Book IV

Summary

And nevertheless the festival of Hambach registered a great step forward, especially if it is compared with that other festival that took place earlier for the glorification of the common interests of the people, on the Wartburg. Only in externals, in coincidences, are the two mountain celebrations very much alike, by no means in their deeper essence. The spirit articulated in Hambach is fundamentally different from the specter that spooked around on the Wartburg. In the former place, in Hambach, the modern age jubilated in songs of sunrise and drank the pledge of eternal friendship with all mankind, but in the latter place, on the Wartburg, the past croaked its obscure raven song, and in the torchlight stupidities worthy of the most idiotic Middle Ages were said and done! In Hambach French liberalism delivered its most intoxicated Sermons on the Mount, and even if many irrational things were said, still reason itself was recognized as the highest authority that binds and looses and prescribes its laws to the laws; on the Wartburg, by contrast, that narrow Teutomania prevailed, whining a lot about love and faith, but whose love was nothing but hatred of the foreign and whose faith consisted only in unreason and in its ignorance could think of nothing to do but burn books! I say ignorance, for in this respect the earlier opposition we know under the name of “the Old Germans” was even more splendid than the more recent opposition, although the latter does not exactly sparkle with learnedness.