English Translation

Born 1921 u The young German. 4/1 Open letter to the serious nobility. If there were a number of you together, it was different than when a group of the other people met. You could be held to be cousins, brothers, fathers, and sons, you could be confused with one another — just as the heads imprinted on the precious coins were mistaken — you were evenly in you, to you and among yourselves, but different from what was called people, and from this to you was a gulf. But you were the higher part, though jealous, but wanted and used; you were leaders, rulers, rulers. You were the soul of every thing that happened; for what happened was done in your name, at your command, with your approval, and under the acts you wrote: of such and such, and sometimes: of God's graces. For you were special, and you knew that you were going with gifts that you had brought to an altitude that had brought you to your heights, which were merely well-settled and working with you, where they belonged (not that they were available to everyone), you were tailor-made for movements and actions that were not ordinary and did not make themselves common, and thus you kept yourselves in the saddle for thousands of years. But now it is over with your Dorrang and overriding. Now it is as if there had gone over all heads a fall beil, not drawn from top to bottom, but hewn to the side like a scythe, and what would go over a moderate height, that would be hidden. In this incision and cut-offness of life I call you out of you again. I am beginning to call in a small and little place, and I hope that it will be heard in quite a circle. I am building that one of you who listens may continue to call out in the same hope that he expresses as I do: that the hearer may become a proclaimer and act. Because if I needed a dog, I would go under a lot of dogs that gathered in a market place where they would be freely tangible, for example in the dog's land, and I took the right one with clarity and speed: a poodle for the circus, a mops for the lap, an airedale for the rats, a stinging hair for the chickens, a Bernhardine for the geist's boy under the avalanche, a beautiful German geradshweis for my report to the K. L. K. in the camp grave. If I needed a horse now, I would probably be informed. I take the fat Belgian to the brewer car, the East Prussia I put in the cavalry, and if I let run, it would not have to be without English influence. And whether jo Taubenjökel, milkman or policeman, I will understand which animals lay the best eggs, give the most capable brood, the most efficient rearing with the least difficulties, and I will nevertheless know for the good reputation, therefore for my joy, but finally for my convenience and finally for the sake of my purse, what I must do, and that is only one thing: keep on race. I keep my fox on a short leash, and I do not spoil my juckers. But after a free journey, when they have come in sweat, foaming and trembling in the flanks, I bring them into the stable, rub them off, and give them sufficient rabbits. My fox will not come near a strange animal as long as I am there, God grace him, — but he is also prepared for a good camp, meal and care. And if I am now advised and determined to have more of them, if I want to see them jump from their foals on my meadow over the year and three little foxes let off the friends who are already preparing for it, then I am also in the picture how this is achieved in the best way. Neither Hinz nor Kunz is up to me with his bagged beast, on which the body is reprehensible, the neck flawed, the bands brittle, the passage clumsy, and the juice is of no use, — to the governor I go, into the basket list, to see the book of the stove, and then move with my beast where the like of it is found in manner, in blood, in addiction, in stroke, that is the whole story. No rattle makes me know that suddenly once wretched little octopuses in my rabbit will quiver around or crooked beasts of owls at the fences: there is no such thing, it does not happen, that understands itself completely and is also known to my cowmaid. But now that I need men, I turn away from dogs, horses, and peacocks to the human.