Neues Europa: Alfred Baeumler: Selected Articles from the Book “Education and Community”

Introduction

In order to have a broader vision of Alfred Baeumler’s thought, we present here several of his texts on education, translated into English for the ﬁrst time (Alfred Baeumler, 1943).

These texts were selected because some of them show a fresh view of how education should be. In a world where it is considered almost a crime to implement the Latin quote ‘mens sana in corpore sano’ and where the ‘need’ to trample on anyone in order to climb the economic and/or social pyramid is taught, subtly and not subtly, we must remember that once this ignominious tide reaches its peak, it will go back down. And those who understand the historical phenomenon will be able to enjoy these texts.

Texts

Race as a Fundamental Concept of the Science of Education.

In what strange situation would an astronomer ﬁnd himself today if he were expected to express himself once again in the formulas of the old Ptolemaic world view? He would be able to regard these venerable formulas, if they were to be connected with the magniﬁcent lawfulness of the stellar sky known to him, only as a facetious mummery, a masked dance. An astronomer is in this situation within the historical sciences today, to whom the idea of race and heredity has dawned in all its greatness and signiﬁcance. He thinks Copernican, while around him calculations are still being made on the basis of the Ptolemaic system; he cannot possibly feel the formulas of the old environmental thinking as anything other than a dance of masks around the cenotaph of the Enlightenment’s concept of man.

At the center of the science of education stands the concept of human malleability. If man were not capable of development and molding, there would be no culture. The malleability of man, who does not come into the world with fully developed instincts like animals, is the prerequisite for civilization. It will always remain the most important concern of pedagogy to deﬁne the concept of malleability correctly. The ﬁrst thing that racial thinking has to achieve in the ﬁeld of educational science is therefore to prove that the concept of malleability has so far been wrongly conceived.

The main prejudice of environmental thinking with regard to the educational process is intellectualism.

Intellectualism assumes: 1. That man comes into the world as a pure, i.e. indeterminate disposition (tabula rasa), 2. That the environment has the power to write on this slate what it wants, 3. That the organ with which man relates to the world is the intellect, 4. That human action is guided by the intellect and can therefore be decisively inﬂuenced by inﬂuencing the intellect.

In the science of education, the concept of unlimited malleability arises from the intellectualistic basic assumption. Finally, it is no wonder that educators felt ﬂattered by a theory by which the development of the individual human being is handed over exclusively to their inﬂuence.

Intellectualism claims that everyone can be brought to everything through upbringing. It spares itself the eﬀort of getting to know people as they really are; reﬂecting on the historical character of educational goals costs it no eﬀort, because it derives the goal of education from reason. Its science of education is ‘autonomous’, i.e. it does not care about history; its educational goal is a human being in itself, which has never existed and never will exist.

The less intellectualism deals with the goal of education, the more eagerly it turns to the means. The success of education seems to him to be guaranteed if the means he recommends are correctly ‘applied’. Thus intellectualism becomes methodism. The prerequisite remains the raceless, i.e. ‘general’ humanity that is not directed in certain directions by any original dispositions.

It could not remain unnoticed that the practical result did not correspond to the expectations raised by this theory. How did one try to explain the appalling ‘arrears’ of this apparently so ideal procedure? The answer is embarrassing because it can give no information other than ignorance and ill will. If a tendency deeply inherent in man did not constantly counteract the well-intentioned eﬀorts of the educators, then the unlimited malleable soul could be shaped according to infallible recipes in such a way that ﬁnally an ideal human being would be able to eke out his idyllic existence in an equally ideal environment. Only by borrowing from highly questionable ideas about human nature is ‘autonomous’ pedagogy thus able to do justice to historical reality, which means, however, that it is unable to do justice to this reality.

History has proven and proves daily anew that man can be brought to nothing through precepts, exhortations or punishments, nor through other environmental inﬂuences, that he is not originally in the core of his being. Realism in the study of man does not consist in attributing evil tendencies to man, but in recognizing that everything man is capable of ultimately comes from himself, from his dispositions.

It cannot be overlooked that intellectualism has a certain foundation in the facts. It is a fact that intelligence is the human faculty most strongly inﬂuenced by the environment. If man were only intelligence, then intellectualism and environmental thinking would still not be right, because the degree and kind of intelligence always remain determined by hereditary disposition, but the extravagant hopes of rationalist schoolmasters would at least not have to be entirely relegated to the realm of fable. Anyone who wants to say something about the signiﬁcance of race for upbringing must ﬁrst make clear what human character means. Racial thinking makes the mostly overlooked but surely indisputable assumption that man is most profoundly character, and that in the end the achievements of intelligence also depend on character. It is precisely the deep layers of human personality, the layers in which the decisions of human existence are rooted, and which determine the life curve of the individual including his achievement, which are independent in their basic orientation from the environment. This has been irrefutably proven by recent character research, especially by studies of identical twins (Plomin, 2019).

All educational theory is groundless and unfounded if it does not build on the secure foundation of a scientiﬁc study of man. The opponents of a vitalistic and racial science of education are still working today with a study of man that leaves aside the research yields of fruitful decades. Only when the relationship between intelligence and character is correctly determined can there be a realistic theory of education.

It might now seem as if the recognition of the fundamental importance of innate character had something discouraging for the educator. For what is education if everything is predetermined by disposition? However, it is an unfounded and tendentious assertion that with the recognition of the persistence of the innate it is at the same time stated that man is inﬂexible and unchangeable. Dispositions are possibilities, not predetermined ﬁxed quantities (J.S. Gómez-Jeria, 2023). The disposition merely determines the direction of ﬂexibility. The fundamental error of intellectualism is to assume that ﬂexibility is conceivable at all without a directed disposition. In truth, genuine ﬂexibility always presupposes a disposition that is not aimless. He who possesses only learned things (i.e. things stemming from the environment), Pindar already knew, is an obscure man, soon enthusiastic about this, soon about that, sampling a thousand arts, with aimless sense, never appearing with steady foot (Nem. 3). If there were not an original directedness in man that chooses and separates, persists and acts, education would not be possible at all. Directedness of disposition does not exclude education but is rather its necessary prerequisite. The acquired is always an immense diversity. Unity and consistent action can only stem from a character rooted in something innate; unity can never be learned.

This having been said, there is nothing of greater importance than the formation of character and intelligence. Racial thinking does not oppose the principle of unlimited malleability with the principle of limited malleability, but it ﬁrst discovers the true principle of malleability. Without unity there is no human existence. But the unity of character is not static-resting but dynamic-moving. It is a unity of direction. Education can always only connect to this pre-given unity; it can never produce this unity by way of intellect and environment. But since it is not a rigid, immovable unity, but a relatively indeterminate unity of direction, the great task of education arises here: to bring what urges ﬂuidly to its own highest form. In the human sphere, the living does not attain perfect form by itself. It requires upbringing in the community. Only through the forming inﬂuence of others does the soul attain itself, does it become what it is. In the beginning stands the innate but still indeterminate direction of character, at the end the clear deﬁnite form in which character fulﬁlls itself. We call this form the type to which the individual is educated by the community.

Thus, with the insight into the impossible concept of ‘unlimited education’, the concept of any ‘limitation’ by educational measures also disappears. Limitation is not an invention of racial science of education, but an essential characteristic of man. Only where man is recognized in his reality and educated according to this reality can the science of education arise in a permanent form.

National Socialism and ‘Idealism’

The discussion of fundamental pedagogical questions suﬀers in our day above all from the fact that the main concepts of the science of education originate from a time which was completely foreign to the revolution in our thinking brought about by the concept of race. Thereby, in every theoretical- pedagogical treatise today, the danger of misinterpreting the fundamental is almost acute. It would undoubtedly be unfair to make the reproach to the science of education of National Socialism on the basis of the fact that it has not yet provided even the conceptual apparatus necessary for understanding. For clariﬁcation cannot occur by publishing a dictionary for all relevant questions; it is not a matter of a new organization of old material, but of a conception and interpretation of the world, of a philosophy which still silently underlies the new pedagogy. It speaks more for than against the National Socialist science of education that it disdains to feign the presence of a world interpretation to be won only in long work or too hastily anticipate a philosophy. In some way, the philosophical is contained in every individual investigation arising from inner necessity. In investigations on community and type, comradeship and attitude, etc., we can discover this philosophical element. Nevertheless, on the basis of manifold experiences today we are also already in a position to present results of fundamental considerations. Reference should be made above all to the essay by Albert Holfelder on autonomous pedagogy.

A discussion of the relationship in which National Socialist science of education stands to pedagogy built on the theory of idealism must be preceded by a remark of a terminological nature. When we juxtapose National Socialism and idealism, then by idealism is to be understood only that philosophical doctrine which was developed in Germany around the turn of the 18th to the 19th century and which found its most magniﬁcent expression in Hegel. We do not claim that all sides of Hegel’s rich philosophy are denoted by the concept of idealism. But at least what constitutes the nerve of his thinking and what has worked most stubbornly in his system is characterized. Philosophy, and with it pedagogy, remained ‘idealistic’ in Germany until recently in the sense of that theoretical idealism whose central concept is ‘spirit’. Something entirely diﬀerent from this philosophical theory, which we consider to be overcome, is meant by that much wider concept of idealism which is in general use in the German language. This wider concept does not denote a philosophical doctrine but a practical attitude. Idealistic means the opposite of materialistic, it means a practical attitude toward existence which subordinates one’s own comfort and ﬁnally even one’s own life to higher, universal purposes. We do not use the term idealism in this practical-popular sense in this essay. The attitude toward the world which we are trying to describe would have to be called idealistic in a practical respect, although it cannot be grasped by the intellectual means of theoretical idealism.

What confronts us today in philosophical terms as decisive about theoretical idealism is its fundamental character as spiritualism. Since we are considering philosophical idealism here in relation to the science of education, we restrict ourselves to emphasizing its spiritualistic character mainly in the ﬁeld of historical study of man.

The derivation of idealism from the two-world doctrine as it was developed during the Christian era of Europe under the inﬂuence of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism is unmistakable. According to this doctrine there is a higher and a lower world, which relate to each other as form and matter; in the supersensible world the forms are preﬁgured which we ﬁnd realized in earthly matter or realize ourselves. The philosophical elaboration can be very diverse, it can proceed in a dualistic or monistic way, the systems confront each other apparently abruptly, but the contrast between soul and body, form and matter always prevails decisively. It was a bold act when Fichte contracted the supersensible world into the I. From now on, not two ‘worlds’ confront each other, but the I confronts its world.

By no means can Fichte’s mighty deed be derived solely from the spiritualistic tradition; we see in it the break-through of the Germanic personalism which had already been eﬀective in Luther. But once again this personalism, which is completely without admixtures from a supersensible world, is put in chains by spiritualism. The bold philosophy of the “I” does not bring liberation but impresses spiritualism into a new, seductive and coercive form. In this form it embarks on its triumphal march through all the humanities.

Through the Germanic personalism, to which idealism owes its momentum and methodical fruitfulness, the old two-world doctrine has been freed from its ontological and thus at the same time static character. Something new has arisen thereby, and all controversies in the historical interpretation of idealism ultimately come back to the correct or incorrect understanding of this new element. The dynamization of the concept of the world which Fichte initiated is regarded by some philosophers as a new beginning. It is overlooked here that the contrast static-dynamic is not decisive, but the answer to the question of whether the contrast of the sensual and supersensual world has been overcome. Idealism has set the entire human-historical context in motion, so to speak, and thus taken an immense step beyond the old view of the world; it has given the contrast between sensual matter and supersensual form a peculiar turn, but it has retained this contrast. That is the reason why its fate was fulﬁlled so quickly in it. Under the inﬂuence of form-matter thinking the philosophical problem of reality cannot be mastered.

The failure of idealism manifests itself in Hegel’s relapse into ontology, indeed into the ontological proof of God. One can hardly admire enough Hegel’s realism in the philosophical penetration of social life and art, the state and history; but through the spiritualistic basic tendency of his system all this is ﬁnally deprived of its original meaning.

The great master in the art of making opposites ﬂuid also understood how to set in motion the contrast between the sensible and supersensible world. But however comprehensive Hegel’s dialectical method may be, however well it may really unite and dissolve opposites and thereby achieve surprising eﬀects, it always moves within the tension of the sensible and supersensible and thus remains completely within the spiritualistic tradition. Precisely in this boldest deed of German idealistic thinking, the constraint of this tradition can also be most clearly recognized. We can call Hegel’s dialectic realistic, realism belongs essentially to it, and yet we thus fail to grasp the meaning which its originator himself attached to it.

The idealistic dialectic proceeds from bottom to top; but at the end it is revealed that this path was in essence a path from top to bottom. The creative principle was already eﬀective at the beginning, historical happening is placed in a logical context, reality is robbed of its uniqueness and unfathomability, the individual form loses its independence and self- groundedness, the ‘spirit’ consumes everything singular in its ﬁery-ﬂuid universality. In the method of dissolving reality into the dialectical process of spirit, Western spiritualism reaches its climax. The greatest proximity to reality and the greatest remoteness from reality coincide in Hegel’s system. The imperishable magic of this system rests on the coincidence of the incompatible.

The magic has held until our time. The properly Hegelian heritage consists in the transformation of the spiritualistic way of thinking into a procedure that we can characterize as the method of penetrating a lower by a higher. No ﬁeld of matter is excluded from this procedure; the penetration proves itself anew in any material. In the last phase of Hegelianism, the contrasts face each other once more, very faded, as the world of facts and the world of values. The question of the penetration of the world of facts and the world of values becomes the philosophical question par excellence. Under a strange compulsion, thinking repeatedly posits some residual stock of factuality in opposition to something other, something higher. The positivism of the factual is continually ‘overcome’ by the idealism of values.

