14. The Development of the German Soul

Another fact is added to this. I can only hint at these things. If one were to study the details of what I have just said, for example on the basis of Schröer's explanations of grammar and his dictionaries of Austro-German dialects, one would truly be able to prove the sentence just uttered as one would any scientific sentence. Another peculiarity that follows from this fact of the German soul is that the German soul needs the emotional connection to what is native and similar, the coexistence with what is native and similar, in order to feel the freshness of this native and similar again and again. The German is not able to push his way into foreign folklore with strong inner strength that leaves him unchanged, as the Englishman does, for example. If he wants to experience his own folk-spirit inwardly and vividly, he needs to be in direct contact with the whole aura, with the whole atmosphere of the folk-spirit. That is why something develops within this aura, this atmosphere of the folk-spirit, that is so difficult to understand for those around it, that is so difficult to grasp for the more rigidly configured folk-spirits, which immediately want to force everything into their categories and thereby distort it; whereas in the unstable, in the light equilibrium in which everything hovers in the German national soul, everything wants to be directly experienced and lived in the living connection with the national soul element itself. This is beautifully illustrated in certain sayings of the truly genuine German spirit Herman Grimm, who has often been mentioned here. More than many others, he has realized – not in the distinctly spiritual scientific form that I am now expounding, but in an inner feeling – how the German soul needs this constant, ever-present fertilization of the mind, and how it can only flourish there. Here he expresses very beautifully how that which the German forms, what the German forms, can actually only be fully understood by this German soul itself, which can be characterized in the way just indicated, and how that which is to be grasped from this soul is distorted, caricatured, by foreign folklore, for the very reason indicated, because the reasons I have already indicated. Herman Grimm says very beautiful and wonderful words, which perhaps many non-Germans do not appreciate, but they are wonderful. They are not only beautiful but also wonderfully true: