May I remind you, Gerhart Hauptmann, that you were among the audience when I gave a lecture, at the University of Frankfurt during the Goethe Week celebrations, about belief and education, or about humanity? You were seated in the first row, and the auditorium behind you was filled to the rafters with students. It was a lovely occasion, and I hope that this one today will prove likewise. In my imagination, I can see you before me now, just as you were then, and address you as a distinguished man on your birthday; and when I raise my glance a bit higher, I can also see the youth of Germany in the hall, listening attentively, for I want to talk to them again today, and also talk about them, and yet again talk with them, to borrow a phrase that appears in a locution such as “to have a bone to pick with them.” I have to speak, in short: about you, whose birthday we’re celebrating today, and about other, more wide-ranging concerns, or yet once again about issues concerning humanity—issues that will always receive a receptive response from German young people, or else they would cease to be German. True, it is possible that they will stamp or shuffle their feet in disapproval over what I’m about to say. But that will not matter: I shall persist and bend my heart and mind to the task of winning them over. For they have to be won over, that much is clear; and they are ready to be won over, for they are not evil, and even those who stamp or shuffle their feet are only a bit proud and stubborn.

To begin once again, it is not surprising that I remember with pleasure the events in Frankfurt and imagine you once more before me: undoubtedly, as I became aware only later (for in the present we never feel gratitude), they marked a high point in my life as a writer. You sat before me, Gerhart Hauptmann, as I have already said, and to your left sat Reich President Ebert. “Before king and kingdom,” as Lohengrin says, “I truly unveiled my secret”—with the word “kingdom,” it is clear, meant to designate Friedrich Ebert, while the word “king” refers to you. For today indeed you are a king—and who would want to deny it?—truly a people’s king, as you sit there before me—the king of the Republic. Does that phrase entail a contradiction? I call upon Novalis, a royalist of a special sort, who once said that people everywhere would soon be convinced that no king could last without a republic and no republic without a king—a democratic expression in any case, and one that invites expansion with the observation that a republic could survive without a king longer than a king without a republic (feet shuffling in the background). One should not be surprised if you, Gerhart Hauptmann, in your capacity as king, were to become a complete republican, for surely our republicanization has served to greatly strengthen and illuminate your kingdom—albeit after a brief wobble in your royal status during the time of revolution.

We live fast. The environment of each individual is changing in the blink of an eye; “today you’re dead,” runs a popular expression, “and tomorrow, until further notice, you’re red.” It’s entertaining—and it is certainly no more than that—to look into the kaleidoscope of current affairs and values, especially insofar as our own moment of fateful choice is at stake. Intellectual radicalism, which accompanied the Revolution in the literary sphere, did not take kindly to a nature such as yours. Fashionable opinion was against you. But that mood has now passed. The younger voices that dismissed you as “unintellectual” are now mute; you stand on the crest of the wave, and the social as well as democratic trends of the time are suited to your greatness. The socialism of this moment reveres you as the compassionate poet of The Weavers and Hannele, the poet of the poor. And when everything that can be said about democracy has been said, it remains true that democracy, after the downfall of a dynastic-feudal system, makes the best intellectuals of a land or nation more visible: respect for writers increases in a republican state, and correspondingly so too does their personal responsibility whether or not this or that writer views it as desirable.

The means of your triumph, Gerhart Hauptmann, was your Germanness, which means your real popularity—to cite Novalis once more, who defines the ideal character of Germanness as “real popularity”—popularity of the most humane kind, as one must not hesitate to add if one is to avoid raising crude and pedestrian misunderstandings: already humane in the source of its historical origins. (Fellow students! [“Well, I never!”] Yes, I am addressing you, German students, insofar as you have felt yourselves obliged to shuffle your feet several times over some of my words.) The last major foreign fructification of our literature occurred in the eighties and nineties of the last century, when Ibsen, Zola, and the great Russian writers reached us, arriving at the same moment as the breakthrough of naturalism and a breath of fresh air discernible among the newest elements of Germany. And who was the poet which this cosmopolitan artistic movement produced? Which major figure did it leave behind? That was the movement that shaped the ultra-German nature of Gerhart Hauptmann, that raised this masterly writer to the heights, a writer who today, by virtue of his popularity, has risen to a princely status, acknowledged by both domestic and foreign critics as the intellectual leader of the postimperial nation. It is worthwhile to reflect on that fact. It is worthwhile, as well, in the case of the poet Stefan George: true, his early years were indelibly marked by the prophets Baudelaire and the Parnassians; yet his life, his stature, and his influence have made him a matter of high and purely national concern. Wherever greatness is found, a nation’s character inevitably breaks through in it, notwithstanding a writer’s cosmopolitan leanings, and among us Germans at least it seems to be a fundamental law that he who loses himself also preserves himself, while he who tries to preserve himself loses himself, lapsing into barbarism or respectable mediocrity. (Once more I hear feet shuffling.)

Humane, I say, and not crude or pedestrian: such is the creative Germanness of this man as found in his literary trajectory. Humane and of the people, I must add, yet neither simple nor boorish and boisterous; but liberal in the most human sense, peace-loving, with the gentleness and dignity that are conferred by culture. We revere him for his German character, his noble genuineness, and his wide popularity. During the privation and affliction of the war, how could he not have felt the attendant suffering within himself! Yet he did not engage in ostentatious philanthropy. He conducted himself as a man of letters; he didn’t go to Zurich and sit there, slandering his land and people with pacifist rhetoric. With heart and voice he stood by Germany, and did so yet again when it came time to face with sorrow the loss of Germany’s border districts, as decreed by the doubtful wisdom of the winners; so that when he left the hall after a speech, on one occasion, the audience followed his noble, fatherly figure into the street, unwilling to leave him, tireless in offering testimonies of their affection for him. How could he have been perceived as a father figure and spokesman for the people—and great cultural traditions are still alive in the depths of the people’s unconscious being, undeniably shaping its conscience—how could he have been so perceived if his popularity had been of a narrow, chauvinistic sort devoid of humanity? Real and truly German popularity can never be of that kind. Whatever Europe may say, we have never lost the sense of humanitas as an idea, a feeling, an ethical and intellectual regulating principle, an unwavering awareness that the state is only “a particular union of a group of people within the great state that humanity makes up for itself” (to borrow yet again an appropriate phrase from the poet who, it would seem, will be my compurgator in what I have to say today); and no other people have so thoughtfully, in the depths of conscience and the heights of intellect, pondered the values of the national and the universal.

At its most intellectually fruitful that transpired in that wonderful group to which Friedrich von Hardenberg belonged, whose understanding of the popular and picturesque was so keen that he elevated it to something embracing humanity, something in which nationalism and universalism reside in close proximity. “Everything national,” writes Novalis, “everything temporal, local, and individual can be transformed into the canonical and universal. Christ is a provincial figure who has been purified into the universal.” And he continues: “This individual shading of the universal is its romantic element. Thus every national and even every personal God is a universal that has been romanticized. Personality is the romantic element of each individual.” Justice reigns in these remarks, and in them it is recognized that the canonical-universal is not empty rationalization, but purification and ennoblement; yet at the same time the individual and national are distinguished as the romantic element of personality within the universal, and so become the poetry of life. Which is the higher? Who can say? If the universal is the higher, more intellectual sphere, then the sphere of personality is perhaps the more intense, the more real. For centuries, certainly, that sphere of personality has included the martial domain. Yes, the sphere of blood is also in a horrible way the bloody sphere—that, it seems, is its shading. War is romantic. Nobody has ever denied the mystical-poetic dimension that inheres in warfare. But today, it would be mere stubbornness to deny that it is a romanticism utterly debased, a version of poetry disgustingly disfigured. If our national feeling is not to fall into disrepute or not to become a curse, it will have to cease being a vehicle for everything warlike and brawling; instead, corresponding with the nation’s artistic and almost sentimental sides, it will be ever more unconditionally understood as the object of a cult of peace. (I hear feet shuffling again.)

