Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

On the uses and disadvantages of history for lifeGermans are, after all, celebrated for their profound inwardness.But this inwardness also carries with it a celebrated danger: thecontent itself, of which it is assumed that it cannot be seen fromwithout, may occasionally evaporate; from without, however,neither its former presence nor its disappearance will be apparent atall. But however far from this danger we may imagine the Germanpeople to be, the foreigner will still be to some extent justified inmaintaining that our interior is too feeble and disorganized toproduce an outward effect and endow itself with a form. The interiorof the Germans can be receptive to an exceptional degree:serious, powerful, profound, and perhaps even richer than that ofother nations; but as a whole it remains weak because all thesebeautiful threads are not wound together into a powerful knot: sothat the visible act is not the act and self-revelation of the totalityof this interior but only a feeble or crude attempt on the part ofone or other of these threads to pose as being the whole. That iswhy the German cannot be judged by his actions and why as anindividual he is still completely hidden even after he has acted. Asis well known, he has to be assessed according to his thoughts andfeelings, and these he nowadays expresses in his books. If only itwere not precisely these books which, now more than ever before,lead us to doubt whether that celebrated inwardness really doesstill reside in its inaccessible little temple; it is a dreadful thoughtthat one day they might disappear and all that would be left to signalize"the German would be his arrogantly clumsy and meeklyslovenly exterior: almost as dreadful as if that hidden inwardnesswere sitting in there falsified and painted over and had becomean actor if not something worse. This, at any rate, is whatGrillparzer, as an independent observer, seems to have gatheredfrom his experience in the theatre. 'We feel in abstractions', hesays, 'we hardly know any longer how feeling really expresses itselfwith our contemporaries; we show them performing actions suchas they no longer perform nowadays. Shakespeare has ruined allof us moderns.'This is a single case and perhaps it has been generalized too hastily:but how fearful it would be if such a generalization were justified, if ahost of individual cases should crowd in upon the observer; howdesolating it would be to have to say: we Germans feel in abstractions,we have all been ruined by history - a proposition whichwould destroy at its roots all hope of a future national culture: for81