Ernst Kantorowicz: The Secret Germany

November 14, 1933 in Frankfurt.

It is an old academic custom when taking up a new position to introduce oneself to future students through an inaugural lecture. Although I only suspended my public teaching duties for one semester, the extraordinary events of recent months justify using even the mere resumption of a teaching position as an opportunity to present oneself anew to one's audience. Therefore today, before moving on to the actual subject matter of this winter semester, I want to speak to you about a completely different topic in a kind of "inaugural lecture." More than any explanation, this confession - and why carry the title of "Professor" if one lacks the courage to be a confessor in decisive hours! - may help you understand why my views on the ultimate source and final goal of all teaching had to remain unchanged, allowing me to speak to you today just as candidly as before and to pick up the thread exactly where it fell to the ground in spring.

From this, one thing will certainly follow: that you should not expect from me that I would cover chasms with latticework and help myself out with phrases where difficulties arise, when only one thing can serve both today's and future Germany: clarity and an unshakeable faith in the immortals of this land and its promises. And this may form our common basis.

The topic of this inaugural lecture shall be: The Secret Germany.

Many of you may not know that this concept "the secret Germany" has its own history. Von Lagarde coined it, Langbehn, the "Rembrandt German," adopted the term and applied it in the sense that he spoke of Rembrandt, Beethoven, Goethe as "the true emperors of the secret Germany." Then Karl Wolfskehl took up the phrase "secret Germany" in the first yearbook for the intellectual movement and gave it another meaning. Wolfskehl understood the "secret Germany" to mean the bearers of certain German, yet slumbering forces, in which the future's most sublime national being was either prefigured or already embodied. In this "secret Germany" he saw the recipients of an unchangeable, eternally constant force that remains hidden as an undercurrent beneath the visible Germany and can only be grasped through images. At the same time, Wolfskehl transferred the concept to a living community that preserved and protected these secret forces. For him, the "secret Germany" was that "uniquely living" element of the pre-war period which - awakened by new poetry - found its voice only in Stefan George's circle at that time and manifested itself there.

"That this secret Germany“ - as Wolfskehl wrote in 1910 - "has not perished, that it wants to emerge more nobly than ever from its mountain and cave seclusion into the light, gives us deep confidence in a future that will certainly be serious, difficult and dark, certainly full of unprecedented upheavals, but in which perhaps for the last time the deep forces will want to reveal themselves."

With this confidence, with the belief in the existence of a "secret Germany," the belief in the nation and its glorious rebirth was initially connected among only a few. In the years of Germany's greatest economic hardship after the war, which made many otherwise silent strings tense and softly resound again, there were probably more who confessed to a "secret Germany." Yet they expanded the concept, sought to make what was hard-won cheaper by mixing it with very different elements: daily goals and special interests, small groups and little associations, until finally the poet himself countered the danger of dilution: in the poem "Secret Germany" a mythical image was seen and with it the mystery of the other realm was created. Under the signs of individual encounters with people in his circle of friends, the poet here wraps the strangest and most foreign of the active powers of "secret Germany" in the indestructibility of life-images that defy any decomposition and are removed from destruction.

It would be inappropriate to give details about these life-images of today - first because knowledge of particulars would leave no stronger impression in the soul than the poem itself, and then because it would contradict the meaning of the closing verses that secrets should not remain secret, that:

Only what in protective sleep

Where no seeker senses it yet

Long in deepest shaft

Sacred earth still rests -

Wonder indescribable for today

Will become the fate of the coming day.

I want to speak to you today not about the narrower "secret Germany" in which the poet lives and lived, but about the broader "secret Germany" which he teaches and taught us to recognize through his life - thus about that greater "secret Germany" whose epiphanies are well known to us all and which must be grasped here as a whole.

After what has been indicated, it is unnecessary to explicitly explain that one should neither seek the "secret Germany" as a forbidden secret society somewhere, nor mock it as a utopian fantasy that exists nowhere.

