Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T09:06:06.444Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Limes Germanicus—Bridge and Frontier*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Goetz A. Briefs
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

THE PENDULUM of dynamic subjectivism swings from a faithful, dreamy, or thoughtful absorption in the world to an aggressive, defiant protest against the world. German history proves it abundantly from the days of the Cimbers and Teutons to the days of the Reformation and up to our present age. Or is it a mere accident that German thinkers formulated that man is obsessed by the will to the infinite, or, as Nietzsche put it: “that man could not tolerate God to be unless he be himself God?” We may well ask if Luther was not expressing a German truth by his word that the soul finds his way to his door by swaying to and fro. Is it a mere accident that dialectic philosophy and dialectic theology were made in Germany and actually acquired reputation only there? Is it not a characteristic self-analysis to assert with Hegel that religion and thought develop in permanent self-contradictions and antagonism and move by such antagonisms to ever higher and higher forms? Is it not a distinctly German appreciation and interpretation of history to say that it is nothing but a sequence of wars? The German mind evidences a clear imperialism interrupted by periods of a self-forgotten devotion to the world, but even in the imperialistic phases there remains some of this self-forgotten devotion—just as in the selfforgotten devotion there surges some of this imperialism. A wellbalanced equilibrium obviously is very hard to attain; it does not even lie in the intention of the German mind because it would entail the recognition of and submission to an ontological order, to form and law.

Type
Articles
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 1 , Issue 4 , October 1939 , pp. 444 - 456
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1939

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

12 An excellent analysis of the development of German political trends may be found in Walter Gerhart, Urn des Reiches Zukunft, Freiburg, Herder, 1932. (Walter Gerhart is a pseudonym for Waldemar Gurian; cf. particularly ch. 5 and 9.)

13 It is noteworthy that these same regions of Germany, Saxony and Thuringia were the focus of the Reformation, the stronghold of pre-War Marxism, the stronghold of post-War Communism, and later again the most radical center of National Socialism.

14 M. Scheler. 1. c.p. 151.

15 M. Scheler. I.c. pp. 148 ff.

16 Cf. with regard to the relationship of the Calvinistic dynasty to the Lutheran population the remarks of Leopold von Ranke, Zwoelf Bucher Preussischer Geschichte, I p. 215–16, Munchen 1930. Very elucidating the remarks of Karl Thieme, Das alte Wahre, Liepzig, 1935, pp. 139 ff.

17 Plessner, Helmut, Das Schicksal des deutschen Geistes im Ausgang seiner burgerlichen Epochs, Zurich und Leipzig, 1935, pp. 36 ff.Google Scholar

18 H. Plessner. I.c. p. 37.

19 H. Plessner, I.c. p. 38.

20 In the meantime the Limes has again been re-christened “Westwall.”