Young men—please, not that tone! I am no pacifist, either of the raving or the oily sort. Pacifism as a worldview is no affair of mine, whether it be a spiritual vegetarianism or a rational-bourgeois philanthropy of happiness. It was also no affair of Goethe’s, nor could it have been; and yet he was a man of peace. I am no Goethe; however, albeit to a small degree and somewhat remotely, I am “from his family,” as the Austrian poet Adalbert Stifter once put it, and I too am a man of peace, for that is the realm of culture, art, and thought; whereas in war, barbarism triumphs . . . not barbarism alone, let me concede. But as mankind stands at present, as matters stand today around the world, almost barbarism alone. Today, the world and its peoples are older and wiser, and the ages of epic and heroic activity are long gone. The attempt to return to them is a pointless resistance to the law of our age, a spiritual untruth. War is a lie, and even its outcomes are lies; no matter how much honor any individual brings with him into war, war itself is devoid of honor. To the viewpoint of anyone not self-deluded, war can only mean the triumph of everything common and brutal, of everything in the popular mind that is inimical to culture and thought, of a blood orgy of egoism, destruction, and evil.

I ask you to acknowledge this truth. I am not saying it out of political ill will, nor to give offense to the memories of those among you who participated in the war, or saw their own blood and that of their comrades shed—memories that are inevitably holy, and that should remain holy. I am no Thersites, no malicious politician striving for power, one who revels in the shame and spiritual homelessness of his opponent whose ideals have collapsed. I know what blood is, what death is, what comradeship is. Admit it: from my lips there has never issued even a syllable of that paltry contempt for, in quotation marks, the “Great Age.” Such contempt does not arise from a feeling of shame—for how could there be any feeling at all for someone to speak in that way? But among contemporary intellectuals even the most manly, the one whose entire body of poetry has been an austere cult of manliness, the one who only recently published a poem vibrating with the love of honor, with “the return of the dead,” and with that hymn to “the armies, the heroes”—even he, pondering the reality of modern war, sees “nothing but many downfalls devoid of worth.”¹

It escapes the creator’s hand, rages despotically,

Deformity of lead and sheet-metal oh bars and tubes.

When false, heroic speeches from earlier times are repeated,

He laughs with rage who has seen his brothers crumbling

Like gruel or clods of dirt oh who has sat in the shameful

Uprooted earth like an insect . . .

The ancient god of battles is no more.

He is no more. He has degenerated into a hideous idol, and to bring him offerings has become a quixotic, pointless enterprise. Human decency and dignity demand that we push this bloody and paltry sovereign off his world throne and declare Europe a republic—insofar as the idea of a republic is bound up with that of a national cult of peace.

Republic—how do you like that word coming, as it does, from my lips? Not very much, to judge by certain sounds that, sadly, one is obliged to interpret as more shuffling of the feet. And yet—and here I differ from most of you—from childhood on that word has always been a trusted term of everyday usage for me. My home city was a republican federated state within the kingdom, as are all those that make up the Reich today. Nevertheless, I’ve never been a republican of the sort represented by Verrina, never a man of doctrinal purity, never a revolutionary in that sense—as you well know. As Novalis once said, and as I say together with him: “In our time, those who declaim against aristocracy as such and find no solution other than that of following the French model; those who think that any true republic must have representative assemblies, and peremptorily assert that a true republic exists only when you have primaries and party conventions, a directorate and councillors, municipalities and liberty trees—they are impoverished philistines with empty minds and arid hearts, literalists who try to disguise their shallowness and vacuity behind the colorful flags of triumphant fashion and the imposing mask of cosmopolitanism. They deserve the reactionary antagonists that they have, and in both groups the war between the frogs and the mice becomes perfectly embodied.” That is how a romantic speaks. For the level of German romanticism, however much it differs from that of political Enlightenment, is for just that reason far above all obscurantism; and since genuine opposition is possible only between things on the same level, the hostility of obscurantism is perceived by romanticism as a final insult. Obscurantism, otherwise known under its political name, reaction, is sentimental crudity, insofar as it deceives itself and tries to disguise its brutish and unintelligent features “behind . . . the imposing mask” of feeling, perhaps of good German loyalty; and sentimental crudity so little deserves the noble and intellectually subtle name of romanticism that even the most inveterate romantic, in the present state of emergency, would become a supporter of political enlightenment, if only to defend romanticism against such shameless claims to it. When sentimental obscurantism becomes organized terror and disgraces the entire country with disgusting and crackbrained assassinations, no one can deny that we have indeed entered a state of emergency; and the hush, as I notice, which that allusion has produced throughout the audience in this hall, I know—I, who must fear that in my intellectual pursuit of freedom I have put weapons into the hands of obscurantism—I, let me say, precisely I, I know what I owe to this hush that has fallen over the room.

Let me say it openly: to the extent it’s needed, my aim is to win you over to the side of the republic, of what is termed democracy, and what I term humanity, an aim born out of repugnance (that I share with you) toward the humbug and murkiness associated with that other word. I am trying to enlist your sympathies for that cause in full view of this man and poet seated here before me, whose genuine popularity rests on the loftiest unification of folk and human elements. For I would hope that the face of Germany, at the moment so pitifully twisted and disfigured, might once more resemble his face, that head of an artist that shows so many features composing a picture of elevated probity, that it is intertwined for us with the German name. Today, things in our land are truly strange and contrary to humane conventions. “A republic,” Novalis once wrote, “is the fluidum deferens of youth. Wherever you find young people, you find a republic.” And isn’t it true that the thirst for freedom, the love of change, the high-minded impulse toward revolution, as much here as elsewhere, have been a natural prerogative of youth? Our students, our student associations, are by no means lacking in democratic tradition. There have been times when the nation and the monarchic-dynastic principle, far from coalescing into a unified idea, stood in irreconcilable opposition to one another; when patriotism and republic did not constitute an antithesis, but seemed one and the same thing; and when all the passion of noble youth supported that cause, unifying fatherland and freedom. Today, instead, it seems that young people, or at least critical masses of young people, have sworn an oath of eternal hatred for the Republic, without remembering what could once have been—for to remember those possibilities would surely mitigate such unconditional hatred. “Those were completely different circumstances,” you will answer me, “but although the times have changed, we have remained loyal, and we recognize ourselves in the martyrs of those days, the noble-minded victims of demagogic persecutions. History does not repeat itself, and our hatred has become an independent life.” That, I have to reply, is probably not really life, though it is only too true that history doesn’t repeat itself, that indeed it can be inimical to life to think and feel only through historical analogies! It horrifies me to think of the dangers that attend such a game: it is a children’s game, perhaps, to imitate the secret military restoration that Prussia undertook after the defeats of Jena and Tilsit. And what if the Republic, forced by necessity to deploy your monarchist secret organizations, had truth and justice on her side, just as you once had it on yours when struggling against the spies and secret agents of reaction?

“What does it really mean to be old? What young?” asks Novalis. “Young,” he answers, “is where the future predominates; old, where the past prevails.” Are we living, then, in a world turned upside down? Young people today are partisans of the past, their hearts bent on a mechanical restoration of the old. Demagogic persecutions? Yes, in some cases it has come to that, albeit in the cause of defending, clumsily and inadequately, the new state, one that self-evidently cannot itself be the truly and genuinely new state, but only a poorly defined precondition and basis for that new state. Real demagoguery? Surely that is the shabby trick of exploiting our country’s domestic and foreign woes to glorify a broken-down past, doing so as well without having the faintest idea of the ways and means needed to restore that departed magnificence, or even how to fill that empty throne—in defense of which I hear feet shuffling, yet one more time.

