of any hoary past. To find suitable points of view for the corrections will be the task of future diplomats, who will need to be at once adepts in the history of culture, agriculturists, and trade experts, and they will have not armies, but reasons and practical utilities to back them.[1] Some breaks with the past being inevitable, there will be plaints for lost national traits (in dress, customs, legal conceptions, dialects, forms of poetry), but we must not lend too much ear to them. It is the price that has to be paid for rising to the super-national, to universal goals of mankind, yes to a real knowledge and comprehension and enjoyment of other pasts than one's own (des nicht Einheimischen)—in a word, for ceasing to be barbarian.[2] Crude patriotism, such as the Romans had, is now, when quite other and higher tasks than patria and honor await us, either a dishonest thing or else a sign of arrested development (Zurückgebliebenheit).[3] National differences are, much more than is commonly realized, differences in stages of culture, not anything permanent, so that there is little obligation to argue from national character for one who is trying to recreate convictions, i.e., to elevate culture. If, for example, one thinks of all that has been German, the theoretic question, What is German? gets at once the corrected shape, "What is German now?"—and every good German will answer it practically just by overcoming some of his German qualities. When a people goes forward and grows, it breaks the girdle that gave it hitherto its national appearance; if it stays as it was, becomes stunted, a new girdle fastens itself around its soul—the ever hardening crust becomes as it were a prison, whose walls ever grow. Has then a people very much that is fixed, it is a proof that it is ready to petrify and become a monument—as was the case at a certain point of time with ancient Egypt. "Hence he who wishes well to the Germans will for his part see to it, that he ever more and more grows out beyond what is German. Turning to the un-German has ever been the distinguishing mark of the strong (Tüchtigen) among us." Nietzsche entitles this paragraph "To be a good German means to un-Germanize oneself."[4]
