We who are homeless. – Among Europeans today there is no lack of those who have a right to call themselves homeless in a distinctive and honourable sense: it is to them in particular that I commend my secret wisdom and *gaya scienza.*50 For their lot is hard; their hope uncertain; it is a feat to invent a form of comfort for them – but to what avail! We children of the future – how could we be at home in this today! We are unfavourably disposed towards all ideals that might make one feel at home in this fragile, broken time of transition; as for its ‘realities’, we don’t believe they are lasting. The ice that still supports people today has already grown very thin; the wind that brings a thaw is blowing; we ourselves, we homeless ones, are something that breaks up the ice and other all too thin ‘realities’…We ‘conserve’ nothing; neither do we want to return to any past; we are by no means ‘liberal’; we are not working for ‘progress’; we don’t need to plug our ears to the marketplace’s sirens of the future: what they sing – ‘equal rights’, ‘free society’, ‘no more masters and no servants’ – has no allure for us. We hold it absolutely undesirable that a realm of justice and concord should be established on earth (because it would certainly be the realm of the most profound levelling down to mediocrity and *chinoiserie);*51 we are delighted by all who love, as we do, danger, war, and adventure; who refuse to compromise, to be captured, to reconcile, to be castrated; we consider ourselves conquerors; we contemplate the necessity for new orders as well as for a new slavery – for every strengthening and enhancement of the human type also involves a new kind of enslavement – doesn’t it? With all this, can we really be at home in an age that loves to claim the distinction of being the most humane, the mildest, and most righteous age the sun has ever seen? It is bad enough that precisely when we hear these beautiful words, we have the ugliest misgivings. What we find in them is merely an expression – and the masquerade – of a deep weakening, of weariness, of old age, of declining energies! What can it matter to us what sequins the sick may use to cover up their weakness? Let them parade it as their virtue; after all, there is no doubt that weakness makes us mild, so righteous, so inoffensive, so ‘humane’! The ‘religion of compassion’ to which one would like to convert us – oh, we know these hysterical little men and women well enough who today need just this religion as a veil and finery. We are no humanitarians; we should never dare to allow ourselves to speak of ‘our love of humanity’ – our type is not actor enough for that! Or not Saint-Simonist52 enough; not French enough. One really has to be afflicted with a Gallic excess of erotic irritability and enamoured impatience to approach humanity honestly with one’s lust… Humanity! Has there ever been a more hideous old woman amongst all old women? (Unless it were ‘the truth’: a question for philosophers.) No, we do not love humanity; but on the other hand we are not nearly ‘German’ enough, in the sense in which the word ‘German’ is constantly used nowadays, to advocate nationalism and racial hatred and to be able to take pleasure in the national scabies of the heart and blood poisoning with which European peoples nowadays delimit and barricade themselves against each other as if with quarantines. For that, we are too uninhibited, too malicious, too spoiled, also too well-informed, too ‘well-travelled’: we far prefer to live on mountains, apart, ‘untimely’, in past or future centuries, merely in order to avoid the silent rage to which we know we should be condemned as eyewitnesses of politics that are destroying the German spirit by making it vain and which are, moreover, petty politics – to keep its creation from falling apart again, doesn’t it need to plant it between two deadly hatreds? Mustn’t it desire the eternalization of the European system of many petty states? We who are homeless are too diverse and racially mixed in our descent, as ