(Originally written August 22, 2007 in Notebook 18)
Beyond Good & Evil
Friedrich Nietzsche
Part 8: People and Fatherlands
240
Richard Wagner's overture to the Meistersinger best expresses Nietzsche's thoughts on Germans: "They belong to the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow as yet they have no today" (Nietzsche, 364).
241
One day the stronger will become master over the strong and with the spiritual flattening of one people there will be compensation in the spiritual deepening of another people.
242
Europeans are becoming more and more similar to one another in a physiological effect of the democratic movement.
They are becoming detached to their climate and class, which is the origin of race.
The new man of Europe is characteristically nomadic and possesses the power of adaptation.
The modern ideas will have disastrous consequences: it will lead to the leveling of man and hence, the mediocritization of man.
The democratization of Europe is preparing a people that are only fit for slavery.
243
The sun is moving towards the constellation Hercules, we men should follow the sun!
244
The German soul is a hodgepodge of diverse origins.
The German people elude definition.
One is rarely completely wrong about the Germans.
The German soul is disorderly with an air of mystery.
The German is contradictory in essence: He is good-natured and vicious.
The German is a man of disguises.
The Germans are the "deceiver people".
245
Mozart was the end of the "good old time". Beethoven was a period of transition. Whatever came after him was romanticism.
Romanticism is superficial; the transition form Rousseau to Napoleon.
With Romanticism came the danger for the Germans (and German music) to cease to be the voice for the soul of Europe and to slink down to mere fatherland-ishness.
246
Books to Germans are like words said to the deaf, they are wasted on them!
247
Until recent clumsy attempts the only rhetorical eloquence in Germany came from the pulpit.
Only the preacher knew how to deliver words that had the correct sound and meaning.
Only the German Bible, Luther's Bible, grows in the hearts of Germans because no one else knew how to use the words.
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