lizing and
bemiring that we experience--the profiteering and gormandizing, the
abject submissiveness, the shameless desertions, the apathy, the
insincerity, the heartlessness and mindlessness of our day?"

Yes, I dare to say it, for I believe it and I know it. The soul of the
German people lies still in the convulsions and hallucinations of its
slow recovery. It is recovery not alone from the war, but from
something worse, its hundred-years' alienation from itself. The
much-ridiculed choice of our old romantic unheraldic colours, black,
red and gold, instead of the bodiless and soulless colours under which
we waged the war,[24] was, among the whirling follies of the time, a
faint symbolic movement of our better mind. We must reunite ourselves
with the days before we ceased to be Germans and became Berliners.

What we need is Spirit. The whole world needs it, no more and no less
than we do, but will never create it. History knows why it decided for
Versailles and the Hall of Mirrors. Not mechanism alone, with its
retinue of nationalism and imperialism, is now again and for the last
time to be glorified; no, the whole Franco-British policy of
acquisition mounts up even to the throne of the Sun-king, and it is
seriously believed that it will govern the destinies of the world for
centuries to come. An inconceivable, and, in its monstrous irony,
unsurpassable drama, which is put forward as the introduction to the
great era. The bourgeois conscience of the West has no inkling of
what it means. To this conscience, the war was a huge violation of
decency, contrived by bandits; its victory is the final triumph of a
capitalist, rationalistic civilization; the torch lit in the East
means murder and incendiarism, and the upward migration of the people
from the depths is to it invisible.

No; it is not here that the spirit of the future is being formed. One
may discover further ingenious devices, lightning-conductors to
mitigate the stroke; but gently or violently a natural force will have
its way, and the new earth which it is preparing needs new seed.

That we have been given the faculty to shape a new spirit does not
imply that we are at liberty to choose whether we shall do it or not.
Even if it were not for our life's sake--even if it were against our
life--still we must obey. But it _is_ for our life's sake, as we have
seen, and as it is indeed obvious, for every organism can live only by
fulfilling the purpose of its bei