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I had an irresistible impulse to call this maiden 'Adelaide. As even at that early age I was a great enthusiast for everything really German, I can only account for the obviously un-German name of my heroine by my infatuation for Beethoven's Adelaide, whose tender refrain seemed to me the symbol of all loving appeals.
The century of the pig-tail possessed no eye for the forest and, in consequence, no understanding of the natural life of the people. Everywhere in the German provinces they removed the princely pleasure-seats from the woody mountains to the woodless flat country. But then, to be sure, the art of the pig-tail age was almost entirely un-German.
And the reason why it was impossible to make public schools fall in with the magnificent plan of classical culture lay in the un-German, almost foreign or cosmopolitan nature of these efforts in the cause of education: in the belief that it was possible to remove the native soil from under a man's feet and that he should still remain standing; in the illusion that people can spring direct, without bridges, into the strange Hellenic world, by abjuring German and the German mind in general.
Prince von Bülow’s whole career has been one steady and rapid ascent to high office and exalted honour. Before his fall he had earned the well-deserved nickname of “Bernhard the Lucky.” He seemed to have found in his cradle all the gifts of the fairies. His most striking characteristic is an amazing and totally un-German versatility and resourcefulness.
But, fortunately, one is rescued from this most un-German predicament by the porter of a waiting hotel omnibus, and so at last we have time to look about us, and to awaken to a realizing sense that we have reached the land of traditions; that we have come to Mecca; that we are in the quondam home of Guericke, Fichte, Goethe, Schiller, Oken, and Gagenbaur; in the present home of Haeckel.
He defended Prussia against the intolerable arrogance and un-German policy of Austria; he defended Germany against French interference in the work of national consolidation; he defended the principle of State sovereignty against the encroachments of the Papacy; he defended the monarchy against the republicanism of the Liberals and Socialists; and the supreme aim of his foreign policy after the establishment of the German Empire was to guard the peace of Europe.
On the other hand, that which now grandiloquently assumes the title of 'German culture' is a sort of cosmopolitan aggregate, which bears the same relation to the German spirit as Journalism does to Schiller or Meyerbeer to Beethoven: here the strongest influence at work is the fundamentally and thoroughly un-German civilisation of France, which is aped neither with talent nor with taste, and the imitation of which gives the society, the press, the art, and the literary style of Germany their pharisaical character.
And really there is but cold comfort in 'William Tell' for those who, in the revolutionary epoch, were clamoring against princes as such. The play is in no sense anti-monarchical, nor is it either German or un-German, but simply human.
Carried over to the moral world, it accounts for his ardent cultivation of friendship rather than love, and frees him from the bitter accusations of Heine, whose attack in The Baths of Lucca is one of the most scurrilous and venomous pasquils in all literary history. Finally, in the esthetic world, Platen seems largely un-German.
His German bias must have given his youth a terrible twist, for the Lodges saw at a glance what he had thought unessential because un-German.
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