ABSTRACT
Romantic painters have memorialized the old castle, the moon and the rich foliage countless times, and anyone who spends twenty-four hours here as an Englishman finds it hard to separate Heidelberg from the romance that has so often penetrated its image. Since in Germany one is located in the flow of a great tradition, it is possible, for a time, to forget the chaos yawning in the depths of life and the soul. For such a view, history is the ever new appearance of a limited number of possibilities of soul and culture, and its ideal is self-enclosure, inner plenitude, and not the constant reference beyond oneself. The letters are written from Heidelberg, a small university town in Germany, and yet they must not necessarily become 'provincial letters'. The reason why it may be possible to see the soul of the larger Germany from a small provincial town can carry us further.
