historians-from-germany

"In character he was amiable and virtuous."

"The God, who made earth's iron, would create no slave; therefore he gave the sabre, the sword, and the spear, for man's right hand. Hence he imbued him with courage, lent accents of wrath to freedom's voice, that he might maintain the feud till death."

"...the anachronistic conception that Greece and Rome alone should be considered sources of culture for us, and that therefore they must remain for all time the focal point of historical-philological research. [Classicists] still practice that orthodox philology, which claims and possesses an influence, which it has not for a long time deserved, [and] that intolerant onesidedness which only accords the oriental sciences a hearing in so far as they are related to the history and culture of Greece, but otherwise are blind and want to be blind to the enormous field of Asian knowledge, which has brought us into contact with the modern world. [They are still beholden to] that real “unworldliness” in the scholarly sense, which takes no part in the widened historical conceptions of our day. Those are the forces with which Orientalistik has always had to struggle, and which today too block Sinology’s path, ... And added to this is another fact, that one ought to think, should offer [Sinology] a leg up, but actually because of the weirdness of our academic [canons of] scientificness hinders it; and that is its vital connection with the present. If Sinology only had to do exclusively with a long finished, ruined and then re-excavated culture, then perhaps there would be a possibility of finding grace in the eyes of the philological right-thinkers. .."

"What will this Europe be for the Orient in the future? A band of swindlers and oppressors, without honor, without shame!"

"A keen intellect with powers of clear exposition, joined to the spirited delivery which distinguished his lectures, ensured him great success."

"If I have not been able to write well, I have at any rate written truthfully, using as authorities those who are best informed about the subject."

"Pietism produced some beneficial results. In the subjective bias of the whole movement, however, there lay from the beginning the danger of many abuses. It often degenerated into fanaticism, with alleged prophecies, visions, and mystical states."

"Еvery intellectual in emigration, without exception, is damaged."

"Ideas can only be met by ideas, and force by force."

"In my view, the task of the scholar is to learn, to criticize, and, wherever possible, to add to the store of valid knowledge."

"Novelty, originality, and creativity have no value if their products do not correspond to truth, to the contrary, they are harmful when they lead to false assertions.... We must separate our valid knowledge, that is documentable and objective from our religious, political and ideological preferences."

"The development of human thought and achievement, as a whole, has not been, as commonly supposed, a continual upward progression, nor even the equivalent of a continuous series of ascertained results. Thoughts and inventions, which seemed on the verge of practical fruition, have often been reduced to nothingness, even at the most decisive moment, through some combination of untoward circumstances; yes, even the very memory of a pathway broken into the Land of Promise is often obliterated and what seemed accomplished fact has had to be recreated by laborious work covering years, decades and even centuries. Just the simplest, most natural and, in the end, almost self evident facts are the hardest to evolve and elucidate, just what was most decisive and potent of result has been time and again overlooked by the seeker after truth. ... The gold of historic thought, indeed, is as little to be found in the street as the gold of actual daily strife, and it is by no means the task of the historian of broad general scope to give the initial clew to its discovery. He, indeed, can only reproduce the past with fidelity and exactitude. The intuition of the true investigator and pathfinder of today and tomorrow must find its own way to new guiding principles from the work of yesterday, before yesterday, and the distant past."

"While the constitutions of Western liberal democracies preserve the freedom of new religions, I am not sure whether new religions, including New Age and neo-Paganism, preserve western liberal democracies. In Weimar they did not."

"It was precisely Hauer’s and other Nazis’ radical liberalism that led them to National Socialism. (p. 20)"

"There is no dogma, word or scripture. German morality is not rigidly chained to words but changes as reality changes and as the original nature adapts to new conditions. It is a convenient moral relativism that Hauer and his cohorts developed. In the final analysis, it is […] a fighter ethic that negates all moral ties except those with respect to the interests of one’s own Volk. (p. 15)"

"The new religions founded in the pre-Nazi and Nazi years, especially Jakob Hauer’s German Faith Movement, would be a model for how German fascism distilled aspects of religious doctrine into political extremism."

"Goebbels followed the stations of political ideologization from Catholicism toward freer forms of a Christian view of the world and self (as in liberal theology) and then National-Socialism. (p. 7)"

"The source of anti-Semitism lies elsewhere than with religion. It lies in a fundamental human divide between those people who love culture, by which I mean the poetics and politics that grew out of a very specific local condition and history, and those who love civilization, by which I mean the poetic and politics that are rooted in non-specific, universal laws meant to protect civilian, local or foreign. Hauer’s fight against Jewish-Christianity is on this divide. (p. 14)"

"The whole thrust of core Nazi radicals was to overcome what they regarded as an already secularized Christianity and replace it with a faith in the ‘Third Reich’. (p. 149)"

"European neo-paganism sees itself as the restorer of all that it claims Christianity removed from European life and thought, that is, human godliness, the seamless unity of religion and science, and the harmony of human beings with the environment. (p. 173)"

"The Third Reich represented yearning for salvation from despair through the fount of power that had its source in the German people (Volkskraft), not in an otherworldly God. Krieck ended his midsummer night’s talk with a hail to the German Youth, German Volk and Third Reich. (p. 151)"

"Those Germans (from Hitler, to Rosenberg, to Himmler, to Heydrich, to Klagges, to Hauer, to Grimm and innumerable others) who became prominent National Socialist ideologues, even though Grimm and other nationalists like him did not become members of the party, were uniformly obsessed with overcoming Christianity and persuading other Germans to do likewise."

