d they must acknowledge and confess
as a favour of heaven! On the other hand, there are those rulers
themselves whose greatness is in inverse proportion to their number.

The criticism which addresses itself to this object is criticism in
hand-to-hand fighting, and in hand-to-hand fighting, it is not a
question of whether the opponent is a noble opponent, of equal birth,
or an interesting opponent; it is a question of meeting him. It is
thus imperative that the Germans should have no opportunity for
self-deception and resignation. The real pressure must be made more
oppressive by making men conscious of the pressure, and the disgrace
more disgraceful by publishing it.

Every sphere of German society must be described as the _partie
honteuse_[2] of German society, these petrified conditions must be
made to dance by singing to them their own melody! The people must be
taught to be startled at their own appearance, in order to implant
courage into them.

And even for modern nations this struggle against the narrow-minded
actuality of the German _status quo_ cannot be without interest, for
the German _status quo_ represents the frank completion of the _ancien
regime_, and the _ancien regime_ is the concealed defect of the modern
State. The struggle against the German political present is the
struggle against the past of modern nations, which are still vexed by
the recollections of this past. For them it is instructive to see the
_ancien regime_, which enacted its tragedy with them, playing its
comedy as the German _revenant_. Its history was tragic so long as it
was the pre-existing power of the world, and freedom, on the other
hand, a personal invasion, in a word, so long as it believed and was
obliged to believe in its justification. So long as the _ancien
regime_ as the existing world order struggled with a nascent world,
historical error was on its side, but not personal perversity. Its
downfall was therefore tragic.

On the other hand, the present German regime, which is an anachronism,
a flagrant contradiction of the generally recognized axiom of the
obsolescence of the _ancien regime_, imagines that it believes in
itself, and extorts from the world the same homage. If it believed in
its own being, would it seek to hide it under the semblance of an
alien being and look for its salvation in hypocrisy and sophistry? The
modern _ancien regime_ is merely the comedian of a world order whose
real heroes are dead.

Hi