To struggle against outward circumstances when they no longer harmonize with the inward, or when they represent only reality, not truth, is a praiseworthy sign of intellect. But it is absurd, and nothing more, to deny facts and not allow oneself to be shaped by a real world that has already become part of our shared mentality, even for those who deny or oppose it. I say to students, and to any citizens who may be here on this occasion, that today the Republic, democracy, are constituents of our mentality, and are such for us all, everyone, and to deny that is merely to lie. Until recently powers sanctioned by time and furnished with the authority that accrues to the magic of inherited fame, authority so compelling that it was only human to leave them in place and continue, even when they had degenerated into histrionics that turned such pieties into embarrassment—such powers ruled over us and constituted the state: the state lay in their hands, and it was their affair. It was an affair they conducted poorly, as is now clear, while we continued, indifferent to their doings, to conduct our own affairs, the affairs of the nation and of culture, as best we could. Indeed, a divorce gradually opened between the life of the nation and that of the state, a rupture of such breadth and profundity that it could no longer be tolerated and was bound to wreak havoc on both. We devoted ourselves to commerce, to art, to absolute thought—I will not say, “with composure,” for our abstention from the political world had turned into a species of fatalist resignation that could hardly merit the expression “having confidence in”; yet we gave the appearance of having confidence in the state, as if we knew it were entrusted to the best hands—when, if we had known anything at all about the state, we would have known that it was in a very dubious condition indeed. Yet it was only human to do so, I repeat, given how everything had developed. But that time is now past. Those powers are no more. Fate has—we shall not use the triumphalist phrase, “swept them away,” for we want to stick to facts—done away with them. They no longer reign over us, and after everything that has happened they will not do so again; the state, whether we like it or not, has fallen into our hands, and that means into the hands of every individual. It has become our affair, one that we now have to make good on, and that is just what the Republic is—nothing more.

The Republic has been our fate, in response to which the best form of behavior might well be “amor fati.” That is not a very festive phrase; but then again, we’re not talking about one of fate’s minor details. So-called freedom is not fun and enjoyment, or at least that is not my view of it. Freedom’s other name is responsibility, and saying that makes it clearer that freedom is also a heavy burden—and especially so for intellectuals. One may legitimately doubt whether many of the people who most vociferously called for freedom, before it became a part of our fate, ever sufficiently asked themselves if they were truly ready for it; for readiness has certainly not been apparent so far, and what the Republic and so-called freedom will entail in terms of mental tragedy will become clear only later. A Russian writer, and hence the son of a land where the republican ideal reigned more completely than anywhere else prior to the recent convulsions, recently spoke about the fate that awaited intellectuals in his homeland, a tense and dangerous existence in a way that we in the West can hardly imagine. “We had to look at life with a sense of strain,” he said, “one that made us abandon an attempt to give it shape” (he meant: the pure pursuit of form); “and that has meant that we have less pure ‘literature’ within Russian than one can find in the languages of our western neighbors. . . . In the West there is a kind of literary culture, a literature at home in its own kingdom, if one can put it that way. . . . In our land the writer cannot confine himself to formal, aesthetic, or psychological observations. Those will not give him the tension that he needs for creation. He must aim higher. He strains to grasp and illuminate the entirety of life. Leo Tolstoy is not just an artist; he is also a historian, a critic, an aesthetician, a philosopher; all these aspects of his talent are paths that perennially point toward the temple of truth without ever actually arriving there. . . . Russian artists live with the recognition that literature doesn’t have to reflect life as it is, to use that expression; it is a heroic form of action, a consecrated life, an overcoming of human weakness, a renunciation of and struggle against everything conventional. Under the burden of these tasks the strong become stronger and forge their own consciousness and genius. The weak, instead, collapse. Many Russian authors of considerable talent have collapsed in the course of their journey, and have given less to literature than they might have—pressured by the burden of tasks too large for them, tasks that exceeded their capacities. . . .” This quotation, which I’ve cited in a somewhat fragmentary form, can help us better understand the fate that awaits the intellectual within the mental world that has been opened up by the Republic and why it is my view that some intellectuals in our country have been a bit careless in celebrating its creation.

But the republic is most certainly there. The “powers” have vanished and the state has become a matter that concerns us all. We have become the state. Yet this state of affairs is deeply loathed by significant portions of our young people and citizens; they don’t want anything to do with it, denounce it on every possible occasion, and do so chiefly because it has not come about as a result of victory, or free will, or a national uprising, but as a consequence of our national collapse and defeat, an event inseparably bound up with impotence, shame, and domination by foreigners. “We are not part of the Republic,” these alienated patriots say. “The Republic is foreign domination—to the extent that (and why shouldn’t we too cite Novalis?) weakness is only the other side of foreign powers that are taking the upper hand, prevailing, setting the mark.” True, all too true. But firstly, it is also true, as the poet Novalis says, that “man can ennoble everything, make it worthy of himself, only when he wills it” (a very true observation, and a fine one, too, and almost sly as well, a shrewd expression of adaptability for life); and secondly, to repeat it once more fiercely, it is not true, it is completely and absolutely untrue that the Republic as a psychological fact (I’m not talking here about constitutional niceties) is a creation born of defeat and shame. It is one born of exultation and honor. The Republic, my young friends, is a creation of that very hour that you want to preserve impervious to criticism or derogatory scorn, that hour when everyone was setting forth, inspired and ready for death—that was the hour when the Republic was born inside your breasts. “Holy homeland,” so began a poem of that hour by Gerhart Hauptmann, “how pale you suddenly seem!” But what actually grew pale at that hour, what was retreating and perceptibly vanishing into a fog were the powers that until then had constituted the state; and then it rose up within you, its life now resided within a community that was aflame, and all of you together were the Republic. And if today it stands humiliated (which I do not deny), then it would be cowardice to leave it in the lurch, instead of lending a helping hand, instead of supporting it and acting like the man who “makes it worthy of himself”; it would be cowardice to concoct every conceivable difficulty for the Republic, acting as if you were old men who no longer understood life and could only show tearful fidelity to the good old days. Let the question be posed again: does it show either intelligence or honor to deny inner truths? The Republic is just such a truth, one lodged within even those opponents who most loathe it, a truth that stands revealed even in the acts of violence bent on destroying it. Paradoxically, those miserable young men who have recently shattered the fine, wise head of an urbane public servant never realized that, in shooting a cabinet member, they were acting in accordance with that republican truth.

Young people and citizens, your resistance against the Republic and democracy is a fear of mere words. Yes, you bridle and rear against those terms like uneasy horses, and a superstitious nervousness robs you of reason as soon as they are spoken aloud. Yet they are only words, relativities, contingent forms, necessary tools, and to believe that they can only signify foreign nonsense is childish behavior. The Republic—as if that were somehow no longer Germany. Democracy—as if that could not be a more welcoming home than some prattling, saber-rattling, sword-waving empire! Have you listened to the Meistersinger lately? Nietzsche once made the admittedly dazzling remark that it was “aimed against civilization” and incited “the Germans against the French.” But it is thoroughly democratic, and democratic to the same degree and in the same exemplary way that Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is aristocratic. It is, I repeat, German democracy; its simplehearted pomp and fervid romanticism prove that the pairing “German democracy,” far from being unnatural or illogical, is as organically and seamlessly conjoined as perhaps no other pairing except one: “German people.”

Have faith—faith in a general sense that at the outset need consist of no more than abandoning the prejudice that a German republic can only be nonsense and humbug, that it can only be defined as what Novalis calls “foreign powers that are taking the upper hand, prevailing, setting the mark,” which is to say, weakness. A divorce between the life of the nation and that of the state, I said a little while ago, is unhealthy. But what should not be divorced can be usefully distinguished: for it should reassure us to recall that unequivocal certainty, that the life of the nation is far more powerful and more profoundly shapes life than any letter of public law or institutional arrangement. “German Republic”—the adjective forms a very strong part of that expression; and if the Weimar constitution should turn out not to be all that one would expect of a perfect constitution, one harmonizing the corpus of the state with its spirit and mind—but has such a perfect constitution ever really existed? One should not, in any event, attach too much importance to a written document. The real life of the nation, always and everywhere, towers far above it in every respect.

