns his face to the wall. We, the honored attendees, get the feeling that we have to identify with this child to some extent. The person who described this scene says: “It was as if Schiller still wanted to say to this child, ‘I couldn't be enough of a father to you; I still had so much to do for you’.”

One would like to say: the whole German nation can feel this way, as Schiller's child, and can relate these words to itself. Schiller died as if he still had much, much to say to his people. And the feeling arises from this, from contemplating such a scene, as it is necessary for this German nation to immerse itself in the impulses that emerged from Schiller's spiritual power and that are to be taken up in every age in order to to the goals of human evolution in the way that the German people are predisposed to do: to bring forth more and more of the fruits that were contained in the blossoms that Schiller once gave them.

And when we look at the other personality, at Johann Gottlieb Fichte's last days, we might say that the contemplation of his last days penetrates us just as deeply, just as directly into our hearts and souls. He often considered – Fichte, the great philosopher of humanity and at the same time the great philosopher of his people – whether he should take a direct part in the great struggle for Germany's freedom that had to be fought in his last years, whether he should take a direct part in this great struggle as a fighter. He then believed that he could achieve more through his mental strength than through physical strength. But Fichte's wonderful and equally talented wife devoted herself to caring for the sick and brought the military hospital fever home to him. He had to care for his wife. She recovered, but the illness passed to Fichte. And so, in a sense, he became an indirect victim of the German struggle for freedom.

But now he stands before us, the man who, out of the strength of his will, gave birth to a world of the spirit, as he was in his last moments. His thoughts were focused only on what had been achieved by the German armies fighting in the west. And when he had to lie down and the feverish dreams mingled with the ideas that had been so energetically clear throughout his entire life, these feverish dreams were filled with images of the battles he heard about; he, the philosopher, felt himself in the midst of the fighters. The philosophical thoughts that he had felt sprouting in his soul immediately merged with these, one might say, so real, in relation to the real phenomena of the time, and the philosopher saw himself, even in his feverish thoughts, deeply connected with what was moving his time.

His son approached his deathbed and a medicine was brought to him. He felt so abandoned in his feverish dreams, so united with the great task of his time, that he said, “I do not need any medicine,” and pushed the medicine back with his hand, “because I feel that I will recover.” He recovered – albeit to his death – but his spirit lives among us. And, as it may seem, one gets a good insight into the nature and essence of the people they now call a “barbarian people” if one turns one's gaze a little to Johann Gottlieb Fichte. At the time when the German people had to fight for their recognition from the depths of their humiliation, it was Johann Gottlieb Fichte who, not only from a theoretical-philosophical basis, but also from the connection he felt between his own soul and the soul of the German people, sought to provide clarity for himself and this people about this German people's very essence.

And we are immediately pointed to one character trait, of this people in its deepest essence, when we consider how Fichte, at one of the most difficult times for the German spirit, held his significant “Speeches to the German Nation,” and how he made three questions the starting point of his reflections. And we are strangely touched by these three questions that Fichte raised in his “Speeches to the German Nation” at the time. The first is: “Whether it is true or not true that there is a German nation and that its continued existence in its peculiar and independent essence is now in danger?”

Today, esteemed attendees, we hardly want to raise this question again, given what the German essence has become, especially through the Schiller-Fichte period, but the final sentence still goes deep into our hearts; and we too can say of our present: “whether this nation in its peculiar and independent essence is currently in danger?” The second question is: “Whether it is worth the effort to maintain it or not?” The answer is given by what the German spirit achieved in the nineteenth century for the development of the world. The third question, which Fichte develops out of his view of the world in particular, was this: “Whether there is any sure and effective means of this preservation, and what this means is?” Fichte then linked these three questions to the considerations that form the content of his “Discourses to the German Nation”.

World history is moving fast in our present times, and we must also count the past century as such. It is impossible, after all that has emerged in intellectual life from the seeds sown by the Schiller-Fichte period, to still profess, to directly profess the answers that Fichte himself gave to these questions. But all the more one feels related when one lets oneself be imbued by the Central European, by the German essence, with the way Fichte at the time gave his answer in his “Discourses to the German Nation”, namely to these three questions.

Fichte tried, so to speak, to put together this answer of his from two parts, first from a consideration of the essence of the German people. Because, after all, he wanted to speak to the German people. Fichte tried – admittedly, we will not try this in the Fichte way today, but we have to answer such questions [with the powers that we have in turn received from this Fichte way] – he tried to answer these questions by examining the peculiarities of the German language. He believed he could see how this language differs in its folklore from the languages of those peoples who were then in conflict with the German peoples. And he believed that he could deduce the essence of this from the fact that the German people, from the very roots of their development, had connected themselves with the source of their language, that they had developed this language directly from these roots of the language in an uninterrupted sequence and had remained with this language, and that they had embodied in this language what they had to develop out of their soul.

While the Romance peoples, according to Fichte, suffered a break in their development, they had gone along with that feeling and sensing embodied in the German language up to a certain point of this development, but then adopted a foreign language and now in a foreign linguistic body, live the mental peculiarities, whereby a break in development has occurred and what Fichte seeks in the meaning of the German essence, the original freshness and immediacy with which the national essence expresses itself, has been lost.

