When, in 1915, I had presented to the public the little book Frederick and the Great Coalition, I thought I had discharged my duty to the day and the hour and that I would be able, even in the turmoil of the times, to rededicate myself to the artistic endeavors I had begun before the outbreak of the war. This proved to be an error. I was, like hundreds of thousands of others who were taken from their paths by the war, “drafted,” estranged, and held for long years from my true calling and occupation. It was not the state and the army that “drafted” me, but the times themselves: to more than two years of military service of the mind—for which I was, by birth and by skill, finally just as little suited spiritually as was many a companion in misfortune physically for real duty on the front or at home, and from which I, not exactly in the most even frame of mind, a war casualty, as I should probably say, return today to my deserted worktable.
The harvest of these years—but I will not speak of a “harvest.” I will do better to speak of a residue, a remainder, and a sediment, or also of a trail, and indeed, to tell the truth, of a trail of suffering—the remnant of these years, then, in order to correctly twist the proud concept of remaining into a noun that does not have an excessively proud character, makes up this volume, which I shall, for good reason, beware of calling a book or a work. For twenty years of not completely thoughtless artistic practice have after all taught me too much respect for the concept of a work or composition to claim these terms for an effusion or a notebook, an inventory, a diary, or a chronicle. Here, however, we are dealing with just such a piece of writing, something that has been piled up—although the volume does, at times, and with some justification, by the way, take on the appearance of a composition and work. With some justification: a basic thought that is organic and omnipresent could be pointed to—if it were not just the wavering sense of such a thought, with which, to be sure, the whole work is permeated. One could speak of “variations on a theme,” if this theme had only attained more precise form. A book? No, we cannot say that. This searching, struggling, and probing toward the essence, toward the causes of an anguish, this dialectical fencing all the way into the fog against such causes—the result was naturally no book. For among these causes there was undoubtedly an antiartistic and unaccustomed lack of mastery of the subject, a lack to which my clear and shaming awareness was always alert, and that instinctively had to be concealed by means of a light and sovereign manner of speaking. Nevertheless, just as a work of art can have the form and appearance of a chronicle (something I know from experience), a chronicle can also, in the end, have the form and appearance of a work of art; and thus this bundle of papers shows, at times at least, the ambition and habitus of a work: it is something intermediate between work and effusion, composition and hackwork—even if its point of existence lies so far from the exact middle, in truth, so much more on the side of the nonartistic, that one would do better to take it, in spite of its composed chapters, as a form of diary, the early parts of which can be dated from the beginning of the war and the later sections approximately at the turn of the years 1917–18.
If, however, these notes do not form a work of art, the reason is finally because, as notes and reflections, they are just too much the work of an artist, of an artistic nature—for they are that, in fact, in more ways than one. They are that, for example, as the product of a certain indescribable irritability with intellectual tendencies of the times, of a touchiness, sensitivity, and nervousness of perception that I have always recognized in myself. At times I believe I have derived advantage from this as an artist. Nevertheless, it has always produced the dubious side inclination to react in an immediate literary, critical, polemic way to these stimuli. This is particularly true when, yes, precisely when, it is not just a question of a superficial tingling of the skin, but when I am to a certain extent inwardly involved in what I perceive. It is simply a literary pugnacity or quarrelsomeness, based on the need for balance, and therefore, for its part, committed again all too strongly to angry one-sidedness. All this happens before my critical understanding is intellectually ripe enough in awareness, language, and analysis for me to be able to hope seriously for essayistic resolution. In my opinion, this is how artistic works come into being.
These essays are also the work of an artist in their dependence, in their need for help and reference, in their endless quotations and appeals to strong affidavits of support and to “authorities”—in their expression of reveling gratefulness for favors received, and in the childish urge to force literally upon the reader everything I have selected in my reading for consolation, instead of letting it form the silent and calming background of my own diction. By the way, it seems to me that, in all the unbridledness of this desire, there was a certain poetic sensitivity and taste at work in its satisfaction: quoting was perceived as an art, similar to the art of tightening a story by inserting dialogue, and the attempt was made to practice it with similar rhythmic effect.
An artist’s work, an artist’s writing: a person speaks here who, as it says in the text, is not accustomed to speak but rather to have others, people and things, speak, and who therefore “has” others speak even when he seems to be, and thinks he is, speaking directly himself. A trace of the actor, the lawyer, of play, artistry, detachment, of lack of conviction and of that poetic sophistry that allows the one speaking at the moment to be correct, and who in this case was I, myself—this trace is undoubtedly to be found everywhere; it scarcely stopped being half-conscious—and still, what I said was at every moment truly my intellectual conviction, my heartfelt emotion. It is not for me to solve the paradox of this mixture of dialectics and genuine, honestly striving will to truth. In the end, the very existence of this book vouches for my seriousness.
For I certainly hope that its feuilletonistic tone will deceive no one of the fact that the years in which I piled it up were the most difficult of my life. Yes, it is the work of an artist, and not a work of art; for it stems from an artistic nature that is shaken in its foundations, endangered in its vital dignity, and called in question, from an artist who is disconcerted to the point of crisis, who absolutely could not express himself in any other way. The insight from which it grew, and which made its production seem to be unavoidable, was above all that every work would otherwise have been intellectually overladen—a correct consideration, which, however, still did not do justice to the true state of affairs; for in truth, a continuation of the work on these other things would have shown itself to be completely impossible, and did show itself, upon repeated attempts, to be completely impossible: thanks, that is, to the intellectual conditions of the times, to the agitation of everything calm, to the shaking of all cultural foundations, to an artistically hopeless turmoil of thought, to the naked impossibility of creating something on the basis of an existence, to the breaking up and impugning of this existence itself by the times and their crisis, to the necessity of understanding, clarifying and defending this existence that had been called in question and brought into distress, and that could no longer be understood as a firm, self-evident, and instinctive basis for culture; thanks to a pressing need, therefore, for a revision of all the foundations of this artistic nature itself, for its self-study and self-assertion, without which its activity, impact, and cheerful fulfillment, its every action and creation, seemed from now on to be quite impossible.
