Parallel Observations, 94 Years Apart

In my post Advice from Goethe on How to Attract Women, I cited some of Goethe’s thoughts about why the Weimar girls preferred visiting Englishmen to the local male talent. When his friend Eckermann objected that Englishmen were not “more clever, better informed, or more excellent at heart than other people,” Goethe responded:

“The secret does not lie in these things, my good friend, Neither does it lie in birth and riches; it lies in the courage which they have to be that for which nature has made them. There is nothing vitiated or spoilt about them, there is nothing halfway or crooked; but such as they are, they are thoroughly complete men. That they are also sometimes complete fools, I allow with all my heart; but that is still something, and has still always some weight in the scale of nature.”

“In our own dear Weimar, I need only look out of the window to discover how matters stand with us. Lately, when the snow was lying upon the ground, and my neighbour’s children were trying their little sledges in the street, the police was immediately at hand, and I saw the poor little things fly as quickly as they could. Now, when the spring sun tempts them from the houses, and they would like to play with their companions before the door, I see them always constrained, as if they were not safe, and feared the approach of some despot of the police. Not a boy may crack a whip, or sing or shout; the police is immediately at hand to forbid it. This has the effect with us all of taming youth prematurely, and of driving out all originality and all wildness, so that in the end nothing remains but the Philistine.”

Skipping forward 94 years, I was intrigued to find some rather similar comments in the memoirs of Wilhelm II, the former Kaiser of Germany:

 

Another thing that struck me, in addition to the one-sidedness of the education in the schools, was the tendency, among youths planning their careers in those days, to turn their attention to becoming Government officials, and always consider the profession of lawyer or judge the most worthy goal…As long as the state consisted, so to speak, of government and administration, this tendency among German youths in the shaping of their lives was understandable and justified; since we were living in a country of officials, the right road for a young man to select was the service of the state.  British youths of that time, self-reliant and made robust by sports, were already talking, to be sure, of colonial conquests, of expeditions to explore new regions of the earth, of extending British commerce; and they were trying, in the guise of pioneers of their country, to make Great Britain still stronger and greater, by practical, free action, not as paid hirelings of the state.

and

To be sure, there were even then enterprising men in Germany—brilliant names can be cited among them—but the conception of serving the fatherland, not by traveling along a definite, officially certified road, but by independent competition, had not yet become sufficiently generalized. Therefore I held up the English as an example, for it seems to me better to take the good where one finds it, without prejudice, than to go through the world wearing blinkers.

And skipping forward another 93 years and moving westward to the United States:  the suppression of youthful high spirits, which Goethe observed, is sadly too often observable here, as is the pressure to  travel along a “definite, officially certified road” which the Wilhelm observed and (somewhat surprisingly) deprecated.

7 thoughts on “Parallel Observations, 94 Years Apart”

  1. And we already know what fruit it bears: An entire generation become mouth-breathingly easy prey for statist barbarians. Especially if they are promised the pleasure of tearing down everything Old and Evil, as the Alinskyite Left offers the Millenials. We are in serious trouble. Fortunately the 2nd Amendment continues to render us historically unique. It means that no matter how powerful the Left gets, going in for the hard kill will remain problematic.

    Meanwhile? Take your kids wilderness camping and forbid them to take any electronic devices. Let them run around and scream and get dirty and wet and bug-bitten and have swordfights with sticks. It is the sovereign cure for all postmodern ills.

  2. “Take your kids wilderness camping and …”: bah! It would do more good if they, and the neighbours’ children, could behave like that in their backyards and neighbourhoods.

  3. I think the absence of the TV and computers is therapeutic and encourage the trend. I took my son sailing to Hawaii when he was 16. He still became a lawyer but at least I tried.

  4. I had a friend whose daughter made him proud as could be when she got into Cambridge to read Natural Sciences. He was heart-broken when she swapped to Law. Really; I thought he was going to weep as he told me.

  5. In America the police referred to above are…the women.

    Cops don’t arrest kids for playing, nor do they command mothers to restrict their children to the yard if even allowing that, nor leash them in airports/public places.

    We are slaves to our women and they are bitter tyrants.

    It’s quite noticed by foreigners from Europe who wonder that there is no life here for the men, merely work and doing the bidding of their master.

    Who do you think votes for the Left anyway?

  6. Vxxc…in Maryland recently, a couple had their children grabbed for letting their kids (the oldest was 10) walk a short distance home from the park. “Child Protective Services” may not be the cops, but they are indeed the government.

  7. It is rather depressing to realize how much of American education has, philosophically at least, been taken over by the Germans. Even the 60s radicals were just aping the Nazi youth of the 30s. And the modern obsession with credentials spreads that ever deeper into American life.

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