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Too Far One Way,
Too Thinly Rooted.
All of life moves without rest. Maybe it spins through space on a scale of unfathomable proportion, with tribes of millions of living beings, each with a name and a fragment of soul, clinging en masse to the crust, and unaware of the incredible swiftness of their passage. Maybe the life of the race swings as a collective mass from one extreme to another, much like the cosmic pendulum swings and sways, first far far to the left, next far far to the right, with periodic passages of equilibrium in the unchanging calm of the revisited center.
In Weimar's time, neo-romanticism inspired fascist ideology on the right, opposite to the far other side of democratic individualism, but the champions of personal liberty were too self-absorbed and apolitical to compete against the proto-Nazi thinkers, and Weimar fell to National Socialism. Rationalism stood little chance against the revolution of the right, which raised the myth of the organic state to living legend. The soil of the Fatherland imparted mystical power to the great race rooted there, but it was too thinly rooted. EB
Writers
The "serious writers of the age," according to Alexandra Richie in Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin (Carroll & Graff, 1998), included: Thomas Mann, Gerhart Hauptmann, Jakob Wassermann, Rene Schickele, Arno Holz, Georg Kaiser, Ricarda Huth, Arthur Schnitzler, Hans Werfel.
"Most of the great writers of the day preferred to remain in the world of the spirit rather than enter the nasty business of politics," Ms. Richie wrote.
Dada
"The aim of the Dadaists was the destruction of art, or at least the conventional art of the bourgeois era that had produced the horors of war," Martin Esslin wrote in The Theatre of the Absurd (Anchor Books, 1961). .... "Dada was essentially destructive and so radical in its nihilism that it could hardly be expected to be creative in an art form that necessarily relies on constructive co-operation." In Germany, Mr. Esslin writes, the movement was transplanted from Zürich and Paris to Berlin and Munich, "where it merged and coexisted with the powerful stirrings of German Expressionism. The dramatic products of the Expressionist movement were on the whole too idealistic and politically conscious to rank as forerunners of the Theatre of the Absurd, with which, however, they share the tendency to project inner realities and to objectify thought and feeling."
Hans Grimm (1875-1959) published People Without A Living Space in 1926, making the case for the mystical value of the soil to German identity.
*This is the first step toward THE One World Language.
Step Two: Your participle on a pike!
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