But why did things have to seem this way to me, of all people? Why the galley for me while others went free? Of course I know very well that there were artists of all types who met this crisis and turning point at about the same age as I did, who, if they were physically spared by the war, were only temporarily inhibited, if at all, in their work. Works of belles lettres, music, and visual arts have been created in these four years and made public, and they have brought their creators appreciation, fame, and happiness. Youth arrived and was greeted. But also artists of an older generation, older even than mine, have progressed, completed what they began, produced their work as before in accordance with their cultural background and their talent, and it almost seemed as if their creations were the more welcome the less they touched upon and reminded people of what was happening. For the demand of the public for art had ever risen, its appreciation of creative work was livelier than usual, the prospect of every type of reward, including the material, particularly favorable. What I am saying here is a captatio benevolentiae, and I make no secret of it. Really, I am attempting to conciliate by pointing out how much renunciation the book has involved. I put off my dearest plans, which many awaited not without desire or impatience—whether to their credit or discredit—so that I might finish a piece of writing, the extensiveness of which I was admittedly, this time as well, not even vaguely aware; otherwise I would, in spite of everything, hardly have allowed myself to embark on it. I remember well that my enthusiasm in the beginning was great; that I was driven by the belief that I had many good and important things to say to myself and to others. But then: what growing unrest, what longing for “freedom in limitation,” what pain from the enormously compromising and disorganizing nature of all speech; what gnawing worry about the loss of months, of years! But when the point where it is still possible to turn back, to abandon the material and to walk away from it, has passed, then “carrying on to the end” becomes more of an economic than a moral imperative—even if the will to bring it to completion definitely takes on heroic proportions when its growing to completion is unthinkable. There is only one motto for action and writing such as this that explains its foolishness and pain without condemning it completely. It is found in Thomas Carlyle’s French Revolution:
Thou shalt know that this Universe is, what it professes to be, an infinite one. Attempt not to swallow it, for thy logical digestion; be thankful, if skillfully planting down this and the other fixed pillar in the chaos, thou prevent its swallowing thee.
Again, why did “my body have to labor in place of Christendom,” to speak with Claudel’s Violaine? After all, was my psychological condition so particularly grave—that it seemed so much in need of discussion, explanation, and defense? Forty is probably a critical age; one is no longer young, one notices that one’s own future is no longer the general future, but only—one’s own. You have to live your life to the end—a life that has already been overtaken by the course of the world. New things have come over the horizon that negate you without being able to deny that things would not be as they are if it had not been for you. Forty is a turning point in life; and it is no small matter—I pointed this out in the text, I believe—when the turning point in an individual life coincides with the thundering of a turning point in the world; the awareness of this becomes terrifying. But others, too, were forty, and got along better. Was I weaker, more vulnerable to consternation, to destruction? Did I lack pride and inner strength so that I lost myself polemically in new ideas at the risk of bringing about my self-destruction? Or must I attribute to myself a particularly sensitive feeling of solidarity with my epoch, a particular intensification, sensitivity, and vulnerability because I belong to a particular time?
Be that as it may, I reduce the origin of these pages to its common denominator when I call it conscientiousness—a quality that makes up such an essential part of my artistic gift that one could say briefly that it consists of it: conscientiousness, a moral-artistic quality to which I owe everything it has been my lot to accomplish, and that now has played this trick on me. For I know well how close it comes to pedantry, and whoever would like to label and explain away this whole book as monstrous, childishly hypochondriacal pedantry would hardly miss the mark; many times it has not seemed otherwise to me. More than once, more than a hundred times, throughout all my explorations, explications, and expectorations, the question of the motto has forced itself upon me with the laughter that accompanies incomprehensibility. In retrospect, when I consider my clumsy efforts on the political question, I notice some of the same feeling that will certainly come over my readers. “What the devil did it matter to him?” But it did matter to me, it was truly and passionately close to my heart, and it seemed absolutely necessary somehow to clear up these questions according to my best understanding, belief, and ability. For the times were such that one could no longer tell the difference between what concerned the individual and what did not. Everything was excited, stirred up, the problems stormed into one another and could no longer be separated. One could see the interrelationship, the unity of all intellectual matters; the question of the human being himself was there, and the responsibility to this question also included the necessity for a political point of view and resolution. It was the magnitude, the weight, and the limitlessness of the times that left the conscientious person and somehow—I do not know to what or to whom—the responsible person, the person who took himself seriously, nothing that he did not have to take seriously. All pain for the sake of things is self-torment, and the only person who torments himself is the one who takes himself seriously. One will pardon all my pedantry and childishness in these pages when one has pardoned me for taking myself seriously—a fact that becomes clear when I speak directly about myself, and certainly a quality that one can recognize and smile at as the very origin of all pedantry. “Lord, how he takes himself seriously!”—My book certainly provides continual opportunity for this exclamation. I have nothing to say against this except for the fact that I have never lived nor could live without taking myself seriously, except for the knowledge that everything that seems good and noble to me—intellect, art, morality—comes from human beings taking themselves seriously; for the clear insight that everything I have accomplished and produced, indeed the charm and value of every single bit of it, every line and expression of my life’s work up to now—as much and as little as this may say—can exclusively be traced back to my taking myself seriously.
But closely related to conscientiousness is loneliness—it is perhaps only another name for it: that loneliness, you see, that is so difficult for the artist to differentiate from public life. All in all, he is not even disposed to distinguish between the two. His life element is a public loneliness, a lonely public life that is of an intellectual nature, and whose feeling and concept of dignity differ completely from civic, material-social public life, although in practice both can, as it were, coincide. Their unity consists in the literary public life that is both intellectual and social at the same time (as in the theater) and in which the emotion of loneliness becomes socially acceptable, civically possible, and even civically meritorious. The recklessness, the extremity of the artist’s communicative dedication, may lead him to the prostitution and revelation of his personal life, to the most complete Jean-Jacques shamelessness—nevertheless, the dignity of the artist as a private person remains completely inviolate. It is possible, it is even natural, for an artist who has just sacrificed, surrendered, yes, even abandoned himself personally in his work to step out at the next moment among people without the slightest feeling that he has compromised his civic existence in the least—and a cooperative, cultured public, that is to say, one that equates itself as much as possible with the intellectual public, will support him; the merits he has earned as a lonely public person may even stand his civic honor in good stead.
