The Rudolf Steiner Archive

"Catholicism as such is a principle of progress; but what really and truly stands in the way of spiritual progress among Catholic peoples, for example, is not essentially Catholic. It must be ruthlessly investigated and combated so that Catholicism can unfold its own essence unhindered!" ... "The ideal that guides theological research is the conviction that the equation between correctly understood revelation and correctly interpreted reality can be established. If unbelieving scholars, guided by other ideals, judge differently, they associate the words God and Christianity with a completely different idea than the theologian" . . . So wrote an idealistically-minded German theologian, the Würzburg professor Hermann Schell, a few years ago. ("Catholicism as a Principle of Progress", Würzburg 1897, recently published in its 7th edition). A few days ago, the Pope gave a clear opinion on whether he thinks the same way about the "truly Catholic" as this Würzburg professor. He has placed Schell's writings on the index of books forbidden to the faithful. This means that the professor's teachings are heretical. It is now said that Professor Schell submitted. If this is true, then Schell simply acted as a true and genuine Catholic. And once again, those who hold Cardinal Rauscher's famous words to be the only authoritative statement on Catholicism have been proven right: "The Church knows no progress". Schell is one of those confessors of the Catholic faith who cannot escape the power of scientific achievements. They feel the power of the knowledge that man acquires through his free thinking. But they cannot escape their religious beliefs. They seek to unite their faith with science. It must always be emphasized to them that all free science has developed out of the power of the human spirit; and that in truth Catholicism has never conceded any result of free research for internal reasons. It has only ever retreated as far as it could from the power of the human mind. It has allowed what it could not eliminate from the world. There is nothing within Catholicism that made it possible for him to harmonize his own teachings with the progress of the human spirit. It is well if this is conceded here and there. The true Catholic must be hostile to everything that the human spirit produces of itself. And the modern spirit must be hostile to what the Church teaches on the basis of her faith in revelation. All bridging of this opposition is a falsification of the facts - not necessarily subjective, but certainly objective. And this falsification is harmful. For it prevents the battle between two world views from being fought out honestly. When Professor Schell says: "Why should it be unchurchly in our time to bring the advanced, deepened and expanded philosophy of modern times into a fruitful alliance with the faith in revelation?", such a standpoint prevents the progress of development that corresponds to the actual factors. It creates an intermediate group between honest supporters of the Church and honest opponents, which prevents the clash and pushes the decision out. The confessors of free thought prefer the Pope to Professor Schell. Where they say "yes", the Pope says "no". And that is good. And the Pope has every right to do so. He is infallible in all things that he proclaims ex cathedra. Anyone who speaks about Catholicism must therefore stick solely to the Pope. Since infallibility has become dogma, this must be recognized. - There are certainly naive minds who resent the fact that believers of Professor Schell's kind submit. We would like to ask them: wouldn't non-submission simply be pointless? What should Professor Schell do? Should he continue to claim that his teaching is true Catholicism and that the Roman bishop is wrong? But then Professor Schell would have to say at the same time: Catholicism excludes progress. So he would have to accuse himself of inconsistency. Either Schell remains a Catholic, in which case his teaching is wrong - because the Pope has declared it to be wrong, and anyone who wants to be a Catholic must abide by this declaration - or Schell does not remain a Catholic: then his teaching is also wrong, because Catholicism then knows no progress. - Even more naive minds might say: Professor Schell could fight the dogma of infallibility and say that he, and not the Pope, represents the correct Catholicism. But if I may say so, that would be the very worst thing. Because if he thought it was necessary, Professor Schell would have had to do that long ago. He has been a true Catholic up to now; in other words, a confessor of the dogma of infallibility. If he now comes into conflict with the Pope through his own teachings, then he can only - renounce it.

This is what happens to all those who surrender to an authority. They are enslaved to it. If they want to get away from it, they first have to get away from their own views.

In the session of the Prussian House of Representatives on March 13 (1899), Representative Virchow said that, as an examiner, he had made the sad observation of a decided decline in the general education of our secondary school students. In particular, he missed the ability to think logically, which is absolutely necessary for the proper pursuit of scientific studies. In the past, for example, medical students were required to attend a logical college at the beginning of their studies. Today this is no longer considered necessary. It is believed that healthy thinking does not require knowledge of logical rules. They are considered by many to be old hat. And it was in this spirit that the Minister of Spiritual and Educational Affairs replied to Mr. Virchow. He said that during his student days, logic was still a compulsory course and he remembers how this collegium logicum was ridiculed. Because everything that was taught there as logic, the students already knew from their German lessons at grammar school; and then the treatment was also strange. What was there in the common textbooks? said the minister. And he quoted the well-known conclusion: "All Cretans are liars," says a Cretan; but if a Cretan says that, it must be a lie itself; therefore not all Cretans are liars." Mephistopheles' saying in Goethe's Faust haunts the minister's mind: "I therefore advise you first to attend the Collegium Logicum. - There your mind will be well trained, - laced into Spanish boots, - that it may more deliberately - henceforth - creep along the path of thought. - What you would otherwise do in one fell swoop - driven, like eating and drinking freely, - one, two, three would be necessary." But there is another Goethean saying that seems to have been less contrary to the Minister: "Your good thoughts, in other people's veins, will immediately quarrel with yourself." - If someone experiences that a cobbler makes bad boots, he will hardly vote for the abolition of boots and for walking barefoot. That would be illogical. But what else does the minister do with logic? He is doing exactly the same thing as someone who walks barefoot because he has fallen foul of a bad cobbler. Has he not just proved the necessity of logical training with such illogicality? Just take a look at the current scientific literature. The lack of logical training is outrageously obvious. Yes, one can go even further. Today one can perceive that researchers who are masters in their specialty put forward theories and results of their studies on all sorts of occasions that cause physical discomfort to a logically trained thinker. Our whole spiritual life suffers as a result. Those who follow scientific literature in any field often have to go through a real ordeal. He has to read thick books because he must know the actual results they contain. But he often has to pick out a few bits and pieces from a jumble of useless, illogically constructed theories.

The Minister of Education said that if the entire education is logical, then logical thinking will be achieved even without a logical college. Such an assertion is like saying that one can become a musician through mere musical feeling without first learning the theory of music. Thinking is an art and has a technique like any other art. If this technique is taught in the old logics in a plaited manner, then one should seek to improve these old logics. Anyone who follows the course of intellectual life just a little will know that outstanding achievements have been made in the field of logic in recent years. If the more recent results of this science were made usable for general education, much could be achieved.

There is an urgent need for everyone who deals with any branch of science to do so on the basis of a very general education. All individual knowledge only sheds the right light when it is considered in connection with the common goals of all knowledge. Only those who have acquired a general education can do this. And this can only be achieved if a sum of philosophical knowledge is offered as the basis for all specialized scientific training. Such knowledge is provided by logic, psychology and certain general branches of philosophy in general. Without being initiated into them, someone can handle the methods of any specialized science, but he cannot understand the intentions of spiritual striving. He cannot impart his knowledge to us in such a way that we can see it in the context of the whole development of culture.

It would be sad if there were no sense of such simple truths at all in the leading positions of the subordinate administrations. No one should teach at a grammar school or any other higher educational institution who does not know what the branch of knowledge he teaches means for the totality of human intellectual life. The history teacher should know how historical knowledge relates to mathematical and scientific knowledge in the human soul. To do this, he must firstly know the logical methods according to which all sciences proceed, and he must understand psychology so that he knows how to bring his individual science into a correct relationship with the overall formation of the human soul.

These things are more important than a complete education in a specialized science. For gaps in individual branches of knowledge can be filled if necessary. This is not the case with the general basis of all scientific education. If a teacher of history does not have the details of the Thirty Years' War at hand in case of need, he may sit down and learn them. But general education must permeate his whole being. He cannot catch up on it if he has not acquired it at the right time.

