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One always felt that an unknown something, an incomprehensible mystery had led him by this way into a hitherto untrodden land.
his initial nervousness was overcome by an amazing lightness and soaring of speech, as is always the case with men who are inspired.
he had succeeded in transcending space and its confines, city and family, by his flight into the boundless.
admire talent ecstatically in all its forms irresistibly leads to introspection, to see if it is not possible to discover some trace or possibility of this choicest of essences in one’s unexplored body or still cloudy soul.
the élan toward the intellectual, the soul’s inner grasping power, is set in motion in those decisive formative years, and only he who has learned early to spread his soul out wide may later hold the entire world within himself.
my thoughts are developed by objects, events and persons,
mine too i think at least in terms of daily poetry writing
but only by years of burning endeavor.
this struggle to wrest from a strange language its most intimate essence and to mold it as plastically into one’s own language, was always a particular artistic desire on my part.
He remained open in every sense, was burdened by no repression and confused by no pride, a free joyous person, easily given to every rapture; when one was with him one felt enlivened in his own desire for life.
And now I was outwardly free and all the years up to the present have been devoted to one struggle – a struggle which in our times grows constantly more difficult – to remain equally free inwardly.
What these poets sought from their small unambitious professions was nothing but a little security for their outer life which guaranteed them freedom for their inner work.
lived for the joy of living in its sublimest form, the creative joy in work.
who sought only to bind verse to verse in silent yet passionate effort, every line saturated with music, flaming with color, glowing with images.
the note – delicate, yet surviving the booming of the age – emitted when rhyme joining rhyme created the indescribable stir, softer than the sound of a leaf falling in the wind, that vibrates to the most distant soul.
our new forms of life, which drive men out murderously from all inner contemplation as a forest fire drives wild animals from their hidden lairs?
But is not ours a time which does not grant, even to the purest and the most secluded, any quiet for waiting and ripening and contemplation and collecting one’s self, as it was still granted to the men of the better and calmer European pre-war period?
his immeasurably sensitive soul, every positive decision, all planning and every announcement were burdensome.
My first lesson had been taught me – that the greatest men are always the kindest.
The second was that nearly always they are the simplest in their manner of living.
Great moments are always outside of time.
In that hour I had seen the Eternal secret of all great art, yes, of every mortal achievement, made manifest: concentration, the collection of all forces, all senses, that ecstasis, that being-out-of-the-world of every artist.
the secret of great art
Goethe when he says that to understand completely great creations one must have seen them not only in their perfection but have pursued the process of their creation.
shelton college review
the tragedy of the Jew more strongly than in his personality which, with all of its apparent superiority, was full of a deep unrest and uncertainty.
For the air about us is not dead, is not empty, it carries in itself the vibration and the rhythm of the hour, it presses them unknowingly into our blood and directs them deep into our heart and brain.
But whoever experienced that epoch of world confidence knows that all since has been retrogression and gloom.
Calmly reflecting on the past, if one asks why Europe went to war in 1914, neither reasonable ground nor even provocation can be found. It had nothing to do with ideas and hardly even with petty frontiers. I cannot explain it otherwise than by this surplus of force, a tragic consequence of the internal dynamism that had accumulated in those forty years of peace and now sought violent release.
no explanation for WWI
no important book or pamphlet by prominent writers of that time is a single discussion of principles or a single passionate warning to be found.
thus, the noted writers were not prophets
Renan,
It was only later that I discovered how greatly we are surrounded with mystery in the midst of life, and how little we know about our next-door neighbor.
usual, the dead were in the wrong.
they were betraying the true mission of the poet, the preserver and defender of the universal humanity of mankind.
one was a writer and had the gift of words, and with it the duty of expressing one’s convictions as far as that was possible
with the gift. and it is a gift. comes a duty.
these simple, primitive people had understood the war more truly than our university professors and poets: namely, as a disaster that had come over them with which they had had nothing to do,
one of those brilliant summer days that are spring in the morning and summer at noon,
Here it jumped out at me, naked, towering and unashamed, the lie of the war!
had recognized the foe I was to fight – false heroism that prefers to send others to suffering and death, the cheap optimism of the conscienceless prophets, both political and military who, boldly promising victory, prolong the war, and behind them the hired chorus, the “word makers of war” as Werfel has pilloried them in his beautiful poem.
masters of war
calling the prudent cowardly, the humane weak, only to be supine themselves in the hour of catastrophe which they themselves wantonly conjure up.
never had I sensed the greatness and the tragedy of those figures as in these all too similar hours.
could never justify that sacrifice.
chose for my symbol the figure of Jeremiah, the man of futile warnings.
here is the true prophet
to portray the man who in time of enthusiasm is despised as the weakling, the timid one, but who in the hour of defeat proves himself to be the only one able not only to endure it, but also to master it.
the spiritual superiority of the vanquished.
the internal hardening which every form of power brings about in man, the spiritual numbness of an entire people which every victory entails, and to contrast it with the energizing power of defeat that plows through the soul so painfully and fruitfully.
From the moment when I attempted to shape them, I no longer suffered so greatly from the tragedy of the times.
had never believed for a single moment that my work might have a visible success.
had said in poetic dialogue everything that I had to withhold in my conversation with those around me. I had thrown off the burden that had rested on my soul and had been restored to myself; in the very hour in which everything in me was “No” against the times, I had found the “Yes” to myself.
To make clear the difference in the intellectual atmosphere between the First and Second World Wars, it becomes necessary to reiterate that the peoples, emperors, kings, who had matured in the traditions of humanity still cherished a subconscious shame about the war.
the world conscience was still a courted power in the years from 1914 to 1918;
wished to serve as an example in only one thing: how one can remain free and faithful to one’s own conviction even against the whole world.
Demain, a document to be studied by all who wish really to understand the spiritual tendencies of that epoch.