The "secret Germany" is like a Last Judgment and resurrection of the dead - always immediately near, even present; it is deadly-factual and being. It is the secret community of poets and sages, heroes and saints, sacrificers and sacrifices, whom Germany has brought forth and who have offered themselves to Germany. It is the community of those who - although sometimes appearing foreign - alone created the true countenance of Germans. As a community, it is a realm of gods like Olympus, a realm of spirits like the medieval state of saints and angels, a human realm like Dante's "Humana civilitas" - his envisioned otherworld of the three domains. It is the heroic world of today's, future and eternal Germany, ordered in levels and ranks. Of the "secret Germany" - bound this time to actual German space, though reaching far beyond it - the same applies as to all mysteries: ταῦτα δὲ ἐγένετο μὲν οὐδέποτε ἔστι δὲ ἀεί, "this has never occurred, has never happened, but it is everlasting and eternal."

This means: such a secret realm that never existed yet is eternal reveals itself as little as mysteries do to everyone. But whoever has eyes to see and ears to hear knows that almost at all times, since there was a "German" in the emphatic sense of the word, up to today, independent of the respective condition and constitution of the Reich, there has always been another Germany which was granted being and life beyond the publicly visible Reich. It is a realm of souls in which the most German emperors of highest rank and most distinctive kind always rule and throne, under whose scepter the whole nation has indeed never bowed in innermost devotion, whose dominion however is everlasting and eternal and lives in deepest concealment against the respective outside and thereby for eternal Germany. "The best thing," (to let Goethe, one of the rulers of that secret realm, speak) "is the deep silence in which I live and grow and gain against the world what they cannot take from me with fire and sword."

Indeed, the rulers of the "secret Germany" are armed against all weapons, and one cannot seize them by dragging their image into the street, making them similar to the marketplace and then celebrating them as one's own flesh and blood. Then the shadows dissolve. You know from Homer's Nekyia and the sixth book of the Aeneid, you know from the "Divina Commedia," that only under special circumstances were the chosen ones allowed to enter the realm of shadows, and that even to the chosen ones the shadows often gave answer and response only unwillingly. Therefore, whoever is not deadly serious about this "secret Germany," whoever only wants to boast about it or worse: wants to misuse it for impure purposes - should not cast a glance at this secret realm at all. Even geniuses can kill! Through their mere being they are judges, and they always destroy those who willfully conjure them and thereby misuse them and abuse themselves through them. This heaven can never be stormed by force, and lukewarm hypocrisy provides no access even to the inferno. For the inhabitants of the "secret Germany" are nobles, they do not surrender themselves to the grasp of impure hands and ignore the call of a generation that

"does not know heights that are heights of the soul.“

Seek then, as befits you and becomes you, your heaven of gods and your judges - well then: here are your gods, here your saints. Here is the forum before which every generation, before which we all must answer. And to sense something of this world, let alone grasp it, is not a matter of materialistic predestination, but alongside the self-evident clarity, it is solely and exclusively a matter of reverence and love! This means: love for the trinity embodied in the "secret Germany," which is called: Beauty, Nobility, Greatness! Whoever cannot muster this love and the reverence that springs from love and vice versa, or whoever believes they know better than those geniuses, should never try to approach them: they will grasp nothing but a few empty phrases, and the "secret Germany" remains as mute to them as any realm of mysteries and myths.

For such a realm is the "secret Germany." It is a realm both of this world and not of this world. A realm simultaneously present and not present. A realm of both the dead and the living, which changes and yet is eternal and immortal - guided by its emperors and a nobility which renews itself not through rules of procreation, but through the generation of most secret powers and thus still leaves room for the workings of the Fates:

"Stemless they grow in turmoil

Blessed ones sprout of their own rank"

Let me speak now of these emperors and this nobility. While it would be tempting to present a panorama of heroes of this secret realm, to arrange the German hierarchies and conjure up a more precise image of these hosts, a lifetime would not suffice to write such a "German Divine Comedy," and I would need to be Dante, not merely a professor of history. As such, first a few words about the genealogy of this realm and its historical position.