Virchow has touched on an important question. This question has nothing at all to do with which view one takes on the question of grammar school education. One can be of the opinion that our grammar schools are outdated. General education has enough sources in modern cultural life. Today, in order to acquire such an education, one does not need to be tormented for eight or nine years with the study of Greek and Latin. But all secondary schools must be organized in such a way that they offer a general education. And the specialized studies at universities and other institutions of higher learning must be built on a general philosophical foundation.

You have to go back to the founding of Christianity if you want to find a point in the history of human development that seems as significant as the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We are immeasurably closer to everything that has happened in the last four centuries than to what happened before. We feel that our own cultural life forms a whole with the events of this age, and that everything that has gone before seems like something complete.

Gutenberg's invention stands there like the great landmark that separates this completed era from the cultural epoch that still continues today. If we take a closer look, Gutenberg appears to us as a contributor to everything that has happened in the last few centuries. Our material and spiritual life fully confirms what Wimpheling said soon after Gutenberg: "Of no invention or intellectual fruit can we Germans be so proud as of the printing press. What a different life is stirring in all classes of the people, and who would not gratefully commemorate the first founders and patrons of this art?" But it can also be said that no art entered history at the right time like letterpress printing. It is as if the whole world had been waiting for Gutenberg's deed in the middle of the fifteenth century. A change in social coexistence, in people's ideas and feelings had been in the making for a long time. German mysticism, which brought about the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, is the herald of the new epoch. The mystics wanted to free themselves from the ideas handed down to man by an old tradition, which could only be believed on the testimony of authorities. They wanted to seek the source of all spiritual life within their own souls. An urge for the liberation of personality, of individuality, took hold. The individual wanted to examine for himself the thoughts to which he had to adhere in his cultural tasks. The need for a new means of acquiring human knowledge had to arise from such an urge. He who has the will to surrender himself unreservedly to authority can do no other than go and have the views of this authority conveyed to him orally. Those who want to seek truth and knowledge for themselves, based on their own thinking, need a book that makes them independent of authority. Gutenberg put the book in people's hands at a time when they had the greatest need for it. Luther translated the Bible into the native language of the Germans. Gutenberg paved the way for this now comprehensible Bible to travel all over the world. The Reformation is inconceivable without the prior invention of printing.

The way in which the spiritual treasures made accessible to all people through the art of printing initially had an impact clearly demonstrates the immense importance of this art. Before its invention, knowledge of scientific laws was a mystery to a few. The great masses of the people had to rely on the worst superstitions if they wanted to explain the natural phenomena that took place before their eyes every hour. The book gave these masses the opportunity to form ideas about the natural course of what was happening before their eyes and ears. But the masses, who for centuries had relied solely on belief in authority, were ill-equipped to form truly factual ideas. The books conveyed ideas that people had never heard of before. People therefore believed that there must be more to these ideas than the simple, plain letters of the new art conveyed. Such beliefs paved the way for all kinds of "secret sciences" and arts, for the charlatans who claimed to possess a special higher knowledge and whom the people willingly believed, allowing themselves to be beguiled by them because they were slow to form their own independent judgment.

We can still observe the inability, nurtured over centuries, to explain natural facts simply in the profound books of such an exquisite mind as Jacob Böhme (1575-1624). This simple man is truly great in his depiction of all things that can be gained through contemplation of one's own heart and mind. However, he becomes highly adventurous when he wants to explain physical or other natural occurrences.

Such phenomena show how Gutenberg's deed contributed to the expansion of Western mankind's horizons. It was through the art of printing that insight into nature was first gained for the majority of mankind.

This conquest of knowledge of nature gave the intellectual life of the modern age a completely different character. As unworldly and hostile to nature as the life of the Middle Ages enclosed in monasteries was, all education before the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was essentially unworldly. What could be the subject of such an education? Nothing other than what man could draw from himself. One did not allow oneself to be instructed by natural phenomena; one only sharpened the logical weapons of the mind. Scholasticism is the result of such an unworldly educational system. It is fair to say that scholasticism could only be decisive for intellectual life as long as there were only written books that were inaccessible to most people. The educational path that someone who wanted to get hold of these books had to go through beforehand was such that it brought the whole human mind in a direction that was receptive to scholasticism. The printing press made it possible to attract entirely new forces to participate in intellectual culture. People could participate in the promotion of education who had not been forced into a particular path. This also changed the whole physiognomy of education. Instead of merely dealing with unworldly scholasticism, the focus was directed towards experience, towards real life. Gutenberg can also be seen as a silent participant in all the achievements associated with the names Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei, Baco of Verulam. For Copernicus' influential book, which showed astronomy new paths, Kepler's discoveries of the movement of celestial bodies: they could only become truly fruitful for the world if they met a generation that sought a world-friendly, not a world-alienated education.

Gutenberg made it possible for the great pathfinders of science and art in modern times to speak to a wide circle of people. The prosperity of a scientific world view depends on the participation of as many people as possible in education. As long as truth was sought in the human mind alone, it was enough for a few people to devote themselves to this search and communicate their findings to others. But since truth has been sought in the immeasurable number of facts of the external world, it is necessary that the circle of those interested in enriching education be as large as possible.

But not only intellectual culture, but also social and economic life in the fifteenth century was virtually waiting for a new means of disseminating human thought, established facts and experiences. The growth and developing independence of the merchant class placed higher demands on the personal efficiency of the individual than earlier conditions. Previously, the activity of the: Previously, the activities of the individual had been strictly determined by the whole to which he belonged, by the social organism in which he was integrated, and within very narrow limits. In the fifteenth century, all these things underwent an expansion. The individual detached himself from the associations which had formerly prescribed his aims. The whole of life became more complicated. The fixed cooperatives had loosened. The individual had to make his own way through life. It was not the guild that now determined what had to be done, but the personality. The large merchant could now only look at the personal efficiency of his clerks and authorized signatories. Family considerations and class affiliation, which had previously been the deciding factors as to who should be appointed to a particular position, were now completely eliminated. The need arose for the individual to have a broad view of the world. People had to find out what was going on in the world. Again, it was Gutenberg's invention that made this possible. Printed information took the place of the primitive means of communicating about world conditions that had been used in the Middle Ages. The first "newspaper" appeared as early as 1505, bringing news about Brazil.

Printed communication made possible what we call public opinion. The whole of humanity was, as it were, drawn into the great consultation that steered the course of world events. In pamphlets, tracts and pamphlets, the individual spoke to the whole. The seventeenth century saw the development of the newspaper and with it the influence of the popular spirit. Alongside the cabinets and the individual statesmen, the people appeared on the world stage and had their say when it came to major political and cultural issues. And the individual statesman is forced to adapt himself to public opinion if he wants to be successful. We see that statesmen disseminate the motives for their actions through the press in order not to be powerless; we see the respect for public opinion growing more and more among leading personalities. Wallenstein's officers send reports of their military exploits to the Munich newspapers; the Austrian government complains to the Brandenburg government that the Berlin newspapers have an anti-Austrian bias. It is thanks to the art of printing that the popular spirit gradually had to be reckoned with as a fully justified element within the world movement.

It is not going too far to say that the Age of Enlightenment was essentially influenced by printing. Gutenberg's workshop in Mainz laid the foundation for the attitude to which the philosopher Kant gave monumental expression with the words: "Have the audacity to use your own reason." For this reason first had to be gradually developed into such boldness. It could only do so if it constantly knew how to obtain information about what was going on in the world. And anyone who wants to benefit from using his own reason must also be able to count on his voice being heard. The eighteenth century was allowed and able to be enlightened because the seventeenth developed public opinion and established its value.

What the publicity of opinion means was soon learned by those in power, but also by those who wanted to contribute their mite to the progress of intellectual life. We can follow how power and education were linked to the art of printing, because successful work depended on it. Book printing found its best nurturing grounds in the vicinity of educational establishments, and scholars fraternized with the new art, even becoming book printers themselves in order to make their works known to the world. The papal envoys no longer merely sent their own weekly reports to Rome, but also the newspapers in which the popular voice was expressed.