Once again I ask you: be on your guard against restless impulses. There is no reason in the world to think that the Republic is an affair of shady young Jews. Do not abandon it to them! Take the wind out of their sails, to use that expression beloved by politicians—the republican wind. The expression is in poor taste, but nevertheless a formula describing a way of acting which, if it were widely adopted, would lead to extremely positive results. For what are political parties actually arguing about? The welfare of the state. That depends not on whether a party is faring well, but on whether the state is faring well; and if every political party is clever in using the wind as the others, then all of them will have smooth sailing, which means the Republic will as well—surely a desirable goal. To that end, advocates of the Republic would be well advised to take the winds out the monarchists’ sails—not allowing them alone to reach the public’s ear when we are discussing matters of honor and disgrace, love and anger; and also to take the song out of their mouths, as Chancellor Ebert did so frankly and shrewdly with his decree on Constitution Day. He took the song “Deutschland über alles” out of the mouths of the “folkish” parties and effectively said that it was not at all their song, but at least as much his song, and henceforth he’d be singing it with a swelling chest. That is a new kind of singing contest, one over a song, and an excellent one at that! For it is self-evident that the nationalists will not want to stop singing it, and if it turns out that everyone is singing “Deutschland über alles” in unison, then we will have the Republic and have it faring forward with full sails.

These men at the head of the state: Are they different from the rest of us, hostile strangers with whom there could be no understanding about the most basic matters, and who wish to exclude you from the Republic? Ah, they would be quite happy if you would come to lend them a hand, and they are Germans who use the German language and have been nurtured, like you, in German traditions and habits of thought. Some of them I know personally, such as President Ebert, for example. A fundamentally agreeable man, relaxed and yet firm. I have seen him at social events, dressed in his black suit, the gifted man who seemed a favorite of fortune, a citizen among citizens, calmly and amiably fulfilling his official duties; and since, on a few occasions, I have also been able to observe our late grand seigneur performing similar tasks, I have come to the insight, which I now want to advocate, that democracy can be something more German than an imperial opera gala. My children, my fellow citizens, things are better now—with my hand on my heart, I affirm that at bottom we are healthier, even with all the suffering and the political indignities in foreign affairs, than we were in the glittering times when the above-mentioned decorative talent represented Germany. It may have been entertaining, but it was an embarrassment, too—smiling, we used to bite our lips when we looked around and saw ourselves reflected in the expressions of others in Europe, hoping that they would not hold us responsible for the farce, which nevertheless they did; we wanted to hope that they would distinguish between Germany and its representative, something they were in no position to do. And so we turned back to cultural matters, saddened by the fatal destiny that had sanctioned tradition and the increasing divorce between the life of the nation and that of the state. A unified culture! Despite all the complaints of today, doesn’t the possibility of harmony glimmer before us? Isn’t the Republic only a name for the good fortune residing for the people in a union of state and culture?

What you will say in reply, I know very well. You will say: No, no, that is precisely what it is not. What does the German mind have to do with democracy, republic, socialism, even Marxism? Economic materialism, with its vile talk about “ideological superstructure,” trash from the nineteenth century that is scorned even by children. What misfortune that it should come to be realized precisely when it has become intellectually moribund. And isn’t that the same state of affairs for the other marvelous things that you, in a truly strange manner, are trying to excite German youth about? Can you see the stars over our heads? Do you know and honor our gods? Do you know who were the prophets of the German future? Goethe and Nietzsche, were they liberals? Are Hölderlin and George democratic spirits, in your quixotic opinion? —No, I won’t say that. Of course, of course you’re right on this point. My dear friends, you behold me crestfallen. I had forgotten about Goethe and Nietzsche, Hölderlin and George. Or is it perhaps that I remembered them, but in silence, as it were, while wondering whether it would more absurd to speak up for the Republic by invoking their names or to advocate a restoration under their aegis? Yes, asking that question can serve to help me in my crestfallen state. And I will go further and raise the question, whether we all (myself included! myself included!) have not underestimated the obstacles that our earlier state powers posed for the realization of German beauty; whether the new humanity, whose prophets were those great spirits and whose dream is planted in your minds even when you shrug your shoulders at the idea of democracy, will not find on this soil, the soil of the Republic, more felicitous possibilities for coming to life than on the soil of the old state. . . .

Now you are getting angry! Indeed, if the presence of certain highly placed people didn’t restrain you, you would shout at me: “What?! And what about your book? Your nonpolitical, antidemocratic Reflections from the year 1918? Renegade, traitor, turncoat! You’re eating your own words, becoming a mind-changer. Come down from the podium, stop trying to lay claim to powers of persuasion when you are denying your own views and displaying a lack of character.”

My dear friends, I am going to remain here. I still have a few things to say that seem to me good and important; and concerning the betrayal discerned in my change of opinion, consider the possibility that the charge may not be fair. I’m not recanting anything. I am not retracting anything essential. I spoke my truth then and I’m doing so now. I could plead Et nos mutamur in illis, or note that I am not one of those saints who stand on pillars and stare at their navels, that I am unable to stare fixedly all my life at one and the same truth (for such self-hypnosis ends in death, a dignified death of historical petrification, and it is still too early for me to reach that state), or that I am constantly in need of new truth, as a new spur to life. But I will not adopt that line of defense. Instead I shall reply to you that in fact I am a conservative, that my natural task in this world is certainly not of a revolutionizing sort, but of a preserving kind—in the sense indicated with delicate force by Novalis in one of his aphorisms. “In certain periods it may be desirable that everything be dissolved in flux in order to bring about new and necessary mixtures and a new and purer crystallization; but to the same degree it is also indispensable, if one is to alleviate the crisis and prevent total dissolution, that a stem can still survive, a nucleus around which a new mass can coalesce and reconstruct itself in beautiful new forms. What is solid must concentrate itself, in order to prevent an excess of caloric, the softening of bones, and dilapidation of the basic fabric.” Now exactly this self-concentration of what is solid, such a provision against the destruction of the basic fabric—that is what my book did, and it was in this sense that it attempted to preserve some things. It was conservative—not in reactionary fidelity to the past, but in loyalty to the future; its concern was with the preservation of the stem and nucleus around which the new could coalesce and reconstruct itself in beautiful forms. The feverish state of revolution, though perennially necessary to life, cannot be considered an end in itself or something worth perpetuating forever; the same can be said of that state of self-concentration, seemingly inimical to the future, that follows. Everything depends on this: it must dissolve at just the right moment and find an equilibrium between what is solid and what is fluid.

How excellently Novalis comments on the two forces of life that are ceaselessly striving against one another today in Germany, and not only here. “Both,” he says, “have great and compelling claims that must be advanced, driven by the spirit of humanity and the world. Both are indestructible forces lodged in the heart of humanity: on the one hand, the remembrance of the past, the devotion to institutions grounded in history, the love of memorials to ancestors and families rich in glory, the joy of being obedient; on the other, the entrancing feeling of freedom, the positive expectation that one can have a powerful effect on wider circles, pleasure in what is new and youthful, effortless contact with one’s fellow citizens, pride in human equality, joy in one’s personal rights and entitlements within the whole and that powerful feeling of being a citizen. One must not hope to destroy the other, for victory in such a struggle would be meaningless: for the inward capital of every kingdom does not lie behind walls of stone and cannot be taken by an assault.” Isn’t that a true formulation? I would like to call attention to the fact that, in these perceptive remarks, justice reigns insofar as the persuasive appeal of revolution is a little more expressly depicted than that of tradition. Yet Novalis does not believe in a “unification on the basis of common consciousness.” In the view of this romantic with Catholic leanings, worldly powers cannot balance each other out on their own; only a third element, at once worldly and supernatural, can achieve that task—hierarchical thought, the idea of the Church. But how can such dreams speak to us? Or do we already know another “third element” that is “at once worldly and supernatural,” that is to say, at once social and spiritual, humane and aristocratic, occupying a beautiful and dignified middle ground between romanticism and enlightenment, between mysticism and reason—that of Germany? My angry friends, wasn’t it precisely that third element that I was defending in my book, an element under assault from left and right, more so from left than right—the element of humanity?