What we can fully acknowledge today is not what Johann Gottlieb Fichte believes he has gained in knowledge by this path, because this scientific consideration has passed over it, although these insights are true in their root, in one direction. But that is not what Fichte arrived at. Rather, what we still find fruitful today is the way in which Fichte approaches the essence of his people.

For what did Fichte want? He wanted to recognize the nature of the German people by visualizing this nature as emerging from the innermost, most secret roots of the human soul without any break in development. He believed that such a people were secure in their future, indeed in their eternity, that they were in uninterrupted development and in connection with the roots of inner life, as he repeatedly expressed, with the deepest essence of soul life.

But that, dearest present, is basically also the keynote of all the spiritual-scientific reflections that I have been allowed to present here in this hall for years. In this respect, this spiritual-scientific reflection is connected in its innermost essence with the nature of Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

To what extent these roots of the human soul lead to spiritual knowledge – we will have to talk about this tomorrow, to what extent what is being sought here really points to Fichte in the true, right sense – only a few words will be said about this now.

From all the considerations that I have been allowed to present here, it has emerged that this spiritual science wants to be – in contrast to a merely external science that reflects on the senses and the mind bound to the brain – that this spiritual science wants to be a science that arises directly from the activity of the innermost human core, from the realization that this human core – which, in contrast to the mortal body, is the eternal and imperishable part in man, can be detached from the ordinary view of the outer senses and the intellect during the life of the body by means to be discussed tomorrow, so that it can be active free of the body and able to look into the spiritual world, so that one's own spiritual essence becomes an immediate reality.

In the deepest sense, spiritual science seeks to appeal to this human self-core, which stems from the source of spiritual life. In this respect, spiritual science is in complete contrast to science, which merely passively surrenders to external impressions and merely allows itself to be approached by what external observation and dissection of the intellect can yield in relation to this observation. Spiritual science stands in contrast to the mere passive reception of a science! Spiritual science wants to be - if the word may be used without arrogance - a valiant science that does not arise from passivity, but from activity, from appealing to the roots of life, from drawing on this innermost source of the roots of life.

And when these roots have been unearthed by appealing to spiritual vision, which confronts a spiritual world in such a way that it first produces the spiritual sense organs – to use a Goethean expression, the spiritual eyes and ears – out of itself, in order to direct them into the spiritual world and to perceive this spiritual world as real as physical eyes and ears can perceive the sensual world as real, as truly, then spiritual science may feel that it is a disciple of that which Johann Gottlieb Fichte sensed, that he willed.

And just when one considers, esteemed attendees, the way in which Fichte knew he was connected to the whole idiosyncrasy and nature of the German character, then one can know that the special dispositions for letting the spirit ascend to the spiritual heights really do exist in this German character. “What kind of philosopher one is” – Fichte once coined a phrase – “depends on what kind of person one is.” And he showed that he wanted to be a German human being. That is why he became the German philosopher that he was. So what kind of philosopher was Johann Gottlieb Fichte? The one who incessantly appealed from the mere world of the senses to the spiritual world and emphasized what was so beautifully expressed in his lectures at the University of Berlin in 1811 on the “Facts of Consciousness,” where he said: “What I have to say to you presupposes a special spiritual sense. Those who only want to accept what the external senses perceive will not understand me. For them, I speak as a single seer among a crowd of the blind-born.

Fichte's striving was directed towards the contemplation of the spirit, towards the experience of the spiritual weaving and essence in the world and in the human soul, and he felt that it welled up from the innermost stirrings of his people's lives. And so we see, not in the striving towards the spiritual, but in the deep disposition of this spiritual research and search with the innermost sources of the personality, to connect the innermost stirrings of human life; in this we see in Fichte the core, the expression of the Central European people, the German people.

Therefore, we find that Fichte emphasizes this concisely, which, as a worldview, must be based on the contemplation of the spirit. One needs only to say a few words, [dear attendees], about what Fichte used to express something of the innermost part of his research and striving, which he knew to be identical with the striving of the German national spirit; and one gets a characteristic of what is actually meant by it.

Thus Fichte's wonderful words, spoken by himself in the “Speeches to the German Nation”, are just as much a characteristic of the deepest human striving as they are of the deepest spiritual inclinations of his people, and he characterizes both when he says:

Time and eternity and infinity beholds them

– he means the philosophy that he sought [from the innermost roots of the vital impulses of his people] –

in its origin from the appearance and becoming visible of that One, which is in itself absolutely invisible and only in this invisibility of His is grasped, truly grasped. All persistent existence that appears as non-spiritual life is only an empty shadow, cast out of seeing and mediated many times over by nothingness. In contrast to this, and through the recognition of this as a manyfold mediated nothingness, seeing itself is to rise to the recognition of its own nothingness and to the acknowledgment of the invisible as the only true.

But, dear honored attendees, Fichte did not express what he felt was the innermost essence of his quest only in such abstract words. Our spiritual scientific observations have often led us to show how spiritual science can establish in man a conviction based on good foundations, that the eternal core of being can be experienced in man, that consciously passes through the gate of death in order to enter into a new existence in the spiritual world after a time of purely spiritual experience. And spiritual science, which is an active science, which wants to be a brave science without arrogance, wants to be a science based on the active powers of the soul, does not speak in an indefinite way about life after death, it seeks to grasp the peculiarity of the human being in order to show how it progresses into the spiritual world. There it also knows how to speak of it, not merely in an abstract way, but in a concrete way, as the soul knows itself as living, as living can know through those cognitions that we will talk about tomorrow, which the soul can gain when it is outside the body, when it looks outside the body at this body, as if it were an external object, as if it were something external.