Every strong and faithful generation like yours created its divine realms with higher and lower deities, whose totality and multiplicity reflect all primordial human types and possibilities of existence within a life circle, thus representing a universal. Hellas most directly and completely grasped and deified human primordial forces and manifestations in the rich pantheon of its Olympus, its world of gods. And Hellas remained an unmatched prototype for the Western world. Since then, essentially no new human archetypes have been added, though much has been lost.

Even the rule of the One God brought no change in certain areas. For although everything entered into Him, the creation of a world of saints and geniuses proved inevitable in living worship, where the human archetypes of Christian eternity and Christian universal space were found. Alongside this, nations created their national saints, and at the beginning of almost all Western states' histories stood a canonized king as national saint and eponymous hero, who was patron of the country and in whom the people honored their highest Christian form of expression. Only Germany among all European states is an exception here: the Middle Ages did not leave Germans with a truly national world of saints.

When the exclusive dominion of the Roman Church ended and the second great death of gods began with the secularization of the medieval world - when, transfigured through the haunting-sweet magic of the early Renaissance, the path to this world was broken: then Dante created the new human pantheon from the shadows of the Christian otherworld. Dante beheld and ordered the soul hierarchies of the world circle and world time, creating from them a new realm of "Humana Civilitas," of human culture, whose image as a secret generative force-core dominated and shaped the Renaissance and Europe, still resonating into the present day. Only Germany - after an early promising beginning that was destroyed by the religious schism - had little part in Dante's "Humana Civilitas," in the Renaissance's culture of humanity. For where philosophy could be considered by the leaders of the people as "an old woman who stinks of Greece," Apollo too had no place. A divine world could not emerge here so quickly.

Into this series of mythical polities - Hellenic pantheon, civitas Dei, humana civilitas - the "secret Germany" fits as the final link for all time to come. As a human realm, it shows certain kinship with Dante's preceding realm. But Europe had grown from universal Christianity: not Christian thinking remained the standard of values in the "secret Germany," and not the unified culture of the universal human community was its aim, but the "secret realm," as George taught us to see it and captured in his work, limits itself to the German space in which it is rooted and which it must shape - regardless of how far the poet reached beyond the narrow borders to include or try to germanize the immortal aspects of geniuses of other races and times, that is: understood them as German in substance.

This poet's self-limitation has its reason: According to the prophecies of earlier times, he trusted that just as Hellas once did in a confined space, Germany would one day again bring forth the totality of all primordial human forms and powers in its own space. The wealth of forms and powers needed to build any cosmos, which made the Middle Ages search through angelic realms and led Dante to transform the world's orbis terrarum - George knew this richness of human archetypes existed in Germany - in the "secret Germany" - if only one would uncover those worthy of secrecy and make their mystery visible.

Just as Hellas - to use a simplifying formula here - allowed one to sense the "Macro-Anthropos" in the totality of its gods, this Macro-Anthropos of German character would rise again in the totality of forms and powers shaped by "secret Germany" and their influence on the visible realm.

"Germany, equal to divine Hellas" - in Stifter's words - would thus be a vision (still far from true fulfillment!) that isn't exhausted in imitating the Hellenic model, but means: such richness of life, such abundance of forms, such comprehensive totality of human being generating itself, that one could only find this equal of what exists in such confined space in Hellas - regardless of how different the naming and layering of powers may appear here and there.