Viewed from the other side, the basic relationship presents itself thus: positivism is inseparable from idealism and follows it like its shadow. Theoretically idealistic trains of thought will always reveal themselves (at least in the last phase of Hegelianism) in that some factual appears in them which needs transﬁguration. The ingenious dialectical method, seemingly constructed from bottom to top, has transformed itself into a procedure of justiﬁcation which could be called a procedure of making sense of the senseless. The separation of idea and reality, which Hegel believed to have suspended forever by the dialectical method, completely dominates the thinking of the epigones. One has neither the courage to entrust oneself to the idea, as Hegel did, nor does one stand in the right relation to reality: the ‘reconciliation’ of idea and reality in the sense of an indeterminate penetration of factuality and value is the only grasp of thinking of which this epigone philosophy is still capable.

The worldview revolution of National Socialism took the ground out from under theoretical idealism. It is characteristic of National Socialist thinking that it knows nothing of the separation between positivism and idealism, which ultimately has its ground in the fact that the two-world doctrine, from which that separation emerged, is foreign to it. For this thinking there is only one reality, and everything that happens rises up out of the one inexhaustible depth of reality. There is no mere factuality in need of transﬁguration by ‘values’; a bestowal of meaning on the meaningless is an unfeasible idea here. The idea itself stems from reality; it is the image that reality produces through man. A making-equivalent of idea and reality in the idealistic-positivistic sense cannot be spoken of here. The opposition of matter and form has lost its signiﬁcance. The elements are not shaped into an image of the world by a subsequent accomplishment; rather, there is an original relation to the world, and in this ‘intuition’ given with its meaning is rooted man’s ability to design an image of the world as well as guiding ideals for his own actions. Reality is not a mere factuality that receives its form and value only from a form foreign to it, but the ground and measure of all form. In the end, all phenomena are measured against reality.

Where there is a lack of insight into the full-blooded reality, which has not yet faded into mere factuality, there the attitude of the individual, from which he creates and acts, is grounded in an idea, without it ever becoming apparent where this idea comes from. National Socialist thinking knows the signiﬁcance of ideas, without which education and life are not possible, but it does not for a moment forget that guiding ideals do not descend from above to transﬁgure a mere factuality or to inspire a dead body, but that they themselves stem from reality. Thus, however much the concrete attitude of a human may depend on the images that were presented to him in early youth, however much a culture may for a time be dependent on foreign traditions, still always decisive remains that original attitude, out of which alone man possesses the power to create images, take them in and judge them.

The unspoiled human being draws the impulses for his activity from himself and has no need of being oriented in his striving by enlivening images of foreign origin. And the same holds for the community. The truly living community of those of the same race also needs no ‘idea’ ﬁrst of all in order to receive meaning and aim. It is no dead body into which an idea would ﬁrst have to breathe life, but an enlivened body. If one must talk of enlivening a community at all, then the life of that community is no longer primeval and robust. A community does not become historically powerful through enlivening ideas of some origin but only through the will of a leader that it itself engenders from itself and who newly and grandly places before its eyes the sensuous-moral guiding ideal of its existence.

The attitude of the individual and the life of the community are grounded not in a spirit estranged from their blood but ﬁrst and last in themselves. That is the philosophical meaning of the concept of race: race always refers us to what we are. In that respect, the racialist worldview has opened up the way to a new philosophy, which no longer knows the old opposition between factuality and value.

The opposition between something that ‘is’ without bearing a value in itself, and something else that does not ‘exist’ but, as an idea, inspires what exists (‘holds as valid’), includes not only a scheme of interpretation that can be applied to all happening, but is also the source of a pathos in speaking which has always won the theoretical idealism many friends. To speak of the ‘idea’ is dangerously easy and lends speech, without any personal eﬀort needing to be connected with it, a touch of the higher. The wholly other relieves the one who knows to speak of it of any personal responsibility and immediate truthfulness. Just speaking of something so lofty is already considered a merit, and ﬁnally the longing speech about the idea takes the place of philosophical thinking. The philosopher transforms himself into a priest and gazes pityingly or arrogantly from his lofty watchtower of ideas upon the ‘workaday’. Thus theoretical idealism returns to its beginning, the two-world doctrine, and spiritualism reveals itself, in spite of all protestations, as its truth.

The philosophy of reality is absolutely not capable of such a pathos. Its language can only be that of simple indication; it is not edifying and exhorting but ‘indicative’, to use a term of Albert Holfelder. This indicative philosophy is as far from positivism as from idealism, for indicative does not mean here ﬁxing on factuality, but indicating reality. In accordance with the National Socialist concept of the world (‘worldview’ [Weltanschauung] as a basic concept precludes the separation of the one beholding from the world), such an indication cannot occur outside the responsibility of the one indicating. In place of irresponsible speech of a wholly other, indicative-responsible speech of reality itself enters, in which the speaker himself stands and in which he intervenes shapingly through his deed and word. Such speech, too, can have its pathos; however, it is no longer the priestly pathos of one who believes to have found a point outside the ‘world’, but the pathos of the ﬁghter asserting himself and his value in reality.

In no other ﬁeld has idealism in its last phase worked with such success as in that of the science of education. This observation is not to be understood as if German science of education of the last hundred years were essentially a product of German idealism. Precisely those who gave the strongest impulses to development stood outside the idealistic movement or kept their distance from it: Pestalozzi, Jahn, Herbart. But in the atmosphere of intellectual fatigue that characterizes the end of the 19th century, and against which Nietzsche protested in vain, all deeper realistic approaches died oﬀ. Idealism and positivism, enemies in appearance, brothers in their derivation, dominated the ﬁeld.

The idealistic theorists doﬀed their hats to the men of practice, the positivistic methodologists, who for their part occasionally also greeted the theorists. A mild gentle pathos, tempered by consideration for the necessities of didactics with Platonic highlights, was ﬁnally regarded as scientiﬁc pedagogy. The core of this science, whose practical eﬀect was based more on the ostentatiously displayed benevolent attitudes than on insights, was a theory of education, which in turn was divided into a more positivistic and a more idealistic part. The former contained child and adolescent psychology, the latter the theory of the teacher’s personality. So psychological-didactic positivism on the one hand, an all-transﬁguring professional idealism on the other, and hovering above everything the pedagogical idea, the Holy Grail, from which one receives the necessary strengthening when one looks up at it from the work of the schoolroom.

The pathetically presented ideology of the priestly teacher, the demands for an animation of the ‘everyday’ and the harmonization of idea and reality are just as harmless as all spiritualistic postulates. For they are the expression of an unreality of the school, which is all the more fateful as it is no longer felt. It is a delusion to believe that a school can somehow arise around a personality in empty space. Certainly, the personality of the teacher is ultimately decisive in the end. ‘A school is only worth as much as the educators who work in it’, says the justiﬁcation for the school reform of Reich Minister of Education Rust. But where there is no school, one could continue, there is also no teacher possible, because the school does not consist through the teacher, any less than it consists through the child, but through the order which it has from the community to which teacher and child belong together. If this order is not clearly given, even strong and good teachers consume themselves without tangible success. The value of the school depends on the personalities who work in it, the school itself is based on the clarity and determination with which the community issues its school-founding mandate.

Only in an unreal school must the ‘animation’ of everyday life be called for. But no ideal construction of the teacher can restore the unity of education and life once it has been lost. That was the fundamental error of idealistic autonomous pedagogy, that it believed it could achieve or at least strive for the unity of education and life from the school. When will the politicians ﬁnally follow the schoolmasters? Autonomous pedagogy ran out into this half delusional, half comical idea. Idealism overshot itself in it. Many now believe that by turning the sentence around one obtains the pedagogy of National Socialism: today the schoolmasters must follow the politicians. With this principle, it is believed, the disempowerment of the teacher, the emptying of his actions, the loss of independence of his profession is given. The teacher now only has to follow directives, pedagogy becomes a dependent variable of politics. The new school is thus still imagined according to the scheme of idealism-positivism, only that positivism has become political, and idealism is omitted. In painting such an unimaginative political positivism, the imagination knows no bounds. The conclusion to be drawn can only be that even the former didactic positivism would have been better for the school.

If National Socialism proclaims the primacy of politics over education, then this principle cannot have the meaning ascribed to it by such critics who are still caught up in the juxtaposition of idealism and positivism. The National Socialist worldview has broken through the barrier that was once placed around the world. Reality has regained its soul. The concept of the political must be newly understood from the National Socialist concept of reality, not from positivistic views about the state. The primacy of politics over education does not mean a subordination of creative forces to dead regulations, but the integration of education into the national order. Politics is the action of the Führer directed at establishing the national order, in which every individual participates in loyalty to the Führer at his own position on his own responsibility. According to the political pedagogy of National Socialism, therefore, the teacher is not a mere executor of directives from political bodies, but he is the one who carries out the political mandate which the school has received from the Führer on his own responsibility. Once he has understood and assumed the political mandate, he is free.

Out of the political sense of reality that ﬁlls the Germans in Adolf Hitler’s Reich, every task that arises in the vast space of the nation is tackled. The most diﬃcult task has perhaps fallen to the teacher: he is supposed to help educate the new type and at the same time help wrest the new educational content for the school in the work of the school. He sees himself placed right in the middle of the struggle of the centuries, the future lies open, immense possibilities stand before him. He needs no ‘pedagogical idea’ to transﬁgure his ‘everyday life’ for him: in his schoolroom he stands in the midst of his people, taking part in the struggle for the emerging Reich. And if the task sometimes seems too diﬃcult for him, then he comforts himself with the sentence from the 1938 school reform: ‘The National Socialist era will also produce the school that is the spirit of its spirit, but we must be aware that we stand at the beginning of the new education’.

The Path to Achievement

According to an old saying, we do not learn for school but for life. Unfortunately, the thought in this sentence is incompletely expressed: school is indeed contrasted with life, but the essential thing about the contrast between school and life remains unspoken. The sentence leaves the school in the shadow of negation, it only hints at the positive relationship between school and life.

School and life belong together, even though they are distributed on diﬀerent levels of our existence. So what the old saying actually means is: although school and life do not obey the same law, we still learn in school for life.

There is a superordinate concept of life in which the diﬀerence between school and life is also suspended. It would be good if, in all discussions about education, one would always keep in mind that the school is an invention of life, but that at the same time it somehow stands opposed to practical life, which is what that old saying has in mind. Pedagogical thinking is distorted and destroyed from the ground up by nothing as much as by the transformation of the diﬀerence in structure between school and life into an imagined value opposition of theory and practice.

Then on one side stands ‘life’ and on the other side lifeless theory; but upon the school falls the abysmal suspicion of being only the site of theory. One loses all impartiality towards it and the power to vigorously rejoice in it as one of the ﬁnest inventions of life. One forgets that, although the school has a diﬀerent structure than practical life, it is precisely this diﬀerence that is indispensable to life. For life is not an undiﬀerentiated but an articulated unity, encompassing structural laws of diﬀerent, indeed opposite kinds.

Life demands from us at speciﬁc times and in speciﬁc places a precisely circumscribed achievement. From this the conclusion is drawn: so we must learn to accomplish something speciﬁc. The path to achievement is imagined, in adaptation to certain original activities (peasant and artisanal), as a straight line: from the very beginning one learns to do something deﬁnite. The process we get to know in apprenticeship training, where the apprentice is trained in and for practice, is straightforward. Here life educates directly for life. The integration of the apprentice into the work process as an apprentice leads on to journeymanship and mastery. Leaving aside that even in this process ‘instruction’ has a place, and that it proves useful here, too, to systematically break down the originally uniﬁed process, which introduces a certain distance from ‘life’. So the apprentice, too, partakes of discipleship. Hence the diﬀerence between apprentice and pupil remains: the former stands in ‘life’, the latter does not; the former is trained through practice for practice, the latter is supposed to be trained through something that is not life for life... Now many simply cannot get over this. In view of this inhibition one might even hit upon the idea that erroneous thoughts are also innate to humans. One of these thoughts is that only the straight line can lead to the goal, while nature confronts us everywhere with the opposite. How surely nature reaches its goals, and what strange detours it takes! If the straight line prevailed in the human world, then one could count on nothing more surely than on the success of a moral sermon. As we know, one can count on nothing more surely than on the failure of a moral sermon. It is precisely the reverse of what the quick judges like to claim: in the human world, the detour is in most cases the shortest connection between two points. This may contradict elementary geometry, but it corresponds to the logic of life.

The school is the detour that life itself invented in order to achieve certain accomplishments. To reach its goal, life seems to contradict itself; it creates the school, which in its structure is not ‘life’, and precisely thereby serves life.

So you want a lifeless school, say the incorrigibles here, who live by shortcuts. Oh no, we only do not want to establish the connection between school and life by leveling the diﬀerence between them, destroying the school and damaging life. If we cling to the fact that in its structure the school is not practical life, we are thinking of what makes the school a school, purposeful instruction. We know that there is a school life, and that this life, community in work, play and celebration, can never be lively enough. But we also know that instruction can get so lost in ‘life’ that it is no longer instruction, whereby the school loses for what it is there.

All genuine instruction is not planned for the moment, but for the long term. Life demands achievement from us now and here; but the school achievement never coincides with the particular achievement of this profession and this moment, indeed in many cases it stands at a wide remove from it. It is precisely this distance which is lamented by the unfruitful theorists of life. Closer to life, they cry. One cannot get close enough!

We do not want to claim that the reversal of this sentence is correct: one can certainly distance oneself too far from life in school. It was once possible to construct a school that was completely removed from life. But that is no longer the danger today. The school that knows nothing of life has been overcome. We no longer tolerate arithmetic books and physics notebooks in which we encounter only examples that deﬁnitely never occur in life. Our school stands in the midst of the community of our people, from it the school receives its tasks as well as its materials. But this connection to life must never lead to the school eventually being everything imaginable, only no longer a school. If we want to serve the living community, then we must assert the school as a school.