Just as the other science speaks of the things of the sensual world, of the things that are seen through the senses, so spiritual science speaks of that seeing that looks back from the spiritual world at the physical world and is able to bring it into a relationship.

Where Fichte attempts to approach the second part of the third question he raised, which is this means for the development of his people, he makes a peculiar remark. Fichte seeks this means in a radical national education that changes the view that lies before him. We cannot speak today - [since time truly does not permit it] - about the details of Fichte's ideas; but in a radical change of all educational principles, Fichte seeks to see that which, in his conviction, is most conducive to the development of his people. An education that does not merely go to externals, but goes to the deepest “roots of the stirrings of life”. And here Fichte feels, when he speaks of it, that this educational ideal differs greatly from what people, according to previous views, had to consider possible in education. He now puts himself in such a position as if he were looking from his horizon, into which his ideal really shines, and wants to look down on what he considers to be outdated [old educational principles]. And he now describes how that which has become obsolete appears to him. He describes it again in the characteristic words of his 'Addresses to the German Nation', words which are easily overlooked but which must strike a deep chord in anyone who has absorbed the more recent spiritual science. Fichte says:

Time appears to me

• the time, namely, in which the old educational principles have prevailed -,

seems to me like a shadow that stands over its corpses, from which an army of diseases has just driven it out, and laments and cannot tear its gaze away from the formerly so beloved shell and desperately tries all means to get back into the dwelling of the plague. The invigorating breezes of the other world, into which the departed has entered, have already taken her in and are surrounding her with a warm breath of love; the secret voices of her sisters are already joyfully greeting her and welcoming her; she is already stirring and expanding within all directions, to develop the more magnificent form into which she is to grow; but she has no feeling for these airs or hearing for these voices, or, if she had, she is absorbed in pain over her loss, with which she believes she has lost herself at the same time.

Now, dear readers, if we take the insights of spiritual science as they can be developed in our time, and if we try to symbolize, from the way spiritual science shows it, this way in which man looks back at his body after death, how he feels about this body, if one wants to create a symbol for something that one wants to evolve from, then one cannot develop a better symbol than that which Fichte has developed. Must we not say:

In the best that we seek, lives that which was absorbed in Fichte, which lived in its great ancestor. For was he not truly with the best that we seek, that must be sought in the transition of human development to a spiritual life? And does it not mean something that Fichte brings this search into intimate connection with the German essence? Precisely what the German essence is becomes so vivid when one - not in abstract theory, but in human, living feeling - takes in what Fichte gives in his “Addresses to the German Nation” and allows oneself to be somewhat influenced by it.

It is very remarkable that in Fichte we have one of the philosophical representatives of the German nation in a period of this nation's development, [at a time] when it was indeed facing a tough test, when it had already gone through centuries of development, questioning the innermost essence of this nation, posing the great inner question of destiny: “What is a German, actually?”

With that, dear attendees, we have something that is truly characteristic of the German character. One is English, French, Italian through that which is imprinted in one through national peculiarity. One is English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian at some point in time. But, as can be seen from Fichte's words, one is never German, one becomes German continuously; because Germanness stands before Germanness as a lofty ideal. And the German looks up humbly at this ideal and asks himself: How do I become German?

And so, in this becoming German, the impulses of becoming human basically come together. Part of developing what characterizes the German character is – one would almost like to say, if the word were not absurd – the elevation of the national feeling of the German to general humanity in the sense of the word coined by Schiller for something else: “To which nation do you profess yourself?” And the answer could be: “To none of the existing ones.” And why none of the existing ones? “Because of German nationality!” For that is the characteristic difference of German nationality, and that emerges precisely from Fichte's so annoying words: it is the essence of Germanness to strive for the essence of the universally human, to search relentlessly: How do you become human? How to become a human being in the most universal sense of the word? There is an apparent contradiction in this; but the contradiction is in everything that is alive; the contradiction is the characteristic of the living. And this – what could be called a characteristic of Germanness, which lies in an eternal striving for [universal] humanity – this becomes clear to us again so beautifully in Fichte's words.

Fichte wants to provide an answer to the question of who can actually be considered a German. And he says in the “Addresses to the German Nation”, which can be described as one of the most German of German intellectual products:

[...] whoever believes in spirituality and freedom of this spirituality, and wants the eternal further development of this spirituality through freedom, that, wherever it is born and in whatever language it speaks, is of our race, belongs to us and will join us.

In this, we also have something of the universal striving that is expressed when one considers German striving in its truly inner sense, or - to use this word of Fichte's again - at the “roots of the stirrings of life”.