I feel myself entitled somehow, albeit in a very modest way, to take up this concept. For the thing itself was mine long before I knew its name, and I may even say that humanity, for me, is not an idea deliberately chosen or thought through, but one rooted in experience. That may sound presumptuous, but one should recall that great things are sometimes found in microcosms, where their essential features can be grasped. I have revealed the secret of my heart, showing how the moving and grand experience of education stemmed, unperceived by me, from the autobiographical urge to self-portrayal; how the idea of education can extend to the social sphere and how humans, moved by social contact, can get sight of what is undoubtedly the highest stage of humanity—the state! When I was starting out in life, I would never have let myself dream that one day I would talk like that. But whoever does so is a republican, even if he goes beyond that and also professes a political and entheistic faith such as that of Novalis.

Shall I continue the tale? The day came (an important day for me personally) when, in an open letter about Whitman, who had made a powerful impression on me through the noble translation of Reisiger, I proclaimed the unity of humanity and democracy; when I recognized that humanity is but a classicizing and old-fashioned term for democracy and that nothing hindered me from coupling that godlike name from Weimar and that of the thunderer from Manhattan, the man who had sung:

For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you, ma femme!

For you, for you I am trilling these songs.

What transpired next was a rereading of the works of Novalis, seen from a new stage in my life and undertaken in connection with an artistic project I was at work on—that voluptuous thinker and highly intellectual dreamer, whose thoughts on the state and human community struck me as having such remarkable connections to the lyrical Americanism that had just impressed me that my talk for today was originally conceived as a lecture on that wonderful pair, Novalis and Whitman, and may well come to that in the end. To establish a connection between democracy, the Republic, and German romanticism—wouldn’t that also entail making the former more acceptable to my bewildered and stubborn countrymen?

“Not only is it not enough,” Walt Whitman says in his Democratic Vistas, “that the new blood, new frame of democracy shall be vivified and held together merely by political means, superficial suffrage, legislation, &c., but it is clear to me that, unless it goes deeper, gets at least as firm and as warm a hold in men’s hearts, emotions and belief, as, in their days, feudalism or ecclesiasticism, and inaugurates its own perennial sources, welling from the centre forever, its strength will be defective, its growth doubtful, and its main charm wanting.” One can, I think, be helpful to what is new in Germany, aiding it to develop its “main charm,” by linking it with a sphere and an era whose intellectual level was the highest ever reached in our land, one in which popular culture and high art, national and universal elements joined together, a moment that to a certain degree will always remain our intellectual home—that of German romanticism.

It has already been mentioned that Novalis, if we set aside his pious sentimentality for the Prussian royal pair, was strongly influenced by the French Revolution in his perception of the state. “The state is too little publicized among us,” he cries out. “There ought to be criers of the state, preachers of patriotism. At present most citizens have only a very low, almost near to inimical relation to it.” And he completes his thought in another passage: “One of the great defects of our states is that one sees the state too little. The state should be visible everywhere, and every person characterized as a citizen. Shouldn’t uniforms and insignia be generally introduced? Whoever thinks such ideas trivial fails to recognize an essential characteristic of our nature.” So acute a social sense is surprising in a student of mysticism. In such sentences his definition of republicanism approaches civic militarism, and one might even call his conception of the state a form of romantic Jacobinism. “Only he who does not live within the state, in the sense that a lover lives within his beloved,” he says sweepingly, and for the first time here he sounds that note of social eroticism that plays such an important role in Whitman’s democratic conceptions, “will find his taxes a burden. For they are a very great asset. Taxes can be considered the salary of the state, the salary of a very powerful, just, clever, and amusing man. The need for a state is the most pressing need for man; to become and remain human he requires a state. . . . A man without a state is a savage. All culture springs from relations with the state; the more cultured a man is, the more he is a member of a cultured state.” An entire world of hope for contemporary Germany can be discerned in that last sentence written a hundred years ago. Man, cultured as a member of a cultured state: that is political humanity. It is a union of the life of the state with intellectual and national life, a union that for so long we did not experience, but that once again we hope to see. In a word, it is the Republic. And what does it matter to us that Novalis, incidentally, was a mystical legitimist? Birth, he claims, is also a choice: anyone who doubts that cannot feel himself “alive in his own skin.” But when he adds that a born king is better than one made or elected because even the best man cannot undergo such elevation without experiencing an alteration of character while one born to the purple will not become giddy or overexcited by new heights—well, we in Germany have had an example of the opposite taking place before our eyes for decades: constant giddiness, permanent overexcitement about his own status in one allegedly born to the purple. And precisely because his “status” was interpreted with a certain imaginative volatility, a certain poetic feeling of immediacy with the divine. Even when a king is a born king, even when he is not a crass mediocrity, the fact remains that monarchy, in our civilization, places impossible pressures on the human—so much so that it would be best to characterize it as inhuman, in a sense as yet insufficiently appreciated, at least as far as it bears on an individual’s capacity for sympathy.

As for Novalis, in his ideas about kingship he constantly adheres to a democratic-republican point of view. For example, when he says there should be only one king “on economic grounds”; for if we did not need to economize, then “we would all be kings.” In imagining a democratic state in which we were all kings (and that is just what noble republics have always been), he implicitly connects the ideas of freedom and equality; and to doubt the logical force of that connection is mere pettiness, and despite every attempt to prove that connection, it will never cease to hover before the eyes of mankind as the purest social ideal. Novalis calls that connection “the noblest trait of a republic or of genuine harmony.” That is a strong claim—for a royalist. Whitman, for his part, expresses himself thus: “This idea of perfect individualism it is indeed that deepest tinges and gives character to the idea of the aggregate.” (Novalis: “This individual shading of the universal is its romantic element.”) “For it is mainly or altogether to serve independent separatism that we favor a strong generalization, consolidation. As it is to give the best vitality and freedom to the rights of the States (every bit as important as the right of nationality, the union,) that we insist on the identity of the Union at all hazards.” He might be speaking of the German federation—or of a future European one. For we can foresee and predict that one day the same kind of friendly arrangements that have been reached between Bavaria and the Reich will appertain between national states and a higher European authority. In any case it is a German, or more generally speaking a Germanic instinct to cherish the idea of a state-shaping individualism, the idea of the community residing in the recognition of the humanity in each of its individual members, the human idea that encompasses the inner individual and the state, the aristocratic and the social, one as far removed from the political mysticism of a slave state as from the radical and anarchist individualism found in certain parts of the West: the union of freedom and equality, the “genuine harmony,” or in a word: the republic.

“Would you have in yourself the divine, vast, general law? Then merge yourself in it.” So speaks Walt Whitman, having a moment earlier said: “Nor is the esthetic point, always an important one, without fascination for highest aiming souls. The common ambition strains for elevations, to become some privileged exclusive. The master sees greatness and health in being part of the mass; nothing will do as well as common ground.” Very good; once again we have the unity of intellectual life and the life of the state, national culture as a culture of peace. But the word “esthetic,” near the beginning of the sentence, makes us aware that it is a question here of the “superman” promulgated by Nietzsche, a fatal character in several respects, the Nietzsche about whom Novalis prophetically remarked: “The ideal of morality has no more dangerous rival than the ideal of power; the ideal of the strongest, which has also been called the ideal of aesthetic grandeur (at bottom quite rightly; but as it is meant, most falsely). It is the maximum of the barbarian, and unfortunately in these days of an increasingly depraved culture it has attracted many adherents, especially among the greatest weaklings. By means of that ideal the human is transformed into an animal-mind, a mixture, a brutal joke that has a brutal power of attraction for weaklings.” That is a striking comment. Above all it shows that democracy can possess the same psychological sensitivity as its sharp-witted antithesis; and that is why I have come to this podium today, to demonstrate that point, and almost that point alone, that democracy can live on a certain plane, the same plane as that of German romanticism.