But all this is only conditionally valid; a personal confession to the social public through literary publication is only valid when it is worthy of the intellectual public—otherwise, publication makes it into a joke or a scandal. One must hold to this law, this criterion. But I must now ask myself whether the publication of these pages, the product of a loneliness that is accustomed to being public, is justified; that is, whether they may show themselves worthy of the social public because they are worthy of the intellectual public—and I will be helped little here if I can only defend their publishability, their right to publication, or the public’s right to them, with reasons that are only human and personal. Nevertheless, such reasons must be included. My production suddenly stopped; announced works did not appear; I seemed struck dumb, lamed, seemed to have left the field. Did I not owe it to my friends to tell how I had spent the years? And if it was not a question of a debt—was it perhaps a question of a right? For after all, I had struggled and renounced, had taken great pains, had honestly tried to achieve understanding, even if with insufficient and dilettante powers, and it was human to wish that all this should not be borne, tolerated, done completely “in vain” in private, nonpublic loneliness. I say that such reasons should be included—they are not the decisive ones. The publishability of these pages must be proven and their publication justified from the point of view of the intellect: it is a question of their intellectual right to publication—and truly, I think such a right exists.
This writing, which has the uninhibited nature of a private letter, offers, in fact, to the best of my knowledge and belief, the intellectual foundations of what I have had to give as an artist, and what belongs to the public. If this has been worthy of the intellectual public, then the following statement of accounts must also be so. And since it was the times that irresistibly demanded it of me, it seems that the times have a right to it: a document, it seems to me, has been presented that is not unworthy of being known by contemporaries and even by future generations, if only for its transiently symptomatic value, for its boundless intellectual excitement, its eagerness to talk about everything at once. But even the misgiving that I may not only have shown myself to be a poor thinker, but that I may also have compromised my artistic gift itself by revealing its intellectual foundations, cannot justify my locking up the manuscript. Let what is true see the light of day. I have never pretended to be better than I am, and I want to do so neither by talk nor by clever silence. I have never been afraid of revealing myself. The will that Rousseau expresses in the first sentence of his Confessions and that seemed new and unheard of at the time: “to show a man in the whole truth of his nature, and this man is I,” this will that Rousseau called “unprecedented until today,” and that he believed would find no imitators—has become an inveterate matter of course, the intellectual, artistic ethos of the century to which I essentially belong, the nineteenth; and the verses of Platen stand over my life as well as over the lives of so many sons of this age of confession:
I am not yet so pale that I need makeup;
Let the world know me that it may pardon me!1
I repeat: a fixation of a problematical nature, whether it be image or speech, is suitable for the general public if it is worthy of the intellectual one. If it is, one’s private dignity remains completely untouched. Here I have a human-tragic element of the book particularly in mind, that intimate conflict to which a series of pages is particularly dedicated and which also colors and determines my thought in many other places. It is true of it, too—especially of it—that its exposure, as far as this was at all times possible, is intellectually justified and therefore not offensive. For this intimate conflict takes place in the intellect and has, beyond all doubt, enough symbolic dignity to have a right to publication and, once presented, not to have a rude effect. A cultured general public, that is, one that equates itself as much as possible with the intellectual public, is not scandalized by the revelation of personal matters that are worthy of the intellectual public and to which the latter has a right. The trust implied in such a revelation may prove to be much too “lonely” and optimistically gullible: if it is mistaken, the one who cherished it will not be dishonored.
I said I had served the times by writing this book, by trying conscientiously or pedantically to “put down” in connected sentences the excited, stirred-up foundations of my being. But many a person, after he has taken note of the following chapters, will judge that I have served the times in a very questionable manner, without a healthy love for them, without discipline; that I have “served” obstinately, with a hundred manifestations of hostile disobedience and ill will, and that I have done little to further their fulfillment, completion, and realization. They will say I had not only, or not just, shown myself to be a bad thinker, but also, and much more, to be one who thinks bad thoughts, has a mean disposition and a bad character: by attempting, you see, to support and defend what is dying out and falling away, and to oppose what is new and necessary, to do harm to the times themselves. To this I must reply that one can serve the times in more ways than one, and that mine does not definitely have to be the wrong, bad, and fruitless one. A contemporary thinker has said: “It is not so difficult to discover the direction a culture is taking, and it is not so wonderful as the half-wits all around the country think to join it with great fanfare. To recognize the true path of life, the reversals, the contradictions, the tensions of life, the counterweights it needs, the opposing forces that tense it anew where it has become weak through expenditure of effort, the antagonists, without whom the drama of life does not progress—not only to see all these things, but to feel them alive in oneself, struggling against one another—this makes the person who is the complete human being in his times.” A beautiful statement that strikes a chord in my soul. I do not think that it is the essence and duty of the writer to join “with great fanfare” the main direction the culture is taking at the moment. I do not think and cannot from my very nature think that it is natural and necessary for the writer to support a development in a completely positive way by direct, credulous-enthusiastic advocacy—as a solid knight of the times, without scruple and doubt, with straightforward intentions and an unbroken determination and spirit for it, his god. On the contrary, authorship itself has always seemed to me to be a witness to and an expression of ambivalence, of here and there, of yes and no, of two souls in one breast, of an annoying richness in inner conflicts, antitheses, and contradictions. What is, after all, the origin and purpose of writing if it is not an intellectual-moral effort in behalf of a problematic ego? No, granted, I am not a knight of the times, nor am I a “leader,” and I do not want to be. I do not love “leaders,” and I do not love “teachers,” either, for example, “teachers of democracy.” But least of all do I love and respect those small, empty people who have good noses and who live from knowing what is going on and from following the right scent, those servile and conforming vermin of the times who, with incessant announcements of their contempt for all those who are less quick and mobile, trot alongside the new; or also the fops and up-to-date people, those intellectual swells and elegant ones who wear the most recent ideas and catchwords just as they wear their monocles: for example, “spirit,” “love,” “democracy,”—so that one can hardly hear this jargon today without being disgusted. All of these people, the conformers as well as the snobs, enjoy the freedom of their nothingness. They are nothing, as I said in the text, and therefore they are completely free to express opinions and to judge, and always, of course, according to the latest fashion and à la mode. I honestly despise them. Or is my contempt only hidden envy, since I do not share their frivolous freedom?