And basically, dear attendees, all the strength that can arise from such a view of life lies in every word that Fichte spoke, but especially in those words that he spoke to express the consciousness that arose from this view of the world, which was precisely suited to his nature. One is tempted to say: Just as the soul forces express themselves as spirit and at the same time as will, and express themselves as eternal inner becoming, so it sounds to us when Fichte - not from a theoretical consideration, but from the context of all human soul forces - expresses himself about the immortality of man, how he now turns his gaze to the countless stars that are in the cosmos, [and suns] and the planets that move when he turns his gaze to high mountains, to the rocks, the clouds that surround them, to the forests and rivers, when he turns his gaze to the three realms of nature, and then turns back to the human soul, and that which expresses itself to his consciousness, expressed something like this in a speech he gave to his Jena students:

And you stars [and you clouds and you rocks], you mountains all, when you all collapse once, when lightning flashes through you, when the elemental forces crush you, so that not a speck of dust of you remains, you tell me nothing about the nature of my own soul. This defies your power, this is eternal, as you are not eternal.

Spiritual science today must speak differently about these things because it draws the appropriate conviction from sources of knowledge. But in Fichte's starting points, a disposition for spiritual science arises from a knowledge that is at the same time a will, from a will that is at the same time knowledge, a willing knowledge that the eternal human soul, which passes through birth and death, is grasped in the immediate becoming and in the coexistence with this eternal life of the human soul knows the personality as connected with eternity.

And the tone that arises from such consciousness pervades as a fundamental tone the discourses that Fichte gave in order to make his people aware in fateful times of what they have to defend, what they hold as their richest treasure in the depths of their souls, and what they have and must defend against all the world. It is the striving for universal humanity – arising out of the essence of his people.

And, as if to confirm what Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the philosopher, expresses, stands Schiller, the great, urgent poet, who, from the mystically deep essence of the South German, especially the Swabian spirit, and who had also been uplifted by Goethe's ideas to that striving which, arising from the striving of a single nation, seeks to give birth to the most universal of all human strivings.

Today, Schiller is not sufficiently appreciated for the way he raised his people to a [level of education] when he created a work that is particularly great because of the level of education, the nobility of education and the intellectual atmosphere from which the work arose. I am referring to the work that is most easily overlooked, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. One could also say that Schiller tried to answer the question for his people through this work: How does man achieve freedom? And in the highest style, he approaches the riddle of human freedom. I would like to say: There is no intellectual height, there is no human-filled, feeling-filled depth from which Schiller does not want to draw the means to answer the question: What is human freedom?

Schiller says to himself that human freedom can be compromised in two ways in the highest style. First, there is that to which man must submit in logical necessity if he is to follow his reason, which chains conclusion to conclusion.

Man may feel outwardly free in such logical activity, inwardly he is not free, for he is a slave to logical necessity; and in submitting to it, he is not free, man. Nor is he free when he has to submit to the senses driving feeling, the natural necessities of nature's necessity.

Man can become unfree in these two ways.

But how does he become free? Oh, he becomes free in the manner of Schiller when he succeeds in detaching from his inner depths that which rests hidden as the core of his being, that which is not directly perceived between birth and death, that which can only be perceived when it is detached from its hidden existence and when the being ascends on the one hand into the spiritual region, in order to develop such inner impulses there, whereby the soul becomes master in the world, where it would otherwise be a slave, when it can ascend into the realm of spirituality and freely interact within it, as a child freely interacts in its play.

Then the soul feels free in spirit and when it can descend again into the body, but does not lose the spirit, but descends with the spirit into what is necessary for the senses, and handles the senses in such a way that what the eye sees, what the ear hears, that the hand seizes, that in the sensual the spirituality is seen through, everything spiritual is sensually experienced, everything sensual is spiritualized, that the higher self in the self, for which Schiller strove by writing these letters, is experienced.

One may ask, does it not signify a high flowering of human development when, out of the forces of a people, not a philosophical-theoretical answer to the highest human questions is given, but an answer from the full range of human feeling, as Schiller gave it? It was then that Schiller also raised the significant question: What are the aberrations of humanity and humanity?

On the one hand, there is the “barbarian”; the “barbarian” in whom the case arises that he is overwhelmed by his instincts and human impulses due to his principles. Man cannot become such a “barbarian,” because he must come to love his principles so that he is not enslaved, but carries his drives up into the spiritual world of his principles, so that he wants to do what he must do because he loves it. And a savage is the person – [that is the other aberration] – when he lets his instincts overwhelm his principles.

Thus there came a point in deepest German sensibility when the question was raised: How does man find true humanity between the realms of the wild and the “barbarian”? So that which is in the highest sense spiritual-idealistic conscience in the German people has sought the true human.

Can they call the members of a people who have sought the true human being between the cliffs of “barbarism” and savagery, can they call this people “barbarians”?! This question could arise from many things like a refrain and keep coming back to us: Why do they call this people [Schiller's and Fichte's] a “barbarian people”? Does it depend on what means this war must seek today? [Everyone could have known that before it began!] It is childish to talk about what means the war must seek; it is worthy of a true observer of human development to ask: what must be defended?

And we have sought a little what needs to be defended by presenting to our minds, if only in a few strokes, the legacy of Schiller and Fichte. And truly, these great men of ours felt this way about the connection of the German essence with what they themselves wanted in the sense of the most general human striving. And what became known long after Schiller's death as words that can be considered a legacy shows how Schiller, with what has been somewhat characterized here, places himself in the essence of his people. In this time, let us bring to mind the words that he spoke in view of what the Germans have to do to stand up to a world of opponents.

