On the Desire to Change Society

“Suddenly, out of the becalmed mentality of the nineteenth century’s last two decades, an invigorating fever rose all over Europe.  No one knew exactly what was in the making: nobody could have said whether it was to be a new art, a new humanity, a new morality, or perhaps a reshuffling of society.  So everyone said what he pleased about it.  But everywhere people were suddenly standing up to rebel against the old order.  Everywhere the right man suddenly appeared in the right place and – this is so important! – enterprising men of action joined force with enterprising men of intellect.  Talents of a kind that had previously been stifled or had never taken part in public life before suddenly came to the fore.  They were as different from each other as could be, and could not have been more contradictory in their aims.  There were those who loved the overman and those who loved the underman; there were health cults and sun cults and the cults of consumptive maidens; there was enthusiasm for hero worshippers and for the believers in the Common Man; people were devout and sceptical, naturalistic and mannered, robust and morbid; they dreamed of old tree-lined avenues in palace parks, autumnal gardens, glassy ponds, gems, hashish, disease and demonism, but also of prairies, immense horizons, forges and rolling mills, naked wrestlers, slave uprisings, early man and the smashing of society.  These were certainly opposing and widely varied battle cries, but uttered in the same breath. [...] If one does not want to, there is no need to make too much of this bygone ‘movement’.  It really affected only that thin, unstable layer of humanity, the intellectuals, who are unanimously despised by all those who rejoice in impregnable views, no matter how divergent from one another (the kind of people who are back in the saddle today, thank God); the general population was not involved.  Still, even though it did not become a historical event, it was an eventlet...” (p. 53-4)