The Harz Journey and Selected Prose by Heinrich Heine

Author:Heinrich Heine
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 1993-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

DIFFERING CONCEPTIONS OF HISTORY

THE book of history is interpreted in diverse ways. Two mutually opposed views are particularly notable.

Some people see in all earthly things only a dreary cyclical movement: in the lives of nations as in the lives of individuals, and throughout organic nature, they see growth, flourishing, fading, and death; spring, summer, autumn, and winter. ‘There is no new thing under the sun!’1 is their watchword; and even this is nothing new, for the king of the Orient groaned it out two thousand years ago. They shrug their shoulders at our civilization, which they say will eventually yield once more to barbarism; they shake their heads at our struggles for liberation, which they say will only assist the emergence of new tyrants; they smile at all the efforts of a political enthusiasm which wants to make the world better and happier, and which they say will finally the down without accomplishing anything. In the little chronicle of hopes, hardships, misfortunes, sorrows and joys, errors and disappointments, on which the individual spends his life — in the story of each man they see also the history of mankind. In Germany it is the sages of the Historical School and the poets of Wolfgang Goethe’s artistic period who are especially devoted to this opinion, and the latter often use it as a sugar-coating to disguise their sentimental indifference to all the political affairs of their native land. A sufficiently well-known government2 in North Germany sets particular store by this view, and promotes it by encouraging people to travel, so that amidst the elegiac ruins of Italy they may develop the cheerful and consoling notion of fatalism, and may subsequently co-operate with preachers of Christian submission to damp down the people’s tertian fever of liberty3 by applying cold compresses of newsprint. Still, if anyone cannot shoot up by free intellectual power, let him twist his tendrils on the ground; the future will teach this government just how far it can get by twisting and turning.

In contrast to the fatalistic and indeed fatal view discussed above, there is a brighter view, more closely related to the idea of providence. According to this view, all earthly things are maturing towards a beautiful state of perfection, and the great heroes and heroic epochs are merely stages on the way to a higher, god-like condition of the human race, whose moral and political struggles will at last lead to the holiest peace, the purest brotherhood, and the most everlasting happiness. The Golden Age, it is said, does not lie behind us, but ahead of us; we were not driven out of paradise by a flaming sword, rather we must conquer it by a flaming heart, by love; the apple of knowledge will not give us death, but rather eternal life. For a long time ‘Civilization’ was the watchword among the disciples of this doctrine. In Germany the philosophers of humanity4 were its principal adherents. It is well known how firmly the Philosophical School, as it is called, was devoted to this view.

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