But to what extent do I not share it? To what extent am I bound and determined? If I am not nothing, as they are, what am I, then? It was this question that forced me into the “galley,” and by “comparison” I sought to find the answer. The understanding that repeatedly tended to appear was wavering, misty, insufficient, dialectically one-sided, and distorted by effort. Shall I, at the last minute, try again to nail it down to tolerable satisfaction?
I am, in what is intellectually essential, a genuine child of the century into which the first twenty-five years of my life fall: the nineteenth. To be sure, I find in myself both artistic-formal and intellectual-moral elements, needs, and instincts that no longer belong to that epoch, but to a more recent one. But since as a writer I feel myself strictly speaking to be a descendant (naturally not a member) of the German burgherly art of storytelling of the nineteenth century that reaches from Adalbert Stifter to the last works of Fontane; since, as I say, my traditions and artistic tendencies reach back to this native world of German masterfulness that charms and strengthens me by an idealistic confirmation of myself as soon as I come into contact with it, my intellectual center also lies on the other side of the turn of the century. Romanticism, nationalism, burgherly nature, music, pessimism, humor—these elements from the atmosphere of the past age form in the main the impersonal parts of my being as well. But it is especially in a basic disposition and spiritual tendency, in a character trait, that the nineteenth century, taken as a whole, differs from the previous one, and, as is becoming increasingly clear, from the new, present one as well. It was Nietzsche who first grasped this difference of character and put it best into critical language.
“Honest but gloomy,” Nietzsche called the nineteenth century in contrast to the eighteenth, which he found, as Carlyle had, feminine and deceitful. But the eighteenth did have in its humane sociability a spirit in the service of desirability that the nineteenth century did not know. More bestial and ugly, yes, more vulgar, and precisely for this reason, “better,” “more honest,” than the former, the nineteenth century was truer, more subservient to reality of every kind. To be sure it was, in the process, weak in will, sad and darkly covetous, fatalistic. Neither for “reason” nor for the “heart” did it show awe and respect, and through Schopenhauer it even reduced morality to an instinct, namely pity. As the scientific century that was unpretentious in its wishes, it freed itself from the domination of ideals and instinctively sought everywhere for theories to justify a fatalistic submission to the factual. The eighteenth century sought to forget what one knew of the nature of the human being in order to adapt him to its utopia. Superficial, soft, humane, enthusiastic for the “human being,” it advocated, with the use of art, reforms of a social and political nature. On the other hand, Hegel, with his fatalistic way of thinking, his belief in the greater reason of the victorious, signified quite essentially a victory over sentimentality. And Nietzsche speaks of Goethe’s opposition to revolution, of his “will to deify the universe and life in order to find peace and happiness in his visualizing and fathoming.” Nietzsche’s critique, never unsympathetic, becomes highly positive; in truth, it rewrites the religiosity of a whole age by rewriting Goethe’s nature as an “almost” happy and trusting fatalism “that does not revolt, that does not weary, that tries to form a totality out of itself in the belief that only in totality is everything solved, does everything appear as good and justified.”
Nietzsche’s critique of the last century, of this powerful but not very “high-minded” epoch, one that was intellectually not very gallant, has never seemed to hit the mark more splendidly than when it is seen from the point of view of the here and now. Recently I found in print that Schopenhauer had been “social-altruistic” because his morality had peaked in pity—I marked the passage with a large question mark. Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the will (and Schopenhauer never tended to forget what is known of the nature of the human being) was without all social and political intéressement. His pity was a means of salvation, not a means of improvement in any sort of intellectual-political sense that went against reality. In this, Schopenhauer was a Christian. One should have talked to him about the role of art in social reform!—to him for whom the aesthetic condition was a blessed predominance of pure contemplation, a stopping of the wheel of Ixion, a breaking away from the will, freedom in the sense of redemption and in no other sense. Here we have Flaubert’s hard aestheticism, his boundless doubt with the nihil as a result, with the scornful resignation of “Hein, le progrès, quelle blague!” Here Ibsen’s burgherly evil head stands out, similar in expression to Schopenhauer’s. The lie as a condition of life, the bearer of the “moral demand” as a comical figure, Hjalmar Ekdal as the human being as he is, his coarsely realistic wife as the upright one, the cynic as a querulous person: here we have the asceticism of honesty—the harsh nineteenth century. And how much of its brutal and honest pessimism, of its particularly stern, masculine, and “unpretentious” ethos, still holds sway in Bismarck’s Realpolitik and anti-ideology!
I see that this often varying tendency and basic disposition of the nineteenth century, its truthful, blunt, and unfeeling submission to the real and factual, which is averse to the cult of beautiful feelings, is the decisive inheritance that I have received from it; I see that it is this that limits and sets my being against certain aspirations that are now appearing and that negate my world as being without ethos. The novel of the twenty-five-year-old, which appeared at the threshold of the century, was a work completely without that “spirit in the service of desirability,” completely without social “will,” completely without solemnity, eloquence, sentimentality. On the contrary, it was pessimistic, humorous, and fatalistic, truthful in its melancholy submission as a study of decadence. One single unpretentious quotation will be enough to—forgive the expression—indicate the significance of the book in intellectual history. Toward the end, bitter and farcical school stories are told. “Whoever,” it says,
among these twenty-five solid young people, was strong and capable of living life as it is, took things at this moment completely as they were, did not feel offended by them and found that everything was obvious and as it should be. But there were also eyes that were focused in dark reflection toward one point . . .
And these eyes belonged to the latecomer of the burgher family, little Johan, who had been sublimated by decay, and whose only remaining talent was in music.
Little Johan stared at the broad shoulders of the boy in front of him, and his golden brown eyes with their bluish shadows were full of disgust, resistance, and fear . . .