And the naming and layering of powers have certainly become very different, especially since the last transformation, since Christianity gave rise to a Europe, from Imperium sacrum to the community of Western nations. Today's person thinks of the whole, the universal that every divine world and mythical realm must represent, primarily in terms of nations. Thus, we modern people often (not always!) understand the primordial powers - which Hellas depicted directly as human in its gods, which the civitas Dei conceived as God-emanated Virtues, which Dante understood through the embodiments of sins and virtues - in terms of different nations. We perceive this as Italian, that as French, another as English, Spanish and Nordic, not to mention the Roman and Hellenic. And one is too easily inclined to simply reject such characteristics as foreign. But do not confuse foreign with primitive. Do not confuse external influences with elemental breakthroughs of the innermost core. Roman and Hellenic, Italian and English elements in "secret Germany" should be understood not as un-German foreign elements, but as humanly original givens of German depths. Only in apparent contradiction could one say: there was something "Spanish" before Spain existed. It would mean recognizing the broad span of undercurrents that carry substances from Europe's primordial spaces beneath the surface of each visible realm, breaking through the earth's crust unexpectedly here and there to create in one who is receptive. And it would equally mean underestimating Germany's depth forces, which at their hour can lead one German to Zeus's retinue, another to Apollo's, a third to Dionysus's. These chosen ones, who then embody now this, now that Western mode of being or primordial human power in German form: they are the true bearers, the emperors and nobility of "secret Germany," and only in them does German being reveal itself. Their rank is determined by the measure of their participation in those fundamental powers of the depths.

After what has been said, can it be surprising that the supreme rulers of "secret Germany" are united first by one thing: that they are not the truly popular figures of the nation? The rising of primordial powers, the coming of a god can never be intimate and cozy. And if "secret Germany" itself is hidden, this applies even more to its rulers, its guardians, that:

"only secretly are there watchers for the tender shoot."

Thus emerges the strange picture that in "secret Germany" the highest thrones are almost always occupied by those who appeared most "foreign" to the public visible Germany. One could almost elevate it to a principle that popularity could make one suspicious regarding rank in this realm. Yet the question remains open whether the less popular countenance of the immortals might be the truer one, whether the more hidden image might be the truly generative one, still pregnant with future.

Consider Barbarossa, whether beyond the common image he might not be sought as someone different from the one who shuddered at the first immediate encounter with the spirit of the Caesars, whose masculine being of comprehension let flame up the passion for Roman greatness. Think of the German emperors of the Middle Ages in general! Do they only continue to affect us as the initiators of a successful Eastern policy, as the leaders of a less successful domestic policy, and as those who succumbed in Italy? Truly, it would be too much uselessly wasted, and disappointed one could ask:

"Does the mountain of the fathers thus reveal itself?"

If there weren't the answer: as bearers of a great tragic national destiny, as deeply tragic figures, which they themselves were, these emperors belong among the most shattering figures in world history! And as figures from a world foreign to us today, the Ottonians, Salians and Hohenstaufens continue to work in "secret Germany"! Or ask yourself whether there isn't an even more unknown Holbein: the one whose inaccessibly glassy clarity made him guardian of the other realm in the age of the most celebrated agitators of souls - a folkish Luther and Faustian Dürer. Or think of the unnameable solitude which bore Frederick the Great from German depths and which - perhaps more than many military victories - made him and his country "super-Prussian"!

For all of them and many another of the truly great ones who are celebrated and seem popular, the same applies as for Goethe, of whom everyone knows that he secretly still encloses infinitely much unrefined and

"that in him the radiant one much

Has faded, which you still eternally name."

If here we find the yet unopened riches of the more popular great ones, with the other rulers of "secret Germany" we repeatedly encounter that supposedly un-German foreignness, although it was precisely they who fathomed the deepest shafts. This is the case - to name examples here - with "Frederick the Great," the Hohenstaufen emperor, whose Roman character still today makes history books lament: "but he was no German!" This is true in later centuries with Hamann's and Herder's strange acumen, so with Winckelmann, whose secret revealed itself to Goethe but who is still as foreign to greater Germany today as he became to the post-Goethean age. This is even true of Goethe himself, from whom Germany through celebration at most became estranged, whom they called Olympian and with this honor marked as foreign to German nature, whom they called cold-hearted and even

"Enemy of our fatherland, sacrificing at a false altar."

