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171 ◆ The Value and digniTy of The german language ◆ The final essay1 in this volume was the preface to Wert und Ehre deutscher Sprache in Zeugnissen: Gedanken einiger deutscher Männer über die deutsche Sprache (The Value and Dignity of the German Language: Thoughts of a Few German Men on the German Language). The twelve authorities were Justus Georg Schottel, Leibniz, Justus Möser, Wieland, Herder, Goethe, Jean Paul, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Fichte, Adam Müller, Ernst Moritz Arndt, and Jacob Grimm, a list that also suggests how Hofmannsthal envisioned the German tradition. The essay emphasizes the peculiarities of the German language: the lack of the kind of public language that works so well in English and in French. This argument echoes what he says in “Adam Müller’s Twelve Essays on Eloquence,” but the real substance of the essay is the relationship between the nation and language, especially in the German case. Hofmannsthal’s reading of Müller’s essay in this volume may have had some influence on his own approach in “The Written Word.” If we think about the history and character of our language, we are confronted with this: we have a very high poetic language and very charming, expressively powerful folk dialects by which the everyday language in all German regions is colored in a variety of ways. What we lack is a middle language—not too high, not too low—in which the sociability of the people manifests itself. Our neighbors to the north, south, east, and west all have such a middle language; we alone make do without it. In this middle language, however, the face of a nation constitutes itself for all time—even a nation that no longer exists: we recognize the countenance of the Romans in the languages that derive from the middle language of the Romans. But the German nation has no face for the gaze of the others ; from this comes a great deal of mistrust, uneasiness, misunderstanding, and underestimation, even hatred and contempt; but this must be endured, because it is part of our destiny. The middle languages of the others have a smooth construction in which the individual word does not stand out too forcefully or harshly. What must reach 172 ◆ Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea the listener’s ear is not the word with its own magical power but rather the connectedness , what is understood along with each word, the mimetic element of speech. What should be perceptible at first is not so much the individual who speaks but rather the sociable element in which both the speaker and the one spoken to know they share; not so much to distinguish a person from the individual who is across from him, not the individual claim, which easily provokes resistance, but the complex web according to which each person stands in certain typical relationships to the groupings in the whole society, its institutions and enterprises . Not so much what he is in himself should express itself in his language, as that which he represents. The individual represents himself when he speaks, the totality represents itself in the language as a whole. In such a sociable speech something prevails among the words so that they constitute, as it were, a family among themselves, such that they all mutually renounce the expression of their deepest selves. Their resonances and reciprocal relationships are displayed more than their original sound. Our contemporary German language of everyday life, on the other hand, is a conglomerate of individual languages. In an individual language the words compete with each other for their highest distinctive life, which they can never fully achieve; they want to recover their static equilibrium, but they cannot help swaying back and forth within themselves. Only the individual with his magic is able at times to tame them. But this is untransmissible. For this reason it is impossible to write German correctly. One can only write individually, or one is already writing badly. Instead of a sociable language, we have produced, since after all something must be there, a useable one, in which the dialects—even if not all equally—came together. It is like a lake whose water would taste stale if ever new tributaries and springs did not always bring something of their flavor. But like everything that is derived from the original—where no powerful spiritual impulse repeatedly intervenes—this ordinary language has many vices. It wants more and less than it is capable...

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