The school imitates life in a false way when it wants to lead to the achievement directly and without any detour. The achievement demanded by life is in each case limited. We need certain hand movements and a certain sequence of activities to produce these machines, these materials and structures. But whoever only sees the individual achievement as such misses the most important thing: a whole fabric of interlinked and interconnected activities is needed for the eventually visible achievement to be possible. To shape and improve this overall context of activities, to keep it going and increase it, is the actual achievement. The deeper we look into the working world of our people, the more clearly it becomes apparent to us how impossible it is to pre-train the next generation in the manner of craft apprenticeships for the immense variety of productive activities. What is needed is a general pre-training that enables each individual to get to work here or there, to apply his strength at this or that point of the overall process. The site of this general pre-training is the school.

If the school did not exist, we would have to invent it out of the vital necessities of our people, because there must be a place that is so far removed from life and its practical demands for achievement that the world of achievement can be set in motion from there. Give me the point outside, says the teacher, and from there I will set the entire working world in motion. One can be trained for individual grips, but the national context of work does not consist of individual hand grips. It is a whole, which the strength of the people, newly collected in its children and adolescents, in turn faces as a whole. The national work achievement emerges from the encounter between the fresh forces and the demands that arise from the national existence in each case. In this, it is of the highest importance that as few people as possible remain at the level where only one hand grip is performed. It is crucial for us Germans in particular that we have as many high-quality workers as corresponds to our innate potential. Therefore, the school must be structured in such a way that it enables the individual to fulﬁll the most diverse tasks, i.e. to work and act independently. It must not train and drill, but it must educate.

The one who is properly educated through the school does not externally imitate a grip that has been demonstrated to him, but is able to solve the individual task reﬂectively, i.e. from a general principle. He gets to the bottom of things, i.e. he understands the individual and particular from its general reason. It is this intellectual attitude towards a task that the general education of the elementary school and, with a view to speciﬁc achievements, the secondary school produces.

The school does not educate for individual, prescribed achievements, but rather for achievements to be accomplished at all under given conditions. What one learns in a good school is not a speciﬁc action, but the ability to act. One learns to behave appropriately to the circumstances and the matter, i.e. correctly, in a given situation. Knowledge is only one, albeit essential precondition for such ability.

The contrast between school and life stands out most sharply in the struggle for the time allotted to the school. Practical life, as the master of time, likes to regard every moment not consecrated to it as lost. The general compulsory schooling of adolescents up to the age of 14 is one of the greatest victories won by life over mere practice. Naturally, there can only ever be a balance between school and life, since both are in the right. The tension between them only becomes unproductive when the right of the school is unintelligently disputed. Above all where a longer training period is required by the matter itself, there tends to be a certain objection to any time devoted to the school and thus ‘withdrawn’ from practice. Through the reform of the secondary school, the school period has been reduced to eight years; but this shortening did not aﬀect the structural law and the aim of the secondary school. Life and school have come to an understanding about a necessity. It is quite another matter where questions of pre-education are examined fundamentally and partially from the point of view of ‘practice’. Such fundamentalism must lead to the destruction of the school. The intricate structure of our working world can be easily destroyed by appealing in the wrong place to the beauties of apprenticeship training. Length and path of education can only ever be understood from the purpose, assuming that, in the overall context of our national existence, higher, more specialized achievements can only be attained via higher, more specialized schools.

The longest and most diﬃcult paths to achievement are those that lead through the universities. In the universities, youth is kept the longest and ‘withdrawn’ from practice the most, so they experience the most thorough dislike of school. We have produced a large number of universities with various structures. Anyone who has once grasped what a school is and what a shorten in g of the path to achievement a university education signiﬁes has also understood that in times of need one can take all passable paths, but that a fundamental destruction of the factual relationship between path and goal, pre-education and achievement must lead to the most severe damage to the life of the whole.

Team and Achievement (Political Physical Education)

1. For decades, the ‘gymnastics teacher’ stood in the shadowy corner of the humanistic schools. Today he is moving into the center. He is, if he understands his existence correctly, a political teacher in a special sense. Until recently, attempts were made to boost the self-conﬁdence of the physical education teacher by relating him to sciences like physiology or psychology. Such borrowings from the sciences are no longer necessary today. The teacher of physical exercises stands on his own two feet. At the moment when he grasps that physical education is political, he no longer needs props and crutches. It must be demanded of him, however, that he is clear about his own existence and his tasks. He cannot be exempt from worldview and political pedagogy, because without them he cannot understand himself. But no matter what other science he may deal with, he remains ﬁrst and foremost always a teacher of physical exercises and as such has his place, originally and not merely as a ﬁef, in the overall educational system of the German people. And on this his self-conﬁdence is based.

From such a self-conﬁdence a new teacher type must grow. No matter where this teacher stands, whether within the school or within the Hitler Youth, the SA or the scope of tasks of the National Socialist League for Physical Exercise: he always remains aware that he is not a mere specialist who ‘can do’ this one thing and nothing else, but that he moves in a space charged with high energies. The notions of the limited ‘gymnastics teacher’ and pure ‘sports teacher’ belong to the past. They were only possible in a time when the sphere of the political had been so narrowed that nothing was left of it but what belongs to the ‘state’, according to which the teacher of physical exercises could at best be connected with politics through a state employment contract. Only the restoration of the political sphere in its full purity and its full extent, which has been accomplished by National Socialism, has made the teacher of physical exercises possible as a political teacher, who is something other than a state functionary. Liberalism had disembodied and desouled politics, it had transformed the living human being into a legally recognized ‘citizen’. No one has more reason to reﬂect on what the transition from the citizen principle to the national comrade principle means than the teacher of physical exercises, who owes his new existence to this transition.

The breakthrough from the individualistic statist to the national worldview is taking place not only in the realm of ideas but is a real event in the soul of our people. For the ﬁrst time in its history, our people as a whole is committing itself to a common worldview. Everyone participates in this event in their own position; but teachers have the duty to also think through their participation in this happening. They must know who they are and what they have to do, they must know the meaning that accrues to physical education in Adolf Hitler’s state. To many, the phrase ‘political physical education’ (which tells us approximately what the word ‘gymnastics’ said to the ancient Greeks) still sounds strange. It will be the task of German teachers of physical exercises to conquer this word and ﬁll it with life.

2. The body is a political issue, which is the ﬁrst conclusion we must draw from the idea of the people. The citizen has a body at his disposal, with which he can do and not do whatever he wants. Since the citizen as such is deﬁned by private property and treats everything according to the scheme of private property, he also regards his body as his private property. The national comrade, on the other hand, knows himself to be connected to the collective body of his people through his own body. To preserve the purity of the national body, to strengthen its health and might, is the primary task of national politics. In this, the state can prevent much through its legislation and supervision, but it cannot provide the vital incentives. State politics in the old style was exhausted in prescriptions and admonishments, national politics develops drives and instills habits. The former relied on commands and punishments, the latter builds on custom and upbringing. From the perspective of national thought, an individual’s bodily care, exercise and discipline are no longer a matter for a private person concerned about his personal well-being but fall under the aspect of health and strength of the whole. The individual is no longer left to decide whether he wants to be healthy or not, whether he wants to make demands on the development of the strength of his body or not. How high he manages to advance in the training of physical dexterity is no longer left to his subjective discretion. If he wants to participate at all in the national education, then he must adapt himself into the system of demands which the state as the representative of the whole people has established.

Bodily care and exercise, across the now-political body, enter into the great context of national being and the unfolding of national strength. The state with its means and organizations no longer subsequently takes care of the perfection of the body begun by individuals, it no longer just emerges in individual places as a promoter, as was previously the case, but from the beginning it takes the whole into its protection. The National Socialist National League for Physical Exercise is not the successor of the old National Committee for Physical Exercise, but a new creation. Whoever only sees an organizational change here sees nothing. In terms of meaning, the ‘National League’ is as little a successor to the former organization as the state under Adolf Hitler is a successor in terms of meaning to the Weimar Republic. They follow one another in time, but what they follow from are diﬀerent worlds. The old National Committee may have been a useful umbrella organization for sports clubs and their endeavors, necessary for its time. It was an attempt to organize the sports society within the German borders in order to make certain common undertakings possible for it. It was an association formed for a purpose which, like other such associations, was supported by the state without having a direct political function as such. Such a function was quite impossible for it because, although the liberal state knew citizens engaged in sports who formed the sports society when united in clubs, it did not know the living people which is one body and one soul. But the body of the people has its honor just as the soul does. That the body must be nurtured as much as the mind, this consideration of utility has long since been entertained by liberal thought. Finally stop refuting the philosophy of physical exercise with this banality. National thought shows that we are not speaking of the body as such, nor of the body of the individual as an individual, but of the body of the individual in relation to the collective body of the people. And this body has its honor. No association formed for a purpose is able to preserve this honor, only the state itself can do this, to whose political leadership the honor of the nation as a whole is entrusted. When the German state transformed itself into a national state, the old sports society also disappeared.

The state incorporated sport into itself, the simple and clear relationship denoted by the formula ‘sport and state’ took the place of the vague and undecided unity of earlier times. In the National League for Physical Exercise, the old sports federations are not merely summarized under a new title but have been assigned a new task. The whole structure expresses the new responsibility that arose from the recognition of the body as a political reality. The body of the German people forms a unity and has its honor. Raising the physical strength and proﬁciency of the German people in all its limbs to the height corresponding to this honor belongs among the most important tasks of the German state leadership. Thus sport becomes political.

The sportsman tends to isolate and absolutize the world of sports. There is an inauthentic cult of the trained body, a sports philistinism, which is nothing but a deviation from unpolitical philistinism. Within the old sports society, an eﬀective ﬁght against this philistinism was not possible. Now that sport has stepped into the space of the state, training philistinism is dissolved by the same agent as beer philistinism, whose apparent opposite it was. The recognition of the political character of our body at the same time precludes any absolutization of the body. For the word ‘political’ refers to the total existence of our people. The honor of the body is part of the total honor of the nation.

The phrase ‘the mind is as German as the body!’ must be opposed to the sportsman who deems himself superior to any intellectual achievement. The ﬁnally recognized unity of the body must not cause the unity of soul and mind to be forgotten. It was once necessary to defend the body against a false spiritualization. But the rejection of intellectualism must not lead to a disparagement of mental work. Does not the old saying already speak of a healthy mind in a healthy body? Let us translate this into our language. Then it applies not to the individual but to the nation, and it means: One body - one mind!

3. To bring the health, strength and ﬁtness of the body to the pinnacle of perfection is the goal of political physical education. But it is not enough just to keep this purpose in view. Physical education itself is a part of the overall national education system. But all true education is education of character. Political physical education is therefore not only education of the body, but education of the whole human being starting from the body. Character proves itself only in service to and sacriﬁce for the community. Education of character and education of community are one and the same.

We must view political physical education not only from the political nature of the body, but also from the political nature of character. At its center we ﬁnd the character traits of readiness for action and courage.

No community can exist unless the readiness of its members for commitment is ﬁrmly and deeply founded in their hearts. This readiness presupposes not only the strength, but also the courage to use that strength. In this sense, one could say that every community is founded on the courage of its members. There is no community of cowards. Cowardice, lack of commitment ability, dissolves the community. If we call what preserves the community virtue, then the saying applies: ‘No virtue without courage’.

The school of physical exercise is a place of genuine character education above all because it is the elementary school of courage. In this school one learns not to shun dangers and at all times to really do what one can do by exerting all one’s powers. Courage is not one virtue among many, but the mother of all virtues. It is what makes both self-assertion and sacriﬁce possible. Of course, only the elementary schooling of the will and courage takes place in the sphere of physical exercises.

Nothing surpasses the ﬁrst steps here; then automation sets in quickly. From a certain point on, most exercises cease to really tax the will. ‘The child’s ﬁrst independent step, its ﬁrst jump into the water were deeds that required a great expenditure of willpower and thus exercised it. The following ones, however, visibly lose this value more and more and are carried out very soon without any eﬀort of will. With that, the mental element disappears from the bodily movements; they become automatic’ (Konrad Koch).

This loss of stimulating power for the will with advancing practice must be counteracted. Konrad Koch’s formula remains always worth considering: ‘Every physical exercise should also be an exercise of courage’. The most important means, applied from time immemorial, against the devaluation of exercises through automation is the proper sequence according to degree of diﬃculty. But beyond that, the principle formulated by Konrad Koch must prove itself in the nature and manner of the exercises and in the conception of their essence. For this purpose, above all the subjectivist conception of the past must be overcome, according to which the exercise has the ‘purpose’ of increasing the individual’s ability to move. The exercise is not undertaken immediately to promote the health of the individual or to increase his dexterity. That is only the result, which is not striven for in itself. For what would the immediate pursuit of this success mean for upbringing? The atmosphere of education for courage would be completely destroyed. The practice of ‘body culture for hygienic reasons’ has shown this abundantly. Immediately, every physical exercise may only arise from the task of making oneself, through one’s body and its forces, master of the surrounding space. The conquest of space is the general task at which courage is put to the test. All individual tasks are derived from this comprehensive task.

The ‘free exercise’, which is not unmotivated but has no object, has rightly fallen more and more out of use. Either game, or an eﬀort directed towards overcoming a speciﬁc object: that is the principle of modern physical exercises. ‘Every exercise wants to have its object’, says Toni Sandner. And he goes on: ‘Does the boy want to learn the jumping movement, perhaps? No, he wants to cross ditch or plank in a courageous jump. Or is he trying to practice the climbing movement? No, he wants to be on top of rock and tree. Or is the boy thinking of what is healthy and useful when he romps about in wintry nature? No, he wants to enjoy all the pleasure that gliding on skis or skates provides, and the joy of the fast, space-traversing glide when he races across ice and snow’.

