Whoever looks at the pictures of old Pomerania or East Prussia knows that this province and its cities were destined for a downfall. They are hardly imaginable with asphalt instead of cobblestones, with the panorama windows of the modernization of the fifties, with TV people on the squares instead of hay-carts and the first cars. How the brick walls of the cathedral and the lower houses with the wide roofs seem predestined to fall, attracting calamity. The fields and farmhouses were not suited for the industrialization of agriculture with its contamination of the rivers in the marshy meadows and lakes between the Baltic Sea shores, and the dunes with the pine woods. The land was ripe, the squares, houses, streets, fields, woods, country roads and their avenues, the culture of daily life without grand gestures but the homeland of Bismarck and Kleist and Kant and Caspar David Friedrich or Runge,127 a sufficient stamp of German provincial life, without which Germany was not Germany, smiling dully and persistently, certain of its penetrating peace. With the loss of these home provinces of a sedate mood, Germany lost an important reservoir of its persistent life, and the loss of the eastern chain of provinces up to Bohemia, in addition, the lands shed, freed Germany up for the alert businesses of a post-war Europe, to stand in first place as the model pupil of cynical progress. Anyone, for example, who reads the misery of the end of Pomerania, the simple words of the desperate man going down in death and brutality, knows in himself, and can only answer with, what is to be done? The Greeks answered with mythological pictures, for novels, TV plays would not be appropriate. Only the highest effort can answer, of poetry and poems, of the song of sadness in mourning, which needs us. The loss of territories is like that of words in the films from Germany spoken in English, when the art of the age gives up its own language. There is no constitutional patriotism. The patria is there where the graves of the fathers are. The constitution as the land. Only the juridical law of some reason from the heads of men makes it transplantable without the heart-blood, as it is used, and justifies what cannot be justified.