ABSTRACT
The German people have been humiliated, but its life is not over unless it pronounces its own sentence of death. If it is to count on new life, self-knowledge is, after such experiences and lessons, the most indispensable requirement. The way to read it has to be learnt, and not everyone can learn it. It is easy, too, to err in deciphering its message. But those who ignore the mirror of the past will never either comprehend the present or foresee the future. For it is not true that peoples, unlike the individual, change their inmost nature from time to time, and that the Germans of to-day no longer have anything in common with those of a hundred, two hundred, a thousand years ago. Past and present are separable only in theory; in reality they are part and parcel of one another. Every conception of the past is lit and coloured by the present.