It comes down to overcoming something, winning a victory. Jahn also saw and acted correctly in this respect. For what is gymnastic equipment other than an artiﬁcially created ‘object of resistance’, a purposefully constructed obstacle, intended to practice one’s strength in overcoming obstacles? The most general ‘object’ is space itself and what ﬁlls it: earth and water, rock and tree, abyss and height. Modern sports have only just opened up this entire huge realm for us: that is its historical achievement.

It is a reﬁnement of resistance when time takes the place of the sensuous object in space, i.e. when it is a matter of a performance whose evaluation depends decisively on the time used for it. The path leads from space to time, from the simple performance of visible overcoming to the compared, measured performance. It is the path from boy to man, from simple movement to great competition.

Sandner has described very beautifully how the boy still lives entirely in space, how he is still entirely concerned with the concrete conquest of the here and now, with the present victory. Endurance is not yet his aﬀair, the time he has objectively taken does not yet concern him: ‘His race is still purely physical measuring with his opponent, not tied to a certain distance, but ending in the start or escape. He is not interested in the time it takes him, as long as he was the ﬁrst at the post or on the hill’. At this stage, man measures himself against things, he takes possession of space by conquest and defeats the obstacles that stand in his way. The competition is already there, but hardly separable from the game.

But then he measures himself systematically with other people, whether directly in combat or indirectly by way of comparison. With the development into youth, an expansion of the horizon sets in. The objective standard comes to the fore, the individual achievement moves into the tremendous context of all achievements once possible. The climax on this path is the consideration: this was once possible to achieve, it must also become my personal best. Courage and willpower receive a new incentive. The opponent is no longer the one who happens to stand opposite me, but the achievement once reached in general. With that, the opponent has become gigantic, and ambition, too, can now take the gigantesque turn. The world of competition opens up, and with it begins the ultimate allure, but also the greatest danger of sports. This danger consists in the fact that sports life degenerates into a comparison of absolute achievements. The only thing that matters is reaching a certain line in a certain time. The supreme goal becomes beating the existing record. The achievement is treated in the manner of a physics experiment, within an apparatus of exactly prescribed, highly artiﬁcial conditions: the movement takes place, the deﬂection is observed, the number is written down.

It is cheap to rail against the craze for records and to ‘reject’ the record mania. All blame and admonition remains in vain, because these are not arbitrary excesses, but phenomena that are necessarily linked to the nature of physically practiced exercises pursued as sports. The objective standard of achievement cannot be dispensed with without taking away all the seriousness and harshness from the exercises. One must not trivialize the value expressible in numbers if the whole thing is not to revert to mere play again. The level of achievement once attained must be maintained and, if possible, surpassed. Anyone who abolishes this hard principle of sports abolishes sports itself. On the other hand, the downright deadly eﬀects of this principle are evident: record mania and ‘sports business’ take the place of healthy, joyful life. It is as if a curse lay over sports. When the early phase of the ﬁrst tests of courage and conquests of space has been passed through, when time ﬁrst emerges dominantly in the form of precise time measurement and exact time comparison (symbol: the stopwatch!), then innocence and joy are gone, the prose of the cinder track is there, and the danger of organized sports becomes acute.

4. One tends to point to the sports team in defense of athletic activities oriented towards absolute performance and means to refute the accusations of individualism and soulless objectivity, which are not without reason raised against this operation, by pointing to the collaborative work, discipline, and team spirit of the sports teams.

But I have pointed out elsewhere that the pure sports team has an entirely impersonal character and therefore cannot be regarded as a team in the political and educational sense at all. It is formed from the point of view of achievement and sees itself exclusively from this objective point of view. I have called it a ‘temporary performance comradeship’.

By team we understand something quite diﬀerent. Belonging together of the members that does not depend on the technical purpose to be achieved immediately is part of the team. The sports team, on the other hand, is a technical association, and the purer it is in this respect, the better it is for sports. It would be quite erroneous to conceive this association, assembled if necessary for days or hours, as a special kind of team. If the purpose which eﬀected the combination ceases, the ‘sports team’ disintegrates. The spirit of a real team, on the other hand, would not be destroyed by the disappearance of the immediate goal; it would then prove itself all the more. The team does indeed only become real through a task felt and recognized in common, that distinguishes it from merely personal circles of friends, but by no means is that which welds it into a unity the accomplishment of a speciﬁc performance. Here, rather, the achievement appears only as the means of testing who ‘belongs’ and who does not, as the matter of course that happens almost incidentally. Not the achievement is the really real, but the life of the team itself. The achievement of the individual naturally receives an entirely new meaning as soon as the individual himself is seen from the team.

From the perspective of living together and working together, which is not limited to just passing moments, the selection also takes place within the team. The deciding factor is character, the ability to be a comrade. The standard of the team is character, not performance. In the sports team, ultimately the relationship of the individual to an abstract performance is decisive; in the real team, it is the relationship of the individual to the team itself that is decisive. It is a ﬁction that character quality in the sense of genuine comradeship and qualiﬁcation for top performance must necessarily coincide.

Finally, we must remind ourselves of the position of the leader. The leader of a team is neither to be compared to a trainer, nor is it necessary that he exhibit top performance in a particular respect. Leadership quality is a quality of its own kind, and it can only be understood in relation to the team. It is assumed that the leader must be able to ‘do’ something, also in the sense of objective performance; but it is not the ability, but rather being a leader that matters. This quality cannot be replaced by any ability, just as little as the living reality of a team can ever be replaced by the best-functioning performance camaraderie.

Sport, as has been understood so far, knows the team as a technical expedient form, but not as a political form of life. There is no harmony between the performance principle and the team principle as previously assumed. The tension that arises here must not be obscured by equating the temporary sports team with the genuine team, or by acting as if a general will to top performance is suﬃcient. In the form that each individual must get the best out of themselves, this will is one of the general prerequisites. But such a will, even if it is shared by all, does not yet establish a community. Formed groups of individuals who feel committed to athletic peak performance do not yet constitute those closed teams under a leader, within which alone real character education is possible. Political physical education as character training cannot therefore be based on the purely athletic performance principle. Rather, one must start from a principle that lies outside the purely performance related. We see this principle in the politically oriented team.

With this we have gained the fundamental insight basic to founding a political sports pedagogy. Before clarity and agreement are reached on this, the discussion about fundamental issues must remain fruitless. It is more useful to think through the problem to the sharpest opposition between achievement and team than to reassure oneself prematurely with an apparent solution.

Two tendencies are opposed: Either priority of achievement is absolute, then achievement also provides the principle for organization, and the formation of the team and the educational aspect are secondary. Or priority belongs to the team, then the possibility also exists that the principle of achievement will be decidedly rejected. The team’s interest in its own self- assertion can lead practically to an anti-achievement tendency, even if in principle (theoretically) the principle of achievement is recognized.

5. To justify the principle of abstract achievement and the record and star system connected with it, the following consideration has been made. It is quite wrong, it is said, to consider the top achievement by itself. Whoever beholds the winner does not see at the same time the host of those with whom he has trained and who have also striven for victory. And yet this host belongs with it. Every great success rests on a broad basis of competing eﬀorts. If one considers this whole, then the top achievement loses its provocative isolation, it ﬁts into a larger context and proves to be meaningful not only in itself but also in relation to this context.

Precisely such a consideration, correct in itself, reveals what matters. It makes visible the question of the principle according to which the whole of physical exercises is structured. It is indeed a matter of the connection of the top achievement with what precedes it. But does this involve a connection of abstract achievements or that of human beings? The consideration from which we started can be understood in the one as well as in the other sense. The principle of structure is completely diﬀerent in both cases. The principle of the pyramid corresponds to the abstract principle of achievement: achievement upon achievement falls behind at the base until ﬁnally only the pyramidal ‘top achievement’ remains. The units of which this pyramid is composed are achievements. That, in order to attain these achievements, joint practice, practice in teams is also necessary, is willingly conceded. This subsequent recognition, however, means nothing for the structure of the whole. Try to introduce a gradation of team circles into this abstract scheme, it is impossible. One can draw a line of separation somewhere, but one cannot structure it. Any attempt to extract a principle of gradation from the performance pyramid itself is doomed to failure. This principle can only be added inorganically, that is, from the outside. Just as inorganically, political education is added to the pure sports system oriented towards achievement. It is not contained in its starting point.

The structural principle of German physical exercises can only be taken from man, that is, it can only be the team. Thus a completely diﬀerent picture takes the place of the performance pyramid: a system of closed circles by which the team units are represented. This structural principle is from the outset simultaneously educational and political. In place of the abstract element ‘achievement’ steps the unit of structure ‘team’. Living structure is the ﬁrst thing, not the pyramid of achievements. If one starts from absolute performance, then the team structure is also seen from the performance, and the living, educational team spirit dies away. If, on the other hand, one starts from the team, then one also looks at the top performance from the team’s point of view, and that alone is right!

Must the principle of achievement necessarily suﬀer harm on this occasion? The answer is: No. For the team structure cannot be projected into the performance pyramid, but the performance pyramid can be projected into the team structure. Once the team structure exists, it is possible, by means of a system of demands, to bring the ‘will to maximum achievement’ in the individual units to the right degree. What is lost through the wrong, anti-structural approach of the abstract principle of achievement, on the other hand, can never be made up for. There is no objection in principle to be raised against the scheme of the performance pyramid. This scheme will always have to be applied where competitions are concerned. This scheme must be rejected merely as a principle of structure for the reason given: not abstract achievement, but only the living human being can provide the principle of structure.

It is decisive where the individual comes from, from isolated work on his top performance or from the team? One will notice where everyone comes from. The attitude that life in the political team gives the individual is irreplaceable and cannot be obtained in any other way. The lonely athlete standing in no man’s land belongs to the past. The future belongs to the team and those whom it releases to top performance from within itself. Isolation and solitude will always be necessary when the utmost is to be achieved through practice and eﬀort. But now this necessary isolation no longer appears as a principle, but as a transitional moment. Previously, isolation was the symbolic expression of the abstractness of the pure principle of achievement. Now it is something that the person who is capable of entering the Olympic circle of achievements from the team takes upon himself.

6. One cannot characterize the ‘Olympic idea’, as propagated by those who conceive sport in principle as apolitical, more sharply than by calling it the climax of the abstract idea of achievement. While ‘national teams’ do indeed appear in the Olympic competitions, while ﬂags wave and anthems sound, for the sports-minded person all this is only an external garment. What matters to him is the body and its performance. Every memory of the broad, structured basis of teams from which the individual competitor and the individual competition team emerge is banished. From the abstract principle of achievement and its individualism there is a straight line to internationalism.

A real team is the symbolic representation of its people, not, like the isolated individual or the mere sports team, only the representative of an achievement. If one sees only achievements, one also sees only representatives, neutral performers of the achievement. Individualism, otherwise rightly distrusted, has suddenly merrily arisen again and basks in the light of the ‘Olympic idea’.

But to see an Olympia in this way means completely missing its meaning. There is no absolute place from which one could look at an Olympia. Only from the nations does Olympia become visible. There is only an Olympia of nations, as formerly there was only an Olympia of Hellenic cities. It is meaningless to separate the individual achievements (as it were by cross-sections) and unite them into an abstract Olympic pyramid. One must visualize these achievements in their relation to the national units (as it were in longitudinal sections). The athletic life of the individual nations emerges, perfecting itself and surpassing itself, in the Olympic achievement. But it is not the individual nation that receives its meaning through the Olympic wreath, but every Olympia receives its meaning from the fact that on it the teams of the nations prove themselves. Just as the individual team does not receive the meaning of its existence through the achievement of the individual but carries this meaning within itself, the achievement in its objective and in a certain sense accidental exactitude is only the wreath that the strength and courage of this community winds for itself.

The proud structure of German physical exercises rises in three stories. The lower stories support the upper one, but at the same time each has its perfection in itself. Let us designate the three stories with keywords: Basic training - competition - struggle for Olympic achievement. From an abstract- athletic point of view, basic training is uninteresting; from the point of view of education it is of the highest importance. For it is here that the elementary schooling of strength and courage takes place, which is of crucial importance for the overall life of the nation. Only when one no longer succumbs to the fascination of absolute achievement can one become aware of the independent life and the independent right of this lowest and broadest sphere. Goals are set here that everyone can achieve. The popular gymnastics rise slowly into the athletic achievement. Hiking, swimming and cross-country skiing form the poetry of this sphere, so to speak.

On the second level, the struggle for achievement emerges with full force. With it also begins the specialization which makes visible the moment of danger that lies in the principle of achievement. Competition and team reach their prime here. The National Sports Badge indicates the level of achievement that is to be attained at least.

On the third level we ﬁnd the small group that enters the Olympic competition. The idea of competition reaches its highest peak at the same time as the idea of achievement. It was the purpose of our exposition to bring to clear recognition: that this peak can indeed be rightly seen from the broad basis of popular and team physical exercises, but that it leads to dissolution and empty athleticism if one tries to construct from this peak, schematically according to the principle of performance, the sphere of popular life and political education.

The Concept of Community in Rousseau, Fichte and Pestalozzi

The more one deals with the practical eﬀectiveness and doctrine of Pestalozzi, the more magniﬁcent appears the breakthrough through individualism accomplished by him. With the blindness of genius, out of his own abundance of soul, the Swiss achieved something similar in his ﬁeld to what the East Prussian Herder achieved. Just as Herder freed us from the individualistic thinking of the Enlightenment and taught us to feel and recognize culture as a product of peoples, so Pestalozzi taught us to feel and see education not only for but also through the community.