Well, the resistance, the highly sensitive-moral revolt against “life as it is,” against what is given, reality, “power”—this resistance is a sign of decay, of biological insufficiency: intellect itself (and art!) is understood and presented as a symbol of this, as the product of degeneration: this is the nineteenth century; this is the relationship of intellect to life that this century sees—but admittedly again in a special and extreme nuance that was only possible after the culmination of that melancholic-honest tendency in Nietzsche.
Nietzsche, you see, who has depicted the character of this epoch in the most sharply critical manner, signified in a certain sense such a culmination: the self-denial of intellect in favor of life, of “strong” and especially “beautiful” life. This is undoubtedly a most extreme and final escape from the “domination of ideals,” a submission to “power” that was by now no longer fatalistic but enthusiastic, erotically intoxicated, a submission that was no longer quite masculine but—how shall I say—of a sentimental-aesthetic nature—and moreover a find for artists of quite a different degree from Schopenhauer’s philosophy! From an intellectual-poetic viewpoint, there are two brotherly possibilities produced from experiencing Nietzsche. The one is that ruthless Renaissance aestheticism, that hysterical cult of power, beauty, and life that found favor for a while in a certain literary school. The other is called irony—and here I am speaking of myself. With me, the experience of the self-denial of intellect in favor of life became irony—a moral attitude for which I know no other description and designation than precisely this one: that it is the self-denial, the self-betrayal of the intellect in favor of life—and here I define “life” just as the Renaissance aestheticism did, but with a different, lighter, and more reserved nuance of feeling that signifies lovableness, happiness, power, grace, the pleasant normality of lack of intellect, and of nonintellectuality. Now to be sure, irony is an ethos that is not completely of a passive nature. The self-denial of the intellect can never be completely serious, completely accomplished. Irony woos, even if secretly; it seeks to win for the intellect, even if in vain. It is not animal but intellectual, not gloomy but witty. But it is still weak in will and fatalistic, and it is at any rate very far from placing itself seriously and actively in the service of desirability and of ideals. Above all, however, it is a completely personal ethos, not a social one, just as Schopenhauer’s “pity” was not social; not a means of improvement in the intellectual-political sense, not exalted, because it does not believe in the possibility of winning life for the intellect—and precisely for this reason it is a form of play (I say form of play), of nineteenth-century mentality.
But even the person who has not already been aware of it for ten or fifteen years now can no longer fail to see that this young century, the twentieth, is clearly showing signs of taking after the eighteenth much more strongly than its direct predecessor. The twentieth century declares the character, the tendencies, the basic mood of the nineteenth to be discredited, it defames its form of truthfulness, its weakness of will and submissiveness, its melancholy lack of belief. It believes—or at least it teaches that one must believe. It tries to forget “what one knows of the nature of the human being”—in order to adapt him to its utopia. It adores “the human being” completely in dix-huitième fashion; it is not pessimistic, not skeptical, not cynical, and—most of all—not ironical. The “spirit in the service of desirability” is obviously the spirit it favors; it is its own—a spirit of social humanitarianism. Reason and heart are again foremost in the vocabulary of the times—the former as a means of bringing “happiness,” and the latter as “love,” as “democracy.” Where is there still a trace of “submission to reality?” Instead, one finds activism, voluntarism, reform, politics, expressionism; in short: the domination of ideals. And art must propagate reforms of a social and political nature. If it refuses, judgment is passed upon it: critically it is called aestheticism; polemically, parasitism. The new sentimentality is not a product of the war, but there is no doubt that the war has strongly intensified it. No more of Hegel’s “state”: “Mankind” is again the order of the day: no more of Schopenhauer’s denial of the will; let intellect be will and let it create paradise. No more of Goethe’s ethos of personal culture: society rather! Politics! Politics! And as far as “progress” is concerned, by which Flaubert’s heroic Faustian couple reached such an ironical end—progress is dogma—and not a blague for the person who wants “to be considered.” This, in sum, is the “New Passion.”2 It combines sentimentality with toughness; it is not “human” in any kind of pessimistic-humorous sense; it heralds “resolute love of humanity.” Intolerant, exclusive, with French rhetorical maliciousness, it insults by claiming all morality for itself—although in the end other people, too, claim with some justification not to have lived exactly as debauchees, purely for pleasure, even before the rule of virtue was proclaimed, and they might be tempted to answer as Goethe answered a reproachful patriotism:
Everyone does his best, each according to his God-given ability. I can say I have allowed myself no rest day and night in the things nature has determined to be my daily work, and I have granted myself no time for recuperation, but have always struggled and searched and done as well and as much as I could. When everyone can say the same of himself, things will be fine for us all.
As far as I am concerned, I have tried at various places in the following essays to make clear to what extent I have to do with the new times, how much there is also in me something of that “resolution,” of that denial of the “indecent psychologism” of the past era, of its lax and informal tout comprendre—of a will, then, that one might call antinaturalistic, anti-impressionistic, and antirelativistic, but which, in the artistic as in the moral sense, was, after all, a will and not simply “submissiveness.” I have made this quite clear in my work—not because I had a need to join, but simply because I only had to listen to my own inner voice to hear the voice of the times as well. Why did I nevertheless have to come into conflict with the new, to feel myself pushed aside by it, negated, offended, and actually abused and insulted by it, the more unbearable and poisonous because it was done by the highest literary skill, with the most rapacious writing, the most practiced passion it was capable of? Because it confronted me, me personally, in a form that had to call forth from me in opposition the deepest and most basic element, the most personal-impersonal one, the most involuntary, inalienable, and instinctive one, the basic national element of my nature and culture: because it confronted me in political form.
The word “politics” can in no way be avoided in any analysis of the New Passion. It is completely a part of its optimistic-ameliorative nature that it is always but two steps from politics: approximately—and not just approximately—in the sense in which Freemasons and illuminati of a Latin tint are always but two steps from it, and never even maintain these two steps. But whoever asks what kind of politics the New Passion follows shows himself to be caught in an error, as if there were two types or even many types of “politics,” and as if the political attitude were not always one and the same: the democratic one. When, in the following discussions, the identity of the concepts “politics” and “democracy” is defended or treated as obvious, it is done with an extraordinarily clearly perceived right. One is not a “democratic,” or, say, a “conservative” politician. One is a politician or one is not. And if one is, then one is democratic. The political-intellectual attitude is the democratic one; belief in politics is belief in democracy, in the contrat social. For more than a century and a half, everything that has been understood in a more intellectual sense by politics goes back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and he is the father of democracy because he is the father of the political spirit itself, of political humanity.
