German soul#
Summary#
Nietzsche characterizes the German soul as fundamentally manifold, contradictory, and impossible to define, describing it as “aggregated and superimposed, rather than actually built” due to the extraordinary mixing of races that produced the German people. He finds in Wagner’s Mastersingers a perfect expression of this soul: at once ancient and modern, arbitrary and traditional, with a clumsiness that is almost intentional. The German soul has “passages and galleries,” caves and dungeons, and loves everything obscure, crepuscular, and shrouded. Nietzsche concludes that Germans belong to “the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow” but have as yet “no today.”