It has a deeply symbolic meaning that the art of printing was met with a similar distrust as knowledge, knowledge itself. And it is significant that Gutenberg's comrade Fust or Faust was associated with the most culturally and historically interesting legend of modern times. Because man has seized knowledge, knowledge, he has fallen away from God. This is the meaning of the Fall of Man. Man's thirst for knowledge could only be attributed to the intervention of the devil. And the "black art", the great ally of the thirst for knowledge, was portrayed as nothing less than a work of hell. It was said of Faust: "He no longer wanted to be called a theologian, became a man of the world, called himself a Dr. Medicinae". The fact that science and the art of printing were followed by a similar formation of legends shows their deep inner relationship.

With the spread of the art of printing, we also see poetry and all literature becoming popular. The scholarly veneer that intellectual life had until then made way for a completely new spirit. The cheerful joke, the amusing prank, enters the art of storytelling. One knows that one can now speak to the people, and one therefore endeavors to offer them things that are connected with their own sentiments, with their feelings and imaginations. And from the people themselves, who are now taking part in spiritual life, new forces are growing. One must not underestimate how much the art of printing has contributed to the fact that personalities such as Hans Sachs were able to rise to a significant height of creativity. How much would never have come before his eyes had it not been for the printing press.

Gutenberg created the bridge between two worlds that are called to work together, which can only bring about a prosperous process of development for mankind through constant interaction. In his "Speeches to the German Nation", Fichte described it as a serious detriment to culture when a scholarly community is confronted with a people that is dependent on itself, that does not understand it and from which it is not constantly supplied with new, fresh driving forces. In the full sense of the word, such a judgment can only be made about the culture of the Middle Ages. The last four centuries have brought about a complete change in it through the printing press. The participation of the people in their work also had the most favorable effect on the scholars. The latter had lost all contact with the other classes. This can best be seen in the first books on natural history that were handed down to the people. These were interspersed with all kinds of miracle stories. It was believed that the people were not ready for real natural truths. In this, too, they soon changed their ways. On the contrary, people were driven to clarify their own thoughts, to give them a better form, because they wanted to be understood. The need to communicate knowledge led to a clarification of knowledge itself. People began to think about the art of how best to make education accessible to the widest circles. Cormenius' great pedagogical thoughts on the tasks of popular education presuppose the need for a lively interaction between the people who desire knowledge and the bearers of the entire intellectual life.

In this way, we can trace the influence of Gutenberg's deed into the whole of modern life. If other intellectual heroes have created the content for this life, he has provided the means to bring this content to full fruition and effect. That is why we are so at home in everything that the last four centuries have produced; and that is also why everything that we historically appropriate about the times that lie before the invention of the art of printing is so foreign to us. How a person thinks depends more than one is usually inclined to assume on the way he relates to his fellow human beings, how he interacts with them. Just as language itself, which builds a bridge from person to person, is a creator of culture, so the printed word, this powerful mediator, this appointed representative of the spoken word, is a co-creator of modern culture. Man took possession of this printed word in the age in which he began to place the highest value on his individuality, on personal efficiency. By emphasizing his personality, he turned away from the old cooperatives, within which the space became too narrow for him. The art of printing has given him a new means to seek a new association in place of the old limited one, which corresponds to the broader horizon of life. The more man individualized himself, the more he needed a means detached from his immediate personality in order to return to the whole. Thus the art of printing proved to be the unifying bond at the point in history when life made the imperative demand on the individual and also on the individual nation to separate themselves in order to make themselves fit for the great struggle for existence.

Since the art of printing was invented, it has shown itself to be the appointed ally of human progress. Where the latter reaches a certain height, the art of printing favors it; where progress is hindered, the art of printing also suffers. The beneficial effect of the Dutch association of the "Brothers of the Common Life" is a clear example of this. It was founded by Gerhard Groote (1340-1384) from Deventer and set itself the task of transforming education from a scholarly monopoly into a source of public welfare. This association developed a significant educational activity. The establishment of a large number of schools can be attributed to this activity. With the advent of the printing press, the cultural work of the Brothers of the Common Life took on a whole new life. It became possible for them to ensure the widest possible distribution of good educational books. They took the printing of these books into their own hands and thus became promoters of the new art in Holland and throughout north-western Germany. If this fact shows that progress and book printing went hand in hand, the regression that occurred in this art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries after an initial period of great prosperity and rapid dissemination is no less indicative of this relationship. The Peasants' Wars, the unfortunate religious turmoil with its bloody, devastating aftermath, the Thirty Years' War, dealt a series of heavy blows to culture, which had reached a wonderful height at the beginning of the modern era. And the art of printing now participated in the decline of intellectual and material culture, just as it had previously contributed to its prosperity.

The interaction between a lower level of general education and the art of printing is also unmistakable in the difficulties the latter encountered in Spain. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, clerical censorship and the paternalism of the people on the part of the clergy were greater here than in Central Europe. For this reason, the art of printing spread only slowly; and even the little that it achieved here was due to the influence of individuals with an interest in science. And because this art had no real foundation in Spain, it was subsequently possible for the subjugation of intellectual life by the Jesuits and the Inquisition to find a special home here. Turkey is the most glaring example of the fact that only those who are also patrons of Gutenberg's art can play a role in modern cultural life. The Turks proved to be complete enemies of this art right up to the eighteenth century. The Sultan Bajazet threatened printing with the death penalty in 1483, and his son renewed the ban. This people had to pay for such anti-cultural measures by losing all significance in the intellectual life of Europe. It is interesting to follow the relationship between intellectual life and the art of printing in Hungary. King Matthias Corvinus ruled there in the second half of the fifteenth century. He had a profound interest in the sciences and arts. For this reason, the art of printing was already being cultivated in the Hungarian capital from 1473 onwards. A lively intellectual life therefore prevailed in this country, which had to contend with "the greatest difficulties in terms of culture due to its geographical location.

Man is a being who can only achieve truly purposeful work in the future by recognizing the past. History is his great teacher. Now compare how much more precisely and intimately we know the last four centuries than the earlier times, when printing was not yet the companion of all culture. With the latter, we are all too often dependent on mere conjecture and bold hypotheses, because historical tradition leaves us in the lurch for large areas. The art of printing is therefore not only an eager contributor to all culture, it is also the best, the most faithful guardian of the treasures of the past, which mankind needs so much for the future.

In the nineteenth century, the age of scientific knowledge and technology, the art of printing did not lag behind other cultural factors in its progress. With its great technical advances, it can stand worthily alongside the other achievements of our time. And if we are not without optimism today as we approach the dawning century and look joyfully into the future of human development, we owe this mood in no small part to the genius of Johannes Gutenberg.

One politician has called the life of Austrian Germans in the present day a churchyard in which a myriad of hopes lie buried. It will be difficult for an outsider to form an idea of the reasons that have determined the fate of the Germans of the Danube and Alpine country in recent decades. But anyone who, like me, spent the first thirty years of his life in Austria, especially those who spent their academic years in Vienna at the beginning of the 1980s, will hardly find anything incomprehensible in the course of Austria's development. For he has seen the individual fates of numerous personalities unfold, which are nothing more than a repetition of that development process on a small scale. And in these individual cases, everything is understandable if one considers the character, the temperament of the Austrian German and, in relation to this, the peculiarities of intellectual life in his state.