I met the New Passion, then, as democracy, as political enlightenment and the humanitarianism of happiness. I understood its efforts to be toward the politicization of every ethos; its aggressiveness and doctrinary intolerance consisted—I experienced them personally—in its denial and slander of every nonpolitical ethos. “Mankind” as humanitarian internationalism; “reason” and “virtue” as the radical republic: intellect as a thing between a Jacobin club and Freemasonry; art as social literature and maliciously seductive rhetoric in the service of social “desirability”; here we have the New Passion in its purest political form as I saw it close up. I admit that this is a special, extremely romanticized form of it. But my destiny was to experience it in this way; and then, as I have already said, it is always at any moment on the verge of assuming this form: “active intellect,” that is: an intellect that is “resolved” to be active in favor of enlightened world liberation, world improvement, world happiness, does not long remain “politics” in the more abstract, figurative sense; it is immediately so in the strict, real sense as well. And—to ask the question again foolishly—what kind of politics is this? It is a politics that is hostile to Germany. This is obvious. The political spirit that is anti-German as intellect is with logical necessity anti-German as politics.
When, in the following pages, I have held that democracy, that politics itself, is foreign and poisonous to the German character; when I have doubted or argued against Germany’s calling to politics, I have not done so—personally or impersonally—with the laughable purpose of spoiling my nation’s will to reality, of shaking its belief in the justice of its international claims. I myself confess that I am deeply convinced that the German people will never be able to love political democracy simply because they cannot love politics itself, and that the much decried “authoritarian state” is and remains the one that is proper and becoming to the German people, and the one they basically want. A certain amount of courage is required today to express this conviction. Nevertheless, in doing so, I not only intend no derogation of the German nation in the intellectual or in the moral sense—I mean just the opposite—I also believe that its will to power and worldly greatness (which is less a will than a fate and a world necessity) remains completely uncontested in its legitimacy and its prospects. There are highly “political” nations—nations that are never free of political stimulation and excitement, that still, because of a complete lack of ability in authority and governance, have never accomplished anything on earth and never will. The Poles and the Irish, for example. On the other hand, history has nothing but praise for the organizing and administrative powers of the completely nonpolitical German Nation. When one sees where France has been brought by her politicians, it seems to me one has the proof in hand that at times things do not work at all with “politics”; and this in turn is a sort of proof that things can also work in the end without “politics.” Therefore no misunderstanding should arise when people like me declare the political spirit to be an alien and impossible spirit in Germany. What provoked the deepest element in me, my national instinct, was the cry for “politics” in that meaning of the word that belongs to the intellectual sphere: it is the “politicization of the intellect,” the distortion of the concept of intellect into that of reforming enlightenment, of revolutionary humanitarianism, that works like poison and orpiment on me; and I know that my disgust and protest is not something insignificantly personal and temporary, but that here the national character itself is speaking through me. Intellect is not politics. As a German, one does not have to be bad nineteenth century to fight to the death for this “not.” The difference between intellect and politics includes that of culture and civilization, of soul and society, of freedom and voting rights, of art and literature; and German tradition is culture, soul, freedom, art and not civilization, society, voting rights, and literature. The difference between intellect and politics, as a further example, is the difference between cosmopolitan and international. The former concept comes from the cultural sphere and is German; the latter comes from the sphere of civilization and democracy and is—something quite different. The democratic bourgeois is international, even though he may drape himself everywhere ever so nationally; the burgher, also a motif of this book—is cosmopolitan because he is German, more German than princes and “nation”: this man of the geographical, social, and spiritual “middle” has always been and remains the bearer of German intellectuality, humanity, and antipolitics.
In Nietzsche’s literary remains an interpretation of the Meistersinger was found that is unbelievably full of intuition. It says: “Meistersinger—antithesis of civilization, German tradition against the French.” The statement is invaluable. Here in a blinding lightning flash of ingenious criticism there appears for a second the antithesis that this whole book struggles with—the antithesis that for cowardly reasons has been much denied and disputed, but that is nevertheless still immortally true, of music and politics, of German tradition and civilization. As far as German tradition is concerned, this antithesis remains a matter of the heart that can only be acknowledged with hesitation; it is something emotional that cannot be grasped rationally and is therefore nonaggressive. For civilization, however, it is political hatred. How could it be otherwise? Civilization is politics through and through, politics itself, and its hatred, too, can only be, and must immediately be, political. The political spirit as democratic enlightenment and “humanitarian civilization” is not only psychologically anti-German; it is also by necessity politically anti-German wherever it holds sway. And this has determined the attitude of its internal German adherent and prophet who haunts the pages of this book as civilization’s literary man. Historical research will reveal what role the international illuminati, the world lodge of Freemasons, excluding, of course, the unsuspecting Germans, has played in the intellectual preparation and actual unleashing of the World War, the war of “civilization” against Germany. As for me, even before there was any evidence, I had my own exact and irrefutable convictions about this. Today, it is no longer necessary to allege, let alone prove, that, for example, the French lodge is political to the point of identity with the radical party—the radical party that in France literally forms the hotbed and fertile soil for intellectual hatred of Germany and of the German character. It is not the nouveau esprit of young France that really nourishes hatred of Germans; this spirit, too, is at war with us today, but to it we are an honorable enemy. Germany’s enemy, in the most intellectual, instinctive, venomous, and deadly sense, is the “pacifistic,” “virtuous,” “republican” bourgeois rhetorician and fils de la révolution; this born three-point man—and he was the one with whose word and will the German representative of the political spirit, the one who deals with the New Passion in the sense of “humanitarian civilization,” could immediately, in 1914, unify his own word and his own will, and whose disgusting argot he spoke as he had always done. I repeat: the German representative was not in agreement with the upstanding, nobly respectful foreign enemy, not with the nouveau esprit, which in the intellectual-moral sphere basically sympathizes with Germany, but with the political, the venomous enemy who is the founder and shareholder “d’un journal qui répand les lumières.” This enemy was his hero, the German representative wished for the enemy’s victory, he longed for his invasion of Germany; and this was logical. The triumph of one “military way of thinking” (to use the words of Max Scheler) over the other would have made little sense; what was urgently desired was the victory of the pacifistic-bourgeois “militarism with a cause” (with negro armies) over the “military way of thinking”: And it is here, at the latest here, that our opinions, those of the political neoenthusiast and mine, separated; in the pressure of the times, the contrast between us became acute; for there were constraints of my being and essence that caused me to long for Germany’s victory.