Nietzsche’s hymn to the blond beast was anticipated and superseded by this passing remark from one of his German teachers. The case is no different with his critique of Christianity, which, in a moment of literary irritability, he called “the one undying blot upon humanity.” Novalis adopts a more a positive attitude toward this phenomenon—not out of hierarchical sympathies, but unequivocally in a democratic and a revolutionary maximalist sense. “Absolute abstraction,” he says, “the annihilation of the present, the apotheosis of the future or an actually better world: this is the core of the story of Christianity. . . . Christian religion is especially noteworthy for so decisively laying claim to and esteeming man’s simple goodwill and his actual nature as it is, without cultivation. It stands in opposition to science and art and enjoyment as such. Its starting point is the common man. It animates the great majority of limited souls on this earth. It is that light that begins to shine in the darkness.” (Tolstoy!) “It is the seed of all democracy, the highest fact of popular life.”

Knowledge, it would seem, does not necessarily entail a Hamlet-like disgust with what is known and its own self-destruction in a disgust with knowledge itself, as in the case of Nietzsche. It can be affirmative. And Novalis, in such thoughts, is very close to Whitman, who once said that at the core of democracy, finally, there resides a religious element, and who shows himself to be in love with the words “en masse” in both his prose and his poetry. That is like Novalis, who turns it into nothing more and nothing less than a mystical formula. He dreams of human immortality, “en masse,” and of a higher, composed human being, the genius. Plurality, he says, is genius. Every person who is composed of several persons is a person to the second power or a genius; and in that sense there were actually no Greeks, but only a Greek genius. He offers observations on living and thinking “en masse,” and finds that if symphilosophy or thinking in common were possible, then a common will would also be possible, the realization of great, new ideas. “Community, pluralism is our inmost essence, and perhaps everybody has a certain share in what I am thinking and doing, just as I have in the thoughts of other human beings.” “Just as philosophy, by means of systematic thinking and the state, strengthen the powers of the individual with the powers of humanity and the world as a totality, so poetry, with respect to life. The individual lives in the whole and the whole in the individual. From poetry stems the highest sympathy and shared activity, the most intimate community of the finite and infinite.” Salut au monde! Did you know that there was such enthusiasm for democracy, such an ecstatic philosophy of socialism? But the state as poetry, philosophy, and inspiration—after all, such a state is more life-enhancing than the one we had before, and the one Novalis depicted in the following terms: “No state has become more like a factory than Prussia in the period since the death of Frederick William I. Such a mechanical administration may be necessary for the physical health, invigoration, and ability of the state; but when it is administered entirely in this way, then its essential features will fall into ruin. The principle of the older and celebrated system was to bind everyone through self-interest to the state. Shrewd politicians kept their focus on an ideal of the state in which the state was as self-interested as its subjects, yet both were so skillfully bound together that each assisted the other. Great effort was expended in this political squaring of the circle. But naked self-interest seems to be utterly immeasurable and antisystematic. It has refused to accept any barriers, though barriers are what is required by any state administration. This open acceptance of petty egoism as a principle has brought about terrible damage here, and the seed of the revolution in our days lies nowhere else than here.” That is not raving, it is sober and realistic and for us an all-too-familiar truth. And even less is it poetry or mysticism, rather than the healthiest, strongest, and manliest good sense, when Novalis cries out: “It is plainly better in republics, where the state is the chief concern of every individual, and each one feels that his existence and needs, his activities and viewpoints are bound up with that of a widely diffused society, and that his life is bound up with that more powerful life, so that he broadens his imagination and his understanding to encompass larger issues, exercises them, and almost unwillingly he forgets his narrow self-interests for the enormous whole.”

Is this the voice of a German romantic? This democratic pluralism forgoes any metaphysical claustrophobia, and it has an almost American freshness, as well as pedagogical suitability—any well-constituted youth will prove receptive to it. More generally, concerning the essence of romanticism there are popular preconceptions and sheer moonshine that one must seize every possible opportunity to refute. Poetry and art, romantic poetry at least, German art—isn’t it a truism that they are dream, simplicity, feeling, or better yet “moods”? What the devil do they have to do with intellect, which is something, much like the Republic, that is more an affair of shady young Jews, that should be viewed with contempt, that should be an object of patriotic scorn. But what if one could be convinced that German romanticism was a strictly intellectual discipline of art and mind? “The seat of real art,” says Novalis, using terms that have something to do with democracy, “is in the understanding. The mind constructs according to a specific concept. Imagination, wit, and power of judgement are required only from it. Thus Wilhelm Meister is completely a work of art—a work of the understanding.” Folkish professors will take offense at citing such a sentence. With them, temperament so outweighs understanding that they would never be ready to grasp that romanticism almost exactly means modernity: modernity in the sense that the word is given by Schiller when he distinguished sentimental poetry as modern in comparison with naive poetry, or in the sense given it by Merezhkovsky, when he explains that in Russian literature, after the unconscious creativity of Pushkin, there arrived with Gogol something that one would have to call a creative consciousness, a creative critical power.

Another example of the unreliability of certain dyed-in-the-wool preconceptions! Where does romanticism stand in relationship to modern commerce, to the spirit of international trade? Is it, after all, pretty shrewd? Is it, after all, like the democratic Whitman, who calls the “complicated business genius” of our day “not least among the geniuses”? Novalis replies: “The mind of commerce is the mind of the world. It is absolutely the grand mind. It sets everything in motion, binds everything together. It awakens cities, countries, nations, and works of art. It is the mind of culture, a perfecting of the human species.”

Gentlemen, without a doubt, that is democracy. Indeed, it is even progress—no matter what connotations that word carries for someone steeped in German romanticism. A perfecting of the human species: Novalis conceives that idea in the sense of that Christian radicalism that means “absolute abstraction, the annihilation of the present, the apotheosis of the future.” For the sake of that idea he violently separates God and nature, and becomes a dualist to the extent that he proclaims God has nothing to do with nature, and instead is nature’s goal, that with which it must one day harmonize. Nature will become moral. “Nature cannot be static: it is continually being absorbed into the sphere of morality. One day there will be no more nature. It will gradually be absorbed into the sphere of culture.” Talk about progressive utopianism! Talk about a bold antithesis to the view of nature and history, full of pseudo-inexorability, with which one brilliant mind has recently terrified us; in that view, “humanity” is yet again only an empty word, something inconceivable, and history nothing more than the relentlessly unfolding decline, following inexorable laws, of biological entities that men have called cultures. “What if the unchanging laws of nature were an illusion, or were highly unnatural?” asks Novalis. “Everything follows a law, and nothing follows a law. A law is a simple, easily comprehensible relationship. For our own convenience we try to discern laws. . . .” For our scientific convenience, indeed; and because we are lacking in love, are imperious, and seek irrefutable certainty. And also because of our self-complacency, an impulse to betray the human and arrogantly to side with nature against mind and humanity, in the name of nature telling humanity self-satisfied dogmas and thereby appearing wonderfully brazen and aristocratic. But with such treatment the problem of aristocracy, plainly entailed within the opposition between nature and mind, is not even glimpsed, to say nothing of being solved, while the flight into nature can turn into an unaristocratic form of snobbery. I would like at this point, which strikes me as an appropriate one, to interpolate my view of Spengler’s recent work. His Decline gives evidence of enormous power and strength of purpose; it is knowledgeable and stimulating; it is an intellectual novel that is highly entertaining, and its musical structure is not its only feature that recalls Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea, a comparison that places the book on a very high level. But at the same time I have my own democratic opinion about it: I find its attitude false, arrogant, and “convenient” to the point of extreme inhumanity. It would be different if this attitude were a disguise for irony, as I at first supposed, or if its prophecies were really a polemical means of offering a defense. It is legitimate to make a prophecy about civilization—Spengler regards civilization as the biologically inevitable end-product of every culture, including the West—not with the idea that it will actually transpire, but with the idea of preventing it from transpiring, a form of intellectual exorcism: and that was what I thought he was doing. But when I learned that he wanted his prophecies of petrification to be taken literally and dead seriously, and that he was urging young people to act accordingly, to stop wasting time by devoting themselves to culture, art, poetry, and learning, and instead to turn to what is the only possibility for the future, the one thing that they had to desire if they were to be able to desire at all, which is mechanism, technology, business, or if need be politics; and when I perceived that what he offered to the yearnings and wishes of the human being was actually a cold, satanic fist, “the law of nature,” then I turned away from such hatefulness. I have put the book out of my sight in order not to have to marvel at such a harmful, deadly work.