He who forms the mind must ultimately prevail,
because
finally, at the goal of time, if the
world has a plan, if human
life has any meaning at all, finally
must prevail custom and reason,
the brute force of form succumb
and the slowest people will catch up with all
the fast fugitives. Ihm

—dem Deutschen —

ist das Höchste bestimmt,
und so wie er in der Mitte von
Europens Völkern sich befindet,
so he is the core of humanity,
the flower and the leaf are the people. He is chosen by the world spirit, during
the struggle of time
to work on the eternal construction of human education
to preserve what time brings,
therefore he has appropriated what was previously foreign
and preserved it within himself.
Everything that was valuable in other times
and peoples, that arose, developed and faded with time,
he has preserved;
the treasures of
centuries are not lost to him.
Not to shine in the moment and
to play its role, but to win the great
process of time. Every nation
has its day in history, but
the day of the German is the harvest of all time.

Schiller spoke such words of legacy for his people, no doubt from a deeply moved heart, from a heart that felt the pulse of his nation.

We, the soul behind what is, as the war was, so cruelly necessary, cruelly necessary for that which truly did not arise from the German spirit, but rather arose to a great extent from that which is not of the German spirit.

The childish saying that the German has a particular penchant for militarism does not need to be discussed in particular in our country; but perhaps - when we are repeatedly confronted with the refrain: “Why do they call the people of Schiller and Fichte a ‘barbarian people’?” - perhaps this question may be transformed to some extent into the other. Could anyone believe that when a world at war is advancing against Germany with a strength of two and a half to one, as if against a fortress, that the Germans would fight by reciting Schiller's poems or Fichte's philosophy to the cannons? Only those who expected this can speak of what is now being spoken of so often in the world.

But is everything that is said true? I will merely hint at the way in which a great mind, an outstanding mind of modern times, has thought about the German character, about the character that we are trying to conjure up in our minds through some of the traits of the Fichtean and Schillerian way of thinking. This way of thinking is connected with everything that the universal spirit, as manifested in Goethe, has brought before our eyes, and which is, after all, the center of German development for the time being. Now, what Fichte and Schiller have become is at the same time the Goethean essence. I would say that what the American Emerson speaks of is not only the essence of Goethe, but also of Schiller and Fichte.

And I cite a non-German critic of the German character, which developed in the nineteenth century from the seeds germinated by Schiller, Fichte, and Goethe; I quote the words of a thinker who was at the height of American intellectual life [and who spoke these words not in German but in English] – Emerson – to raise the question: how did the “barbarian people” and their culture affect the people of the nineteenth century who understood something of German culture?

Emerson, the great American, says:

One quality in particular, which Goethe shares with his entire nation, makes him stand out in the eyes of both the French and English public: that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth.

Thus the American sees the German essence represented by Goethe, concentrated in Goethe, that the German essence is that everything is based on truth!

Emerson continues in English:

In England and America, people respect talent, but they are only satisfied when it works for or against a party of their conviction. In France, people are delighted to see brilliant ideas, wherever they may lead. In all these countries, however, talented men write within the limits of their talents. If what they write stimulates the discerning reader and contains nothing that offends against good manners, it is considered sufficient. So many columns, so many pleasantly and usefully spent hours.

Not a single German says this, as I said!

The German mind has neither the French vivacity nor the Englishman's practical understanding, nor, finally, the American adventurousness. What it does have, however, is a certain probity that never stops at the outward appearance of things, but always comes back to the main question: “Where is this going?” The German public demands that a writer stand above things and simply express himself on them. There is intellectual activity, so what is it advocating? What is the man's opinion? Where does it come from? Where does he get all these thoughts?

I am quoting an English speaker!

The English [...] only see the individual, they do not know how to grasp humanity as a whole according to higher laws. The Germans think for Europe.

Written in English!

The English do not appreciate the depth of the German genius. For this reason, the terms used in higher conversation are all of German origin. While the English and French, who are mentioned with distinction because of their acumen and erudition, approach their studies and points of view with a certain superficiality.

• written in English! —

and their personal character is not too deeply connected with what they are and with the way in which they express themselves, Goethe speaks

— whom Emerson regards as the representative of the German nation —

the head and content of the German nation, not because he has talent, but because truth concentrates its rays in his soul and shines out from it. He is wise in the highest degree, though his wisdom may often be obscured by his talent. No matter how excellent what he says is, he has something else in mind that is even better. [...] He has that fearsome independence that arises from dealing with the truth.

So, dear attendees, in the course of the nineteenth century, one of the most enlightened minds of the nineteenth century could think and speak about German nature. Why do they call the people, about whom such talk must be had, a “barbarian people”? It sounds to us again and again as a refrain [against]. We do not need to answer the question, in view of the fact that we only need to raise it.

Another thing, ladies and gentlemen, very briefly, one would like to say: months before the war, lectures were held in one of the southern cities of Great Britain about the German spirit, lectures about the German spirit and intellectual life, in order to make this German intellectual life - the lectures have also been translated and are available in book form in German – to make this German intellectual life, as it is said in the preface of the book, a little more accessible to people who, as the English author says, know all too little about this intellectual life. He explicitly states which people he means – he speaks of English journalists. I don't know how much they have learned from these lectures, the journalists, after the trials we are now experiencing in their judgment of the German character.

