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Rome was to be brought to ashes and rubble. Kleist directed these words at France, which was the villain for the Germans at the time. Even though the historical persons and events in his play had nothing to do with the Germans, the effect of such a text was ling-lasting and has been stamped onto the self-image of the Germans.

Romanticism and the exuberance over the war of liberation produced much testimony of this type. Even a man such as Bonn Professor of History, Ernst Moritz Arndt, who entered the struggle for middle class rights and served later as a delegate to Paul’s Church, without any remuneration, praised the supposed racial purity of the Germans: “The German people have not been bastardized by alien peoples; they have not become hybrids; they have maintained their inborn purity more than any other people; and they have developed their nature slowly and consistently according to the according to the fixed laws of time – the happy Germans are a primordial people.” Here is the genesis of the racial malaise of the National Socialists.

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