"[T]he variant core elements of Goebbels’ religiosity consisted of Christological symbols and Vitalism. (p. 24),"

"Liberalism broke the ground enabling the emergence of radicalism. (p. 21)"

"Sich," sprach der Greis, "hast du denn nicht gelesen: Wenn Menschen schweigen, werden Steine schreien? Nicht spotte ferner, Sohn, mit Gottes Wort! Lebendig ist es, kräftig, schneidet scharf, Wie ein zweischneidig Schwert, und sollte gleich Das Menschenherz sich ihm zum Trotz versteinen. So wird im Stein ein Menschenherz sich regen."

"The fascination emanating as usual from the historical material itself prevailed over any desire of practical or moral application and, needless to say, preceded any afterthought."

"The antithesis served the Anonymous, it is true, to observe very strictly the inherent difference between the God and the king; but it served him also to blur that line of distinction and to show where the difference between "God by nature" and "god by grace" ended; that is, in the case of potestas, of power. Essence and substance of power are claimed to be equal in both God and king, no matter whether that power be owned by nature or only acquired by grace."

"The features as reflected by the looking-glass betray that he is stripped of every possibility of a second or super-body — of the pompous body politic of king, of the God-likeness of the Lord's deputy elect, of the follies of the fool, and even of the most human griefs residing in inner man. The splintering mirror means, or is, the breaking part of any possible duality. All those facets are reduced to one: to the banal face and insignificant physis of a miserable man, a physis now void of any metaphysis whatsoever. It is both less and more than Death. It is the demise of Richard and the rise of a new body natural."

"Over against his lost outward kingship he sets an inner kingship, makes his true kingship to retire to inner man, to soul and mind and "regal thoughts": You may my glories and my state depose, But not my briefs, still am I king of those. (IV.i.192ff)"

"In other words, whenever we capitalize a notion and, in the English language, even change the gender from neuter to feminine, we actually are "haloing" the word or the notion and are indicating its sempiternity as an idea or power."

"That the phrase actually originated in the Hispana is obvious for a simple reason: only in that collection do we find a textual corruption of the acts of the Council of Chalcedon at which one of the bishops modestly said that God imperatorem erexit ad zelum [i.e. fidei]. In other words, a scribe copying the canons of Chalcedon misread the text and changed ad zelum into ad celum; and this erroneous reading must have reached, perhaps through the channels of Pseudo-Isidorus, the Norman Anonymous for whom even that great forgery in favor of the hierarchy could turn into grist brought to his royalist mill. This reading is merely an error, though an error remarkable by itself, since it shows how easily any extravagant exaltation of the imperial power could flow from the pen of a scribe in those centuries."

"It appears relevant to the general subject of this study, and also otherwise worth our while, to inspect more closely the varieties of royal duplications which Shakespeare has unfolded in the three bewildering central scenes of Richard II. The duplications, all one, and all simultaneously active, in Richard — "Thus play I in one person many people" (V. v.31) — are those potentially present in the King, the Fool, and the God. They dissolve, perforce, in the Mirror. Those three prototypes of "twin-birth" intersect and overlap and interfere with each other continuously."

"The jurists had claimed that the king's body politic is utterly void of "natural Defects and Imbecilities." Here, however, "Imbecility" seems to hold sway. And yet, the very bottom has not been reached. Each scene, progressively, designates a new low. "King body natural" in the first scene, and "Kingly Fool" in the second: with those two twin-born beings there is associated, in the half-sacramental abdication scene, the twin-born deity as an even lower estate. For the "Fool" marks the transition from "King" to "God," and nothing could be more miserable, it seems, than the God in the wretchedness of man."

"A hundred years or more of Christ-centered monastic piety have affected also the image of rulership. In fact, the unique Reichenau miniature is the most powerful pictorial display of what may be called "liturgical kingship" — a kingship centered in the God-man rather than in God the Father. As a result, the Reichenau artist ventured to transfer the Ottonian emperor also the God-man's "two natures in one person."

"In late antique art, we often find the halo bestowed on such figures as might impersonate a supra-individual idea or general notion. This special mark of distinction indicated that the figure was meant to represent in every respect a continuum, something permanent and sempiternal beyond the contingencies of time and corruption."

"There have been peoples who flourished under democracy; there have been peoples who perished under democracy. Democracy may imply stoicism, republicanism and inexorable severity; or it may imply liberalism, parliamentary chatter and self-indulgence."

