p a thousand times over that which they had sworn to defend
with the last drop of their blood; then none of them know what has
really happened. In a few years' time they will know; and then they
will fight no more for things that no longer exist; they will be
meditating a general sacrifice to save what can still be saved, and
what is worth saving.

IX

Germany is a land without power, without poise, with its prosperity
shattered, its authorities and its external aims annihilated, its
intellect and its ethics at a low ebb. In such a condition, if we wish
to understand the only kind of life-faculty which can save us from
intellectual and spiritual death, give us force and inspiration to
shape for ourselves and for the world the new social order of freedom,
spirituality[17] and justice, and in the true sense to "save" us, we
must look ourselves and the German character in the face--this
unknown, problematic character, which for a century in contradiction
to its own inmost being, has been flattering and lulling itself with
hackneyed and complacent phrases and unproved judgments. For we can
undertake nothing and claim nothing which has not its prototype in our
own soul and is not founded in our own past, our own traditions.

There is no people, not even the French, which in recent decades has
administered to itself and digested so much praise as we have. We
never discussed ourselves but at once the stereotyped toasts began.
The more German culture declined, the more disgusting became our
babble about it.

The persons through whose mouths we let ourselves be lauded were
school-teachers without comparative knowledge, professional
banquet-orators, nationalists who praised in the service of some
interested hatred, and scholars with appointments who were simply
commissioned to demonstrate that the Hohenzollern system was the last
word of creation. No one dreamed of distinguishing this glorification
of the German people from the apotheosis of the dynasties--to which we
had vowed our heart's blood--and the profound insincerity of these
declamations was shown by the indifference with which the dynasties,
the main feature in the programme, were afterwards got rid of, and the
affair of the heart's blood shelved.

We know the stereotyped phrases. German faith, French knavery. The
world is to find healing in the German soul. We are the heroes--the
others are hucksters.[18] To be German means to do a thing for its own
sak