But perhaps the words of a directly English, not an American, man, spoken not long before the war [in university lectures intended to educate English journalism] and intended to educate journalism about German nature, perhaps these words may also be given a little consideration. What is communicated here is not said in America by Emerson, but in England, in English, about German nature, German intellectual life:

The highly favored elite among Descartes' and Newton's countrymen knew the spirit of science unquestioningly; but the passionate urge for knowledge was taught to modern Europe, if at all, primarily by thousands of German researchers.

One almost feels embarrassed, but it was first spoken in English.

Imagination, feeling, will asserted their right to be heard beside or beyond reason, and under their transformative pressure the universe became deeper, wider, and more wonderful. The irrational was recognized as a source of enlightenment; wisdom was drawn from the child and the flower; science, philosophy and poetry came close together. In England, this revival of the imagination gave birth to noble poetry, but left science and philosophy almost untouched. One of the keys to understanding the period is the fact that, while in England and France the poetic, philosophical, and scientific movements flowed mostly in separate channels, in Germany they touched or merged completely. Wordsworth sang and Bentham calculated; but Hegel caught the genius of poetry in the net of his logic; and the thought that discovers and explains, and the imagination that creates, worked together in fruitful harmony in the genius of Goethe. In Faust, at the end of his eventful life, we see a reflection of present-day Germany, the Germany of restless, bold will and action, and we can understand all the better why the great citizen of the world, in whose eyes state and nationality were subordinate and sometimes harmful ideals, nevertheless claims his unassailable place as the highest poet of the German Empire alongside Bismarck, his creator.

And in these lectures, in which, one would like to say, the spirit is so thoroughly discussed, including Hegel, who summarizes German essence in the most crystal-clear thought-images – Hegel, whose memorial tablet we see on the house across the street – there we also find the words.

[Dear attendees], yes, I am only saying this because I have not completely forgotten Goethe's dictum: People say that self-praise stinks; but they don't like to talk about what someone else's censure smells like. It is difficult to rise above such words, but, aren't they, if the words have been said in English, perhaps an excuse if they are repeated in Germany. Months before the war, they were spoken at the same university in Manchester: “No German words are more deeply imbued with the juice of national ethics than those that describe these things: true, thorough, loyal.” “True, thorough, loyal.” One could almost be proud of this characteristic from across the Channel, [dear lady present]. But in the short time available to us for today's reflection, let us add something that relates to these words.

I speak to you as someone who spent his youth in Austria, among a group of people who, coming from very different circumstances, longed for the moment when, in a great deed or in some larger context Austrian culture could merge with German culture – in other words, a group of people who sensed something of what is now so moving our Central European souls, [sensed something of the pulse of the times]. And I remember a word that used to resonate a lot in the ears of those who only felt something of the pulse of the times: I remember a word, the word “Herbstzeitlose”. And where did the word “Herbstzeitlose” come from? I will hint at it very briefly.

In the 1970s, there was a liberal party in Austria [after the Parliamentary Congress], a party made up of talented individuals, led by [Eduard] Herbst. He represented a certain abstract liberalism, a liberalism tailored to the pattern of English parliamentarians. At the Congress of Berlin, under the predominant influence of the English statesmen of the time, Austria was given the mission of working down to the southeast, which then found expression in the occupation and later annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and all that Austria understood to be its mission.

At that time, Austria incurred the wrath of the Russian Pan-Slavists, precisely because of British influence; for Britain sent Austria against the aspirations of Russian influence on the Balkan Peninsula. Those in Austria who were Herbstians at the time opposed this mission. But Bismarck knew how this was connected with the whole of modern development, how, under the influence of England, the Russian resentment was rekindled. At that time, a certain impulse of Austrian politics arose towards the southeast, and Bismarck knew that this had to happen. He found that those who did not understand this in Austria, under the influence of [Eduard] Herbst, were the “Herbstzeitlosen” (literally: “autumn crocuses”). And just as a witty man who understands his time can be devastating, so the Herbst party destroyed the dictum of the “Herbstzeitlosen”. Words formed by personal power that act like personal forces in the world.

So what were the Central European people like? They accepted the fact that they were 'barbarians' in those days, that they were understood in England as part of a southeastern mission. They held on to it until 1914. They did everything they could. They were thorough and loyal to what the English statesmen had instructed the Central European peoples to do at the time: they were true, thorough and loyal, these Central European peoples!

We need only state this, and then the fact, [dear ladies and gentlemen], that England is now on the side of the power whose resentment against both Germany and Austria led it to set them against each other. [And I have to ask]: Is leaving the ground on which it once stood also true, thorough and faithful? If today's events follow from what was thus determined, why do they call the people who carried out what once seemed right to them a “barbarian people”? The question sounds to us again and again as a refrain from current events!

Now, esteemed attendees, I do not want to make an assertion, but rather pose a question: Could it not be related to the very essence of the German world view that what sometimes seems so terribly significant to others is illuminated differently in the light of the world view of Schiller, Fichte and Goethe?