Never did they forgive him that, like Hölderlin, like Jean Paul, like Hegel temporarily too, he sensed in the "All-named One," in Napoleon, the ancient hero of the time and the similarly attuned "World Soul." This foreignness also applied to Hölderlin, whom they dismissed as a Greco-romanticist, whose criticism of Germans they gladly ignored, felt as "de-Germanization" - and who yet called himself: vault and temple to which he invited the future ones to process with wreaths. And no less foreign remained - quite apart from a power like Jean Paul - "countless other" Germans, from smaller stars like Platen, who erected altars to beauty in otherwise unknown purity, to the greatest constellations, to Nietzsche, who experienced the power of the "mad god" and remained foreign to the German environment, and to George, whom they called removed from reality and foreign because they didn't know how to incorporate him into the bourgeois world of public Germany. The greatest geniuses were always considered "un-German" because they certainly did not correspond to a cheap unity that was called "German" at any given time; and this extended to physical appearance and gesture. For so forgotten is the truly royal bearing to the 20th century that the poet who conjured the most genuine figures of the nation could describe the Hohenstaufen-Frankish royal type of the "Bamberg Rider" as the "Most Foreign," whose return he indeed promised:

"You, most foreign one, still break forth as true scion

For good return from your people's flank."

Yet the foreignness of these heroes of "secret Germany" is not their burden. They are as little un-German as the landscape that nurtures them. When that Roman emperor could exclaim upon entering the Bergstrasse's Arcadia: "Where am I? Am I in Italy?", when some days the Neckar valley can remind one of Tuscany, Munich's clear alpine-cooled air of southern cities' clarity, when Swabian traits sometimes recall France's delicacy, or when a glow over the Rhine's shore hills called forth other visions

"And no longer let envy the long-yearned-for

The divine gleam of the island sea"

when thus the German landscape can ultimately conjure up images of all Europe and yet does not become foreign or un-German - provided one doesn't claim merely useful beet fields as the German landscape: then one must also not perceive as foreign or un-German the people who correspond to such landscape. Only one thing applies: that "everything perfect in its kind goes beyond its kind", that thus the geniuses, like the landscape of "secret Germany," because they go beyond their kind and seem super-German, in truth only bring forth the perfectly German. Thus Friedrich the Great's perfect Prussianism went beyond Prussian and already reached into the German, and thus Goethe's word always applies again: "the perfect German must always be more than German," that is super-German. And thus - in the sense of the super-German - Nietzsche's seemingly dangerous paradox is to be understood: "to become German, one must de-Germanize oneself!"

However: no error would be greater than thinking our worship of those eternal-German and super-German heroes of the secret realm has anything in common with aesthetically pale or non-committal universal humanism, or worse, with "the wishes of those" who speak for an all-European unity-mishmash like those modern literati whose impure hand touches the mystery of "secret Germany" to thus withdraw from obligations to the nation and make themselves "European-world-citizenly." The "secret Germany" must not serve as a protective shield behind which un-German and nation-dissolving beings can make themselves comfortable. On the contrary: in "secret Germany" the innermost essential core of the nation itself is preserved, and whoever has once beheld it is obligated to it like the soldier to the flag. That this core carries within itself the essential natures of all Europe and the Mediterranean lands, as far as Germanic tribes once settled them; this precisely increases, not diminishes, the enormous obligation of the individual to do justice to the true image of the German; this precisely constitutes Germany's world-significance; this precisely is the essence of Schiller's prophecy: "Every people has its day in history, but the day of the German is the harvest of all time." It is no less dangerous misunderstanding from another perspective when one wants to understand as "national poetry" not Hölderlin or George, but seeks to find such in the "Horses of Gravelotte" and the "Trumpeter of Säckingen." Both one and the other close their eyes to the true countenance of the German, which "secret Germany" only unveils shyly.

