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The
following poem was written in January of this year in
Paris, and the free air of the place blew into many
stanzas more sharply than I myself might have wished.
I at once took pains to soften and to delete whatever
seemed incompatible with the German climate. Nevertheless,
when in the month of March I sent the manuscript to
my publisher in Hamburg I was still forced to take various
doubts and scruples into consideration. I had to submit
to the odious work of rewriting, and thus it may have
happened that the grave undertones were lightened more
than necessary or even drowned out too merrily by the
cap and bells of humor. In my hasty ill temper I even
tore the fig leaves of a few naked thoughts and perhaps
offended some prim and prudish ears. I am sorry, but
I console myself with the thought that greater authors
have been guilty of similar crimes. I will not even
mention Aristophanes by way of extenuation, for he was
an utter heathen, and although his public in Athens
had had the benefit of a classical education, it knew
little of moral decency. I could much more appropriately
refer to Cervantes and Moliere, the first of whom wrote
for the high nobility of the two Castiles, the latter
for the Grand Monarch and the great court of Versailles!
Alas, I forget that we live in a very bourgeois age
and, unfortunately, I can predict that many daughters
of good families by the banks of the Spree, even indeed
by the Alster, will turn up their more-or less curved
little noses at my poor poem! But what I foresee with
even greater regret is the hue and cry of those Pharisees
of Nationalism who now go hand in glove with the antipathie5
of existing governments, enjoy the complete love and
esteem of censorship, and are able to strike the prevailing
tone in the daily press whenever it is a question of
waging war upon those opponents who are at the same
time the opponents of their high and mighty liege lords.
In our hearts we are armed against the displeasure of
these heroic lackeys in black-red-gold livery. I can
already hear their beery voices: "You defame even
our colors, O Scorner of the Fatherland, Friend of the
French, in whose favor you are ready to evacuate the
free Rhine!" Calm yourselves, I will honor and
esteem your colors when they deserve it, when they are
no longer an idle and a servile mummery. Plant the black-red-gold
banner upon the heights of German thought. Make it the
standard of free humanity and I will give my best heart's
blood for it. Calm yourselves, I love the Fatherland
as much as you do. Because of this love I have passed
thirteen years of my life in exile, and because of this
same love I am returning again into exile, perhaps forever,
but in any case without whimpering, or without making
the wry grimace of a martyr. I am the friend of the
French as I am the friend of all men when they are noble
and good, and because I myself am neither so stupid
nor so bad that I could wish that my Germans and the
French, the two chosen people of humanity, should break
their necks for the benefit of England and Russia and
for the malicious joy of all the Junkers and priests
of this globe. Be calm, I shall never evacuate the Rhine
to the French, for the very simple reason that the Rhine
belongs to me. Yes, to me, by the inalienable right
of birth; I am the free Rhine's freer son. On his banks
stood my cradle and I cannot understand why the Rhine
should belong to any other than his own children. Alsace
and Lorraine, to be sure, I cannot incorporate into
the German Reich as easily as you do, because the people
in those states cling firmly to France because of the
rights which they won through the French Revolution,
because of those laws of equality and those free institutions
which are very pleasing to the bourgeois soul but which
nevertheless leave much to be desired by the stomach
of the great masses. However, the Alsatians and Lothringians
will join Germany again when we complete what the French
have begun, when we outstrip them in our deeds as we
have already done in our thoughts, when we rise to the
ultimate consequences of those thoughts, when we destroy
bondage down to its last refuge, heaven itself; when
we rescue the God who dwells on earth in mankind from
his degradation, when we become the saviours of God;
when we restore the poor people, robbed of their rightful
heritage of happiness, and genius scoffed at, and beauty
violated, to their dignity again as our great masters
have said and sung and as we desire to do, we, the disciples—yes,
not only Alsace and Lorraine, but all of France will
then fall to our lot, all of Europe, the whole world
will become German! Of this mission and this universal
Germany I often dream when walking under oak trees.
That is my patriotism.
In my next book I shall return to this theme with a
final decisiveness, with an utter lack of consideration,
in any case with loyalty. I shall know how to honor
the most decisive disagreement whenever it arises from
a conviction. Even the crudest hostility I am then willing
to forgive with patience; I am even willing to stand
and give answer to stupidity, if it only be honest and
well-meant. On the other hand I dedicate all my silent
scorn to the unprincipled wretch who, out of miserable
envy or unclean personal venom, attempts to depreciate
my good name in the opinion of the public and at the
same time makes use of the mask of patriotism, even
indeed of religion and morality. The state of anarchy
in the world of German political and literary journalism
has at times been exploited in this respect with a talent
that I am compelled to admire. Truly, Schufterle (rascality)
is not dead. He is still alive, and for years has been
at the head of a well-organized band of literary bandits
who hold sway in the Bohemian forest of our daily press.
Behind every bush, behind every leaf and leaflet, they
lie hidden, listening for the slightest whistle of their
worthy captain. One word more. The "Winter's Tale"
forms the tailpiece of the New Poems which at this moment
are being published by Ho~mann and Campe. In order to
be able to undertake a separate printing, my publishers
were compelled to hand the poem over to the supervisory
authorities for especially careful treatment, and new
variants and purifications are the result of this higher
criticism.
Hamburg, September I7, 1844.
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