One point should be made – I know that this can be addressed as a rather questionable point – but that is not the issue, but rather to remain “true, thorough and faithful”, to remain true, thorough and faithful to the world view of Goethe, Fichte and Schiller.

Although the destruction of the cathedral of Reims is not as bad as one might see – I myself saw this cathedral in 1906 in a rather fragile state, I am one of those who will not let anyone in their admiration of the cathedral – nevertheless, in view of what is available as an expensive legacy to the people of Schiller, Goethe and Fichte in the form of a worldview, the following may be said:

It is deeply true for this people in a certain respect that beauty pulses through the entire structure of the world, that beauty lies in the construction of the entire structure of the world. And one feels deeply a word that Goethe spoke and Novalis, [the great poet], spoke again in a similar way, a word that, in the Goethean style, goes something like this:

What would all the eons of stars be, all the suns, all this beauty, if they did not ultimately shine into a human eye, and out of a human eye looked spiritualized and ensouled!

And in Novalis: “From such a worldview comes the thought of how all that takes place in the cosmos is integrated and combined and organized and together makes the soul and spirit in what ultimately is the human being. That is why Novalis calls this human structure, that which we encounter in the human being in its structure, a holy temple. And the contact with this holy temple itself, he describes as something that must arouse the most sacred feelings in the human soul. The temple of the highest is the human body.

The human body is the highest physical expression of the spirit for such a world view as that of Fichte, Goethe and Schiller.

And our fateful time, like every difficult time of war, makes it necessary to ruthlessly destroy thousands upon thousands of works of art that must be the highest works of art for the worldview of Goethe, Schiller and Fichte: human bodies! The German Weltanschauung has a sense not only for human works of art, but for the highest, at least earthly-highest divine work of art, for man himself. And the German Weltanschauung asks: May one not, in the face of the highest reverence, may one not cry out when human works of art have to be damaged in a time when thousands of them are being mowed down?

I know that this is a thought that is not understood everywhere. [But I also know] that once all the fruits of Goethe's, Schiller's, Fichte's conception of the world have ripened, this thought will stand as a thought, not of a “barbarian culture,” but as a thought of a spiritual high culture.

There is much hatred and rejection of the German character in our day! And when the question is raised, “Why do they call the people of Schiller and Fichte a ‘barbarian people’?” when you look at this German character, you will not find the answer in this German character. Then this question changes into another question: Is it perhaps the case that what is hurled at the people – who are besieged like people in a fortress, what is hurled at the people, who are to be starved out – is The insult of “barbarism” is hurled at this people, therefore, in order to cover up what one is ashamed to say about the true causes of the situation in which one stands in relation to the besieged people whom one wants to starve?

Of course, esteemed attendees, there is also much within this humanity, besieged on all sides, that can be called hatred, that can be called antipathy; but let it be said frankly and freely: I do not believe that the roots of German life are connected with this antipathy, this national hatred, in the long run. I do not believe it in a nation that was capable of loving the English genius of Shakespeare more than the English people themselves, I do not believe it in a nation that was capable, in its prime, and as a poet must be recognized, I do not believe that a people could turn to one of the English poets of more recent times, to Byron, and, in the second part of Faust, produce a character who was inspired by Goethe as a result of his study of Byron. Byron appears to him – [Goethe took up this idea] – as Euphorion, the child who was the child of Faust and Helena, who emerged from the marriage of the highest cultural blossoms for Goethe.

But [is it not something that resounds there and offers us purely contemporary] as a characteristic of this Euphorion, does it not correspond intimately to us, do we not feel from what Byron-Euphorion is for Goethe, what the right word is at the time? [Goethe has Euphorion say]:

No, I have not appeared as a child
The youth arrives in armor;
He has joined the strong, the free, the bold
In spirit, already. And do you hear the thunder on the sea?
There, valley after valley thunders back,
Army after army in dust and waves,
In urge upon urge, to pain and agony.
And death
Is the command [...]
That is simply understood.
Should I look on from afar?
No! I share the sorrow and the need.

When the German Goethe wanted to express something that was so close to his heart, his love led him to take the foreign model!

No, one cannot believe, need not believe that there is anything else that is German than the search for the noblest human spirit and that it is only this search of the German soul [for the noblest human spirit] that is often spoken of in today's style, that one does not understand; and because one does not understand it, one hates it.

Schiller, too, was never deceived about it. He, who not only said but also did what he expressed in the words I quoted, who knew how to transform all human nature, wherever he encountered it, into German nature – artistically and spiritually – he, Schiller, never deceived himself. His words are beautiful, showing us how he had no illusions when he looked to France and England:

Two mighty nations wrestle
For sole possession of the world;
To swallow up all countries' freedom,
They brandish the trident and the lightning. Gold must every landscape weigh for them
And, like Brennus in the rough times,
The Frank lays his brazen sword
In the scales of justice. The British extend their merchant fleets
Greedily like polyp arms;
And the realm of the free Amphitrite
He wants to close, like his own house.

No, Schiller did not fool himself, but in the German striving he saw general human striving:

The world loves to blacken what is radiant
And drag the sublime into the dust.

