14. The Development of the German Soul

And let us contrast all this, but really not to make value judgments, but only to emphasize peculiarities, with the basic character of the German soul, the German national soul. What I have to say about the German national soul can be wonderfully corroborated, not only from the German's own views on what lives and abides in his soul, in the soul lives and from the but also from the expressions of the other nations, especially from the impressions of unbiased observation in the other nations. The soul of the German people is truly a most peculiar thing. It is, I might say, somewhat uncomfortable to have to say this as a German, but it is truly a most peculiar thing. It should not be judged, but approached objectively. If one examines its basic character, one finds that it now permeates and interweaves the human being, giving him a certain emotional content, so that the forces in this folk soul are related to everything that is in the soul of the human being from the beginning of the twenties to the beginning of the forties, up to the forty-second, forty-third, forty-fifth year. That is the remarkable thing about the German national soul. If this should make the other nations uncomfortable, then they need only take comfort in the fact that what is poured out over three stages of life in the human being, so to speak, has a weaker effect, is diluted, as it were, while what concerns the other national organisms has a stronger effect, penetrates the human being more strongly. I would like to say how, in relation to the other thing I have said, these things can be made wonderfully clear to us in a few examples, so the facts about the German national soul that have just been hinted at can be made clear to us through certain phenomena. Those who, as I said, do not look directly at the folk soul itself in language, but at an effect of the folk soul, will not be surprised that a wonderful genius is at work in language. It is precisely the genius that is the folk soul that works. And how often is language cleverer than we are! How often do we only find out afterwards what has been ingeniously expressed in language. Of course, one can only characterize such things if one is aware that the things one says can actually only be said in one language in this way, and would have to be said differently in another language. But what I am saying now can be said in German. For example, the fact that it is expressed in two terms is wonderfully ingeniously designed: we do not say “father tongue” and “mother country” in ordinary language. We say “mother tongue” and “fatherland”. And for the humanities scholar, this expresses in the fullest possible way the whole way in which the native landscape is passed on to man through the paternal inheritance and in turn affects his unconscious; and how that which lives in language flows over to man from the maternal side through the forces of inheritance. But much, much more could be cited. Regarding what I have just said about the peculiarity of the German national soul, I was repeatedly confronted with an experience that perhaps I was able to make more easily than some others, since I spent a large part of my life, almost three decades, in Austria. In later years, in close harmony with the dialect research of my very esteemed teacher and friend Schröer, I was able to see how the German national soul develops when it moves into other national soul areas, into the Czech national soul area, into eastern and western Hungary, where, under the beautiful name of Heanzen, Germans live as far as the Wiesenburg district. Then we come to the areas below the Carpathians, where the Germans of Spiš live; then we come to Transylvania, where the Transylvanian Saxons live; then to the Banat, where the Swabians live. All these peoples will gradually – no value judgments or criticism should be made about this – be completely absorbed by the Magyar element. One can study a remarkable peculiarity here. It may well be mentioned: how easily the German in particular loses his nationality, gradually sheds it when he moves in with other nationalities. This is connected with the peculiarity of the German national soul of which I have just spoken. It takes hold of the human being, I would say, in a lighter, more delicate way with the forces that lie in the individual development of the human being between the ages of twenty and forty-five. But by characterizing him as more emotionally unstable, she makes it possible for him to strip away his emotional ties more easily, to denationalize himself and nationalize himself into other nations. He is not so strongly, so intimately imbued with this German essence that comes from the folk soul.