In Germany, one must take the greatest pains to explain and to excuse this wish. In the country of Kantian aesthetics, it is above all advisable to emphasize that one desires a German victory in a disinterested way. I am neither a power-proud Junker nor a shareholder in heavy industry, nor even a social imperialist with capitalist connections. I have no life-and-death interest in Germany’s trade dominance, and I even entertain oppositional doubts about Germany’s calling to grand politics and to an imperial existence. Finally, for me it is also a matter of intellect, of “domestic policy.” With my heart, I stand with Germany, not as far as she is competing with England in power politics, but as far as she opposes her intellectually; and for the German defender of “humanitarian civilization,” it was soon not so much his political hostility to Germany as his spiritual hostility to German tradition that bothered me and awakened my fear, hatred and resistance—especially since for his part, as well, “domestic” policy soon supplanted “foreign” affairs, and hostility to Germany retreated behind opposition to German tradition, or more correctly: fell away from it and left it as its center. His hostility to Germany soon had little more to hope for: the military invasion of Germany by civilization’s troops had failed. What he has continued to put his hopes in, not without a strong semblance of correctness, is the intellectual invasion that is possibly by far the strongest and most overpowering political invasion by the West that has ever become German destiny. Germany’s spiritual conversion (which would mean a real transformation and structural change) to politics, to democracy: this is what he is hoping for. No! This is what has become for him, not without a strong semblance of correctness, as I said, a triumphant certainty, indeed, so much so that he deems it possible today, and does not think it a blemish on his honor, to unite himself with Germany in the first person plural; now he forms words on his lips that he has not used all the days of his life; the words “We Germans.” “We Germans,” civilization’s literary man says in a manifesto that appeared at the turn of the years 1917–18, “now that we have grown up to democracy, have the greatest experience of all before us. A nation does not reach self-government without learning much about human nature and without managing life with more mature organs. The play of social forces lies in nations that govern themselves in full public view with the individuals educating one another and learning about each other. But if we act now at home, the barriers abroad will also soon fall; European distances will become shorter, and we will see our fellow nations as family members travelling the same paths. As long as we persisted in the national status quo, they seemed to us to be enemies—doomed because they did not also persist. Has not every revolution come just before the end? Was it not ruin to try to realize ideas in battles and crises? This destiny shall now be ours as well . . .”
What unspeakably painful resistance rises up in my inner being before this hostile gentleness, before all this beautifully stylized unpleasantness? Should one not laugh? After all, is not every sentence, every word in it, false, translated, basically mistaken, grotesque self-deception—the confusion of the wishes, instincts, and needs of a novelist who has been spiritually naturalized in France with German reality? “This destiny shall now be ours as well!” A sublime and brilliant but basically Latinized literary man who long ago renounced every feeling for the particular ethos of his people, yes, who even ridicules the recognition of such a special national ethos as bestial nationalism, and who opposes it with his humanitarian-democratic civilization and “social” internationalism. This literary man is dreaming! He thinks that just because Germany is in the process of broadening her basis for selecting her political leadership, calling this “democratization,” that things will now be as magnificently pleasant for “us” as they are in France! Caught up in mania and confusion, he is flinging at his country and people a destiny that never, never can or may belong to it—is this not so? I will let his reference to Germany’s “growing up to democracy” stand—a form of government and society that Paraguay and Portugal have long ago “grown up to.” I will pay even less attention to the chamber tirade about “self-governing nations.” The important thing is that never, no matter how much democracy he assumes, will the German human being ever “manage” his life with the “more mature organs” of a boulevard moralist. The German will never mean society when he says “life,” never elevate social problems above moral ones, above inner experience. We are not a social nation and not a bonanza for wandering psychologists. We think and write about the ego and the world, not the role that an ego sees itself playing in society, and not the mathematically rationalized social world that forms the subject of the French novel and theater—or did until the day before yesterday. To be able to think that “activity”—especially “subjective” activity—only means social, critical, and political activity, and to believe that it is proper for the German “to continue this frightful activity and also to waver this way and that”—precisely this is what I call alienation. In the cosmopolitan world of art, such alienation would be completely suitable for the production of goods of bizarre value, but it becomes unbearable from the moment when, as political prophecy, it attempts to set the direction of the nation’s moral life, and presumes to lead it by the hand. Here confusion and distortion reach the point where he claims that we were completely wrong in looking upon our well-meaning fellow nations (the dear and good ones!) as enemies. Does he want to ridicule us, then? We saw them as enemies? We have done only too little of that! Our good-natured, nonpolitical humanity has always led us to think that “understanding,” friendship, peace, and good relations were possible, and we would never have allowed ourselves to dream, we had to learn for the first time in the war with shock and horror, how much they hated us (and not we them!) all this time—hated us, indeed, not so much because of economic competition, but rather—something much more venomous—hated us politically. We had not imagined how, under the guise of peaceful international intercourse, in God’s wide world, the hatred, the unquenchably deadly hatred of political democracy, of the Freemason-republican, rhetorical-bourgeois of 1789, was doing its cursed work against us, against our form of government, our psychological militarism, our spirit of order, authority, and duty.
