when you can simultaneously “experience” an assassination attempt against a king in France29 and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from all Dasein of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great man of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph; then, yes then, there still looms like a specter over all this uproar the question: what for?—where to?—and what then?
The spiritual decline of the earth has progressed so far that peoples are in danger of losing their last spiritual strength, the strength that makes it possible even to see the decline [which is meant in relation to the fate of “Being”]30 and to appraise it as such. This simple observation has nothing to do with cultural pessimism—nor with any optimism either, of course; for the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the reduction of human beings to a mass, the hatred and mistrust of everything creative and free have already reached such proportions throughout the whole earth that such childish categories as pessimism and optimism have long become laughable.
We lie in the pincers. Our people, as standing in the center, experiences the most intense pressure—our people, the people richest in neighbors and hence the most endangered people, and for all that, the metaphysical people. We are sure of this vocation; but this people will gain a fate from its vocation only when it creates in itself a resonance, a possibility of resonance for this vocation, and grasps its tradition creatively.
29. Probably an allusion to the assassination of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in Marseille on October 9, 1934. A film of the event was shown in newsreels in theaters.
30. In parentheses in the 1953 edition.