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[continued from p123]
“Would you like to retain the capitalist system, Deutschlin,” asked Arzt -- “because it keeps alive the memory of the insecurity of human life?”
“No, I would not, my dear Arzt,” answered Deutschlin with some heat. “Still, I may be allowed to indicate the tragic antinomies of which life is full.”
“One doesn’t need to have them pointed out,” sighed Dungersheim. “It is certainly a desperate situation, and the religious man asks himself whether the world really is the single work of a benevolent God and not rather a combined effort, I will not say with whom.”
“What I should like to know,” remarked von Teutleben [where did this “von” suddenly come from?], “is whether the young of other nations lie about like us, plaguing themselves with problems and antinomies.”
“Hardly,” answered Deutschlin contemptuously. “They have a much easier and more comfortable time intellectually.”
“The Russian revolutionary youth,” Arzt asserted, “should be excepted. There, if I am not mistaken, there is a tireless discursive argumentation and a cursed lot of dialectic tension.”
“The Russians,” said Deutschlin sententiously, “have profundity but no form. And in the west they have form but no profundity. Only we Germans have both.”
“Well, if that is not a nationalistic sanction!” laughed Hubmeyer.
“It is merely the sanction of an idea,” Deutschlin asserted. “It is the demand of which I speak. Our obligation is exceptional, certainly not the average, for that we have already attained. What is and what ought to be [or “What Is And What Should Never Be"] -- there is a bigger gulf between them with us than with others, simply because the ‘ought to be,” the standard, is so high.”
“In all that,” Dungersheim warned us, “we probably ought not to consider the national, but rather to regard the complex of problems as bound up with the existence of modern man. But it is the case, that since the direct faith in being has been lost, which in earlier times was the result of being fixed in a pre-existent universal order of things, I mean the ritually permeated regulations which had a certain definite bearing on the revealed truth . . . that since the decline of faith and the rise of modern society our relations with men and things have become endlessly complicated and refracted, there is nothing left but problems and uncertainties, so that the design of truth threatens to end in resignation and despair. The search rising from disintegration, for the beginnings of new forces of order, is general; though one may also agree that it is particularly serious and urgent among us Germans, and that the others do not suffer so from historical destiny, either because they are stronger or because they are duller --”
p124 “Duller,” pronounced von Teutleben.
“That is what you say, Teutleben. But if we count to our honour as a nation the sharp awareness of the historical and psychological complex of problems, and identify with the German character the endeavour after new universal regulation, we are already on the point of prescribing for ourselves a myth of doubtful genuineness and not doubtful arrogance: namely, the national, with its structural romanticism of the warrior type, which is nothing but national paganism with Christian trimmings and identifies Christus as ‘Lord of the heavenly hosts.’ But that is a position decisively threatened from the side of the demons. . . .”
“Well, and?” asked Deutschlin. “Daemonic powers stand beside the order-making qualities in any vital movement.”
“Let us call things by their names,” demanded Schappeler -- or it might have been Hubmeyer. “The daemonic, the German word for that is the instincts. And that is just it: today even, along with the instincts, propaganda is made for claims to all sorts of sanctions, and that one too, I mean, it takes them in and trims up the old idealism with the psychology of instinct, so that there arises the dazzling impression of a thicker density of reality. But just on that account the bid can be pure swindle.”
At this point one can only say “and so on”; for it is time to put an end to the reproduction of that conversation -- or of such conversations. In reality it had no end, it went on deep into the night, on and on, with “bipolar position” and “historically conscious analysis,” with “extra-temporal qualities,” “ontological naturalism,” “logical dialectic,” and “practical dialectic”: painstaking, shoreless, learned, tailing off into nothing -- that is into slumber, to which our leader Baworinski recommended us, for in the morning -- as it already almost was -- we should be due for an early start...
p125 ...For next day along with physical activity and the enjoyment of natural beauty, they would continue the usual theological and philosophical debates with almost interminable mutual instruction, opposition, challenge, and reply. It was the month of June, and the air was filled with the heavy scent of jasmine and elder-blossom from the gorges of the wooded heights that cross the Thuringian basin. Priceless it was to wander for days through the countryside, here almost free of industry, the well-favored, fruitful land, with its friendly villages, in clusters of latticed buildings. Then coming out of the farming region into that of mostly grazing land, to follow the storied, beech- and pine-covered ridge road, the “Rennsteig,” which, with its view deep down into the Werra valley, stretches from the Frankenwald to Eisenach on the Horsel. It grew ever more beautiful, significant, romantic; and neither what Adrian had said about the reserve of youth in the face of nature, nor what about the desirability of being able to retire in slumber after intellectual discussion, seemed to have any cogency...
Yes, they were stirring hours, days, and weeks. The refreshment of the out-of-doors life, and the oxygen in the air, the landscape. and the historical impressions, thrilled these young folk and raised their spirits to a place where thought moved lavishly in free experimental flight as it will at that time of life. In later, more arid hours of an after-university professional career, even an intellectual one, there would be scarcely any such occasion. Often I looked at them during their theological and philosophical debates and pictured to myself that to some among them their Winfried period might in later years seem the finest time of their lives. I watched them and I watched Adrian, with the clear perception that it would not be so with him... I felt, not without a pang, the foreordained gulf between his existence and that of these striving and high-purposed youths... destined to return from that roving, seeking student life to its bourgeois courses, and the other, invisibly singled out, who would never forsake the hard rout of the mind, would tread it, who knew whither...
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