to his homeland half a year later as one struck by Apollo—smitten by the excess of light. The two poetic works, “Germania” as well as “The Rhine,” however, also date from the year of this letter. The relevant section reads (V, 319f.):
We learn nothing with greater difficulty than the free use of the national. And, as I believe, precisely the clarity of presentation is originarily so natural to us as the fire from the heavens was to the Greeks. For this very reason the Greeks will have to be surpassed more in beautiful passion, which you also have preserved for yourself, than in that Homeric presence of mind and gift for presentation.
It sounds paradoxical. Yet I assert it once more and place it at your disposal to test and to use, namely that in the progression of culture, the properly national will always have the lesser advantage. For this reason, the Greeks are less masters of the holy pathos, because it was innate to them, whereas they excel in their gift of presentation, from Homer on, because this extraordinary human being was soulful enough to capture Occidental, Junonian sobriety for his Apollonian kingdom, and thus to truly appropriate the foreign. With us it is the reverse. For this reason it is also so dangerous to abstract artistic rules for oneself solely and uniquely from Greek excellence. I have labored long over this, and now know that, with the exception of what must be the highest for the Greeks and for us, namely, the living relationship and skill, we are presumably not allowed to have anything identical with them. Yet one’s own must be learned just as well as the foreign. This is why the Greeks are indispensable to us. Only we shall not come close to them precisely in what is our own, our national, because, as mentioned, the free use of one’s own is what is most difficult.
We must here forgo a detailed interpretation. Yet there are three things that we cannot pass over, which we shall mention briefly:
1. The poet’s eye for the essence sees the essence of Greek Dasein in its essential opposition to the Dasein of the Germans. The poet has an eye for these essential relations because he experiences beyng as a whole from out of the ground of need. To the essence of historical Dasein belongs: first, being struck by beyng as a whole; second, being able to grasp beyng in an effectual presentation of beyngs. Being struck: “the fire from the heavens”; being able to grasp: “the clarity of presentation.”
Both are apportioned differently: in each instance to a people with historical vocation, yet always in such a way that one is native (endowment), the other given as a task—to be struggled for. Our historical vocation is always to transform our given endowment, the “national,” into what is given us as a task: “the free use of the national”—that is,