German awakening

- Yg. 1933, No. 1 -

I've always said it (but does anyone listen to an old man?). And now the time has come: Germany is in a state of awakening. Experience not to be said!

One should have foreseen it. These constant challenging calls (singly and in chorus), Germany may wake up, were just a game with the fire. For how easy can such frivolous requests be taken seriously! How easily could Germany really awaken! (One should not paint the devil on the wall, my grandmother used to say in such cases, what a wise woman, I still see her as today!).

And now we have the mess. The stubborn wake-up calls of our nationalists have been successful. Everywhere we are in a state of excitement, and as a result we now have the opportunity to wonder whether it is not so similar among peoples as it is claimed by some individuals: that they work better in sleep than in waking.

The intellect evidently wakes up the latest. At least one has this impression when one sees what qualities have been awakened in this people so far. It can hardly be doubted that they are not the best.

Or is it to be welcomed that election campaigns today are no longer fights with the help of electoral votes, but those in which the natural voice (possibly reinforced by microphone and megaphone) as well as fence slats, chair legs, beer glasses play a role play? I can not find it.

I also don't want to like throwing bombs at people in the opposite direction. After all, it seems to me to be a sign of insufficient self-control. [...]

And it must also be said of theater and cinema that they are now used with preference as demonstration sites for the sinew of the people of poets and thinkers. Trumpets, whistles, drums, stink bombs, sneezing powder and similar indispensability of the awakening German soul are invaded by a visit to the cinema or theater, just as candy or chocolate used to be. If she had kept sleeping, the German soul!

However, I am told that some German universities are even more alert than in cinemas and theaters. I can hardly believe it, but I have been told so many pages that I have to put my doubts back. Some professors, it is alleged, are now experiencing attendance figures in their lectures in the middle of the semester, which used to be common at the beginning of the semester. And they are not pleased at all. For what draws the newly emerging visitors to them is less the thirst for knowledge (which they usually seek elsewhere to satisfy) rather than the urge, the rehearsed lecturer a rehearsal of the newly awakened German spirituality in the form of feet rants, chants, swearing attacks, musical performances and punched door panels to give. So one did not study at my time (when Germany was still asleep).

In the same context, however, it seems obvious that schools should also be awakened today, not for the purpose of intensive work, as the harmless would like to assume, but for the purpose of a certain politicization. According to credible newspaper news, even education ministers are said to have confirmed this and reportedly achieved notable successes. I know from an apparently particularly alert German country that the students in it may belong, for example, to National Socialist associations, that they must receive holidays down to the Sextans down to mass National Socialist rallies, and send telegrams to beastly assassins if they belong to the same party In which they assure them that they are proud of them, that they are stopped for weekly chorus vows, which are directed against the inventors of the Versailles Treaty, which has since been revised several times. Provocations and spying on the teacher as well as denunciations of all kinds - be it in the form of assembly reports, sent or secret advertisements - are; I hear that, nothing more is rare. Swastikas decorate not only the school toilets - where you could possibly still apply - but also benches and books. In short, a wide, wide field has opened up here for the effects of the German awakening.

Again, I predicted it. Something like that had to It comes when you woke the German soul willfully. It could no good end to it. And what do we do now? Is it enough to hold your nose in the long run? Or should we even try to get used to the new atmosphere that has spread that awakening around us?

I'm afraid I'm afraid that's not a question at all that will be answered by ourselves. If lazy fish are constantly being cooked in an apartment, then usually the rest of the households usually take care, as long as they still have sensitive noses. And much differently, I think, it probably will not be synonymous with the products of today's German cuisine.

1933, 1 Heinrich Kuhn