Love that is truly love, and not a mere transitory lust, never clings to what is
transient; only in the eternal does it awaken and become kindled, and there alone does it
rest. Man is not able to love even himself unless he conceives himself as eternal; apart
from that he cannot even respect, much less approve, of himself. Still less can he love
anything outside himself without taking it up into the eternity of his faith and of his
soul and binding it thereto. He who does not first regard himself as eternal has in him no
love of any kind, and, moreover, cannot love a fatherland, a thing which for him does not
exist. He who regards his invisible life as eternal, but not his visible life as similarly
eternal, may perhaps have a heaven and therein a fatherland, but here below he has no
fatherland, for this, too, is regarded only in the image of eternity---eternity visible
and made sensuous, and for this reason also he is unable to love his fatherland. If none
has been handed down to such a man, he is to be pitied. But he to whom a fatherland has
been handed down, and in whose soul heaven and earth, visible and invisible meet and
mingle, and thus, and only thus, create a true and enduring heaven---such a man fights to
the last drop of his blood to hand on the precious possession unimpaired to his posterity.
Hence, the noble-minded man will be active and effective, and will sacrifice himself
for his people. Life merely as such, the mere continuance of changing existence, has in
any case never had any value for him, he has wished for it only as the source of what is
permanent. But this permanence is promised to him only by the continuous and independent
existence of his nation. In order to save his nation he must be ready even to die that it
may live, and that he may live in it the only life for which he has ever wished.
So it has always been, although it has not always been expressed in such general terms
and so clearly as we express it here. What inspired the men of noble mind among the
Romans, whose frame of mind and way of thinking still live and breathe among us in their
works of art, to struggles and sacrifices, to patience and endurance for the fatherland?
They themselves express it often and distinctly. It was their firm belief in the eternal
continuance of their Roma, and their confident expectation that they themselves
would eternally continue to live in this eternity in the stream of time. In so far as this
belief was well-founded, and they themselves would have comprehended it if they had been
entirely clear in their own minds, it did not deceive them. To this very day there still
lives in our midst what was truly eternal in their eternal Roma. . . .
In this belief in our earliest common forefathers, the original stock of the new
culture, the Germans, as the Romans called them, bravely resisted the oncoming world
dominion of the Romans. Did they not have before their eyes the greater brilliance of the
Roman provinces next to them and the more refined enjoyments in those provinces, to say
nothing of laws and judges= seats and lictors= axes and fasces in superfluity? Were not the Romans
willing enough to let them share in all these blessings? In the case of several of their
own princes, who did no more than intimate that war against such benefactors of mankind
was rebellion, did they not experience proofs of the belauded Roman clemency? To those who
submitted the Romans gave marks of distinction in the form of kingly titles, high commands
in their armies, and Roman fillets; and if they were driven out by their countrymen, did
not the Romans provide for them a place of refuge and a means of subsistence in their
colonies? Had they no appreciation of the advantages of Roman civilization, of the
superior organization of their armies, in which even Arminius did not disdain to learn the
trade of war? Their descendants, as soon as they could do so without losing their freedom,
even assimilated Roman culture, so far as this was possible without losing their
individuality.
Freedom to them meant just this: remaining Germans and continuing to settle their own
affairs, independently and in accordance with the original spirit of their race, going on
with their development in accordance with the same spirit, and propagating this
independence in their posterity. All those blessings which the Romans offered them meant
slavery to them because then they would have to become something that was not German, they
would have to become half-Roman. They assumed as a matter of course that every man would
rather die than become half a Roman, and that a true German could only want to live in
order to be, and to remain, just a German and to bring up his children as Germans.
They did not all die; they did not see slavery; they bequeathed freedom to their
children. It is their unyielding resistance which the whole modern world has to thank for
being what it now is. Had the Romans succeeded in bringing them also under the yoke and in
destroying them as a nation, which the Romans did in every case, the whole development of
the human race would have taken a different course, a course that one cannot think would
have been more satisfactory. It is they whom we must thank---we, the immediate heirs of
their soil, their language, and their way of thinking---for being Germans still, for being
still borne along on the stream of original and independent life. It is they whom we must
thank for everything that we have been as a nation since those days, and to them we shall
be indebted for everything that we shall be in the future, unless things come to an end
with us now and the last drop of blood inherited from them has dried up in our veins. To
them the other branches of the race, whom we now look upon as foreigners, but who by
descent from them are our brothers, are indebted for their very existence. When our
ancestors triumphed over Roma the eternal, not one of all these peoples was in
existence, but the possibility of their existence in the future was won for them in the
same fight. . . .
