One just goes on creating characters and making them move. The idea is still very vague. If one has definite opinions, then they have only emerged from the activity of creating characters.
That is what we lack: danger! I am the end-product of generations of middle-class endeavours directed towards prosperity, security, freedom from illusion, towards an existence entirely serene and smooth. In me the ideal of middle-class culture ought to be attained. In fact, all move- ment has come to a standstill in me: I believe nothing, hope for nothing, strive for nothing, acknowledge nothing: no fatherland, no family, no friendship. And only the oldest of the emotions and the last to expire still troubles me. I barely possess it, but I can still recall it. Love: all its cruelty, its delight in danger, its will to destroy and to be absorbed in another being--where would I, last feeble representative of the middle class, find so many violent urges.
My whole life was one great love; with ardent breast I cast myself upon all that was great and beautiful. I scorned nothing, condemned no one, nourished no rancour. To the very end I acquiesced in my own nature and in my fate.
I have in fact played out, item by item, the programme that was specified for me before I ever came on the scene. One after another, the three goddesses have draped the folds of my garments, ordered my gestures, each to her own way of thinking. My life was a work of art.
In its Gothic nooks there crouches, and through its gabled alleyways there creeps something uncanny, something senile, some hereditary taint medieval hysteria, superannuated neurosis, something in the nature of a religious malady.
. . . . stronger, warmer men, who were not eroded by understanding, who only took thought as long as they were speaking, who did not pursue with agonizing meticulousness the evolution of their inner destiny, but for whom everything proceeded from outside themselves . . . they were not all alone with their shredded souls.
I speak about a small community that--full of vices and depravity --nevertheless in a moment of love, joined in brotherhood on its dusty town square, takes an irrevocable step upwards towards greatness.
It is he who has worked for decades in Germany to put a good face on the things that are not of the mind, to justify by sophistry what is unjust, in the interests of his mortal enemy--authority.
They have taken the life of the people only as a symbol for their own lofty sensations. They have accorded to life only the part of a walker-on, have never involved their fine feelings in the struggles down below, have never known what democracy is and yet have scorned it.
How grand it felt when responsibility was divided and the sense of guilt collective.
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Publication Information: Book Title: German Men of Letters. Volume: 2. Contributors: Alex Natan - editor. Publisher: Oswald Wolff. Place of Publication: London. Publication Year: 1963. Page Number: 220.
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