Page 194 - The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages - Alfred Rosenberg

The Track of the Jew through the Ages

modern age they are a walking mystery. It may be solved on the day
of which the prophet foretold, that then there will be only one
shepherd and one herd and the righteous who cares for the salvation
of mankind will receive his glorious recognition".
These are words that every European should note, especially
in a time when the Jewish wave has reached an unprecedented height
and threatens to overwhelm everything. There lives in them again
the spirit of the Talmud and of the Law of the Old Testament which
says: "God was pleased only with thy fathers that he loved them,
and after them it is your seed alone that he has chosen among all
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peoples".
But I cannot fail to point to Heine's relationship to Goethe
also. It is similar to those to Christianity and to Kant: on the one
hand, he pretends to be full of reverence and sees in him a great
master but between his praises he strews the most superficial remarks
and those distorting the image of Goethe most coarsely.
When Goethe treated the Romantics coolly and later
brusquely rejected them, Heine opines: "Even if Goethe wanted to
feel superior to them, he had to thank them for the greatest part of
his reputation". "One heard of Goethe alone and always, but there
emerged poets who were not much inferior to him in power and
imagination". And here rings out in prose the well-known: "And if
one were to name the best names mine would also be named". That
Heine, who indeed considered himself a real poet, dared to compare
himselfto Goethe already shows with striking clarity that he however
had no idea that poetry is something other than drooping verses.
"Goethe was afraid", he writes further, "of every
independent original writer and praised and extolled all insignificant
petty minds: indeed he took it so far that to be praised by Goethe
was equivalent to a certificate of mediocrity.
He further blames Goethe for religious indifferentism, that
he did not or did not wish to understand philosophical enthusiasm
in order not to be torn out of his "peace ofmind", that he was afraid
to express his convictions, that "he occupied himself with artistic
toys, anatomy, the theory of colours, botany, observations of clouds,
m
DeutX:\5.

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