In this sense we can call Pestalozzi the Herder of pedagogy.

Humanism and Enlightenment are rightly called ‘pedagogical’ currents. Our present interest in school, learning and teaching, instruction and education stems essentially from these intellectual movements. But that narrowing of the pedagogical problem also comes from them, which makes the stretches of the theory of education one of the most unpleasant and unfruitful chapters of the humanities. By their origin in Humanism and Enlightenment, the theory of education suﬀers from a false approach. Erasmus and Vives, Comenius and Ratke are indeed reformers of the school and bold innovators in didactics, but they leave the essential questions untouched. Pestalozzi, on the other hand, is not a mere reformer of the school, but a revolutionary of education. He frees pedagogy from its overgrowth by didactics and puts it on its own feet. His discovery of community as the basis of all education means the detachment of pedagogical theory from the fetters of individualism and the attainment of the only possible fruitful approach to the science of education.

To this day, however, it is not Pestalozzi but Rousseau who enjoys the fame of this liberation. In ‘Emile’ one sees the basic book of modern pedagogical science. Here one believes to ﬁnd the ideas that have not only had a revolutionary eﬀect on their time but have also determined the approach to the pedagogical problem down to the present day. The education of the individual into a ‘human being’ through the systematic development of the physical and mental powers slumbering within him up to his integration into human society, this is supposed to have been the program of all education and the key to pedagogical theory since Rousseau. This has been repeated countless times, countless times people have thereby sinned against the genius of Pestalozzi. For it is not Rousseau but Pestalozzi who is the real revolutionary in the history of the science of education. Through Rousseau only one side of the Enlightenment is overcome; precisely at the decisive point the author of ‘Emile’ remains completely caught up in the Enlightenment. Pestalozzi penetrates to the depths and destroys Enlightenment thinking at its root.

Through Rousseau, education has been freed from the guardianship of the book; the right of childhood and youth has been recognized and aﬃrmed by him; as has the right of the body and manual labor. These may be important discoveries in the ﬁeld of education. But we are concerned with the principle. Is Rousseau the explorer of the true realm of education, as has been presented to us again and again by liberal historiography, or does his pedagogy merely represent the climax of Enlightenment individualism in its ﬁnal phase brought about by him?

Rousseau’s historical signiﬁcance is based on the fact that he put an end to the rationalism of the Enlightenment. It is usually assumed that rationalism and individualism are so closely connected that the end of one must also mean the end of the other. This is not the case. There is a rationalistic and an irrationalistic individualism. Rousseau does not abandon Enlightenment’s individualistic thinking when he puts feeling in the place of reason. What is achieved by this is merely individualism in a new, more dangerous form. The place of rationalistic individualism is taken by irrationalistic individualism, the strict rule of reason is replaced by the anarchy of a heart that feels only itself and impetuously desires its happiness. Reason still has its standards and forms; the unleashed heart, however, knows only itself and its formless arbitrariness. The ‘liberation’ through Rousseau does not lead to a new, deeper commitment, but to dissolution. That is why Rousseau was able to become the philosopher of the French Revolution, which did not ﬁnd the measure in itself, but had to be brought to a halt from the outside by General Bonaparte.

Rousseau’s philosophy is without binding principle, so how could his ‘Emile’ contain the right pedagogical approach? Irrationalistic individualism takes the place of rationalistic individualism, and the former is even more dangerous than the latter!

In ‘Emile’, three diﬀerent kinds of education are distinguished. The individual is educated by nature or by human beings or by things. The education provided by nature does not depend on us, that provided by things only to a certain extent, and that provided by humans is also only conditionally within our power. The true educator is the connection between nature and things. The pedagogue does not have to educate, but only has to ensure that nothing is done to interfere with the educational work of nature. With the word ‘nature’ every notion of natural human community must be dismissed. ‘Nature’ merely means the nexus of forces and events into which humans are placed; the result of education should be that in the end one ﬁnds oneself in a right relationship to nature.

Rousseau’s ‘nature’ is a completely impersonal educator; the connection between nature and things, through whose reactions one attains knowledge of one’s own strength and weakness, is an inhuman one. The human community is contained in Rousseau’s approach in no form whatsoever.

Emile is an orphan; he stands outside all relationships and bonds. The only human relationship in which he is shown from the beginning, that to his educator, remains completely vague, shapeless and cool. This educator stands beside the actual happening, he only supports and explains what happens by itself. Neither the family nor the men’s association have any inﬂuence on Emile. The other human being only becomes signiﬁcant for him at the moment when his sexuality awakens. He encounters him in the ﬁgure of the beloved.

The detailed description of puberty therefore marks the decisive turning point in the structure of the whole. In principle, however, nothing more is changed by the appearance of Sophie. The education is complete. Emile, who has been formed into a ‘human being’ without human beings, becomes husband and father and in this way a citizen.

Emile has grown up not only in external solitude and silence, but also in complete inner solitude, as if it were in a socially empty space. If nevertheless he ends up as a citizen in accordance with the demands of Rousseau’s main political work (‘The Social Contract’), this is, considered purely intellectually, no contradiction, because life in human society remains the goal of education for Rousseau after all. His Emile is educated away from human community, but still for life in community. Herein precisely lies the peculiar paradox of Rousseau’s philosophical-educational approach: only outside the community (of today) can one educate for the community (of tomorrow). Education for the true, future community is to be made possible by separation from the corrupt, present community.

The question remains unanswered here whether it is at all possible to educate a human being for the community outside the community life. How is a human being who has never had the experience of community supposed to grow into the community? Through marriage the isolated egotist can become a family egotist, but not suddenly a human being in the community. Without the experience of community from an early age, an education for the community is not possible. Rousseau’s system is the system of consummate egotism. All his appeals to the sympathetic heart cannot disguise the fact that individualism here reaches its peak and refutes itself. The complement to this extreme individualism is an equally extreme collectivism, as we ﬁnd in Rousseau’s concept of the state.

From the same metaphysical assumption that the present is completely corrupt, Fichte draws a completely diﬀerent pedagogical inference. Although he does segregate the generation to be educated in the spirit of a new era from the older one, he does after all let the children grow up under the guardianship of their teachers in an institutional community.

But Fichte’s signiﬁcance for theoretical pedagogy is not to be sought in the conquest of the concept of community for the science of education. Fichte approaches the problem of education from the point of view of the ideal task set for the new generation. In this way he ﬁnds and shapes the concept of the nation as a historical community of descent which at the same time is a community of pure spirits, whereby what matters to Fichte is to demonstrate the spiritual character of this community, but not to demonstrate the independent signiﬁcance of a concrete community as such. And there is no talk of an educational eﬀect of the community. Finally, in Fichte too education is more an education for the spiritual community than an education through the community. Of the two concrete forms of community (family and men’s association or clan and entourage [Gefolgschaft]), not one appears in Fichte’s system of education. In their place stands the pure rational construction of an educational institution that unites children of both sexes under the supervision of teachers.

Originally and before all education, so Fichte believes, there lies in man that which makes education at all possible. Morality cannot be instilled into the child if it were not already in him beforehand. But the purest form of this morality is the drive for respect. Not sensual childish and parental love, as Pestalozzi assumes, but the drive for mutual respect is for Fichte the basis of all moral education.

Accordingly, man does not develop in life within the community into a complete human being through mutual give and take, but coexistence with others is only the consequence of a morality that is ready-made and as it were preformed within us. The drive for respect has no real development, its content is always the same. It changes appearance, but not essence.

Thus Fichte does assume the relationship between human being and human being as the basis of all moral education, but for that very reason he does not understand man as a being developing morally within the community. As a consequence, the community as the prerequisite for moral development recedes completely into the background in pedagogical theory. Surprising as this may sound to us today, Fichte does not derive the concept of the nation from the concept of community. Fichte knows nothing of the fact that man ﬁrst grows into a real human being in community. Mutual respect is a great thing, but human relationships within a living community are by no means exhausted by mutual respect. Much more elementary processes than that of mutual respect form the fundamental layer of the life of the community. Because Fichte leaves all these processes unconsidered, he is unable to build up his concept of the nation from the bottom up but has to construct it from the top down.

Pestalozzi in turn does not know Fichte’s concept of the nation. His concept of the people is merely a social one. For Pestalozzi, ‘people’ quite indeﬁnitely means the ‘lower’ people who must be helped, not the political people, the closed nation. Pestalozzi’s path to pedagogy does not lead via the philosophy of history and the historical phenomenon of the nation, but via the experience of youth education. And that means for him: via the experience of the living community.

It is the narrow community of the house, the family, parental and ﬁlial love that Pestalozzi has exclusively in mind here. His concept of community never detached itself from this narrow starting point. The contemporary nature of this peaceful-idyllic concept of community is easy to recognize, and criticism of it can be given without diﬃculty in the age of the great nation states. But for pedagogical theory, the decisive thing is not which sub-area of community Pestalozzi started from, but ﬁrst the fact that he started at all from the real community of the family, that was a real revolution, and second, the way in which he conceived his approach.

In the consciousness of posterity, Pestalozzi lives on as the creator of the method of elementary instruction, that is, as a didactician. A tragic misunderstanding! It was precisely that which lies before all didactics that mattered to Pestalozzi the practitioner as well as the theoretician. He found it diﬃcult to give adequate expression to his greatest and most important idea, and perhaps only today can we fully understand how simple and correct the approach of Pestalozzian pedagogy is.

It was a very simple insight that Pestalozzi wanted to express. All instruction, however successful it may be, is without value and meaning if it does not take place within the framework of a living community. Training of intellect and will leads to nothing but a thousand empty skills if man does not at the same time unfold morally. But he does so only under the breath of love. ‘The error was great and the deception immeasurable’, says Pestalozzi, ‘in believing that I seek the formation of human nature through one-sided development of the head, that I seek it through the one-sidedness of arithmetic and mathematics; no, I seek it through the many-sidedness of love’. The life of the heart precedes all correct knowledge and skill, and without the development of the powers of the heart, all development of mental abilities is of no avail. Therefore the child can only be morally educated within the circle of domestic life. The child loves and believes before it thinks and acts, and the inﬂuence of domestic life stimulates and raises it to the inner essence of the moral powers which presuppose all human thought and action.

The point at which Pestalozzi starts is thus that layer of elementary experiences and events which connect the child with mother, father and siblings. The ‘love’, into which word Pestalozzi summarizes all these experiences, is not about one-time early experiential states, but about something that is permanently essential to humans, about what actually ﬁrst makes them human. The educator’s task is to never detach methodically guided instruction from such situations through which the loving power of the pupil is challenged. Only in a continual exchange of loving giving and taking can the child unfold as a moral being. Nothing would be more disastrous than a didactics which, without this elementary education through love (which we can call emotional), would undertake to educate people. It would result in a mechanical doll, not a living human being. Faith and love is the A and O of natural, and consequently elementary, education towards humanity. Mental education and artistic education are only subordinate educational means to it and are only able to contribute their share to the harmony of our forces and to their equilibrium among one another in this subordination.

Pestalozzi is the ﬁrst pedagogue who understood humans not as isolated, ﬁnished individuals, but as those still developing in community. He is the ﬁrst who considered a real circle of life, a communal reality as the ﬁrst and most important thing in all education and teaching. He turned to the questions of didactics with true passion and got lost in the strangest trains of thought. He never underestimated the signiﬁcance of questions of teaching methodology. At the same time, however, he assigned a place for all time to instruction where alone it can unfold its beneﬁcial eﬀect.

Instruction must always be embedded in a living community, this is Pestalozzi’s decisive insight, the doctrine he left to the generations of teachers after him. Only if the ‘basic forces’ that make the coexistence of people in the family possible are alive and active can intellect and will unfold without harm. Pestalozzi’s pedagogy therefore distinguishes the means of unfolding the human basic forces from the means of training and directing towards knowledge and skills.

The means of unfolding the basic forces are always equal to themselves and proceed from eternal laws; the means of training and directing are as diverse as the objects of the world to whose cognition and use our forces are applied. These are subordinate and adapted to the former. This means not only the priority of the irrational over the rational, of the heart over the intellect, but it means the priority of the reality of life over all instruction and over all knowledge and ability of the individual. But the deepest meaning of the priority of life’s reality over method is the priority of community over the individual.

This priority is not to be understood as if community and individual were separable from each other and the former had to be valued more highly than the latter. That would be an externally mechanistic notion. Community and individual belong together and form a whole. Priority of community means (in Pestalozzi’s language) priority of love, which means: priority of the forces which establish the immediate life of the community over all abilities and achievements of another kind, even if they constitute the pride of the individual.

Philosophy

The philosophical thinking of the West has been most strongly determined by German philosophy in recent centuries. Names like Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel designate high points of the global inﬂuence of the German spirit. The precondition for this eﬀect was that German philosophy moved along a line (Kant did so exclusively critically) that had been outlined by the ancient scholastic theory of ideas. The European propagation of this handed-down doctrine created the prerequisites for the success of German theoretical idealism.

A single thinker dared to oppose the idealism named after Plato and to design a German (and at the same time pre-Socratic Hellenic) philosophy independent of tradition: Friedrich Nietzsche. It will always remain the fame of this ﬁghter against his time that he had the courage to measure the doctrine of ideas of the past against his own inner self and made the bold decision to put something new in its place. The philosophy of the will to power was never completed, but it will still be alive when the closed systems of the idealist tradition have been forgotten.

