When we talk aloud to each other, we merely continue what and how each individual inwardly talks to himself. In this kind of talking none is the other’s judge; everyone is both defendant and judge at the same time. All our talks are darkened by such accusations, by the moralizing which has for ages mingled with so many conversations and keeps dripping into our wounds like poison, whatever it may be aimed against. We cannot remove this shadow but we can make it constantly lighter. We can have the right impulse: we do not want to accuse, except in the case of definite crimes capable of objective determination and of punishment. All through these years we have heard other people scorned. We do not want to continue that.
But we always succeed only in part. We all tend to justify ourselves, and to attack what we feel are hostile forces with depreciating judgments or moral accusations. Today we must examine ourselves more severely than ever. Let us make this plain: in the course of events the survivor seems always right. Success apparently justifies. The man on top believes that he has the truth of a good cause on his side. This implies the profound injustice of blindness for the failures, for the powerless, for those who are crushed by events.
It is ever thus. Thus was the Prussian-German noise after 1866 and 1870, which frightened Nietzsche. Thus was the even wilder noise of National-Socialism since 1933.
So now we must ask ourselves whether we are not lapsing into another noise, becoming self-righteous, deriving a legitimacy from the mere facts of our having survived and suffered.
Let us be clear about this in our minds: that we live and survive is not due to ourselves. If we have a new situation, with new opportunities amidst fearful destruction, it has not been created by our own strength. Let us not claim a legitimacy which is not due us.
As today every German government is an authoritarian government set up by the Allies, so every German, every one of us, owes the scope of his activities today to the Allies’ will or permission. This is a cruel fact. Truthfulness prevents us from forgetting it even for a day. It preserves us from arrogance and teaches us humility.
Among the survivors, among those on top, there are today, as ever, the outraged, impassioned ones, all thinking they are right and claiming credit for what has happened through others. The man who is well off, who finds an audience, thinks that this alone makes him right.
No one can avoid this situation altogether. Time and again, when we get on this path for an instant, we must make a real effort to find our way back to self-education. We are outraged ourselves. May outrage cleanse itself, may it stay with us as outrage against outrage, as morals against moralizing. We fight for purity of soul in struggling against the invincible in us.
That is true of the work which we now want to do together in this lecture course. What we have thought as individuals, or heard in conversations here and there, may partly be objectivized in a reflective connection. You want to participate in such connected reflections, in questions and attempted answers in which you will recognize what lies ready within yourselves or is already clear. We want to reflect together while, in fact, I expound unilaterally. But the point is not dogmatic communication, but investigation and tender for examination on your part.
Brainwork is not all that this requires. The intellect must put the heart to work, arouse it to an inner activity which in turn carries the brainwork. You will vibrate with me or against me, and I myself will not move without a stirring at the bottom of my thoughts. Although in the course of this unilateral exposition we do not actually talk with each other, I cannot help it if one or the other of you feels almost personally touched. I ask you in advance: forgive me, should I offend. I do not want to. But I am determined to dare the most radical thoughts as deliberately as possible.
In learning to talk with each other we win more than a connecting link between us. We lay the indispensable foundation for the ability to talk with other peoples.
If I anticipate that which is to become the theme of these lectures only at their very end: for us the way of force is hopeless, the way of cunning undignified and futile. Full frankness and honesty harbors not only our dignity—possible even in impotence—but our own chance. The question for every German is whether to go this way at the risk of all disappointments, at the risk of additional losses and of convenient abuse by the powerful. The answer is that this is the only way that can save our souls from a pariah existence. What will result from it we shall have to see. It is a spiritual-political venture along the edge of the precipice. If success is possible, then it will be only at long range. We are going to be distrusted for a long time to come.
Lastly, I characterize ways of remaining silent to which we incline and which constitute our great danger (I myself cannot refrain from accusing—at least not from a mental attack on the aggressive mentality).
A proudly silent bearing may for a short time be a justified mask, to catch one’s breath and clear one’s head behind it. But it becomes self-deception, and a trap for the other, if it permits us to hide defiantly within ourselves, to bar enlightenment, to elude the grasp of reality. We must guard against evasion. From such a bearing there arises a mood which is discharged in private, safe abuse, a mood of heartless frigidity, rabid indignation and facial distortions, leading to barren self-corrosion. A pride that falsely deems itself masculine, while in fact evading the issue, takes even silence as an act of combat, a final one that remains impotent.
Talking with each other is canceled too by speech which no longer speaks in private—speech which means to insult but not to hear an answer, waiting rather for the moment of face-slapping and secretly anticipates what in reality is fist and manslaughter, machine gun and bombing plane. Rage can distinguish only friend and foe for a life-and-death struggle, talks frankly with neither and does not see men as men, to get along with by being ready for self-corrections. We cannot be conscientious enough in illuminating this sort of conflict and rupture in our intercourse.
THE GREAT DIFFERENCES BETWEEN Us
Talking with each other is difficult in Germany today, but the more important for that reason. For we differ extraordinarily in what we have experienced, felt, wished, cherished and done. An enforced superficial community hid that which is full of possibilities and is now able to unfold.
We cannot sensibly talk with each other unless we regard the extraordinary differences as starting points rather than finalities. We have to learn to see and feel the difficulties in situations and attitudes entirely divergent from our own. We must see the different origins—in education, special fates and experiences—of any present attitude.
Today we Germans may have only negative basic features in common: membership in a nation utterly beaten and at the victors’ mercy; lack of a common ground linking us all; dispersal—each one is essentially on his own, and yet each one is individually helpless. Common is the non-community.
In the silence underneath the leveling public propaganda talk of the twelve years, we struck very different inner attitudes and passed through very different inner developments. We have no uniformly constituted souls and desires and sets of values in Germany. Because of the great diversity in what we believed all these years, what we took to be true, what to us was the meaning of life, the way of the transformation must also be different now for every individual. We are all being transformed. But we do not all follow the same path to the new ground of common truth, which we seek and which reunites us. In such a disaster everyone may let himself be made over for rebirth, without fear of dishonor. What we must painfully renounce is not alike for a1l—so little alike that one man’s renunciation may impress another as a gain. We are divided along different lines of disappointment.