streets of his town; every visit he pays to his art-dealers and to his
trader in the articles of fashion. In his social intercourse he ought
to realise the origin of his manners and movements; in the heart of
our art-institutions, the pleasures of our concerts, theatres, and
museums, he ought to become apprised of the super- and juxta-position
of all imaginable styles. The German heaps up around him the forms,
colours, products, and curiosities of all ages and zones, and thereby
succeeds in producing that garish newness, as of a country fair, which
his scholars then proceed to contemplate and to define as "Modernism
per se"; and there he remains, squatting peacefully, in the midst of
this conflict of styles. But with this kind of culture, which is, at
bottom, nothing more nor less than a phlegmatic insensibility to real
culture, men cannot vanquish an enemy, least of all an enemy like the
French, who, whatever their worth may be, do actually possess a
genuine and productive culture, and whom, up to the present, we have
systematically copied, though in the majority of cases without skill.

Even supposing we had really ceased copying them, it would still not
mean that we had overcome them, but merely that we had lifted their
yoke from our necks. Not before we have succeeded in forcing an
original German culture upon them can there be any question of the
triumph of German culture. Meanwhile, let us not forget that in all
matters of form we are, and must be, just as dependent upon Paris now
as we were before the war; for up to the present there has been no
such thing as a original German culture.

We all ought to have become aware of this, of our own accord. Besides,
one of the few who had he right to speak to Germans in terms of
reproach Publicly drew attention to the fact. "We Germans are of
yesterday," Goethe once said to Eckermann. "True, for the last hundred