Law! Truly Walt Whitman understood better than that severe mind what is the real essence of law. “Law,” he says, “the law over all, and law of laws, is the law of successions; that of the superior law, in time, gradually supplanting and overwhelming the inferior one.” And he adds: “And, topping democracy, this most alluring record, that it alone can bind, and ever seeks to bind, all nations, all men, of however various and distant lands, into a brotherhood, a family. It is the old, yet ever-modern dream of earth, out of her eldest and her youngest, her fond philosophers and poets. . . .” Old and ever new: the morphologist of history knows and even speaks of this dream, but he speaks of it without any love and with a false inevitability. From his scientific viewpoint the dream of humanity is simply something that appeared once by chance and that will return by the dictates of a mechanical and inhuman law, a phenomenon of mind, fatal and banal in its predictability, a dream on which even the people who are dreaming it should not pride themselves, for all have dreamed it in their turn. To deny the idea of humanity is banal callousness, something that escapes his learned gloom; just as it also escapes him that a single work born of love, such as Mahler’s Song of the Earth, which merges lyrics from ancient Chinese poems with the most advanced musical structures of the West into a humane and organic unity, overturns his entire theory about the radical incommensurability between different cultures. What, then, is humanity? Is it the sum of all men now living or that of all who have ever lived and will live—always and everywhere hard to delimit against the animal world? No, it is something inmost and more essential; to use Novalis’s words, it is “the higher meaning of our planet, the star that connects this individual to the world above, that he turns up toward the sky.” That may well seem like trifling poetry to the science of historical morphology; but beneath its basilisk eye we shall not flinch from making it our own.

Hidden in the insipid rigidity of the viewpoint that has been contested here is a latent politics that can be drawn out. It is not that of the German romantic Novalis, whose ideas perhaps here as well are in harmony with those of that lover of mankind across the ocean. As for war, it is not that he rejects it in on pacifist grounds. But, he says: “What would it be like if a closer and more various connection and contact were the historical aim of war; if it stirred a Europe that has been sleeping until now; if Europe wanted to awaken again; if a State of States, a new political science, stood before us!” The state of states! Is he thinking romantically and hierarchically? But Novalis says in a secular spirit: “International law is the beginning of universal law and a universal state.” And he is one of the earliest to say what everyone today is shouting from the rooftops: “States must finally realize that the achievement of all their aims is possible only through collective measures.”

There is nothing for it but to admit that all this is political enlightenment, is unambiguous democracy—straight from the lips of a knight of the blue flower, one who moreover was a born Junker, from whom one would sooner expect medieval or feudal love of honor, asserted with weapons, than such modernities. But what does he actually say about knighthood? My fellow students, he speaks of it with open contempt. “It was the point d’honneur of chivalry that first introduced a ridiculous formality between human beings. Etiquette is the death of all free humanity, a mixture of Asiatic elements, the meanness of slavery and despotic arrogance, with Christian humility.” He is a profound psychologist: and that too has something to do with a republic. Even more closely connected to the idea of a republic is his phrase about “free humanity,” which is really only another, nonpolitical term for it—and yes, an expression of love, indeed of being-in-love. I use that last, more limited but clearer expression to come to another trait that Novalis and Whitman deeply share, one that unmistakably constitutes the root of their humanity and their socialism. It is love—not in some pale, anemic, ascetic, pitiful sense; but in the sense of that obscene root-symbol that Whitman chose as the title to that raging and reverent sequence of songs, in which lines glisten, such as these:

Come, I will take you down underneath this impassive exterior, I will tell you what to say of me,

Publish my name and hang up my picture as that of the tenderest lover.

Or elsewhere:

There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well,

All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.

And what does Novalis say? “Dancing, eating, talking, shared observing and working, being together, listening to each other, seeing, feeling, etc., all these are conditions and occasions and even functions of the power of the human being of genius. It is amor that unites us. Desire lies at the bottom of all the aforementioned functions. The truly voluptuous function (sympathy) is the most mystical, the almost absolute, the one urging to totality of union (mixing), the chemical.” Earlier I called him a voluptuous thinker; here we have an example of that, one that also illustrates the radicalism of his social psychology. But it is when he speaks of sympathy, the mystical-chemical function or sympathy with the organic, that he most approaches Whitman’s erotic and all-embracing notion of democracy. Sympathy here is that sensuality that sets in very early and is responsive to the touches of desire, and it makes Novalis perceive that even looking is already an elastic pleasure: the need of an object is the result of the impulse to touch, at a distance. It is here that he meets up with Whitman. Sympathy is something like biology as a state of being-in-love; such is Novalis’s quest to assert and experience the organic and the animal, even in domains where it is not ordinarily found: in the air, where the combinations of nitrogen and oxygen are not simply chemical but “purely animal,” and in fire, which has the nature of an animal and is a consuming force κατ’ εζοχήν.² Nonorganic nature, and even plants, animals, and human beings, must be seen as excrement of the organic and animal. Man: the most complicated, developed excrement of a highest and most refined fire. And Novalis, that wide-eyed dreamer, broods over the phenomenon of sexual desire, of the yearning for flesh touching flesh, of pleasure in the naked bodies of human beings, something that this mild-mannered man ascribes to origins in cannibalism. “Might it not be a repressed desire for human flesh?” But right next to this expression of erotic mysticism and skepticism one finds another in which desire is elevated to devout inspiration, to religious humanity: “There is only one temple in this world and that is the human body. Nothing is holier than this lofty form. To bow before it is to pay homage to this revelation in flesh. When you touch a human body, you are touching heaven.”

“The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body.” This is a line from that magnificent poem filled with love’s sacred insanity, which begins: “I sing the body electric.” Its ninth section is an anatomical hymn that is delivered in the exuberant, naive, catalogue-like style of this wild artist, a devout and orgiastic celebration of the human body in its organic structure.

“In a curious way that no one would guess,” the surgeon Wilhelm Meister recounts, “I was already far advanced in my knowledge of the human form because of my theatrical career; since, all things considered, physical man plays the main role in that world—a handsome man, a handsome woman! . . . The freer conditions under which a company lives make the members more familiar with the true beauty of unveiled limbs than would any other environment. Various costumes even require that which is usually veiled to be exposed. . . . And so I was sufficiently prepared to pay steady attention to the anatomical lectures that taught the external features in detail; the inner features were likewise not unfamiliar to me, since I had always had a certain intuition about them.” Shrewd and candid terms. Goethe’s adventurer in the human realm regards the free, sensual, erotic sphere of the theater as a felicitous preparation for the study of that humanistic discipline we call medicine, which, like all its sister disciplines, is a variety and an inflection of the same lofty and deeply interesting theme that one can never consider variously or many-sidedly enough, for it is the human being. Wilhelm, of course, will be led on to further adventures and opportune researches into pedagogy, sociology, and politics: but for these fields, too, aren’t the “freer conditions” that revealed to him the beauty of the human form a felicitous preparation? “O I say,” Walt Whitman calls at the end of his anatomical love song, “these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul, / O I say now these are the soul!” That is Hellas—born anew out of the spirit of American democracy. There is Goethe in it; and the best, most forward-looking, and most instructive parts of Nietzsche; and Novalis’s reverence for the temple. “Was it doubted that . . . / the body does . . . fully as much as the soul? / And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?” That is the third kingdom of religious humanity, and over it presides Eros—as king? No, that would smack of the Middle Ages and chivalry. But Whitman would like it if the youthful god were made president of this new kingdom.

