Germany -- Social conditions; Reconstruction (1914-1939) -- Germany; Socialism
It is no mere accident that in not one of the hundredfold provinces of
life, from art to military organization, from State-craft to
jointstock-companies, from saintliness to table-utensils, have we
Germans discovered a single essential and enduring form. And again,
there is scarcely one of these forms which we have not filled with a
richer and more living content than those who first discovered it.
For whoever bears the All within himself can be satisfied with no
form; he finds in himself at once vision and reality, thesis and
antithesis. He seeks for a synthesis, but all form is one-sided. He
conceives, chooses, comprehends, fulfils, breaks in pieces and throws
away. He remains a unity in constant change, like the year as it
proceeds day by day, hour by hour, and no two of them alike. He does
not force things--out of respect for creation.
But he who makes forms must use force. He makes himself the standard
and comprehends himself only. Everything else, everything that is
extra-normal, unconformable, unintelligible and not understood remains
for him something alien, trivial, inferior, or negligible. The maker
of forms can rule, even by compulsion, without being a tyrant, for he
is convinced of the value of what he brings and knows no doubts. He is
ruthless, yet only up to a certain limit, which is determined by his
sense of the inferiority of the other. The man who rejects forms,
however, cannot rule; the very penetration into the domain of another
seems to him a wrong to his own, the basis of which is recognition and
allowance. If he is forced to penetrate, he loses all balance, for in
wrong-doing he understands no gradations. Similarly he is incapable of
civilizing, for he cannot take forms seriously; he violates them
himself--how can he impose them upon others? In his inmost soul he is
naive, for creation is seething in him; but in execution he is
conscious, critical, eclectic and methodical, in order that he may be
completely master of the one-sided element into which he has forced
himself. The man of forms, however, is, in his soul, rigid and
conscious, but in action naive, because he does not know the meaning
of doubt.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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