The intellectual and political upheaval, of which Nietzsche had a premonition, was indeed brought about in a diﬀerent way than he imagined by National Socialism. In a struggle of unprecedented violence the parties were annihilated, and the Reich was won. The traditional world of ideas sank along with the parties. The handed-down world of ideas had not been able to save the nation at the decisive moment, it had not freed people’s hearts for reality, but had pushed itself between human beings and reality. Now it met its fate. The new experience of community, born out of the upheavals of the World War, shaped by genius, did not measure its own reality against the doctrine of ideas, but the doctrine of ideas against its reality. Thus, at the beginning of what will one day be called National Socialist philosophy stands a new experience and a new conception of reality, a new worldview. Our ﬁrst task is to recognize what distinguishes the worldview of National Socialism from the ‘philosophia perennis’. From this results a standard for judging all subjectively well-intentioned attempts at a National Socialist philosophy. The danger of a restoration of the handed-down doctrine of ideas is still very great. Let us remember that once before a national awakening of our people was brought by a great thinker (Fichte) to the spiritual formulas of the old doctrine of ideas and thus robbed of its revolutionary thrust. If today many would like to see the author of the Addresses to the German Nation as the ﬁrst National Socialist thinker, that is less harmless than it looks. What is at stake is nothing less than the self-assertion of the new sense of reality as the source of a future philosophy vis-à-vis all attempts to strike a compromise between National Socialism and theoretical idealism.

If National Socialist ideology gives the word ‘idea’ pride of place in its dictionary, it does so in a sense that is completely contrary to tradition. For here the idea is related to the HUMAN BEING who produces, recognizes and realizes it. It is not simply the idea as such (the absolute idea), but the idea for me . In the language of the traditional doctrine of ideas, this means: the idea is relativized by being deﬁned on the basis of an individual and personal ‘frame of reference’. The crucial twist now consists in the insight that the concept of relativization only makes sense in relation to an absolute. If there is no reason to assume an absolute, the opposition between absolute and relative also disappears. National Socialist consciousness of reality no longer knows the problems of the old doctrine of ideas, which was obliged by its point of departure to contrast the relative with the absolute, the conditional with the unconditional, the ﬁnite with the inﬁnite.

The philosophy corresponding to this consciousness has its problems elsewhere, namely where the question of general communicability arises. The traditional doctrine of ideas includes absolute logic. From the point of departure of National Socialist philosophy arises the problem of a logic which, although arising within the compass of our frame of reference, at the same time transcends it. All the questions raised by the National Socialist worldview are theoretically and practically insoluble in principle from the absolutist and universalistic point of departure of the traditional doctrine of ideas. This is because in both the dualistic and monistic systems of philosophy the ‘idea’ always has the HUMAN BEING before it as an individual. The misconception of personality contained herein has been eliminated by National Socialism through the recognition of the commonality and persistence of racial character. To be sure, man is a personal unity, but this personality is not an absolute one confronting or encompassed by an absolute idea; rather, as a person we are at the same time non-persons in that we only arrive at ourselves by ﬁnding ourselves in a fateful real connection with our ancestors and descendants.

On Theology and Science - For the 1937 Descartes Congress

Zum Descartes - Kongreß 1937 (Völkischer Beobachter 30. 7. 1937)

The almost unmanageable problematic nature of recent philosophy does not have its cause, as is sometimes assumed, in the particular vanity of individual philosophers who seek to surprise the world with new systems, but in the highly intricate process of the emergence of Western philosophy as such. Philosophy among the Germanic and Romance peoples has emerged just as little unmediated from the original inclination of these peoples toward cognition as has art and poetry. What a philosophy would have looked like that had sprung unmediated from the at once brooding and daring spirit of the northern tribes without the mediation of Greek conceptual formation, we do not know.

Western philosophy, which has entered a new stage in recent decades, was determined by an overpowering tradition. The terminology and systematics of this philosophy are dependent on the mighty context of thought reaching from the pre-Socratics to Proclus. However, the torn state and confusion that make philosophical understanding so diﬃcult for us would never have occurred if, yet another inﬂuence had not taken place in the development of Western thought. Under the compulsion of general development, the thinking of the European peoples is ﬁrst directed toward the explication of the dogma of the Church, thus bringing forth a rational system of immense proportions. For the development of philosophy up to the 19th century (and in a certain sense up to the present day) it has been of importance that theology in the West is older than independent science. Although over the course of the centuries people have detached themselves more and more from theological opinions about the world, for philosophy not individual opinions and theories are decisive, but rather the direction in which the primary question moves. Despite tremendous eﬀorts, European thinking did not achieve a completely independent formulation of problems up to the 19th century because from the very beginning it had been distracted by a formally superior theological speculation in certain directions.

The great epoch of Western philosophical thinking begins in the vigorous, promising century that directs the mathematical sciences and the investigation of the physical nature with bold momentum into unexpected paths. From the 17th century onward, philosophy, regardless of its connection with theology, is indissolubly linked with the independent research of modern science. The philosophical systematists of the Baroque era are at the same time the leading mathematicians and physicists of their time. However, they do not succeed in freeing themselves from the power of traditional formulations of questions in metaphysics and in their conception of man.

Theology and natural science stand unharmonized side by side and engage in magniﬁcent battles in the minds of the great thinkers. A strong restlessness and an immense philosophical productivity result from the encounter between the old metaphysical basic ideas and the new basic concepts and methods of investigating nature. The entanglement of problems and complexity of hypotheses reaches its climax.

The systematizer who initiates this epoch is Descartes; it is Hegel who brings it to an end. The theological and scientiﬁc elements that struggle with each other in Descartes are synthetically combined with each other by Hegel, as previously by Leibniz; at the same time, the Greek tradition penetrates anew, enriching and complicating, by way of humanistic philology. Descartes is dismissively referred to by the theologians today as an Enlightener. From their point of view they are right to be angry with this bold and yet cautious spirit. If we celebrate him as the father of modern philosophy, we do so because in his person he was the ﬁrst to present the conﬂict between theology and science on a grand scale. We are able today to do justice to Descartes because the intellectual situation out of which he created no longer exists; we have gained the distance necessary for a just judgment. There is but a single name that denotes this distance: Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche is the ﬁrst European philosopher who no longer derives his problems and solutions from the conﬂict between theology and science, but advances to independent formulations of problems independently of the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition. His recourse to pre-Socratic philosophy is the precise historical expression of the new situation.

That philosophy should remain allied with natural research is beyond doubt for Nietzsche. But it is just as certain to him that philosophy can never become a merely ‘epistemological’ appendage of the exact sciences. No one can solve its problems except itself. This recovery of philosophy in its independence from theology and in its sovereign position vis-à-vis the individual sciences is the most important event in recent intellectual history.

It is necessary to understand this event today. As tends to happen in times of crisis when the new is already present but recognized by only a few, the powers that fought with one another in the past awaken once more. The theological metaphysics with its traditional problems reconstitutes itself anew; the exact sciences ﬁnd advocates who call themselves philosophers and who are willing to renounce any philosophical problematic in favor of a formal language in which everything can be said with the utmost precision that interests no living human being. The tendencies of theological metaphysics and the exact sciences, whose union and conﬂict constitutes the history of modern philosophy up to Nietzsche, confront each other once more under the catchwords ‘metaphysical’ and ‘anti-metaphysical’ philosophy in a ﬁnal formalization. However, the skirmish already bears the character of that unreality which characterizes events in which the soul of the age is not present. It is more a ghost battle than a battle of spirits. Let us seek, beyond theological and scientiﬁc ‘philosophy’, the ﬁrm ground of a truly philosophical problem!

Genuine problems are posed by life, not by tradition; tradition can only provide guidance and standards for overcoming them. For more than a century, the peoples of the West have been struggling with an experience of which internationally recognized philosophy has not yet taken note. It is the experience of the peoples’ own existence, which is referred to by the name nationalism. With this experience the urge for the peoples’ historical self, understanding is inextricably linked. When we pose the question of man anew today, we are posing the question of historical reality. German philosophy in its development from Leibniz to Hegel has approached this problem in bold advances; it was ﬁrst formulated by Nietzsche, and it is only now being fully understood in our time.

Descartes had consciously removed the problem of history from himself; a philosophy that makes itself the handmaid of the individual sciences is simply incapable of seeing historical existence at all. Both ‘metaphysical’ and ‘anti-metaphysical’ philosophy pass by historical life in this way. Neither lacks formulas, but human thought cannot be separated from human existence. It lives in problems; it turns rigid in formulas. Philosophy today is where the problem of shared historical existence is experienced and thought.

Iphigenia in Tauris

When the verses strike our ear:

‘Come forth into your shadows, stirring treetops...’ then before our mind’s eye stands the sublime image of the daughter of Agamemnon, who, erect and proud, in noble simplicity and quiet grandeur, longingly gazes over at the distant native coast. The old legend of the house of Atreus, Greek measure, and modern humanity are, as is usually perceived, thought to have entered into a wonderfully intimate union in Goethe’s mind, and Iphigenia stands there as priestess before the altar of the noble ideal of a classicism in which ancient substances are wedded with modern sensitivity. Iphigenia in Tauris is regarded as the drama of humanity, as the most perfect presentation of the idea of humanity that succeeded for Goethe at the beginning of his turn to classicism (Cavaliero, 2013; J. W. v. Goethe & Farrelly, 2000; J. W. v. Goethe, Pascal, & Swales, 2014).

If one investigates this idea of humanity in Iphigenia, it turns out ﬁrst of all that there can be no talk of a doctrine of humanity. Nowhere does the drama deal with general human duties; it knows only duties of kinship, hospitality, and an obligation to the gods. Only a single passage at the end could stimulate a dogmatic interpretation in the sense of the idea of humanity. When Iphigenia entrusts her and her house’s fate into Thoas’ hands and says: ‘Destroy us, if you may’, the king answers (V. 1936):

‘You think the rough Scythian, the barbarian hears

The voice of truth and humanity that Atreus,

The Greek, did not perceive?’

And Iphigenia answers:

‘Everyone hears it,

Born under every sky, to whom

The spring of life ﬂows purely

And unhindered through the breast’.

Is it not said here: We are all human, and each of us hears the voice of truth and humanity? Is not the doctrine of humanity thus proclaimed by Iphigenia herself and the old conception of the drama of humanity conﬁrmed?

But what does Iphigenia really reply? Under every sky, she says, there can be human beings in whom ‘the spring of life ﬂows purely and unhindered through the breast’. These are the ones who perceive the voice of truth and humanity. It remains an open possibility that there are human beings in whom the spring of life does not ﬂow purely and unhindered; Iphigenia does not speak of them. What she rejects is the limitation of the feeling for truth and humanity to the Greek; what she states is not a general doctrine but an experience: there a r e human beings in whom the spring of life ﬂows purely and unhindered. She counts herself among them; by addressing the king, she appeals to him to examine himself as to whether he too might belong to them. The process is concrete: eye to eye the Greek woman faces the barbarian; now and here it must prove to which group he belongs. There is nothing in this scene that conﬂicts with a racial conception. How could the primal phenomenon of a speciﬁc racial basic feeling be better described than by the metaphor of the spring, in whose free ﬂow the feeling of existence of the nobly born manifests itself? What Thoas really is shown in the test. Iphigenia does not draw logical conclusions from a humanistic dogma but confronts Thoas with the necessity to decide and thereby reveal himself.

Iphigenia in Tauris, alongside Werther and the ﬁrst Faust probably the most perfect work that ﬂowed from Goethe’s soul, allows us in its main character to experience the human being in whom the spring of life pours purely and unhindered. In the ﬁgure of Iphigenia we are not confronted with the noble jointed doll of a humanistic postulate, not with man as he should be, but with a living soul that shows in every moment how a nobly born being feels, thinks and acts. But the magic of classicism is overpowering. Perhaps nothing is more diﬃcult than recognizing that Iphigenia is not an ethical postulate in Greek garb, but a real German human being.

According to traditional interpretation, humanistic content and classicistic form are most closely intertwined precisely in this drama. Goethe, one believes, enters a new epoch of his existence with Iphigenia. This drama is the gate through which he enters the land of serenity, perfection and maturity. Storm and Stress now lie far behind him. Not the urgent heart and its abundance, but beauty, truth and measure are now everything to him.

This conception, it seems to me, does not do full justice to the drama. Iphigenia is the last work of the young Goethe: in terms of content it is neither humanitarian nor classicistic in form. Rather, it is the purest representation of the deepest experience of his youthful period, the experience of his own, unerring feeling, his ‘subjectivity,’ as it used to be called, his innermost certainty of existence, as it is more aptly termed.

Goethe’s term for this innermost certainty of existence is heart. By heart Goethe understands the ultimately only immediately comprehensible ﬁnal justiﬁcation of everything we feel, think and do in ourselves, in the unfathomable depth of our soul. ‘Heart’ apparently does not say much, justiﬁcation by the unfathomable, explanation by the inexplicable, naming by the unnameable, and yet it says everything, for the recourse to the heart is the recourse to the center of life, from which everything that happens to man receives its meaning. Without soul, without personal responsibility, without conscience, everything that happens in and around man is nothing but meaningless, empty bustle. Iphigenia in Tauris gives shape to the most important experience of the young Goethe: that it is the heart to which man owes everything, that there is only one betrayal for him, betrayal of what the heart tells him to do. Iphigenia in Tauris is the drama of the pure heart, not the conjuration of a marble-cold ideal by classicistic means, but the liveliest, albeit most reﬁned, representation of fresh, immediate experience.

The ﬁgure of Iphigenia is anything but the representation of an invariable content. Iphigenia is a ceaselessly agitated soul, an intense subjectivity. At issue in the drama is not the victory of an objective truth, but the victory of truthfulness. The virgin and priestess does not confront us as the administrator of an eternal objective meaning, but as a living being that quivers with joy and pain.

‘A wheel of joy and pain rolls through my soul ‘, she says at one point (V. 1184), and even to the king she ﬂares up so that he says (V. 1821):

‘From holy lips comes forth a savage song’.