From here it gains its meaning when precisely the mightiest princes of the secret realm reach beyond national borders and draw in and germanize the powers of geniuses of other peoples and times; not to make foreign things at home in Germany, but because the same primordial human drives were active in them which are naturally at home in universal Germany. Since they contain primordial human forces, as they swing in the German spiritual realm, they become German precisely through their most essential nature itself. No German Shakespeare without Herder and Goethe; no German Dante without the "Greats of the Catholic" Church, without Stefan George; no German image of Caesar without Carolingians, Ottonians, Salians and especially the Hohenstaufens. And above all: the secret connection of the German with Hellas - where would it have become visible if not through Winckelmann, if not through Hölderlin, if not - to be silent about others - through Nietzsche and through George? Indeed there exists a secret blood kinship between Hellas and Germany, but it must first be created! For the relationship is not that of son to father, but of pupil to master, whose pulses beat in unison only through shared love for a common divine image and human archetype, or as metaphor: the kinship, indeed the transformation of blood, arises only from love and reverence for gods and geniuses. Only when the youth bows in reverence and love before the divine image, not when the infantile one claims natural sonship, does the answer resound: O Son!

With this, the boundary against all "classicism" is drawn - that is, against any merely formal imitation whether of antiquity or any other period of universal flowering. The fact that Nietzsche co-rules the secret realm guarantees that Apollo cannot be here without Dionysus; that the "demonic" is not missing. One will think not only of those greats whose life or work in an absolute sense is possessed by demons, like the Hohenstaufen Frederick II, in whom appeared the Christian Lord of the End, the Antichrist on Earth; or of a Grünewald, who for a "smile of victorious transfiguration" let a world of monsters rise up with it; or of a Rembrandt, who for a ray of light had to simultaneously give birth to a world of darkness. Whoever grasps even a little of "secret Germany" cannot escape perceiving in all gods of the German mythical realm - however Apollonian they may appear - also the demonic countenance. Primordial depths are always simultaneously demonic. Yet the demonic is not to be understood as "Faustian" just because it appears here in German form. On the contrary: the merely Faustian, which pushes into the darkness of the depths and loses itself in them, instead of lifting the depths to light and letting them become body in daylight's gleam, is rather the counter-force of "secret Germany."

Precisely this one thing all heroes of "secret Germany" have in common: they let the depths of primordial powers become image, they shape even the demonic - without banishing it - in light; and here think of Nietzsche's word about the Germans: "There is something in them that could be Hellenic, that awakens upon contact with the South." Thus "secret Germany" appears related to the Hellenic divine world in that here the world of the Mothers grows into that of the Fathers, so that it is not again separated and torn from the powers of fate. Each of these worlds becomes transparent only through the other; while the Faustian separates itself as individual force from the Fathers and flees to the Mothers.

In general: the becoming-image of dark drives and dreams is characteristic of the "secret realm." Thus belong here those "sacrifice-ready ones who die for a dream." Let us remember Otto III, the "Wonder of the World," and Conradin, the two last scions of powerful ruling houses; boys in whom the German ruler's dream called to deed with such density that it almost seemed children could give it reality. And here too belong the inhabitants of "secret Germany" who are ennobled through poverty - strangely akin to the sacrifice-ready ones who, renouncing broad happiness, are early taken away. Who among them would want to miss a Manfred, who gave his life at Benevento for the Sicilian realm-dream, who would want to miss among the poor ones a Mozart, whose work consumed his tender powers. Poverty is always bound to inner nobility and inseparable from sacrifice:

"What serves, be it more than pious delusion,

Equality of all and their broadest happiness!

When grace dies in us!"