“Their destiny shall now be ours as well”—that is, “to work for the realization of ideas in battles and crises.” What foolishness! It can never be and never will be Germany’s mission and task, her “destiny,” to realize ideas politically. The politicization of the intellect, as civilization’s literary man sees it, strikes here against the deepest, most instinctive, most steadfast opposition, because here it is an elementary, essential, and basic part of our national ethos to believe that in this politicization both politics and intellect will go to the dogs, that both are equally jeopardized when a philosophy is made into the way of thinking and the basis of society and of the state. Ask all those who know, all those who understand national souls: they will tell you about the reserved character of German democracy. They will convince you that this reserve does not come from a lack of respect for the intellect, but from reverence for it; because reverence for the intellect makes one skeptical of programs of action for its political “realization.” German democracy is not genuine democracy, for it is not political, not revolutionary. Its politicization in such a way that the antithesis of Germany and the West in this point would be leveled out and made to disappear is an illusion. Even its proponents do not deny that such a revolution could not be brought about by institutions, suffrage reforms and the like: only a spiritual change in Germany’s structure, the complete transformation of her national character, would be able to bring it about—and this is, of course, what the German zapadnik3 wishes and what he therefore believes in. He is daydreaming and he is wrong. German “democracy” will never be anything more than economic equalization for the liberation of individual creative powers; at the most an administrative-pedagogical way of freeing natural political talents—as long as it is strictly German democracy, more “German,” that is, than “democracy”; and its essence will not be “politicized intellect,” that is to say, it will not consist of realizing “ideas” politically and staging intellectually sparkling affairs between saber and aspergillum on the one hand and “justice” on the other. Is not all this true?
And still—what triumphant certainty, no longer warlike, but transformed into a happily beaming mildness, speaks from the phrases cited from that manifesto! Is it possible to pass over so much subjective assurance of victory with a shrug of one’s shoulders? And did I not say myself that his hopes, his belief, his triumph, had a strong semblance of correctness? Has the Western intellectual-political invasion been as completely frustrated as the military one? From the beginning this was clearly improbable, for Germany’s national ethos cannot resist nearly as well as her armies can—let us admit what we know! The intellectual invasion has not been frustrated and could not be, for it has encountered not only ethical weakness, but also positive cooperation: the path had been prepared for it, and not just from today and yesterday. Germany’s national ethos does not match those of other nations in clarity and distinctness. It lacks both self-awareness and self-assurance. It is not well defined, it has such “bad boundaries” as Germany herself. But its greatest weakness is its lack of readiness with the word. It does not speak well; and if one defines it in words, they sound paltry and negative, like the statement that it is not Germany’s business “to realize ideas.” Civilization’s political ethos, on the other hand, with its high-minded, rhetorical-literary ability, has the scarcely resistible dash and verve of attacking revolutionary troops. It has admirers, friends, and allies within the walls, betrayers because of high-mindedness, who open the gates for it. Soon it will be fifty years since Dostoyevsky, who had the eyes to see, asked almost incredulously: “Can it be true that cosmopolitan radicalism has already taken roots in Germany, too?” This is a way of asking that is equivalent to astonished confirmation, and the idea of cosmopolitan, or more correctly, international radicalism, itself contradicts the protestation that it is a “mirage” of our present enemies that the national democracies could ever unite into an intellectually unified European or world democracy. By “cosmopolitan radicalism,” Dostoyevsky meant that intellectual tendency that has the democratic civilization-society of “mankind” as its goal; la république sociale, démocratique et universelle; the empire of human civilization. A mirage of our enemies? But mirage or not: those who see this mirage hovering before them must definitely be enemies of Germany, for it is certainly true that a union of the national democracies into a European, a world democracy, would leave nothing of the German character: the world democracy, the imperium of civilization, the “society of mankind,” could have a character that would be more Latin or more Anglo-Saxon—the German spirit would dissolve and disappear in it, it would be obliterated, it would no longer exist. Richard Wagner once declared that civilization disappears before music like mist before the sun. He never dreamed that one day, for its part, music would disappear before civilization, before democracy, like mist before the sun.
This book dreams of these things—in a confused, difficult, and unclear way—but this and nothing else is the content of its fears: “finis musicae”—the phrase appears somewhere in it, and it is only a dream symbol for democracy. The progress from music to democracy—this is what it means throughout when it speaks of “progress.” But when it claims and tries to show that Germany is really moving rapidly and unavoidably in the direction of this progress, then admittedly this is first of all a rhetorical method of defense. For it is obviously resisting this progress; it opposes it conservatively. Indeed, all of its conservatism is only opposition in this connection; all of its melancholy and half-hypocritical resignation, all of its sinking into the breast of romanticism and its “sympathy with death,” is nothing else, either. It denies progress altogether in order at least to deny this progress; it argues quite indiscriminately and even enters into doubtful alliances; it runs up against “virtue,” covers up “belief” with quotes, expresses itself provocatively about “humanity”—all this to oppose this progress, Germany’s progress from music to politics.
But why the effort? Why the harmful and compromising galley service of this book that no one demanded or expected of me, and from which I will have no trace of thanks and honor? One does not worry to this degree about something one does not need to worry about, that is none of one’s business because one knows nothing about it and has nothing of it in oneself, in one’s own blood. I said that Germany had enemies within her own walls, allies and advocates of world democracy, that is. Is this possibly repeated in miniature? Do I contain elements in my own conservative inner nature that aid and abet Germany’s “progress”? Could it be true that my being and—as far as one can talk about such a thing—my impact, too, do not correspond exactly at all to my thoughts and opinions, and that I myself with a part of my nature was and am fated to further Germany’s progress to what in these pages is given the quite figurative name (and which has only superficially to do with universal suffrage) of “democracy”? And what part would this be, then? The literary part, perhaps? For literature—let us once more say what we know!—literature is democratic and civilizing from the ground up; even more correctly: it is the same as democracy and civilization. And could it be my authorship, then, that, for my part, has caused me to further Germany’s “progress”—while I was fighting it conservatively?
With what I have said and asked here, I have summarized the motifs of the following reflections as in a musical prelude. At the same time, I have said what they are. They are the detailed product of an ambivalence, the presentation of an inner-personal discord and conflict. It is this that makes this book, which is no book and no work of art, almost into something else: almost into a story.