He says this in particular about the [heroic] spirit in the Maid of Orleans, who expresses it in such an epoch-making way in the human being. And how did she stand up, this French national heroine, [the Maid of Orleans], who had to defend France against England's claims? How did she, who was spat upon and reviled by Voltaire and is still not treated nicely by Anatole France [in the present day], how did she stand before Schiller's spirit, and how did he embody her in German poetry, which has become so dear to us?

Being German does not mean rebelling against anything national in the world; but this German identity carries with it the duty to embody with all means what the German soul is in the German body.

It has already been pointed out [dear attendees] that after all, one really does not need to be German to express words that suggest how the German essence is integrated into the essence of the world.

Yes, I know a man who once tried to visualize the highest that earthly culture can produce, using three brilliant thinkers. The third of these brilliant thinkers, on whom this man climbs, was Novalis, the profound German poet. The man I mean contemplated Novalis and he said the following to himself – he expressed beautiful thoughts – he said to himself – one does not need to go along with what he said – he said: Yes, what Sophocles has his characters act out, is ultimately all human action. And if a spirit were to descend from another planet [and come to Earth], it might be that it would not be at all interested in these people, [in what the characters of Sophocles do or] what Ophelia, Desdemona, or Hamlet himself accomplishes; [because] these are earthly matters that do not interest a genius from another planet. But there is something – [so this man opined] – on Earth among people that would most certainly interest the geniuses of other planets, [if they could descend]. The human soul has also soared up to that, the man opined. And he cites Novalis, the quintessentially German poet, as an example of such a soul that has produced something that would interest geniuses. He has spoken beautiful words in reference to Novalis and to what Novalis can be for humanity. Listen to the beautiful words he said about the quintessentially German poet Novalis:

But if he needed other proof, it would lead him among those whose works almost stir to silence. It would open the gate of the realm where some loved it for its own sake, without worrying about the small gestures of their bodies. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness rises [by one step] and where all those who are restless about themselves [feel] attentively survey the immense ring that connects the world of appearances with our higher worlds. She would go with him to the borders of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably only begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are only in the invisible, where he must be on his guard unceasingly. On these heights alone there are thoughts that the soul can approve of, and ideas that resemble her and are as commanding as she is. There, for a moment, humanity has ruled, and these dimly illuminated peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth in the spiritual realm.

So says the man. What Novalis says belongs to the lights by which the earth announces itself to the spiritual realm.

Their reflection truly has the color of our soul. We feel that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of a [strange] reason; [but the people I am talking about have come out of the little village of passions in their works and said things that are also of value to those who do not belong [to] the earthly community.

So, a German once lived after this man, who produced writings that are not only valuable for souls on earth, but for souls that are not of this earth. In Novalis, the German, such a soul lived for the man. Who is the man who spoke such words about Novalis? Yes, I have to say it: Maurice Maeterlinck!

You, esteemed attendees, know what he – [Maeterlinck] – has since said about the German “barbarians”: the question resounds again like a refrain: if things are as you say they are, then why do you call the people of Schiller and Fichte a “barbarian people”? For if we look at what is sacred to us, if we pay attention to what Schiller and Fichte are not only for us, but what they impose on us as an obligation, to all that we must defend in their souls and out of their souls, as German essence, then we arrive at a conviction, [which is only a paraphrase of what I have said]: one becomes German ceaselessly, and Germanness stands before our soul like an ideal. Indeed, we then feel something of the fact that it is ultimately the [innermost] “roots of life's impulses” that lead to those highest fruits of the spirit, which are expressed in Schiller's valiant poetry, in Fichte's valiant wisdom, which now stand at the walls of Germany, which are now defended by cannons and swords [and other things] around German territory; so we confidently feel the necessity of the life of the German spirit, feel with the times and in time and feel above all with the troops in the west and east, who defend the German spirit with their fresh youth, and we feel justified in this defense of the German spirit, of which we feel that it was not only something, but that it contains the potential for what it is yet to become: an ever higher and higher quest for the spiritual and ever more spiritual. And if they want to cut off the German spirit's lifeline today and take away its light, if they want to oppress it to the point of affecting its physical substance, the German knows that the German spirit has not yet reached completion, that what it has achieved is only the beginning.

And when we hear the word “barbarians” used to describe “German culture that has grown old” [das alt gewordene Deutsche Kultur], which only had to embody itself for a time in that in which the whole world now embodies itself, but which has the highest spiritual goods to defend, then we once again ask ourselves the question: why do they call the people of Schiller and Fichte a “barbarian people”? And then we answer, not by trying to give a direct answer to this question, history will give that answer, and we can await that answer from history in peace. But some of what can be said with regard to German striving with regard to spiritual science will be said tomorrow; [also in connection with our Zeitgeist].

But to the question that was raised, we answer with the feeling that tells us: This German spirit has not yet been fully realized. It still has work to do, and it must retain the light and air of life. So we do not answer theoretically, not abstractly, so we answer, I think, dear ladies and gentlemen, from the depths of our hearts to all that lives in this fateful, fateful time – we answer with the words:

The German spirit has not yet achieved its purpose.
It lives in hope for the future,
It hopes for future deeds full of life;
In the depths of its being, it feels a mighty
Secret that must still mature to be effective.
How can the desire for its end arise in the power of the enemy
The wish for his end may arise without understanding:
As long as life reveals itself to him,
Which holds him in the roots of being?