I would like to use the example of a student friend to show how easily talents can perish in Austria, which under other circumstances would probably have been very fruitful. I began my studies at the Vienna University of Technology in the eighties. It was a time when a lot was happening in Austria. Liberalism, which had experienced a brief heyday after the defeat of Königgrätz because authoritative circles hoped that it would save the state, which had been brought into complete confusion by the bureaucracy, had lost its prestige. He had lost the leadership of the empire, partly out of weakness and partly because he had been given too short a time to realize his intentions. We young people of that time no longer expected anything significant from him. We devoted ourselves all the more enthusiastically to the up-and-coming German nationalist movement. Its leaders cared little for what had previously been called the "Austrian idea of the state". They saw it as an abstract concept that was hostile to reality. An Austrian state that took no account of the diversity of its national cultures, but instead wanted to resign itself to a democracy that took account of all kinds of inherited prejudices and rights on the basis of quite moderate progress, seemed an absurdity to the younger generation. The younger Germans believed they could look to the future with all the more hope if they emphasized their own nationality, if they immersed themselves in their national culture and cultivated the connection with the course of intellectual life in Germany. The young German academics of the eighties settled into such ideals. They did not notice that the development of real events was taking a direction in which only endeavors that rested on much cruder premises than their own had any prospect of success. The great effect achieved soon afterwards by Georg von Schönerer, who replaced the idealistic German nationalist tendencies with the racial standpoint of anti-Semitism, could not cause us to convert. Rarely do idealists do anything other than complain about the misjudgment of their justified aspirations in such a case. In Austria at that time, these idealists had the rug pulled out from under their feet, so to speak. Their activities were paralyzed by a public spirit whose aspirations they wanted no part of. These words could be used to describe the fate of a large number of personalities who devoted themselves to their studies during the period described. Only a few of them took it upon themselves to seek satisfaction in professions that were remote from the public life of Austria; many fell into a dull philistine life of unpleasant resignation; quite a few, however, were completely shipwrecked in life.

I would like to pay tribute to one of the latter with these lines. His name is Rudolf Ronsperger. In the fullest sense of the word, he was one of the idealists just mentioned. He showed a promising poetic talent to those who, like me, became friends with him during his student years. The German nationalist idea was the soil on which such talents developed. In Ronsperger's case, in addition to the shipwreck we experienced with this idea, there was something else that is no less characteristic of Austrian circumstances. He had not graduated from a grammar school, but from an upper secondary school. To a certain extent, these Austrian upper secondary schools are models of modern educational institutions. There, without Latin and Greek, one is brought to an educational level that is completely equal to that of the Gymnasium in every other respect; the only difference is that their pupils lack knowledge of Latin and Greek. This is why they are denied access to university. These secondary schools are a loud and clear testimony to the half-measures that are indigenous to Austria in all areas. Almost everywhere, one remains stuck in the beginnings of legitimate goals. In most cases, there is a lack of resilience for the final consequences. This was the case with secondary schools. They were set up in such a way that the pupils received a modern-humanistic education; and then the more idealistically inclined among them were barred the way to a profession which, according to their previous education, they alone could wish for. Countless personalities fell victim to this half-measure in the organization of the education system. Ronsperger was one of them. Due to the nature of his talent and the direction this talent had taken within the Realschule, he was completely unsuitable for a technical profession. He did not have the energy to catch up later on what would have opened the doors to university for him. In this he was quite Austrian himself. He remained stuck in half measures. The course of his life is the understandable consequence of his Austrian character and the Austrian circumstances described above. He and I lived through many things together as students; later life led us apart. In friendly intercourse he communicated to me many a pleasant poem and some dramatic achievements, including a drama "Hannibal", about which Heinrich Laube later spoke not without praise. I then only heard that he had become a railroad official. - A few months ago, his sister, the wife of a respected writer living in Berlin, gave me the estate of his friend from university. After all hope had faded, he ended his life at the age of thirty-eight.

I do not feel compelled to share anything from the contents of this bequest, which contains lyrical and dramatic works, even though it contains a comedy in four acts, which was praised by the judges at a prize competition in Vienna for its very good dialog and only had to be rejected because the man who had been mistreated by life had painted this life as all too unreal. It is not these performances that must elicit deep sympathy for the unfortunate man, but his life. There is a document in the estate that clearly speaks for this life. It is a letter to me, written several years before Ronsperger's suicide. In this letter he wrote of his dashed hopes, of the suffering that had been imposed on him; he was trying to revive our old friendship in order to find his way back to some extent with my help. He didn't send the letter because he couldn't get my address. This fact symbolically expresses his whole fate to me. He is a representative of the many characters, especially in Austria, who go so far in all their endeavors until they are confronted with reality. And even if this reality offers obstacles of ridiculous pettiness, as in this case, - they do not enter this reality. I am convinced that countless contemporaries of Rudolf Ronsperger could characterize themselves in the same way as he has done in this letter. I am sharing some of it because I do not regard it as a random individual case, but as something typical. "Little remarkable has happened in my external circumstances. First transferred to Leitmeritz, later to Kostomlat, then back to Leitmeritz, finally for almost two years now a traffic officer in Nimburg, I am now in a position that a subaltern officer could not wish for more prestigious and pleasant... There is more to tell about the fate, or rather the changes that my inner life has undergone in recent years. Much, perhaps everything, may have changed in my views of the world and man - but one firm conviction has not been lost to me even in the five years of bitter struggle: the conviction of my poetic profession. It has remained alive to me, even though I have devoted myself to a life's work that usually takes up the whole person day and night and usually robs him of the ability to devote himself to secondary thoughts that are completely different from his official duties and almost incompatible with them. It has stayed with me in spite of the mocking smiles of all those who have learned of it by chance. And even if nothing will be heard of my writings in the wider world, I believe I can say it boldly: I am a poet after all ... . You might call that self-aggrandizement. But anyone for whom poetry has become a necessity in life as it has for me, anyone who, like me, is compelled to put all his feelings and thoughts into poetry, can justifiably claim that he is called to be a poet. Whether chosen? - That's a question I can't answer with "no", because I would be depriving myself of a good part of my hopes - and a sanguine of the first kind, as I am, doesn't do that. But I am not blind to all the faults that I possess and that have contributed to the fact that I have not yet achieved what alone could have a determining and indeed definitive effect on my professional direction: success. - Lack of energy is the first and greatest of all these faults; the lack of strength and perseverance, of that iron perseverance, that determined and victorious tenacity in the pursuit of plans once made, which are always the accompanying qualities of talent and help it to achieve a breakthrough under the most difficult circumstances. - Without being immodest, I can say that I would have done well if luck had favored me and a warm sunshine had made my ability blossom, if my inclinations had met with no resistance and my attempts had been favored by fate. I would have sailed swiftly in the direction of the wind; and I might have achieved much that others would never have attained under equally favorable circumstances. I lacked the courage and strength to sail against the wind. - I made many fainthearted attempts - and the fact that I did not fail completely and plunged headlong into the waves alone gives me hope that the wind might turn once again and drive the clumsy skipper forward who did not want to learn how to turn the sails." Unfortunately, this shift in the wind did not happen. More energy would have allowed Rudolf Ronsperger to seek his own way, away from the paths marked out by Austrian cultural conditions; less idealism and temperament would have caused him to adapt to the profession into which these conditions had brought him. He would then have buried the conviction of his profession as a poet in the dull sea of everyday life.