In this context, which remains a political context, and with all due caution and respect, I will venture to speak of the particular sphere of feeling that was alluded to in my last remarks: that zone of eroticism, in other words, where the generally accepted law of sexual polarity proves inoperative, superfluous, and where what we see linked in passionate communion is like with like, maturer masculinity with admiring youth, in which this masculinity may idolize a dream of itself, or young masculinity see a model for itself. Society, which for a long time has contained this without acknowledging it, either suppressing it from awareness or prudishly rejecting it with abomination, is gradually beginning to relax the taboo of denial and disrepute imposed on this phenomenon, to look it more calmly in the face, to articulate its many-sidedness in properly human terms. It can indeed signify enervation, degeneration, sickness, and in such cases one may wonder whether punishment or humane care is the best way to address it. But it is impossible at a deeper level to assign to the sphere of decay a complex of feeling that can contain what is most sacred and culturally fertile. Whoever thinks about nature and its laws, as did Novalis, as something that is to be overcome, will find the charge of un- or antinaturalness a trivial one right from the start; Goethe, moreover, already rejected this common argument with the remark that the phenomenon was thoroughly within nature and humanity, rather than outside of it, as it has made its appearance in all times and peoples and can be aesthetically explained by the fact that, objectively speaking, the masculine is the purer and more beautiful expression of the human ideal.

Schopenhauer put it very similarly. . . . But the dimension of this remarkable subject that I want to bring to attention here is the political one, something that is also not lacking. Isn’t it said that the war, with its experiences of comradeship in blood and death, of hard and exclusive masculinity in its way of life and atmosphere, has powerfully strengthened this erotic realm? The political attitude of its believers is generally nationalist and militarist, and it is said that relationships of this sort form the secret cement of monarchist leagues, indeed, that an erotic-political emotion, modelled after certain loving friendships of antiquity, has been behind specific terrorist acts of our days. And yet Harmodius and Aristogeiton were democrats; and it cannot be said that what seems to be the rule today stems from some more fundamental law. The most powerful, modern counterexample is the poet of the “Calamus” songs, Walt Whitman:

Resolv’d to sing no songs to-day but those of manly attachment,

Projecting them along that substantial life,

Bequeathing hence types of athletic love.

With these songs, this bodily-athletic love, Whitman sought to “make the continent indissoluble,” to “make divine magnetic lands,” “inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks, / By the love of comrades, / By the manly love of comrades.” Eros as statesman, even as a creator of states, is an old, trusted idea, which in our times has recently been skillfully advocated anew; but it is basically nonsense to seek to make its cause and political expression a monarchist restoration. Its cause is rather the republic—in other words, the unity of state and culture to which we give this name; and although no pacifist in the vegetarian sense, he is by his very nature a god of peace, one who, between states, seeks to establish “without edifices or rules or trustees or any argument, / The institution of the dear love of comrades.”

In my attempt to convince you, I did not want to ignore or leave unnoticed a sphere of sensibility that undoubtedly contains or can contain elements important for state and culture. Health? Sickness? Careful with those notions! They are the most difficult in all of philosophy and ethics. Whitman’s worship of boys, since it formed only one fine province of the all-embracing kingdom of his phallically healthy, phallically brimming inspiration, was certainly something healthier than the love for Sophie that beset poor Novalis, who found it shrewd to love a sleeping form in order to prepare a convivial resting place “for the night,” and whose Holy Communion eroticism lets the irritable lecherousness of the consumptive break through in an uncanny way. The “Calamus” songs and the Hymns to the Night: they are as different as life and death or, when Goethe’s definition of these concepts is right, as different as the classic and the romantic. “Sympathy with death”: certainly that formulation doesn’t quite capture all the wonderful, glittering essence of romanticism; but it delimits its deepest and highest moments well enough. The youthful Flaubert knows this when he says that “what the poets of our time feel in the very depths of their being” is what he calls a “deep love for nothingness,” a love for the “empty sockets of the yellow skulls, and tombstones covered with moss”; and in the case of Novalis, that sympathy with the organic that we have spoken about is so mixed together with that other, seemingly antithetical sympathy that never have disease, death, and desire been so closely linked in one man’s poetry. Life itself as disease—the thought is not remote to him, for in organic matter he discerns an instinct for self-destruction, the hallmark of all disease; death and desire for him are one and the same function—namely, the chemical, pressing toward total unification. And from that idea stem his evil associations with the bridal bed.

What do such excesses have to do with the pure and freshly smelling, primitive healthiness of the singer of Manhattan? Nothing, no doubt; and if “sympathy with death,” while plainly not the whole of romanticism, is plainly nothing other than romanticism, it should be wildly alien and repugnant to the prophet of athletic democracy and free states lovingly holding their arms about each other. And yet it isn’t. He was familiar with and cherished it, this sympathy. His love for the ocean would betray him, even if he didn’t betray himself through this confession that the waves of the idle ocean, on whose eternity he rests, murmur to him, “death, death.” For love of the sea is nothing other than the love of death. And it is in the “Calamus” songs—precisely there, and not by chance there—that the old romantic formulation, “death and love,” that immortal and magical formulation that will never become trite, openly becomes the dominating theme of Whitman’s unfettered verse:

Give me your tone therefore O death, that I may accord with it,

Give me yourself, for I see that you belong to me now above all, and are folded inseparably together, you love and death are.

“What indeed is finally beautiful except death and love?” The question is put right there, and it includes the statement that love of beauty, love of perfection, is nothing other than love of death—a claim that has been a commonplace of aestheticism ever since Platen’s poem “Tristan.” If you like, all poetry is disease: for at bottom it is inseparable from, irrevocably bound up with, the ideas of love, beauty, and death—even that primeval, athletic poetry of Walt Whitman, which enabled us a moment ago to establish a relationship between democracy and aestheticism. But isn’t poetry life for the sake of life? If poets love the sea for the sake of death, will somebody reply that it is from the sea that life stems? Or is this the truth: Sympathy with death is more than a vitiated form of romanticism only when death is not set up as an independent spiritual power opposed to life, instead of being a consecrating and consecrated force that is absorbed within life? Interest in death and disease, in decadence and the pathological, is only an expression of interest in life, in man, as the humanistic discipline of medicine proves. Whoever takes an interest in the organic, in life, will also take an interest in death. Perhaps a bildungsroman will strive to show that the experience of death is ultimately an experience of life, that it leads toward the human. Novalis once expressed a profound insight into morality and biology, one freighted with knowledge about desire and ethics, freedom and form. It runs: “Our elements are driven toward deoxidization. Life, instead, is forced oxidization.” Death, in this remark, is perceived as fascination and seduction, elements driven toward freedom, formlessness, and chaos; life, instead, as the whole content of duty. Was it this insight that led the man who dreamed of an eternal bridal night to his ideas about the state and a fine community of human beings?

No intellectual metamorphosis is more familiar to us than the one which begins with sympathy for death and ends with a decision on behalf of service to life. The history of European decadence and aestheticism is rife with examples of this breakthrough into the positive, into the people, into the state—especially in the Latin countries. Many of you will be familiar with Maurice Barrès, the impetuous advocate for the Rhineland. He has written a book with a title reminiscent of Novalis, Of Blood, Desire, and Death. He wrote another with an equally telling title, The Death of Venice. He has been a member of parliament, the president of a patriotic society, a probing theoretician of nationalism, a shaping force of the nouveau esprit in France, and a chronicler of the war. I have said that he is an example; but I have to think a little before I describe him as a model. His “breakthrough” has been of an extremely French sort—as well it should be. But it would not be appropriate for us to imitate him, and if it didn’t sound a bit nationalist, yet again, one might be tempted to say only a Frenchman could believe that nationalism is really life.

Let us drop this question of the French. A people who had the wit to invent nationalism will also have enough wit to be done with it. As for us, we shall do well to attend to our ourselves and our own—yes, let us use the word with restrained pleasure—national affairs. I will invoke for you yet again a term at once somewhat old-fashioned and bright with youthful allure: humanity. That term represents a German middle ground, the human-and-beautiful that our best intellectuals have dreamed of, mediating between aesthetic isolationism and a degrading downfall of the individual into the general; between mysticism and ethics, inwardness and the state; between a deathly negation of ethics and civic values and the all-too-easy ethics of philistine rationalism. We are paying homage to its explicit legal form, whose meaning and aim we have defined as the unification of political and national life, insofar as we flex our still unaccustomed tongues to the cry: “Long live the Republic!”

Translated by Lawrence Rainey