"Who is the liberal chameleon: democracy? Who is this Moloch who devours the masses and the classes and the trades and the professions and all human distinctions? Who is this Leviathan? We must not let either the rhetoric or the bonhomie of the democrat deceive us about the true nature of the monster."

"A Policy may be reversed: History cannot."

"The English always talked of freedom. They always sought their own freedom at the expense of everyone else's. They early developed a peculiar mode of thought based on a confusion of ideas, which gave precedence not to a cause for its own sake but to the advantage they themselves derived from it. There was no hypocrisy in this: though it looked like hypocrisy. It was merely an incredible naivete combined with a natural brutality of approach. The English were perfectly unconscious of these things. Their trump card was their stupidity, and in their stupidity lay their highest shrewdness."

"Our enemies have their present success. The moment is in their favour, but everything else is against them. The secret, however, must not be revealed before its time. What we can, however, already detect is a regrouping of men and nations. All anti-liberal forces are combining against everything that is liberal. We are living in the time of this transition. The change is taking place most logically from below and attacking the enemy where his power began. There is a revolt against the age of reason."

"The revolutionary concludes overhastily that the world will now for all time be guided by the political principles which governed him in overthrowing it. The reactionary takes the diametrically opposite line: he seriously considers it possible to delete the Revolution from the page of history as if it had never been. The revolutionary is soon cured of his error. The very day that sees the old moulds of life shattered, brings home to him the urgent necessity of casting it into new moulds. [...] The reactionary on the other hand imagines that we need only revert to the old moulds in order to have everything again exactly "as it was before." He has no inclination to compromise with the new."

"Amongst the discoveries which reason made, the most fateful was this: that man is not free. It might well have seemed the most obviously reasonable thing to hedge this unfree man about with state conventions. Instead, the liberals demanded that this man-who was biologically unfree-should have perfect individual and political freedom."

"The reactionary's reading of history is as superficial as the conservative's is profound. The reactionary sees the world as he has known it; the conservative sees it as it has been and will always be. He distinguishes the transitory from the eternal. Exactly what has been, can never be again. But what the world has once brought forth she can bring forth again."

"The Revolution can never be un-made. A revolution may be combated while there is yet time while there is yet faith that help may be found for the nation in its need. Such help will most readily be found in the government which has hitherto been the nation's best protector. But once a revolution has become a fact, there is nothing left for the thinking man but to accept it as a new datum, a new starting-point."

"Liberalism was the ruin of Greece. The decay of hellenic freedom was preceded by the rise of the liberal. He was begotten of Greek 'enlightenment.' From the philosophers' theory of the atom, the sophist drew the inference of the individual. Protagoras, the Sophist, was the founder of individualism and also the apostle of relativity. He proclaimed that: "Opposite propositions are equally true." Nothing immoral was intended. He meant that there are no general but only particular truths: according to the standpoint of the perceiver. But what happens when the same man has two standpoints? When he is ready to shift his standpoint as his advantage may dictate? This same Protagoras proclaimed that rhetoric could make the weaker cause victorious. Still nothing immoral was intended. He meant that the better cause was sometimes the weaker and should then be helped to victory. But the practice soon arose of using rhetoric to make the worse cause victorious. It is no accident that the sophists were the first Greek philosophers to accept pay, and were the most highly paid. A materialist outlook leads always to a materialist mode of thought."

"The principle of liberalism is to have no fixed principle and to contend that this is in itself a principle."

"Every people has its own socialism."

"The liberal is inspired by the ambition of the would-be great man who does not want to take the lower seat, the anxiety of the inadequate person to miss nothing. Jealousy of power explains this hate of genius, of anyone who is great, who does, singlehanded, things which can never be done by the many. Jealousy of power explains this hate of the dynasties with their hereditary prestige and privilege; this hate of the Papacy with its traditional authority transmitted to the wearer of the tiara; the hostility to Louis XIV's and to Pius IX's doctrines of infallibility. This jealousy of power explains no less that passion for constitutions which make power dependent on elections; this craze for parliaments to take control of the state; this mania for republics in which the parties divide the power and party leaders draw the pay and the electors enjoy the party patronage; or the preference for a limited monarchy that has resigned all real power but still lays claim to grace."

"The population problem is THE problem of Germany: a socialist problem if you will, but more exactly a German problem. Since access to the outer world is forbidden us we must look for its solution within our own borders; and since it cannot there be solved, a day must come when we shall burst our frontiers and seek and find it outside. [...]The victors have no population problems. Their countries give a home to all who speak their tongue. In addition they possess other lands to which their people may migrate. They have divided up the globe between them. Since the word 'annexation' has acquired an ugly ring, and 'sphere of influence' is no less suspect, they have invented the idea of the mandate and conferred it on themselves through the League of Nations. They have now not enough people to take possession of these countries and administer them to full advantage, or to bring them up to that level of progress which they consider it their peculiar privilege to promote. The population problem of the victors is that of declining populations."

"The German nation is astir. Its path is blocked. It has lost its bearings. It seeks space. It seeks work: and fails to find it. We are becoming a nation of proletarians."