Born on October 25, 1800

There are few works of history whose reading evokes such a sure feeling that they take us into the spirit of the epochs described as Macaulay's "History of England". Undoubtedly there are historians who are able to shape their material more artfully, to bring out the personalities more vividly, and those who are able to apply even greater diligence in the collection of details than Macaulay. The harmonious interaction of these three skills, as found in his work, can only be found in the same way in very few historians. The first two volumes of the work were published in November 1848. The publication was awaited in England with the highest hopes. The most extraordinary things were expected from the man who had been held in the highest esteem as an essayist and politician for more than twenty years. Macaulay surpassed everything that had been expected. In the shortest possible time, translations into German, French, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Bohemian, Hungarian and Persian were available. Such a rapid spread of the book throughout the educated world is perfectly understandable when one considers the aforementioned sense of security that its study arouses. It is one of those literary achievements in which one gains complete confidence as soon as one first becomes acquainted with them. The first two volumes cover the short period of English history from 1685 to 1689; in the later volumes Macaulay succeeded in describing events up to 1704. Ten years of careful study preceded their publication. Even if one does not learn about this care from Macaulay's biography, one soon gets to know it from the work. Every sentence expresses it forcefully. The description of the facts is so vivid that one almost believes one is listening to a contemporary; the characterization of the personalities portrayed often lulls us into the illusion that someone is telling the story on the basis of personal acquaintance. This perfect maturity of his historical judgment is a result of the course of Macaulay's life and his quite unique character. He was almost always in situations in life that offered him the widest conceivable horizon of experience. His father was sent to Jamaica by a Scottish trading house when he was sixteen. There he experienced the horrors of slavery. This prompted him to devote part of his life to fighting it. After his return home, a company founded for the purpose of freeing slaves commissioned him to colonize freed slaves on the coast of Sierra Leone. The mindset of such a personality, who had matured in cultural tasks on a grand scale, must have contributed to the development of a great, free spirit in his son. The father certainly influenced the young Macaulay in this direction. The parental home often brought together numerous men who were involved in a wide range of activities. The old Macaulay did everything he could to arouse his son's interest in the negotiations and work of these men. - When Macaulay was twenty-five years old, his first important piece of writing appeared in the "Edinburgh Review" on Milton. It made the author a famous man in one fell swoop. Fame at such a young age raises those who have the prerequisites for it to a higher level of activity. It gives the strength necessary to bring talent into the right relationship with things and with one's contemporaries. In a country like England, the attention of those interested in public life was soon to be drawn to the young writer. In 1830 he was elected Member of Parliament for Wiltshire. He was a representative of the people at a turbulent time. The French July Revolution sparked calls everywhere for the expansion of freedom. Macaulay was privileged to participate as a Member of Parliament in the debate on Lord Russell's reform bill in 1831. The preservation of the English constitution was in question. Macaulay acted in a way that added to his reputation as a great writer that of an important politician. Three years later, his field of work expanded again. He was elected a member of the High Council of India. He administered his office in England's colonies on the basis of a highly ethical view of life. His activities in India lasted until 1837 and left a beneficial mark on both the material and spiritual culture of the country. - Until 1847, Macaulay led a quieter life, devoting himself almost exclusively to extensive studies for his "History of England". In 1847 he once again entered Parliament. The extent of his influence, which was based on nothing more than the persuasive effect of his words and reasons, can be seen from the fact that in 1853 he succeeded in defeating a bill relating to the exclusion of the Chief Archivist from Parliament, which had been as good as passed before his speech, by a majority of over a hundred votes.

The fact that Macaulay was able to exploit the fortunate circumstances in which he found himself for the purpose of comprehensive effectiveness is explained by the extraordinary qualities of his mind. In addition to an almost miraculous memory, he had a rare gift for combining information, which, as a historian, allowed him to illuminate one event through another, often quite distant one, and which, in the field of practical activity, allowed him to energetically find the appropriate means to achieve the goals he had in mind. I would like to cite one of his brilliant historical analogies to characterize his intellectual capacity. It is to be found in the essay "Burleigh and His Times": "The only event of modern times which can be conveniently compared with the Reformation is the French Revolution, or, to express it more definitely, that great revolution in political views which took place during the eighteenth century in almost all the countries of the civilized world, and which celebrated its greatest and most terrible triumph in France. Each of these memorable events would be most correctly described as an outrage of human reason against a caste. One was a struggle for spiritual liberty, waged by the laity against the clergy; the other was a struggle for political liberty, waged by the people against princes and nobility. In both cases, the spirit of innovation was initially encouraged by a class of society that one would have expected to be in the forefront of prejudice. It was under the protection of Frederick, Catherine, Joseph, and the French greats that the philosophy which later threatened all the thrones and aristocracies of Europe with destruction received its terrible development. The zeal with which scholarly studies began to be pursued towards the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century found warm encouragement from the heads of the same church to which the scientific enlightenment was to become so pernicious. When it broke out, it happened in both cases with such violence that even some of those who had at first distinguished themselves by the freedom of their views turned away in horror and disgust. The violence of the democratic party transformed Burke into a Tory and Alfieri into a courtier. The passion of the men at the head of the religious movement in Germany made Erasmus a defender of the abuses, and caused Thomas More, the author of the Utopia, to act as a persecutor against the followers of the innovations."

When one reads the character sketches of historical figures that Macaulay has provided, one is often reminded of the monumental style of Emerson. But whereas the latter, as a rhetorician and moral writer, worked towards the finely elaborated thought and preferred the faithfulness of the apergus to the naturalistic depiction of reality, the reverse is the case with Macaulay. But his immersion in reality is so mature, so thorough and thoughtful that his historical fidelity is automatically transformed into a striking apergus. Thus, when he characterizes Burleigh, Queen Elizabeth's statesman, with the words: "He never left his friends until it became unpleasant to stay with them any longer. He was an excellent Protestant, so long as there was no great advantage in being a Papist. He recommended to his mistress, as strongly as he could without risking her favor, the observance of a tolerant policy. He allowed no one to be put to the torture unless it was likely to extort a useful confession. He was so moderate in his covetousness that he left only three hundred different estates, although, as his honest servant tells us, he could have left many more if he had wanted to take money from the treasury for his own use, as many a treasurer has done."

In Macaulay's "History of England", the chapter on the state of England in 1685 is a model of historical representation. It is a modern trend in historiography to replace the former, purely diplomatic-political method with the cultural-historical method. In this chapter Macaulay becomes a perfect cultural historian, because the intrinsic truth of his subject induces him to do so, and his comprehensive sense makes it impossible for him not to trace the relations which connect things into their remotest corners. - It was not possible for the indefatigable man to continue his historical work beyond the year 1704. A heart condition swept away this strong life in 1858.

On October 28, 1900, one of the most popular scholars of our time died. The way Max Müller was spoken about after the death notice was received was reminiscent of the words of esteem that could be heard a few years ago when Hermann Helmholtz passed away. Today, the names of both scholars are associated with similar ideas by those who lay claim to a certain general education. And yet it is not the same thing that goes on in the minds of contemporaries when they mention one name as the other. In the case of Hermann Helmholtz, people knew that he was one of the greatest physicists. He was one of those who, according to an old saying, are more praised than read. Many people still remember that we had to see the monument to the great physicist on the Potsdamer Bridge in Berlin adorned with the incorrect title of one of his books. The situation is different with Max Müller. He really is read. Countless of the ideas he set down in his charmingly written works on the development of language, mythology and religion have become an integral part of contemporary education. He conveyed the intellectual development of the Oriental peoples to the general education of the Occident. He knew how to do this in such a way that even those who were not part of a scholarly profession were interested in his work. He was one of the most important intellectual stimulators of the present day. His peers, the linguists and religious scholars, did not value his work as highly as the others. As a Sanskrit scholar and Sanskrit mythologist, he is not even regarded as a scholar who should be mentioned first and foremost. They say that hardly any of his basic ideas can hold their own against the current state of scholarship. Anyone who is not an expert in the field of linguistic research should not presume to pass any judgment on this.

However, the non-expert can say one thing about Max Müller: what he has achieved for our western cultural life is, purely in terms of the scope of his work, as significant as the creations of very few writers. He has published the oldest monument of Indian intellectual life (Rigveda) in six large volumes (London 1849-1874); he has arranged for the publication of one of the most monumental works of our time, the complete "Holy Books of the East", on which scholars of almost all cultural nations are working, and to which he himself has made important contributions. And while he was so incessantly endeavoring to present the educational treasures of the Orient to Europeans, in his lectures on "The Science of Language" (published in German in 1875), in his "Essays" and in a large number of other works and treatises, he sought to explain the laws of the spiritual development of mankind.

