“An otherwise free-thinking man in Nuremberg who was not at all insensitive to the 
new had a monstrous hatred of democratic intrigues. He was a devotee of Ronge, 
whose portrait he had in his room. But when he heard that Ronge had sided with the 
democrats he removed the portrait to the lavatory. He once said: ‘Oh, if only we lived 
under the Russian knout, how happy I would feel!’ He died during the disturbances 
and I presume that although he was already old, it was despondency and grief at the 
course of events that led him to the grave.” (Vol. H, pp. 321-22.) 

If, instead of dying, this pitiable Nuremberg philistine had 
gleaned his scraps of thought from Correspondent von und für 
Deutschland, from Schiller and Goethe, from old schoolbooks, and 
modern lending-library books he would have spared himself the 
trouble of dying and Herr Daumer the hard work of writing his 
two volumes of “combinatory and aphoristic foundation”. We, of 
course, should not then have had the edifying opportunity to 
become acquainted with the “religion of the new age” and at the 
same time with its first martyr. 

Herr Daumer’s work is divided into two parts, a “preliminary” 
and a ‘“‘main” one. In the preliminary part the faithful Eckart of Ger- 
man philosophy expresses his profound concern that even thinking 
and educated Germans have let themselves be led astray for the past 
two years and have given up the inestimable achievements of thought 
for mere “external” revolutionary activity. He considers the pres- 
ent moment appropriate to appeal once more to the better feelings 
of the nation and points out what it means so light-mindedly to 
abandon all German culture, through which alone the German 
burgher was still anything at all. He summarises the whole content of 

German culture in the pithiest sayings that the casket of his erudition 
contains and thus discredits German culture no less than German 
philosophy. His anthology of the loftiest products of the German 
mind surpasses in platitude and triviality even the most ordinary 
reading book for young ladies in the educated walks of life. From 
Goethe’s and Schiller’s philistine sallies against the first French 
Revolution, from the classic “Dangerous it is to rouse the lion”? 
down to the most modern literature, the high priest of the new 
religion zealously digs up every passage in which German pedantry 
stiffens with sleepy ill-humour against the historical movement it 
loathes. Authorities of the weight of a Friedrich Raumer, Berthold 
Auerbach, Lochner, Moriz Carriére, Alfred Meissner, Krug, Dingel- 
stedt, Ronge, Nürnberger Bote,” Max Waldau, Sternberg, German 
Maurer, Luise Aston, Eckermann, Noack, Blatter fur literarische 
Unterhaltung, A. Kunze, Ghillany, Th. Mundt, Saphir, Gutzkow, a 
certain “née Gatterer” and the like are the pillars on which the 
temple of the new religion rests. The revolutionary movement, 
which is here declared anathema in so many voices, is confined for _ 
Herr Daumer on the one hand to the tritest prattle about politics 
as carried on in Nuremberg under the auspices of Correspondent von 
und für Deutschland, and on the other hand to mob outrages of which 
he has the most fantastic idea. The sources on which he draws are 
worthy of being placed on a par with those already mentioned: side 
by side with the oft-named Nuremberg Correspondent figure the 
Bamberger Zeitung, the Munich Landbotin, the Augsburg Allgemeine 
Zeitung and others. The same philistine meanness that sees nothing 
in the proletarian but a disgusting, corrupt ragamuffin and which 
rubs its hands with satisfaction at the Paris massacres in June 1848, 
when more than 3,000 of those “ragamuffins” were  but- 
chered—that same meanness is indignant at the raillery of which 
sentimental societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals are the 
object. 

“The frightful tortures,” Herr Daumer exclaims on page 293 of Volume I, “that 
unfortunate beasts suffer at the cruel, tyrannous hand of man are for these barbarians 
‘trifles’ that nobody should bother about!” 

The entire class struggle of our times seems to Herr Daumer only 

a struggle of “coarseness” against “culture”. Instead of explaining it 
by the historical conditions of these classes, he finds its origin in the 

seditious doings of a few malevolent individuals who incite the base 
appetites of the populace against the educated estates. 

“This democratic reformism ... excites the envy, the rage, the rapacity of the lower 
classes of society against the upper classes—a fine way of making man better and 
nobler and founding a higher stage of culture!” (Vol. I, p[{p]. [288-] 289.) 

Herr Daumer does not even know what struggles “of the lower 
classes of society against the upper classes” it took to bring forth even 
a Nuremberg “stage of culture” and to make possible a Moloch- 
fighter a la Daumer.? 

The second, ‘main’, part contains the positive aspect of the new 
religion. It voices all the annoyance of the German philosopher over 
the oblivion into which his struggles against Christianity have fallen, 
over the people’s indifference towards religion, the only object 
worthy to be considered by the philosopher. To restore credit to his 
trade, which has been ousted by competition, all our world-wise man 
can do is to invent a new religion, after long barking against the old. 
But this new religion is confined, in accordance with the first part, to 
a continuation of the anthology of maxims, album verses and versus 
memoriales’ of German philistine culture. The suras of the new 
Koran' are nothing but a series of phrases morally palliating and 
poetically embellishing the existing German conditions—phrases 
which, though divested of the immediately religious form, are 
_ none the less interwoven with the old religion. 

“Completely new world conditions and world relations can arise only through new 
religions. Examples and proofs of what religions are capable of are Christianity and 
Islam; most clear and palpable evidence of the powerlessness and futility of 
abstract, exclusive politics are the movements started in the year 1848.” (Vol. I, 
p- 313.) 

