d) Founding of the Need Pertaining to a New Commencement of Our Historical Dasein within the Metaphysical Need of the Western World
We are not to think that we could escape from this power, that we could be released from a new confrontation with this primordial power, a confrontation that could perhaps exceed all confrontation hitherto. Certainly, this confrontation is not some leisurely game of scholarly comparison of current views with earlier views, but rather a questioning that is truly necessitated, one that has the task of once again first bringing about a historically spiritual space. This can occur only if such questioning is necessitated from out of the ownmost need of our historical Dasein. How many experience the need and have the courage to know of it is a matter of indifference. The need is in any case. It is the need of needlessness, the need of the complete inability to experience the innermost question-worthiness of Dasein.
Anxiety in the face of questioning lies over the Western world. It binds peoples to worn-out and dilapidated paths and drives them back in flight into their decrepit shells. Where a rupture does occur, they do not want to see that something other than a mere variation on internal political affairs is happening there.
Yet the first thing is that we ourselves comprehend this, and do not forget the need of a century overnight, but learn to know that Hölderlin has in advance founded the need pertaining to a new commencement, so that it awaits us. His saying has coined in advance this need in ever-new forms, and only the poetic word itself, not some extensive and yet lame paraphrase, is capable of maintaining its power to awaken. We said earlier (p. 44ff.) that the inner movement of the poetic saying in the poem “Germania” is a turbulence that tears us away to a determinate location. The poet establishes this locale in a sound and robust word in the first three lines of the poem “Mnemosyne” that we have already mentioned several times (IV, 225):
Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungslos
Schmerzlos sind wir und haben fast
Die Sprache in der Fremde verloren.
We are a sign that is not read
Without pain we are and have almost
Lost our tongue in foreign parts.
Dasein has become foreign to its historical essence, its mission and mandate. Alienated from itself, it remains without vocation, indeterminable and hence “unread.” Its vocation remains absent because the