>German words hang like lead weights on the German language, I had said to Gambetti, and constantly drag the mind down to a level that can only be harmful to it. German thought and German speech soon become paralyzed under the intolerable weight of the language, which suppresses any thought before it can find expression. Under the German language, I said, German thought had developed only with difficulty and never come to full efflorescence, as Romance thought had under the Romance languages—as witness the centuries of effort that the Germans had invested in their thinking. Although I have a higher regard for Spanish than for Italian, no doubt because I am more familiar with it, Gambetti that morning illustrated yet again the lightness, effortlessness, and infinite versatility of Italian, which bears the same relation to German as a child reared in complete freedom, in a happy and prosperous home, bears to one who has been cowed and beaten into low cunning in the poorest of poor families. How much more highly, then, must we rate the achievements of our philosophers and writers? I asked. Every word inexorably drags their thought down, every sentence forces to the ground whatever they venture to think, and thus forces everything to the ground. That’s why their philosophy and their writings are so leaden. Using my hands to simulate a balance, the left representing the German scale and the right the Italian, I quoted a sentence from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, first in German and then in Italian, and showed Gambetti how the German scale sank and the Italian sprang up. For his amusement, as well as my own, I recited a number of sentences from Schopenhauer, first in German and then in an extempore Italian translation, weighing both versions in my hands and making what was at first intended as an object lesson into a kind of bizarre game, concluding with some sentences from Hegel and an aphorism from Kant. The sad thing is, I told Gambetti, that heavy words and heavy sentences are not always the weightiest.
>retarded opinion from literal whoLiterally everybody knows German has the strongest philosophical record of any language in Europe, possibly the entire world. The grounded seriousness of the Germanic languages makes them better for a deep, introspective field like philosophy. Meanwhile the greatest philosopher Italy ever produced was Machiavelli, who is still in the derivative field of political philosophy.The effete Romance languages do better with things like comedic operas.
>>25299064You know better than Bernhard?
>>25299050>>25299121only weighs you down if you let it
>>25299050Before 67, there was German Italian
Nobody better at stripping away pretense. Nobody better at showing how stripping away pretense doesn't make you anything. Love you Thomas.
>>25299331Bet you wish you were that ice cream
Muh Feels disguised as Objective Truth
>>25299050It is Bernhard. He takes everything that has a little truth to it and makes an elephant out of it. He has mastered the art of complaining and is able to complain about everything. And not one of his complains was ever really deep, as far as I remember. It is always just on the surface. Shallow enough so that people seem to get the basic idea, but not deep enough for there to actually be a solid statement someone could even start to attack. In Old Masters he started to attack Tintoretto, Heidegger, Stifter, Austrian toilets, etc. without ever mentioning something specific. He takes small stuff that happened out there and completely blows it out of proportions. Same with this quote. German language is a bit different from other languages, which makes it possible to use it in other ways. Kafkas writings sound more clinically sterile in German, which makes intended effect greater. A lot of certain words are shitty to be translated into English, f.e. Sein und Dasein to Being and Being-there or some shit. Same for some people thinking that Shakespeare sounds better in German. Overall Bernhard writes old, grumpy Austrians that complain about everything. And he does a very good job at that. I just love the ice cream man
>>25299050>The attempt to treat the German language as an instrument of virtuosity could only occur to those to whom the German tongue is truly alien, and who therefore twist it to improper uses. None of our great poets and sages can be rated as virtuosi of speech: every one of them was in the same position as Luther, who had to ransack every German dialect for his translation of the Bible, to find the word and turn to popularly express that New he had discovered in the sacred books' original text. For what distinguishes the German spirit from that of every other culture-folk is this, that its creative sons had first seen something ne'er yet uttered, before they fell a-writing,—which for them was but a necessary consequence of the prior inspiration. Thus each of our great poets and thinkers had to form his language for himself; an obligation to which the inventive Greeks themselves do not appear to have been submitted, since they had at command a language always spoken by the living mouth, and therefore pliant to each thought or feeling, but not an element corrupted by bad pensters. In a poem from Italy how Goethe bewailed his being doomed by birth to wield the German tongue, in which he must first invent for himself what the Italians and French, for instance, found ready to their hand. That under such hardships none but truly original minds have risen to production among ourselves, should teach us what we are, and at any rate that there is something peculiar about us Germans.