The wonderful composure with which she faces Arkas and Thoas is the pride of the king’s daughter and the priestess, not the serene calm of a mind moved only by gentle waves. Iphigenia is the spiritual sister of Werther and Faust. The seemingly so antithetical ﬁgure of Tasso does not belong to another world but is only a particular abstraction of that subjectivity which stirs so vividly in all of Goethe’s favorite characters.

When Iphigenia acknowledges herself as belonging to the race of Tantalus, that is no empty phrase. Genealogically she really belongs in the line of those whose ‘vigorous marrow’ stems from the Titans, for whom every desire turns to fury and whose fury ranges boundlessly about (V. 328 ﬀ). This fateful fury is the subjectivity of those around whose brow the god forged a brazen band, bearers of an immense blind selﬁshness which is nonetheless a distorted self-certainty. As a foreigner, an outsider, Iphigenia would not be able to absolve her house.

Only the granddaughter of the Titans can help; the deed demanded by necessity can only be accomplished from the power of a tempestuous heart.

Iphigenia stands between two worlds, one of which (Thoas, Arkas) she belongs to as priestess and guest, the other (Orestes, Pylades) she belongs to by blood. Compelled by the necessity of the moment, she is forced to commit an act that does not stem from her own soul. In passing on what the clever Pylades puts into her mouth, she becomes unfaithful to herself, slips into an external and mechanical action; she is now only a means, no longer a person; it is not she who acts; it acts through her. Thereby she violates the root of her being, loses her purity. This purity does not consist in being untouched by mood, feeling and passion, but in the power of self-assertion, in the unshakable faithfulness to the deepest part of her soul.

With horror she feels that she is about to lose herself, then in a mighty upswing of the soul through an ‘unheard-of deed’ she saves herself (v. 1892 ﬀ). She casts aside the clever, forced word and speaks the truth, although she must believe that this will ruin her brother and her whole house. One should not underestimate this decision. Objectively, viewed from the actual interconnection of events, what she does is madness: she opposes the plan that would lead to salvation, she takes the side of the opponent, and with no other justiﬁcation than that the purity of her soul demands it. Viewed from the level of actuality, it is illogical, but it corresponds to the logic of her heart. From the unconditional self-assertion speaks the granddaughter of the Titans: it is the same unconditional nature that once brought the curse and now shall bring blessing upon the whole race. Yet nothing changes in the mighty contrast between Atreus and Iphigenia, between blind rage and knowing goodness. One should not overlook the power of decision that lies in Iphigenia, how monstrous it is to stake everything on one’s own inner self at this moment.

The unexpected has happened, Iphigenia has placed the self-assertion of her character above any calculation of possible success, the inner self has detached itself from the external rational coherence of things and thereby seems to bring everything into confusion. Iphigenia, who has listened to Pylades’ advice, acts contrary to what he wishes based on his causal foresight. But his clever calculation is not conﬁrmed by the course of events. He has underestimated the strength of the Taurians, the opponent is already driving the Greeks back. Orestes’ external situation has changed fatefully while Iphigenia detaches herself from Pylades’ plan and returns to her original attitude. What had to be considered folly now appears as wisdom. What situation would Orestes be in if his sister, burdened with the lie, now stood beside him before the victorious king? Iphigenia’s self-assertion comes entirely from within herself, without any regard for the interconnection of events, which is precisely why it can now be in harmony with events. That her friends are losing does not disturb the priestess anymore; with gathered strength and whole soul, she brings her confrontation with Thoas to an end. If her courage to be herself had been less, her conscience not so unconditional, she would have been drawn into defeat and perhaps into destruction. The madness of the pure heart reveals itself as the wisdom of things. Scarcely has Iphigenia spoken the words (2005ﬀ):

Forgive me, brother! but my childlike heart Has placed our whole fate in its hands.

I have confessed your design

And saved my soul from betrayal.

when the turn has already happened that takes the reproach from her.

What is brought into the center through the action of the drama, the self-certainty of pure feeling, must clearly reveal itself within the score as the part, the main voice. But it is not so simple to look into Iphigenia’s heart. The steady stance of the drama, the loftiness of the overall tone, easily deceives one into thinking that the heroine indulges in humane reﬂections, rather than striding from one peak of feeling to another. It is nothing but an illusion if one takes the opening monologue for an elegiac piece and imagines hearing the tone of calm composure continuing in the subsequent conversations with Arkas and the king. Whoever has once experienced the incomparable Iphigenia played by Anne Kersten at the Munich State Theater, the classicist veils will already fall from their eyes after the very ﬁrst verses, when the great artist, following the splendidly struck rhythm of the beginning, immediately allows the passionate soul of Agamemnon’s daughter to become palpable at the word ‘shuddering feeling’. Here speaks not an unchanging prudence, but a mind open to the mood of the moment, of deepest impressionability, a soul that preserves itself only by giving itself to the world. The opening monologue is not a noble-longing declamation, but a single mighty swelling outburst of the strongest feeling; in the increasingly impassioned address to the goddess, passion streams forth with impetus (v. 35 ﬀ). Several more times (v. 538 ﬀ, 982 ﬀ, 1039 ﬀ, 1094 ﬀ, 1317 ﬀ, 1712 ﬀ) we hear the priestess directly address the gods. This is not temple habit: Iphigenia’s prayers are breakthroughs of genuine emotion, improvisations of the heart at the highest points of the widest-spanning waves of feeling.

But the impulsive nature of the heroine also emerges everywhere else (v. 461 f, 844, 867ﬀ, 967ﬀ, 1156ﬀ, 1190ﬀ, 1677 ﬀ, 1956). Her falling silent (v. 349, 918) at the realization of the terrible fate of her house is the silence of a deeply agitated soul deprived of words.

Pure is the heart that ﬁnds itself in harmony with itself. The mind at one with itself is free. Iphigenia essentially wants nothing but to be free; through the lie she feels bound, estranged from herself. She does not ﬁght for others, she ﬁghts for herself; but since what she seeks to attain is true freedom, she also frees the others, and it is revealed that the pure heart stands in a secret covenant with the world.

Characteristically diﬀerent from these prayers is the formal blessing wish of the priestess to Thoas (v. 220 ﬀ). To believe in this covenant, in a ﬁnal unity, although the world knows nothing of the heart, the heart nothing of the world (as the action of Iphigenia shows), leads to religion.

One can never admire enough with what power Goethe has brought the belief in the gods of the Hellenes to life in Iphigenia. The Parzen song could almost be called a highpoint of Hellenic piety. The gods are present everywhere. And yet the action itself and the character around which it revolves are not antique. Iphigenia’s conscience is ‘modern’. But what is the meaning of the ‘modernity’ of this drama? Pylades, as the man of the external interconnection of things, is Iphigenia’s true opponent. Not by chance does the decisive point come to clear expression in the conversation between the two (IV, 1). Pylades presents the necessity to Iphigenia. She replies:

Yet my own heart is not satisﬁed.

When her interlocutor here scents ‘hidden pride’ (subjectivity), she defends herself with the prime argument of the philosophy of the heart:

I do not inquire, I only feel.

And as the highpoint of this life-aﬃrming philosophy she speaks the words (v. 1652):

The heart enjoys itself only when entirely unstained.

The heart does not receive its purity from the gods, its freedom it owes only to itself. The gods do indeed speak to humans through a ‘hint of the ﬁnger’ (v. 1464); but what one has to do, the human must know from within themselves. Not through miracles and external signs do the gods communicate with humans.

They speak to us only through our heart (v. 494).

Thereby the ultimate is touched upon: the relationship of humans to the gods. No statement of humanism reaches into this sphere. But the stance that Goethe’s Iphigenia proclaims also transcends the boundaries of Hellenic religion. It is perhaps the most expressive passage of this drama, when Iphigenia at the depths of her confusion remembers the Olympians and pleads with them for her salvation with the words (v. 1717):

And save your image in my soul!

With what unheard-of boldness the maiden places herself opposite the gods here! There is a kind of Promethean self-certainty in her demand that the gods should be concerned about their own image in the soul of this human. The gods are not indiﬀerent to prayers and sacriﬁces, they need humans as these need them. But from this general reciprocal relationship between gods and humans to the prayer cry: save your image in my soul, is a long way. One could see in Iphigenia’s prayer the expression of a new, of a religious humanism. This new humanism would have to be called Protestant in intellectual history, not going back beyond Cicero and Plato, but beyond the faith of Luther. In the concept of faith of the German Reformation lies that inwardness of the relationship between human and God that leads to Iphigenia’s piety.

Schiller’s Wallenstein

Until the start of the Thirty Years’ War, the German people lived in the peace of the Empire; after 1648, the Empire was no longer a reality. To the biological and material damages that the terrible war inﬂicted on the German people must be counted as the last and heaviest the destruction of the idea of the Empire (Mann, 1976; Mortimer, 2010).

We possess a poetry that still lets us sense the lost spiritual space of the Empire. It is Simplicius Simplicissimus. Its theme is the homeless German, the German without an Empire. Grimmelshausen’s creation is irreplaceable for us because it at least still lets us feel the wound that the spiritual downfall of the Empire left in the German people during the Thirty Years’ War. A generation later, and even this wound is no longer felt. A generation grows up that seeks its way without knowing anything of the Empire. Emperor and Empire were still present somewhere, but as spiritual powers they had vanished virtually without a trace.

It is the miracle of our history that we recovered at all from this spiritual collapse. A hundred years after the Peace of Westphalia, the ascent to the new classical period begins with Klopstock. To be sure, we sense from our classical poetry that it moves in a space without an empire. Its diversity and richness, but also its problems and the contingency of its creations, are the consequence of that loss. Entirely left to itself, without being rooted in a political-spiritual community, without guidance by an idea, the solitary poet must seek his material in life and an imponderable past, glancing yearningly at times toward the unattainable Hellenes, whose native saga and history oﬀered the poet everything he needed.

Neither Goethe nor Kleist, neither Grillparzer nor Hebbel grasped the theme of the Empire. ‘Götz’ and ‘Egmont’ can only be called historical poetry in the cultural-historical sense: Kleist wrote the drama of Prussiandom; Hebbel saw only the state, and Grillparzer in his ‘Ottokar’ even avoided the Empire. His work is merely Habsburg, without relation to the substance of the real Empire.

It is diﬀerent with the great epic poet of the southeastern space. Stifter’s ‘Witiko’, which nobody knew recently, which few know today, and which will be read in schools tomorrow, is the purest work about the Empire that we possess. The whole contrariety and tension of the German soul lies in the fact that alongside this work of the Southeast stands the so entirely diﬀerently constituted work of a Swabian. ‘Wallenstein’ is Schiller’s mightiest achievement. Of all German poets, Schiller is the only one who succeeded in transferring a piece of the Empire’s history into the truth of dramatic poetry (Schiller, Kimmich, & Paulin, 2017). And it is certainly one of the most shattering conﬁrmations of the fateful course of our history that even this subject matter came into the hands of our greatest tragedian only by chance, in no way from a conscious connection to the idea of the Empire.

It goes without saying that we must not tear apart a poetic whole and then use the individual pieces as evidence for some opinion or system. Every poetic work is a structure with its own atmosphere, its own life, and its own lawfulness. However, it is aestheticism to understand the intrinsic existence of the poetic work as an absolute existence and to oppose the artistic structure to this world as a world unto itself. It is the material that connects even the consummate structure of the greatest artist with reality and history. The intrinsic lawfulness of the work of art, which ﬁnds expression in its form, does not negate the mysterious lawfulness that prevails in the materials. No poet can shut himself oﬀ from the pull of necessity that comes with his subject matter; every union with a new material means an undertaking into the unknown for him, because what is truly contained in his subject matter is only unveiled in the course of the work.

The Wallenstein material was the luckiest that Schiller ever seized upon; nevertheless, he did not sense what was actually happening when he ‘dramatized’ these events so familiar to him.

For many, a classiﬁcation and consideration of poetic forms still appears more necessary than a classiﬁcation and consideration of materials, which always seems to have something philistine clinging to it. But it is merely an inheritance of the 19th century when one sees the material only in the region of the ‘factual.’ There are characters, there are events, perhaps a main action of state, but hovering above this is the universal human, which is what the poet is ‘actually’ aiming at. It seems self-evident that Max Piccolomini ‘embodies’ the unconditional moral demand, and Wallenstein embodies power and politics with its realism. The historical material, in truth a piece of the living past of the community, thus dissolves into a mere exemplary occurrence, with ‘ideas’ hanging like rags on its framework. An undividable reality is replaced by an aggregate split into morality and factuality. What are individual characters, what are historical events? Reality is the Empire! For those who know nothing of the Empire, our history ultimately disintegrates into psychology and misfortunes. But if we look at Schiller’s ‘Wallenstein’, then the Empire stands before our eyes in that fateful moment after Gustavus Adolphus’ death. We do not experience examples of morality and immorality, but rather a concrete moment of real communal existence.

The Empire is not one material among others, it is the general material that is contained in some way in any authentic subject matter that a German poet is able to grasp. The unheard-of thing about ‘Wallenstein’ is that the poet, without knowing it, directly approaches the mighty material, and does not fail! What did Schiller still know of the greatness of the Empire? Coolly and objectively, as a mere constitutional form, it is mentioned in the ‘Prologue’:

We see in these days disintegrating

The old ﬁrm form, which once a welcome peace A hundred and ﬁfty years ago

Gave to the realms of Europe.

But even if the historian no longer possessed any knowledge, the poet had to bear witness to the Empire from his soul, if as a German he wanted to do justice to the material seized upon out of interest in a remarkable character. For the poets are the deep memory of their people.

