grown mutinous, and which
finally breaks out into the passionate cry: I am culture! There,
before the gates of the public schools and universities, we can see
the culture which has been driven like a fugitive away from these
institutions. True, this culture is without the erudition of those
establishments, but assumes nevertheless the mien of a sovereign; so
that, for example, Gutzkow the novelist might be pointed to as the
best example of a modern public school boy turned aesthete. Such a
degenerate man of culture is a serious matter, and it is a horrifying
spectacle for us to see that all our scholarly and journalistic
publicity bears the stigma of this degeneracy upon it. How else can we
do justice to our learned men, who pay untiring attention to, and even
co-operate in the journalistic corruption of the people, how else than
by the acknowledgment that their learning must fill a want of their
own similar to that filled by novel-writing in the case of others:
_i.e._ a flight from one's self, an ascetic extirpation of their
cultural impulses, a desperate attempt to annihilate their own
individuality. From our degenerate literary art, as also from that
itch for scribbling of our learned men which has now reached such
alarming proportions, wells forth the same sigh: Oh that we could
forget ourselves! The attempt fails: memory, not yet suffocated by the
mountains of printed paper under which it is buried, keeps on
repeating from time to time: 'A degenerate man of culture! Born for
culture and brought up to non-culture! Helpless barbarian, slave of
the day, chained to the present moment, and thirsting for
something--ever thirsting!'

"Oh, the miserable guilty innocents! For they lack something, a need
that every one of them must have felt: a real educational institution,
which could give them goals, masters, methods, companions; and from
the midst of which the invigorating and uplifting breath of the true
German spirit would inspire them. Thus they perish in the wilderness;
thus they degenerate into enemies of that spirit which is at bottom
closely allied to their own; thus they pile fault upon fault higher
than any former generation ever did, soiling the clean, desecrating
the holy, canonising the false and spurious. It is by them that you
can judge the educational strength of our universities, asking
yourselves, in all seriousness, the question: What cause did you
promote through them? The German power of invention, th