Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationssume them together with all their dolls and idols of wax. - Onecould, to be sure, derive that inclination for 'beautiful form' now gettingthe upper hand in Germany from other and deeper sources:from the prevailing haste, from the breathless grasping at everymoment, from the precipitation that plucks all things from thebough too soon, from the race and pursuit that nowadays carvesfurrows in men's faces and as it were covers all they do with tattoos.As though a potion that prevents them from catching their breathwere working within them, they storm ahead with indecent anxietyas the harassed slaves of the moment, opinion and fashion: so thatthe lack of dignity and decorum is indeed all too painfully evidentand a deceitful elegance required to mask the 'sickness of thisundignified haste. For that is how the fashionable greed for beautifulform is connected with the ugly content of contemporary man: theformer is intended to conceal, the latter to be concealed. To becultivated means: to hide from oneself how wretched and base oneis, how rapacious in going for what one wants, hw insatiable inheaping it up, how shameless and selfislt in enjoying it. When I havein the past pointed out to someone that a German culture does notexist, more than once I have received the reply: 'But that is quitenatural, for hitherto the Germans have been too poor and modest.Just let our compatriots become rich and self-confident, and thenthey will possess a culture too!' Though belief may make blessed, thiskind of belief has the opposite effect on me, because I feel that theGerman culture which is here believed to possess a future - a cultureof wealth, polish and feigned gentility - is the most hostile antithesisof the German culture in which I believe. Certainly, he who has tolive among Germans suffers greatly from the notorious greyness oftheir life and thought, from their formlessness, their stupidity anddull-mindedness, their coarseness in more delicate affairs, evenmore from their envy and a certain secretiveness and uncleanlinessin their character; he is pained and offended by their rooted joy inwhat is false and ungenuine, in bad imitations, in the translation ofgood foreign things into bad native ones: now, however, that one hasin addition, and as the most painful experience of all, their feverishrestlessness, their search for success and profit, their overestimationof the moment, one is limitlessly indignant to think that all thesemaladies and weaknesses are on principle never to be cured but onlypainted over - with a 'culture of interesting form'! And this in thecase of a nation which produced Schopenhauer and Wagner! And oughtto do so often again! Or are we desperately deceiving ourselves? Do168