The way in which Max Müller did all this corresponded to a large extent to the needs and inclinations of the second half of the century. The historical approach was congenial to this period. It differed significantly from the age that preceded it. The latter believed that it could arrive at conclusions about human nature, about the laws of language, morality and religion by observing the nature of the present human being as a finished individual being. This changed as the century progressed. People wanted to explain the man of the present from the man of the past. It was no longer believed that the observation of the fully developed human being could, for example, provide information on how religious needs arise, from which moral concepts spring.

They wanted to get to know the first beginnings of such ideas and gradually ascend from the understanding of undeveloped cultures to that of the present. They also wanted to learn how different civilizations came to be formed in order to be able to fathom the laws of human development through comparison. People increasingly moved away from viewing man as an individual; they learned to see him as a member of humanity as a whole. Max Müller's thoughts lie entirely within such a conceptual direction. He opened up the Orient to us in order to show the similarities and differences between the various cultures and in this way to arrive at an understanding of the great laws that govern them all.

It was only towards the end of the century that people began to realize that this approach was also one-sided. One of Friedrich Nietzsche's most inspiring writings is "Unzeitgemäße Betrachtung: Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben". He sought to show how man spoils his life in the present by always looking at historical development. It is Nietzsche's opinion that life is higher than the knowledge of life. If I ask myself with every one of my ideas how it has become, I paralyze my free, go-it-alone life. I believe that with every step I take, I must first think about whether it is in line with the previous lawful development. We have heard so often in recent decades that when a new impulse wanted to assert itself somewhere, the advocates of the historical approach immediately came and said that it was unhistorical. The philosophical approach has gradually been lost to us above the historical approach. We have experienced this in the worst possible way in philosophy itself. Our time has become poor in new philosophical ideas. Indeed, those who still want to put forward such ideas are looked down upon with contempt. Our time has even been denied the ability to create new laws before we have fully penetrated the process of legal development.

The spread of such an attitude is the dark side of the work of Max Müller. And here we have reached the point where this important writer leaves the forward-looking among our contemporaries unsatisfied. To what extent he has been overtaken by contemporary linguistics and religious research is something we can leave to the experts to decide. The fact that his philosophical dispositions were not very significant is what must disturb those who look for elements in the literary achievements of the present that are relevant to the great questions of worldview. Max Müller could not understand why Ernest Renan regretted that he had become a historian and not a naturalist. This has to do with Max Müller's characteristic philosophical disposition. He always remained very distant from the natural sciences. He could not decide to cross the "Rubicon of the spirit", which leads from man to the rest of nature. He pursued the historical development of language as far as history, the science of man, can do. If one wants to learn about the emergence of language from lower faculties, one must abandon the historical approach and move on to the scientific one. Müller lists 121 linguistic roots on which the language of the Aryans is based. They are supposed to express just as many original terms. This is as far as the historian gets. The natural scientist goes further. He looks for the origin of everything that occurs in humans in animal abilities. Those who reject everything that is not accessible to history will never arrive at such origins. The natural scientist examines the laws of nature in the present. He illuminates the past from the present. The historical way of looking at things will gradually have to expand into the scientific way if it is to be fruitful for our world view. We can never understand the present merely from its becoming; rather, we must also understand the becoming, the development, from the present. The geologist researches the causes that are still changing the surface of the earth today. From there, a perspective into the past opens up for him. A shift in this direction will also have to be made in our view of mankind. However, there is little evidence of such an insight in Max Müller's writings. This separated him from the way natural scientists thought. It will be increasingly recognized as a shortcoming of his work.

Anyone who is able to observe themselves just a little knows what the so-called "impartiality" of historical observations is all about. We all make judgments from a personally colored point of view, to which the place and time of our birth and life have brought us. This is most evident when we look at spiritual creations. It would be vain self-deception if we did not want to admit to ourselves that ultimately no two people can be of the same opinion about a painting or a piece of poetry. And the different opinions also flow into our historical judgment. The person who sees Lessing as the great pathfinder of the new literature will describe the historical context in which he places him quite differently; and the person who, with Eugen Dühring, sees him as nothing more than an illusory greatness elevated by "Judaism" will see him quite differently. Those who have this introspection will have a milder view of many a work of intellectual history than those who believe in the fairy tale of "impartiality".

This must be borne in mind when approaching a book that is in many respects characteristic of our current way of writing literary history, Adolf Bartels' "History of German Literature" (Verlag Eduard Avenarius, Leipzig 1901), of which the first volume has so far been published. Adolf Bartels is, it should be said at the outset, a man of spirit and taste. He has so much of both, in fact, that his measure at least entitles him to view the development of German literature from his point of view. But the way in which Bartels expresses his point of view is decidedly repulsive to someone who is self-observant and self-critical. I need only add a single sentence here to justify this feeling. In discussing Goethe, Bartels applies a word of Jacob Burckhardt's to "Faust": "Faust is a true and just myth, that is, a great primeval image in which everyone has to divine his nature and his fate in his own way." To this sentence by the great historian, Mr. Bartels adds: "Yes, and especially if he is a Germanic man". We read something like this again and again in this literary history. Adolf Bartels wants to write his book as a "Germanic man". What he is actually trying to say comes to light if you know how to read between the lines. It does not occur to me to equate Mr. Bartels with the flat party people who invented the "Germanic man" in order to have a word that sounds as good as possible to justify their anti-Semitism. I have too much respect for Bartels' knowledge and taste to fall into the error that would lie in such an equation. But one thing seems certain to me: Bartels' remarks about the "Germanic man" have grown up on similar ground to the nonsensical ramblings of the anti-Semites.

His entire book gains something untrue from the fact that he wants to talk us into believing that the judgments that only Mr. Bartels makes are made from the standpoint of "Germanic man". And what is much worse, this gives his book something dangerous. For the untruth that lies in the fact that he reinterprets his personal opinion as that of someone who feels "Germanic" becomes a danger to himself. He becomes petty and - also from his point of view - unjust. One need not be an unconditional follower of Wilhelm Scherer, one can certainly recognize the errors of this man's view of literature; but one must nevertheless find it petty when Bartels writes on the occasion of his review of the Christ e;pos "Heliand": "On the other hand, Scherer leaves little good in the poetry: to him it is a mere didactic poem... "The Jews are put in the most unfavorable light". One realizes that Scherer's literary history was originally written for the audience of the "Neue Freie Presse"." This sentence by Bartels is only understandable if it is understood in such a way that the audience of the "Neue Freie Presse" is thought to be Jewish. In the end, these are the blossoms of the "Germanic" spirit, that a Marin, who by his scientific seriousness and his spirit is absolutely entitled to a different assessment, is suspected of writing for a certain audience.

It is just as petty when Moses Mendelssohn is characterized with the words: "With Moses Mendelssohn, his "Phaedon", his "Morgenstunden", his "Jerusalem", the Jewish influence on German literature begins, his basically sober deism becomes the creed of wide circles and is still called by Hettner "beseligende (!) Vernunftreligion". It will be necessary to completely rewrite the chapter on Mendelssohn and to shed light on what is specifically Jewish in Moses' nature and work - as a human being, I believe he should not lose too much. - You can see how much Mr. Bartels has to go to great lengths to ensure that the noble humanity, which even he does not dare to deny in Moses Mendelssohn, makes a portrayal possible in which - the Jew loses something.