Something else can be learned from the heroes of the "secret realm," their images, and their deeds. For from the rulers of "secret Germany" alone can you learn the genuine German gesture, the eternal-German style. Certainly, any human gesture can be executed in a hundred different ways, but among ninety-nine wrong ones, only One is right. A glance at a Greek grave relief, a Greek vase painting tells you that - as long as humans exist - there is only one right way to extend the hand. Of course, by German gesture I meant not just the individual movement, but that physical bearing which shows soulfulness alongside all courage. And such soulfulness does not exclude the warrior-like, for is there anything more soulful than an Achilles, whom one would like to place alongside the Hohenstaufen Enzio, so that he might work from "secret Germany" into every present?

Such soulfulness was once mediated to the Germans by the Roman Church: think of Bishop Hohenlohe's portrait in Bamberg Cathedral or of Cusanus's noble spirit, and even today this human-forming power of the Church, especially in its most essential domain, remains unbroken. For anyone who was ever fortunate enough to work at the Vaticana in Rome, that most beautiful elderly head will be unforgettable - a Swabian prince of the Church, Cardinal Ehrle, bending over a parchment volume - he too belonging to "secret Germany" through his soulfulness.

But for most people today, the ensouled gesture can grow from association with musical people or more generally: with the Muses, provided this association is binding and not merely pleasurable. One should not complain that this is a luxury and that the time needs people of harder wood. Compared to Apollo's metallic hardness, the hardest statesman will always prove to be like wax - and yet this god created states, the golden lyre brought forth all laws (Pindar, Nem.V, 24f.) φόρμιγγ' Απόλλων... ἀγεῖτο παντοίων νόμων. Therefore also for you students, whom an earlier time called "sons of the Muses," Euripides' word applies: "No community with those of unmusical nature," if you want to preserve what is most your own. This breeds no arrogance. For whoever masters commerce with the Muses knows best how to move in all layers of the people. Arrogance is always only a sign that the Muses and Graces were equally distant from one's cradle.

Thus will the mythical realm of "secret Germany," which is simultaneously present and absent, temporal and eternal, always shape the best of growing Germany in its spirit. When Jean Paul once says: "A genius like Caesar, Frederick, Napoleon recruits people only to discharge them as heroes...", then "secret Germany," in which beside the heroes also poets and sages are enthroned, will educate young Germans in the cult of nobility, beauty, and greatness, perhaps to release them as new Kalokagathoi so that they may work in state and people. Only in that secret realm are the eternal truths of the people preserved. Therefore, do not say with that politician of the post-war period: "Whoever wants to be interested in eternal truths should stay with his books and not enter the battlefield of present problems." (Max Weber) For let this be countered: "Whoever knows nothing of eternal truths can achieve nothing on the battlefield of present problems." Even the politician must - to speak with Dante - at least "see the towers of the holy city."

But you who are or want to become historians and know yourselves compelled by your profession to not judge the past, yet to evaluate and assess it: how will you do justice to your task if you want to draw your judgment only from your small living space, from quiet study and swept alley alone? No one can be a German historian who knows nothing of "secret Germany." For "judgment requires rank", and rank no one can measure from themselves, but can only read it from the "Other" that is outside oneself and yet German: from the immortal geniuses of "secret Germany." Only against this background considered does history gain life and the "respectively right" relationship to the present, until one day "secret Germany" and the visible realm become one, merge into each other and only mirror each other. Just as Dante beheld the mystery of God becoming man when he saw in the divine light - outlined with light's own color - the features shimmering of "our image," so may - if the prophecies are fulfilled - the real Germany trace itself in the "secret realm" "with colors equal to it." Then there will be no more "secret Germany" just as little as in the "days" of the Hohenstaufens, when that "secret Germany" of that time, which one might call "Roman," was elevated from the Hohenstaufens to official Germany and only waits in the mountain for its awakening. Until then it is still a long way; until then "secret Germany" still has to watch over the hidden powers, whose rulers, themselves untouchable and eternal, call out to the respective enemies within and without:

"Stop us! indelible is the word that blooms.

Hear us! take note! despite your favor: it blooms -

Practice murder on us and richer blooms what blooms!"