This weighty proposition immediately brings out the shallowness 
and ignorance of the German “thinker” who takes the small German 
and specifically Bavarian “March achievements” for the European 
movement of 1848 and 1849 and who demands that the first, in 
themselves very superficial, eruptions of a gradually developing and 
concentrating major revolution should bring forth “completely new 
world conditions and world relations”. The ‘“world-wise” Daumer 
reduces the whole complicated social struggle, the first skirmishes of 
which were fought between Paris and Debrecen, Berlin and Palermo 

in the last two years, to the fact that “in January 1849 the hopes of the 
constitutional societies of Erlangen were postponed indefinitely” 
(Vol. I, p. 312) and to fear of a new struggle that could once more be 
unpleasantly shocking for Herr Daumer in his occupations with 
Hafiz, Mohammed? and Berthold Auerbach. 

The same shameless superficiality allows Herr Daumer to ig- 
nore completely that Christianity was preceded by the total collapse 
of the ancient’ “world conditions” of which Christianity was the 
mere expression; that “completely new world conditions” arose not 
internally through Christianity but only when the Huns and the 
Germans fell “externally” on the corpse of the Roman Empire; that 
after the Germanic invasion the “new world conditions” did not 
adapt themselves to Christianity but that Christianity itself changed 
with every new phase of these world conditions. We should like 
Herr Daumer to give us an example of the old world conditions chang- 
ing with a new religion without the mightiest “external” and ab- 
stract political convulsions setting in at the same time. 

It is clear that with every great historical upheaval of social 
conditions the outlooks and ideas of men, and consequently their 
religious ideas, are revolutionised. The difference between the 
present upheaval and all earlier ones lies in the very fact that man 
has at last found out the secret of this process of historical upheaval 
and hence, instead of once again exalting this practical, “external”, 
process in the rapturous form of a new religion, divests himself of all 
religion. 

After the gentle moral doctrines of the new world wisdom, which 
are even superior to Knigge inasmuch as they contain all that is 
necessary not only on intercourse with men, but also on intercourse 
with animals —after the Proverbs of Solomon comes the Song of the 
new Solomon. 

“Nature and woman are the really divine, as distinct from the human and man.... 
The sacrifice of the human to the natural, of the male to the female, is the genuine, 
the only true meekness and self-externalisation, the highest, nay, the only virtue and 
piety.” (Vol. II, p. 257.) 

We see here that the superficiality and ignorance of the 
speculating founder of a religion is transformed into a very 
pronounced cowardice. Herr Daumer flees before the historical 
tragedy that is threatening him too closely to alleged nature, i.e. toa 
stupid rustic idyll, and preaches the cult of the female to cloak his 
own womanish resignation. 

Herr Daumer’s cult of nature, by the way, is a peculiar one. He 
manages to be reactionary even in comparison with Christianity. He 
tries to restore the old pre-Christian natural religion in a modernised 
form. Thus he of course achieves nothing but Christian-Germanic- 
patriarchal drivel on nature expressed, for example, as follows: 

“Nature holy, Mother sweet, 

In Thy footsteps place my feet. 
My baby hand to Thy hand clings, 
Hold me as in leading strings! ”* 

“Such things have gone out of fashion, but not to the benefit of culture, progress 
or human felicity.” (Vol. IT, p. 157.) 

We see that this cult of nature is limited to the Sunday walks of an 
inhabitant of a small provincial town who childishly wonders at the 
cuckoo laying its eggs in another bird’s nest (Vol. II, p. 40), at tears 
being designed to keep the surface of the eyes moist (Vol. II, p. 73), 
and so on, and finally trembles. with. reverence as he recites 
Klopstock’s Ode to Spring? to his children. (Vol..II, p. 23 et seqq.) 
There is no mention, of course, of modern natural science, which, 
with modern industry, has revolutionised the whole of nature and 
put an end to man’s childish attitude towards nature as well as to 
other forms of childishness. But instead we get mysterious hints and 
astonished philistine notions about Nostradamus’ prophecies, 
second sight in Scotsmen and animal magnetism.™ For the rest, it 
would be desirable that Bavaria’s sluggish peasant economy, the 
ground on which grow priests and Daumers alike, should at last be | 
ploughed up by modern cultivation and modern machines. 

It is the same with the cult of the female as with the cult of nature. 
Herr Daumer naturally does not say a word about the present soci- 
al position of women; on the contrary it is a question only of the fe- 
male as such. He tries to console women for their civic destitution 
by making them the object of a rhetorical cult which is as empty as" 
it would fain be mysterious. Thus he seeks to comfort them by tell- 
ing them that marriage puts an end to their talents through their hav- 
ing to take care of the children (Vol. II, p. 237), that they retain the 
ability to suckle babes even until the age of sixty (Vol. II, p. 251), and 
so on. Herr Daumer calls this the “devotion of the male to the 
female”. In order to find the necessary ideal women characters for 
his male devotion in his native country, he is forced to resort to 
various aristocratic’ ladies of the last century. Thus his cult of the 

woman is reduced to the depressed attitude of a man of letters to 
respected patronesses— Wilhelm Meister.* 

The “culture” whose decay Herr Daumer laments is that of the 
time in which Nuremberg flourished as a free Retchsstadt, in which 
Nuremberg’s industry—that cross between art and craftsmanship 
—played a role of importance, the German _ petty-bourgeois 
[Kleinbtirgertum] culture which is perishing with the petty bour- 
geoisie. If the decline of former classes such as the knighthood 
could offer material for great tragic works of art, philistinism can 
achieve nothing but impotent expressions of fanatic malignity and a 
collection of Sancho Panza maxims and rules of wisdom. Herr 
Daumer is the dry, absolutely humourless continuation of Hans 
Sachs. German philosophy, wringing its hands and lamenting at the 
deathbed of its foster father, German philistinism—such is the 
touching picture opened up to us by the religion of the new age.