It goes without saying that Bartels' viewpoint puts Lessing's "Nathan" in a skewed light. He says that it is a tendency poem with the "faults of the tendency poem". How little Mr. Bartels understands himself can be seen from the words he attaches to his reflections on "Nathan". "We no longer doubt for a moment that Christianity as a religion, not merely as a moral doctrine, is decidedly superior to Judaism and Mohammedanism, and in an objective work - and that is what all dramatic works should be - we would rightly demand that the representative of Christianity be placed alongside those of the other two religions as the spiritually highest personality .... .". Mr. Bartels would therefore prefer a Christian tendency poem to Lessing's "Nathan". That is his personal judgment. But he should confess this and not fib that every work of poetry should be "objective". That is narrow-mindedness after all. And this narrow-mindedness, this limited scope of vision, is a major flaw in Bartels' entire book. What can one say about the way this literary scholar tackles Schiller? Mr. Bartels has a lot to say against Schiller. He seems overrated to him. We don't want to argue with Mr. Bartels about that. If he simply said that Schiller is "indispensable as an educator for the people and youth" to this day "and, at a certain stage of education, is still the great poet and man who carries us forward; for the time being, the stage must hold on to him for lack of a complete replacement, but the development of literature has gone beyond him....", there might be much to object to, but it could be discussed seriously. The seriousness ends, however, and the comedy begins when Mr. Bartels becomes "Germanic" with Schiller: "He is the only important dramatist of his tribe, and even if I believe in a law of contrast that imperiously demands the opposite type to the type, i.e. the dramatic man of will to the Iyrian man of feeling, I still find Schiller's drama not corresponding to Swabian poetry, find, here in agreement with numerous other judges, something un-Germanic, even un-Germanic in it. This has also led to the assumption of a Celtic bloodline in Schiller...". So, because Schiller does not quite satisfy the "Germanic" Bartels, Schiller does not have to be a "pure Germanic".

Whoever sees through things from all sides has only a smile for such statements as those of Mr. Bartels. The danger, however, lies in the fact that many who have an - even narrower circle of vision than Bartels must feel "Germanically" at home with his narrow-mindedness. However, I only find anti-Semitic gnats in the book. But I wouldn't be surprised if these gnats were to grow into quite respectable anti-Semitic elephants in many readers. And I don't believe that such an effect would be very unpleasant for Mr. Bartels. His entire work cannot at least save me from this belief.

A gentleman who conceals his name has written a reply in the "Post" of September 23 to my article about Mr. Bartels, the literary historian, published with his full name. The gentleman also omits my name. His omissions are characteristic of the way members of a certain press view their journalistic duties. Either this gentleman is so uneducated that he cannot understand a simple train of thought, or he understands his journalistic duty to mean that he does not need to read an article he opposes properly. Because his reply is nothing more than a series of distortions of what I said. I claimed that Mr. Bartels was merely judging from his personal point of view and decreeing this point of view to be a "Germanic" one. There is something untrue in that. And that would be dangerous for Mr. Bartels because it would lead him to narrow-mindedness and injustice. The "Post" claims that I attacked Mr. Bartels because of his Germanic point of view. It is clear to any reasonable person that I was just trying to prove that Mr. Bartels is wrong to call his point of view a "Germanic" one. It would be useless to fight with people who are not fighting against what you have said, but against the distortions they have created. The critic of the "Post" is not intelligent enough to tell him that - according to my explanations - I would have exactly the same thing to say if another literary historian were to judge from his personal point of view and then claim that he had judged from a "Jewish" point of view.

How the author of the "Post" article reads is clear from another passage. He says that I accused Mr. Bartels of wanting to find something un-Germanic in Schiller's poetry. In the relevant passage of my essay, I am not talking about Schiller's poetry, but about his drama.

It is often said that great men have the weaknesses of their virtues. It is no less true, however, that those who emulate great men inherit the weaknesses of their vices to an outstanding degree. The first sentence is applicable to the great aesthete and literary historian Friedrich Theodor Vischer, who was for a long time an ornament of the Stuttgart Technical University; the other truth comes to mind when one looks at his successor on the teaching pulpit, Mr. Carl Weitbrecht. Vischer's broad view of artistic matters was tinged with a certain philistinism; the fine humorist, who gave us the heart-warming novel "Also One", is constantly spoiled by an "inner philistine". And as gratifying as it is that Vischer has given Goethe's idolatry of the judgmentless a good rap on the knuckles with his third part of "Faust", the fact that the honest Swabian goes about his "dispatching" in a rather too bourgeois manner makes a rather uncomfortable impression amidst all this joy. But these are the faults of great virtues. Carl Weitbrecht lacks these virtues; he has shown this sufficiently in his many writings. There is no doubt that he learned a lot from Vischer. And that is why his book "This side of Weimar" has many good points. He has pointed out some of the advantages of Goethe's nature, some of which were lost to the great spirit in later life. However, the flip side of Vischer's merits appears quite repulsive in the two volumes that Carl Weitbrecht recently had published as "Deutsche Literaturgeschichte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts" in the "Sammlung Göschen" (no. 134 and 135 of this collection, G. J. Göschensche Verlagshandlung, Leipzig 1901).

You don't have to be very suspicious when reading these two volumes to come to the conclusion that the first was written to accuse the "German Jew" Heine of every conceivable evil; the second to vent a bitter resentment against everything so-called "modern". Among the various judgments that emerge, this appears again and again, in the most diverse paraphrases: a poet, a writer is all the more well-behaved the less he does it like the evil Heine. Here are just a few examples. "When Goethe died, Heine was the man of the time - that characterizes the situation: the old man in Weimar has fallen silent, and a German Jew in Paris sets the tone." Just in passing, I would like to point out a small thoughtlessness on the part of Mr. Weitbrecht. According to his statements on page 8, the "Old Man of Weimar" had nothing more to say at the beginning of the nineteenth century. "The life that he" (Goethe) "lived and expressed in literature in the first third of the century had little more in common with what the nation lived and fought for at that time; just as he had brought his personal life over from the previous century, so he lived it to the end in the new century... a lonely greatness, certain of his immortality, but more and more alienated from the present." What is Carl Weitbrecht's fault that he has Goethe spiritually dead by the end of the eighteenth century: in order to have an "elegant" entrance for a butchery of Heine, one can behead Goethe's genius twice.

What has poor Heine, in Weitbrecht's opinion, had on his conscience! "From Heine, as from hardly anyone else, the Germans have learned for generations to despise their own nation and to speak ill of it, because their governments did criminally stupid things, because the freedom that the French Revolution meant could not be introduced so quickly in Germany; from him they have learned to regard criticism and joking about German things as a higher sign of intellectual development and freedom of thought than patient, self-denying work on these things; from him they have learned the vain tone that trumpets the pains and dissatisfactions of the individual as the pains of humanity and forgets that the nation stands between the individual and humanity". Mr. Carl Weitbrecht may think about Heinrich Heine as he is able, according to his talent. People who understand Heine can hardly be upset by Weitbrecht's private opinion. But what you have to have a serious word with gentlemen like Carl Weitbrecht about is the, to put it mildly, offensive presumption with which he labels "the Germans" as fools. For only fools could prove to be "docile" in the sense described in Weitbrecht's sentence above. Does Carl Weitbrecht's Swabian soul not have anything that would make it ashamed of such a characterization of its nation?

Weitbrecht often refers to Heine to say how others were different. "What was witty, self-satisfied play in Heine was serious, incurable suffering in Lenau". Learn, Mr. Weitbrecht, to characterize the spirits out of themselves, because what Lenau was has nothing to do with what Heine was. But it continues in this tone. It is true that Mr. Weitbrecht must himself acknowledge Menzel's scurrilous denunciation, which contributed to Gutzkow's punishment, as such; but he cannot get past this acknowledgement without the tasteless sentence: "Heine felt very flattered to see himself most solemnly placed at the head of the whole movement... and coined the poisonously dishonest title of "denunciator" for Wolfgang Menzel, whose unnecessarily clamorous criticism of Gutzkow's trivial novel "Wally" had, however, given the Bundestag the external occasion for its folly."

