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131 ◆ New GermaN CoNtributioNs ◆ Announcement This essay1 first appeared in 1922 as an announcement from the editor in the first printing of a new literary magazine: Neue Deutsche Beiträge. Here Hofmannsthal made some of his most explicit comments about language and the German nation, and he emphasized how much the historical situation had changed since the announcement of Stefan George’s Die Blätter für die Kunst in 1892. Someone who announces contributions confesses to the belief that something exists to which it could be a duty or a pleasure to contribute. Contributions then—to what? To German literature? The word and the concept have become threadbare in too many hands. To German poetry? That aims high and could seem presumptuous . To the spiritual resources of the nation and, therefore, to language? For where would we find the spiritual resources of the nation if not in the language? Fair enough. Language, yes, it is everything; but beyond that, behind it is something more: truth and mystery. And if we do not forget this, we may say: language is everything. Contributions, then, to the spiritual life of the nation; we could almost say to a reflective and heightened existence. One could just as well announce beginnings or new beginnings. But the word would be perhaps less modest and not as true. For everything always goes on, even if in a painful and unclear way. So, contributions. It is a sober title. But the presumptuous titles and the ones that promise a lot are lies or empty ornaments . What use is the signpost that points nowhere, the bridge that reaches no shore, the scale that gives false weights? What use is Prometheus or Faust or Hyperion or, perhaps, the Horen2 to us once again or the Einsiedlerzeitung3 [Journal for Hermits]. They all point, even the classics, to a past condition of the German mind, and we can adopt neither the methods of past ages nor their terminology. They seem clever, but they lack something of the strength and the feeling of responsibility , and in truth, spirit is something unconditionally responsible to life, however much it may raise itself above life. 132 ◆ Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea Thirty years ago Blätter für die Kunst was founded. Here spirit and rigor spoke to the nation, to youth, a language never heard before. The first volume expressed the wish for a distinctively German gesture, which was needed more than a great new victory. The expression was bold and sharp, like everything that was expressed in these pages; a bit arrogant perhaps, but to a great purpose. A dark fate that has reached us today lay in the distance at that time, lying in wait—and perhaps one could still express oneself that way at that time. Today, on the other hand, the gesture of a witty despair is fashionable. But the game is not so simple. Such an attitude betrays a new inclination to excess and spiritual Epicureanism; it wants to simulate spiritual passion—the rarest thing in the world, especially among contemporary Germans—and is nothing but sleep; excess and sleep follow easily from one another. It depends, it seems to us, solely on intellectuals’ (through whom the whole society expresses itself) assuming in a difficult and dark situation the same attitude that would be appropriate for the individual in such a situation: that of a “modest respect” toward the European intellectual world, present and past in one, and an upright self-respect without any sense of superiority, however fate may have treated us otherwise. So much for the attitude. And now regarding the content, we want to abstain from everything that encourages the unrestrained inclination to abstraction in which a conceptually overcultivated language rather than an active capacity takes effect. We want to be sensitive to form, as much in our own offerings as in our commentary, and to avoid excessive intellectual displays and paradoxes. Even nature is manifested only through form. We are only able to love the form, and anyone who pretends to love the idea always loves it only as form. Form disposes of the problem; it answers the unanswerable. It hardly needs to be said, however, that the concept of form [Gestalt] is from here on very broadly conceived! Thus, Aeschylean4 tragedy is form, but so is Pindar’s hymn, and the Platonic dialog as much as the words of Heraclitus.5 Next to the Greeks, the great Italians of the sixteenth century...

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