HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

114 l^eine*
FRENCH AND GERMAN PATRIOTISM.
The patriotism of the French con
sists in this : the heart warms ; throug]
this warmth it expands ; it enlarges soai
to encompass, with its all-embracin{
love, not only the nearest and dearest
but all France, all civilization. The
patriotism of the Germans, on the con
trary, consists in narrowing and con
tracting the heart, just as leathei
contracts in the cold; in hating
foreigners; in ceasing to be Europear
and cosmopolitan, and in adopting e
narrow-minded and exclusive Germanism,
We beheld this ideal empire oi
churlishness organized into a system by
Herr Jahn; with it began the crusade
of the vulgar, the coarse, the great unwashed—
against the grandest and
holiest idea ever brought forth in Germany,
the idea of huinanitarianism ; the
idea of the universal brotherhood oi
mankind, of cosmopolitanism — an idea
to which our great minds, Lessing,
Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Jean Paul, and
all people of culture in Germany, have
ever paid homage.
HEINE AND UNCLE TOM.
It is strange! during my whole life 1
have been strolling through the various