The belief, held until the last trace of horse and rider, that the world, God help us, should be saved by the German character[1], has been buried. The hope that it be saved from the German character, arises. As has, praise be to God, the hope that it will save itself from itself, to find its way back from the delusion, so inappropriate to its values and language, to itself, and its good senses, from export to the place in the sun[2] of its natural gifts. Honour to an unhappy people which has sacrificed itself to the point of understanding, shame on those who led it astray, who, whether by malice or stupidity, committed the greatest crime, and claimed the greatest number of victims, in history! But the experience that the conviction which one avowed, as one of very few, is now shared by many, and is almost no longer dangerous to hold; this surprising experience of the complete devaluation of empty phrases, the beginning of the last, most bitter, but also most rewarding phase of unconditional regret[3], this rapid switch from being audacious to being self-evident, doesn’t discharge me of the duty to declare it. One is still the one who suspected, no, who knew, right from the breakthrough at Gorlice[4] and even earlier, in fact from the first day that we ran the gauntlet of mechanized lack of imagination, of all the victories which prolonged the war, of the frenzy of a quantity which didn’t have the courage to quantify itself, that, with a greater inevitability than a Shakespearean tragedy, would end with liberation from the coercion of the idol, and that one day, unfortunately before the end of the physical suffering, the even greater mental and spiritual crisis, which made contemptibility a virtue, hatefulness a success, wretchedness an honour, would end. If you wanted to find someone in the haunted kingdom of these Lebensmittelmächte[5], haunted because it is where stock-brokers spoke the language of the grave and because it had the power to fill graves, both romantic and technological power, the power of slogans which ignite automatically; if you wanted to elect the central European who was least likely to restrain a soldier, or even poke the iron Hindenburg in the eye, or undertake anything against the spirit of those times, in which instruction manuals and chemistry, decoration and organization, stupidity and bestiality, undertook their unmentionable offensive against human dignity, shoulder to shoulder, then I would probably be on the short-list of those of whom it must be said that they performed the sacred duty of refusing and resisting this unholy time. If you read the two thousand pages of the war Fackel, which is only the fraction to which technical and official barriers restricted me, then, even if you don’t credit me with any positive achievement, you would have to grant me that I effortlessly rejected, day for day, the filthy claims of power over the intellect, to hold lies for truth, injustice for justice, and madness for sanity. Because my courage to recognize the enemy in my own camp, was the greater! And only he who knew no fear before the effective power, has the right to have no pity for the broken power. Because the frame of mind in which I stood before the faces of these very subordinate men of violence, despite all the sorrow, all the pain and all the shame, was always one of invincible cheerfulness. And bearing such witness is a great enough sacrifice. Could there be a more difficult endurance than having to laugh when you would would rather run sobbing into the last forest which this organized catastrophe has not yet gassed? Than the incapacity to believe in the glory of a glory which goes around a miserable, hungry, lousy, wasted world, carrying its laurels in a rucksack? To bear the curse of this sordid plot by tyrants and crooks, who have inebriated the people with the spirit of battle honours, only to slaughter them, and then to rob the slaughtered! These highest traitors, who shunned no pretext of patriotic honour to sneakily get their hands on the possessions of others for their own benefit; who with every breath they took violated those jaded conceptions in whose name they disposed of the life, happiness, youth, health, liberty, honour, rights and property of others; who stole under the cover of flags, those heartless administrators of cowardly mechanical death, who betrayed humanity to the homeland, and the homeland to their baseness. But what a turn-around now, by the grace of God! What a respite! Hark the great hammering on the gates of this time; see the light which is piercing the night of this mental dungeon; what an earthquake in the volcanic lava which America is lucky not to have! If this is not a turning point, then there has never been one! If Fortinbras is not approaching, there has never been the ruins of a realm, there was never a disjointed time to be to be restored. Like Horatio, I meet it:
And let me speak to the yet unknowing world how these things came about: so shall you hear of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts; of accidental judgments, casual slaughters; of deaths put on by cunning and forc’d cause; and, in this upshot, purposes mistook fall’n on the inventors’ heads: all this can I truly deliver.
And I will help to arrest all these rulers and wrong-doers, and their helpers, their seducers, the henchmen of the most heinous days‘ work, the journalistic inciters of this bloody fraud, the adorners of doom, the criers of the fields of corpses, the incredible reporters of this tragic carnival, as they all live near their destiny. I also vouch that all those who still own a bloody press, as far as the mental limits of this town reach, and as long as this realm is concerned, are dishonoured. Woe be to him who wants to promote the continuation of business of the anonymous hangmen, they who are already converting humaneness into an empty phrase, because murder born of words now brings danger, not profit! The panic in which entire divisions of plate-lickers are suddenly on Wilson’s side, the miserable willingness to exploit the popularity of the new spirit of the times, will protect neither the parasites of the deposed ideal, nor their followers, from being identified, and dealt with according to what they earned/deserved during the double-pay war years — and I swear to God that I will make sure that all those who are today almost as impressed by fourteen points in the distance as they were yesterday by a hundred-and-twenty-kilometer cannon, are put forward for a medal to the current world authorities. We are more disgusted by the word than we regret the deeds, so we will now take possession of the minds of the people, so that we never again allow those irresponsible voices who falsified the call of the fatherland, and who now want to hind behind the voice of eternal peace, to cheat us of our goods and blood. If the great times, which were the most base where we were, are finally to become great times, it will be because we give a second shove to throw all the mental rubbish, all the junk of discarded concepts and the whole inventory of the professional criminals of the word, and they themselves, after the useless political rubbish! The day is coming on which the emblems and decorations of the glory which we have survived will stare us into bleary-eyed horror, like carnival masks and pale painted faces in the sunlight. But if we, in our natural generosity, decide to pardon the official bearers and servants of those fatal ideals, because we are prepared to forget the feverish dreams of the night for the sake of a glimpse of freedom, and because we take pity on their stupidity, God protect us from the mercy which we would waste on the journalistic intermediaries and profiteers, on the writers and scholars who put it down in black on red as mankind was crucified. They should bail out the bloodbath which they set up and promoted, pen for pen, villain for villain!
[1] As claimed in a nationalist slogan. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am_deutschen_Wesen_mag_die_Welt_genesen (German only).
[2] Phrase used to indicate German colonial ambitions before the war. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platz_an_der_Sonne (German only). Pistorius 2011, p. 378
[3] Untranslatable word-play: unconditional loyalty = Treue has become unconditional regret = Reue. Pistorius 2011, p. 343, Nibelungentreue
[4] Pistorius 2011, p. 177
[5] Lenbensmittel = groceries, Mittelmächte = The Central Powers. Lebensmittelmächte then means something like materialist countries
Die Weltbühne in English Translation 