About the book: year / "“In any case, I hate everything that only teaches me, without expanding and directly reviving my activity “. These words of Goethe, this sincere ceterum censeo, could serve as an introduction to our discussion about the positive or negative value of history. For in this discussion we intend to show why teaching without animation, why knowledge associated with a weakening of activity, why history, as a precious excess of knowledge and luxury, should be, in Goethe’s expression, seriously hateful to us - namely, because we need still in the most necessary, and because everything superfluous is the enemy of the necessary. Of course, we need history, but we need it differently than the spoiled and idle lover in the garden of knowledge, no matter how arrogantly the latter may look at our crude and inelegant wants and needs. This means that we need it for life and activity, and not for a convenient evasion from life and activity, or even less for justifying a selfish life and cowardly and bad activity. Only insofar as history serves life do we ourselves agree to serve it; and yet there is a way of serving history and such an assessment of it that leads to decay and degeneration of life: a phenomenon that, in connection with the outstanding symptoms of our time, is now as necessary to study as it may be painful…»