Even Freiligrath's manly way of bearing the suffering of exile inspires Mr. Weitbrecht to lash out at the "German Jew": "He did not blubber softly or flirt with exile" (Freiligrath) "for that reason." Weitbrecht's idea of how Heine led the spirits by the reins is quite amusing. "It was Heine who made Platen and Immermann enemies." So the good Platen would not have been taken in by the "Jew in Paris": he would not have portrayed the "Nimmermann" as the "vain fop" in his "Romantic Oedipus". Gustav Schwab and Paul Pfizer were, in Weitbrecht's sense, called to do quite different things than what they achieved, but they "were no match for Heine's dishonest fencing tricks". In his review of Emanuel Geibel, our literary historian makes the beautiful statement: "Wherever he seemed to achieve or strive for the brevity of the simple lyrical mood or the very compact song in his earlier poems, he was mostly dependent on role models, including even Heine; the more he gave of himself, however, the more effort he needed." Oh misery upon misery: poor Geibel, it must be said of you that you once wrote some decent poetry; but that's nothing, because Heinrich Heine seduced you into such skill.

I think we can take leave of Mr. Weitbrecht after these rehearsals. To write the right words about the further course of his remarks would be to be cruel.

It is just a pity that a "collection" like Göschen's, which contains so much good stuff, has absorbed Weitbrecht's two volumes of ranting.

We understand,¹ when the anti-Semites try to put their program on a scientific basis. After all, we have seen the Social Democrats at work these days trying to save their party doctrine, scientifically endangered by Bernstein, from being undermined. This is certainly a laudable endeavor, provided it is not based on pontificating, as in Lübeck, or the evidence is based on fallacies and cleverly concealed truth, as in the "Staatsbürger-Zeitung" (September 22), where Professor Paulsen is invoked as the key witness of anti-Semitism.

The article in question is based on Paulsen's "System of Ethics", a widely read and older work that was already available in its 4th edition in 1896. Anyone who has ever studied Paulsen's works with an objective understanding, be it the aforementioned "System of Ethics", the "History of Teaching", his "Philosophia militans" or even his "Introduction to Philosophy", cannot possibly believe that Paulsen had a tendency such as the one attributed to him by anti-Semites. The aforementioned scholar is protected from this by the fine historical sense that runs through all his works. Everything Paulsen says in his "System of Ethics" about the nationality and religion of the Jews has grown out of this historical understanding, and so he can rightly say: "The awareness of being the chosen people of God permeates religion and nationality". Of course, this is a historical reconstruction of Judaism from its gray past. If the writer of the article in the "Staatsbürger-Zeitung" had learned to see objectively, then the concept of Jewish "nationality" must have already indicated this to him. But such an admission would have destroyed the whole tendency of the anti-Semitic article. At the very moment when the Jews lost the "down-to-earthness" of their old homeland, their rigid nationalism was struck to the heart, and true to all human laws of development and adaptation, the process of new "down-to-earthness" began among them.

History should prove to our anti-Semites that we are only dealing with a historically possible and even necessary event. The Slavs of eastern Germany have become "native" in places where Germanic peoples once lived, and Germanic language islands (the Saxons of Transylvania) have survived in the middle of Slavic countries. All the migrations of prehistoric times are a tearing of the old homeland bond and a new contract with nature. Part of the story is, one might say, a shifting groundedness, sometimes unsuccessful, in many cases also successful. The mixture between Slavs and Germanic peoples as we know it will roughly correspond to the ethnological state in which Judaism finds itself in the midst of European or other cultural states. If the process of assimilation had not been artificially halted, the Jew among us would in any case not suffer from any greater exclusivity than the Slavs in Germanic countries, for example. The author of the above-mentioned anti-Semitic article is hopefully familiar enough with German Jewish legislation up to the middle of the nineteenth century to prove us right. Even the century of "enlightenment" and "humanity" came up with paragraphs in this regard that are reminiscent of the conditions of slavery. Every police law of the eighteenth century provides information on this. These things certainly gave the Jews a certain "mobility and internationality" that Paulsen talks about. But are these characteristics so thoroughly un-German, "unteutsch" our anti-Semites would say? Haven't hundreds of thousands of Germans left their homeland to try their luck on the other side of the ocean? And it is precisely among these emigrants that a considerable percentage are Upper Germans, i.e. unadulterated Germanic people. If these hundreds of thousands were to make a national profession of faith, it would or should, judging by their actions, read: "Ubi bene, ibi patria", "Where it is well with me, there is my fatherland". And don't "national" papers, to which the "Staatsbürger-Zeitung" surely also belongs, sing the lament that many Germans living abroad so soon deny their Germanness? Yes, this national immersion is even said to be one of the characteristics of the German "Michels". So "mobility and internationality" on both sides, not just as a specific feature of Judaism.

The feeling of being linked "for life and death" with the people to which one belongs is not based on race, but on the moral fitness of the individual. The "Staatsbürger-Zeitung" pretends that "standing and falling" with one's own people has always been found among Germans, otherwise the contrast to Judaism would make no sense. The apparently historically untrained writer of the "Staatsbürger-Zeitung" is probably unaware that seven Prussian ministers with illustrious noble names offered their services to Napoleon, that in 1808 no fewer than seven senior officers were sentenced to death by the courts martial for cowardice before the enemy. Names such as von Lindener, von Ingersleben, von Poser, von Hacke and von Romberg were probably not Jewish. The author is probably also unaware that after the retreat from Jena and Auerstädt, liberated Prussians, at least half of whom were "down-to-earth", refused to take up arms. German princes courted Napoleon I, and they glorified his day as prince. In the "Confidential Letters", the "Fires of Fire" and the "Gallery of Prussian Characters" from the days after 1806/07, there was a lot of truth alongside some vituperation. Did the accusations concern Jews? Stein's angriest letter was addressed to a German imperial prince, that of Nassau-Usingen. The depth of Stein's confession: "I have only one fatherland, that is Germany", can only be expressed by a moral concept of duty, as Stein knew it. First and foremost, moral responsibility is the deciding factor when it comes to going along "to the death". And this moment was also lacking in the racial Germans when Napoleon trampled on the fatherland. No amount of "down-to-earthness" helped.

Now the "Staatsbürger-Zeitung" believes that the Jew could never enter into this pact of life and death "without abandoning the old national religious ceremonial". The ceremonial thus seems to be essential to the writer of the article. What does he say about the sects that form outside of national churches? Finally, what about the Protestant regional church, which broke away from the womb of the Roman Catholic Church not least because of its ceremonial. So the ceremonial really can't be the deciding factor: no, it's the religion itself.

Paulsen is supposed to be the scientific savior of the anti-Semites. In any case, it is not without significance for them when the meritorious scholar says of the Jewish religion in his "Introduction to Philosophy", 4th edition, p. 294, that "the special talent of the Israelite people lies in the seriousness and depth" with which they grasp moral and religious matters. "Seriousness and depth" are what made Stein, Blücher, Fichte, Scharnhorst and others act when life and death were at stake. A lack of "seriousness" gave rise to the wretched treachery of those days, despite the racial purity of Germanism and membership of the state, which had been gloriously ruled by Frederick the Great only a short time before. The "seriousness and depth" of Judaism is really not as specifically Jewish as the anti-Semites would like us to believe.

The Jewish religion has all the elements that make it capable of assimilation, which are especially useful for Christianity: these are the elements of denaturalization and denationalization. Paulsen, the classic proof of the "Staatsbürger-Zeitung", says on $. 295 of his "Introduction to Philosophy": "As moments in this development" (of the Jews' conception of God and the world) "there emerge first the centralization of the cult through kingship and priesthood, then the moralization, denaturalization and finally denationalization of the concept of God through prophethood." But the "Staatsbürger-Zeitung" knows for which circles it is writing, otherwise it could not play such an unscientific jugglery as in its leading article in the September 22 issue. It does not matter to her that Paulsen himself rejects the accusation of anti-Semitism. Nor does she see that the ethicist Paulsen generally castigates the degenerate, naturally also in Judaism. Science or no science! Science here! says the writer of the article in the "Staatsbürger-Zeitung".

• 1. we are happy to give this article, which we received from a friend, space without identifying ourselves with the view it expresses about Prof. Paulsen's position on anti-Semitism, and we reserve the right to return to the question. The editors