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My first act as the Rector
Of the Freiburger University,
Was to send a circular letter
To all lecturers.
The construction of a new mental world,
For the German folk is the essential duty
Of the German university.
This is national work
Of the highest meaning and priority.
In 1933 I craved for power,
In the field of Political Science.
I wanted to be a Führer of the Mind,
To create a real geistige world
For the German folk.
I found a suitable forum
In the NS-Führer-State.
I greeted the Freiburger students
With the authoritative imperative words:
‘Not teachings and ideas
Are the rules of your being.
The Führer himself alone
Is the German reality
And your law today
Till hereafter.’
The teachers had to be taught again,
So I transformed my philosophical thoughts,
To political activities.
Again and again,
The being, the Germanvolk,
And the Führer were connected
In all my speeches.
At the beginning of 1934 ,
It became clear to me,
That the greatness (Hitler) which I desired,
Was destined to fall.
I noticed that the liberals and conservatives
Were disgusted with Hitler’s propaganda.
Erich Jaensch characterised my philosophical thoughts
As ‘tamundic-rabulistic,’
Which would have a magnetic attraction
For Jews and people of Jewish descent.
To Erich Jaensch,
I was a dangerous schizophrenic
And my pathologic writings
Would only be admired by weird people.
Ernst Krieck saw in my philosophy
A ferment of decay and decomposition
For the German folk.
I saw in the Führer not the egocentric powerful man,
But an instance of political knowledge,
With a concentration
Of the new spirit of state-and-folk community.
There is only one will for the state to exist.
The Führer has awakened this desire
In the entire folk and made it
To a common goal.
In lieu of the objective he-she-it,
I preferred the meaning of being ‘I am.’
I became a follower of the NSDAP,
The propagandist of national socialism.
I wanted to see people who had the will,
The inner power to make greatness even bigger.
Most people made the usual snarls
Of ordinary citizens,
Who cling to small and half-things;
They don’t want to see,
Never can see the big and farthest,
The unique and all-powerful.
My friends wrote to me on my 80th birthday:
‘Mr. H.,
Are you back from Syrakus?’
Back from my escapade.
I felt like Plato,
Who was disappointed by Dionysios II.
My disappointment was much bigger
Than that of Plato,
Because the tyrant and his victim,
Were not beyond the seas,
But in my own country.
My thoughts moved to Being,
Das Sein.
In my search for heroes I came across:
Parmenides, Heraklit, Holderlin and Nietsche.
I abandoned political thought,
Embraced the thoughts of the poet,
Poetic thoughts,
For in the language of poetry,
You find the purest essence of language,
Which can begin and develop.
I wanted to show that language
Is not an expression of biological-racist humans.
The essence of humans through language,
Is the basic reality of the mind.
To the Nazis I became suddenly
A suspected person,
Who needed to be shadowed. |
