Note 17 — VI YOUNG GERMANY (continued 2)

"I have never been able to understand their conception of fate, their confusion of the antique with the Romantic idea, their Christian paganism. Death is either a loving father, who comes to fetch his child home from the school of life, in which case fate is not tragic; or he is the cannibal Kronos, who swallows his own children, in which case it is unchristian. Your fate is a hermaphrodite, unable either to beget or to bring forth."