We have only one true historical tragedy, Wallenstein is its hero, its true theme is the Empire. Goethe’s ‘Faust’ is also a poetic work of the Empire, because every great German creation stems from the Empire. But ‘Faust’ is not a historical drama, no more than ‘Götz’ or ‘Egmont’ are fundamentally historical dramas. ‘Wallenstein’ is a poetic work of the Empire that has the historical Empire as its subject. Schiller proved himself equal to the material he took from history as a creator, and thus produced our only dramatic work that has the depth of the Empire in both subject matter and soul.

The Empire is the unity of ‘rule and freedom’ (Prologue), over which today (1798 or 1941, it is the same) as in former times struggle takes place. All struggle is about ensuring that the idea of freedom is not powerless, and life is not devoid of ideas and slavish; it is about the right order of existence. It is the most beautiful idea of Schiller the dramatist to ﬁrst present the Camp before our eyes. This camp means much more than a mere preparation for the ﬁgure of the military leader. It is a world unto itself, a world that is admittedly out of joint. The camp shows us the Empire in the condition into which it had fallen through the Thirty Years’ War. It is the Empire in disorder. Everywhere signs of disintegration, violence and arbitrariness prevail, pillage and destruction mark the path of degenerated armies. The order of peace has vanished from memory, no one knows anymore for what purpose the war is being waged, existence is without law.

Out of the tumult the fundamental theme of Germanic warriorhood stands out clearly and sharply: honor. It ﬂashes in the speeches of the huntsmen and ﬂows broadly in the cavalry song at the end. The song of freedom and honor that ﬁrst give meaning to the soldier’s life and are therefore above life, does not mean the freedom of the Empire; but it does mean that freedom from which the Empire stems and from which it must constantly renew itself. Thus the camp presents disorder and the creative principle of order together before our eyes. What we see directly is the disintegrating Empire of 1634, but as long as honor does not die, the Empire too cannot die.

The honor of the soldier is inextricably linked to the honor of the leader. The camp before Pilsen is the following of a military leader whose name is already played about by the legend of invincibility like the truly great leading ﬁgures. But where there is a leader, there the Empire is also possible. Warrior’s honor and leadership are the center of the Empire, the decay of outward order need not yet mean downfall: from the order-creating deed of leadership, the Empire can be reborn. A sense of such possibilities ﬂashes through Wallenstein’s camp. Hie Emperor, hie Military Leader: it is not quite stated so clearly, but it lies in the air. The old authority in the splendor of tradition is confronted by the young authority of deed.

Here is no Emperor anymore. The Prince is Emperor!

With these words of Questenberg’s (P. I, 3) the camp is characterized. Legally the Duke of Friedland is only one of the princes of the Empire, in reality he is the master of the situation. The army is on his side, but is it truly in his hand?

The appearance of the Capuchin friar means more than just a burlesque interlude. It is the party of the court that speaks here, and indeed, which is signiﬁcant, in a popular way. The imperial war counselor Questenberg is not dangerous, the Capuchin is, even if one hardly listens to him now (in the Berlin production the stage empties during his sermon). Still: the Croats take his side:

Stay here, little priest, fear not,

Say your little verse and share it with us.

A deep-reaching contrast opens up, the warrior is confronted by the monk, the salvation of soldierly leadership by organized spiritual power. The Emperor too has his soldiers, even if they are not bound to him by their own strength and their own salvation. The military leader is equated by the Capuchin with Herod and Holofernes, which is nothing less than a curse. The scene is entirely serious, it brings the true opponent onto the stage, the spiritual originator of the disastrous war: the Counter-Reformation priesthood. The zealous Capuchin is only the foreground, in the background one sees Father Lamormain (P. II, 2; 7). Questenberg too knows how to strike the Counter-Reformation tones forcefully.

Without great ado, Schiller has thus placed an opponent alongside the empire founded on military prowess, and with a few strokes has drawn the historical situation in all its gravity. The Viennese court and the Counter- Reformation (‘Spanish’) system on one side, the bold soldierly leader on the other. The question is whether Albrecht von Wallenstein is also the man to dare the step from mere soldierly leadership of the camp to leadership of the Empire.

Max Piccolomini does not ask this question. In his words before the war council Questenberg (P. I, 4), the mood of the camp ﬁnds puriﬁed and consummate expression. To the ﬁery youth, Wallenstein is the ruling soul and the center that is a stay for thousands. The salvation of true leadership resounds in his words:

And what a pleasure it is, how he awakens

And strengthens and renews all around him... From each one he draws forth his own strength, The distinctive one, and draws it forth greatly, Let’s each one remain entirely what he is;

He only watches over that he always be so

In the right place; thus he knows how to make The ability of all people his own.

The diﬀerence between Max and Wallenstein is not that of two abstract principles, or of morality and immorality, but rather of youth and age. Max Piccolomini does not see the possibilities in the midst of which the military leader stands. He too bears a guilt, the guilt of blindness. Germany is torn into factions; the Emperor, obstinate and himself a faction, sees himself as an advocate of the Church, not of the Empire. In this terrible situation, a prince of the Empire may well have the thought: should it not be possible to wrench the Empire out of these contrasts with one jerk, to make the imperial power independent of Father Lamormain and the alien Spanish system? And would it even be at the price of a temporary alliance with the Swedes! Wallenstein is inwardly neither Lutheran nor Papist. New possibilities for the future are based on this.

The spiritual representative of the party of the court is Octavio Piccolomini. He is a Metternich of the 17th century, a defender of the existing order out of aversion to upheaval. To the son who appeals to the ‘living oracle’ within the military leader, he objects to the disregard for the ‘old, narrow orders’, holds up before his eyes the ‘measured boundaries of property’ (P. I, 4). This Piccolomini cannot be dismissed as a mere intriguer. He is obedience personiﬁed toward the existing order, the man of his oﬃce (P. V, 1).

I do not ponder; I do my duty;

The Emperor prescribes my conduct.

That he works together with the monks is self-evident (P. V, 2). The decisive event is the defection of the regimental commanders from Wallenstein. This defection, aided and accelerated by Octavio Piccolomini’s prudence, reveals the entire depth of the gulf that exists between Wallenstein’s leadership salvation and the power of the Emperor. On the side of the prince stands a personality and her changeable inﬂuence, to which only Terzky and Illo ultimately succumb; on the side of the Emperor stands the entire superiority of legitimacy, the persuasive power of the existing, and the security of tradition. The odds would be uneven, even if the prince unswervingly pursued his path as one called. But against the indicated political background, Wallenstein’s character tragedy now ﬁrst unfolds. To all the objective contrasts is added the contrast within the prince himself. Only under the described preconditions can this character tragedy be meaningfully discussed. If one takes it as the essential and primary thing, regarding the contrasts between which Wallenstein is ground down only as an occasion for the unfolding of a remarkable personality, then the action, with its historicity, also loses its gravity and weight. What then remains is a character study dressed in the costume of the 17th century. At the end of the great conversation with his father, Max Piccolomini seems to gain an inkling of the real situation. He sees the action and reaction between the individual and his historical world. They will make him guilty too, he senses (P. V, 3). Here the youth is grazed by a breath of the realization of the inevitability of events, of which we, after the masterful exposition of the ﬁrst two pieces, become witnesses in the last part of the tragedy unfolding with the logic of fate.

In all dramatic literature there is no other monologue that is better justiﬁed inwardly and more necessary in its place than that of the hero at the beginning of ‘Wallenstein’s Death’. The event has slipped from his control. He still believed himself free when he was no longer so. The events take their course without asking him. For a moment he recognizes his situation: he wanted to shake the ‘power, sitting securely, calmly enthroned’, which has fortiﬁed itself on ‘the childlike faith of the peoples’ (W. T. I, 4). Only now does he see the opponent he has to deal with: habit, tradition, the ‘common’ (that which is common to all). He wants to shake ‘time-hallowed, vested possession’. Too late he recognizes:

This will be no battle of force against force.

He could confront an opponent with whom he ﬁghts on equal terms, but against the Emperor he is powerless. Nevertheless, he begins to negotiate with the Swedish colonel, not shrinking from surrendering Eger, with a clear characterization of the situation in the Bohemian region created by the Counter-Reformation. At the same time, he leaves no doubt that he does not want to betray the Empire; he wants to know nothing of surrendering Prague. The veil of delusion has already enwrapped him again: he still believes he can negotiate, that he has the Swede as a partner before him, while in the Swede fate itself already stands opposite him, with which there can be no negotiation. Objectively seen, what now follows is only a playing out. The compelling nature of these scenes lies in the fact that we experience the doom from within, from the one it strikes, who still believes he stands freely opposed to it. Never has the web of freedom and necessity been more transparently portrayed. We experience freedom, but we suﬀer necessity.

Wallenstein’s guilt (if one may speak of guilt) is that he tries to keep fate at a distance through reﬂection, while he should take it upon himself through action. To be sure, he senses that the threads have been taken from his hands, but he still tries to assert himself in an illusion of freedom. He refuses to recognize that it is no longer a matter of ‘having an eﬀect’ (W.T. I, 7), but of resolution. When he ﬁnally makes it under the inﬂuence of Countess Terzky (the sister sees more clearly than he), it is too late. At the very moment when he wants to take up the struggle with utmost determination, the Emperor has already won. Like one doomed to death in the Germanic saga, Wallenstein attains the maturity of the ﬁghter:

He can no longer trust me, so I too

Can go no more back. Let come then what must. Fate is always right, for the heart within us

Is its imperious executor (W.T. I, 7). He identiﬁes with his destiny. Ready to receive the fate that is his fate, he goes into the ﬁnal struggle. Over Wallenstein’s ﬁnal actions lies the transparent shadow of sublime irony. Once more he has abandoned himself to fortune. He who was just now a victim of reﬂection is now calmed by the blessing of ‘having no choice’ (W.T. II, 2). In this mood he stands before Max Piccolomini. The youth does not comprehend that here there is ‘no choice’ anymore, that it is ‘too late’. He speaks of betrayal; he is unable to perceive the serious tone that resounds in the words of the military leader:

Submit to it. We act as we must;

So let us do what’s necessary with dignity, With steady step...

Max Piccolomini is the belief in freedom, the belief of youth, which still knows nothing of the bondage of man. By bringing the youth together with the hero once more, the poet sets freedom and necessity in opposition to each other, not as principles, but as living humans. Honor stands against honor. Wallenstein’s honor is to assert himself and his will in bondage, Max Piccolomini’s honor is to keep faith with the Emperor without breaking faith with his freely chosen leader. The former succumbs to the necessity that he unleashed through his actions, the latter to freedom; the former to the events he set in motion, the latter to the heart that guides him. But in unfathomable depths, freedom and necessity are one. For Wallenstein is free, and Max Piccolomini succumbs to necessity.

The Empire could only become the subject of dramatic poetry by freedom becoming the subject. But the poet could not grasp freedom without also grasping necessity. Thus, the poetry about the Empire becomes poetry about the heart and fate. In his readiness for fate, Wallenstein regains himself: Night must be where Friedland’s stars are shining (W.T. III, 10).

I feel that I am the man of fate (W.T. III, 15).

Over Wallenstein’s farewell lies the mood of perfect detachment. From his words to Gordon and Seni speaks smiling mildness. Grateful towards the fortune that bore him up, in the conviction that now the envy of fate is ‘sated’, the military leader looks forward to the next day. Once more, unchanged but in a softer key, the theme of fate resounds. Looking at Max Piccolomini’s sacriﬁcial death, he says:

Maybe I would then have paused, maybe. Or not. Yet why now spare? Too earnestly It has begun to end in nothing.

Have it then its course!

Schiller’s Wallenstein is not a criminal from ambition, but he is also not a great political leader who has a new idea of German unity. What is he?

A German man amid the contrasts of German history, grasped by possibilities he does not overlook, overwhelmed by the course of events that he does not master, victim of a historical entanglement that at this hour could be resolved by no one. What wonderful irony lies in the fact that Schiller places this man, who wants to act at the wrong time, right in the midst of the astral belief of the Renaissance, to let him seek the right hour in the signs of the heavens!

The character of the Wallenstein poetry as a true tragedy of fate clearly emerges precisely through the contrast to the playing at fate in astrology. In Wallenstein’s ﬁnal readiness for fate, the frivolous astral belief falls away from him. But the gripped spectator, who thanks to the poet is wiser than the tragic hero, recognizes in the downfall of a great man the full weight of the history of his people.

We expect readers to enjoy these texts.

References

Baeumler, A. (1943). Bildung und Gemeinschaft. 2. Auﬂage. Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt Verlag.

Cavaliero, R. (2013). Genius, power and magic. A cultural history of Germany from Goethe to Wagner. London: I.B. Tauris & Co.

Goethe, J. W. v., & Farrelly, D. J. (2000). Under the curse: Goethe’s Iphigenie amongst Taurians. Dublin: Carysfort Press.

Goethe, J. W. v., Pascal, R., & Swales, M. (2014). Iphigenia in Tauris: a drama in verse. In Angel classics.

Gómez-Jeria, J. S. (2023). Towards the Complete Man: Consciousness, Psyche, Mind, Memory, Soul, and Spirit. Journal of Advances in Education and Philosophy, 7(9), 351-371. doi:10.36348/ jaep.2023.v07i09.005

Mann, G. (1976). Wallenstein, his life narrated. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Mortimer, G. (2010). Wallenstein: the enigma of the Thirty Years War.

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Plomin, R. (2019). Blueprint: how DNA makes us who we are (First MIT Press paperback edition ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Schiller, F., Kimmich, F., & Paulin, R. (2017). Wallenstein: a dramatic poem. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers.

Sunday, 17 November 2024

Alfred Baeumler: Selected Articles from the Book “Education and Community”

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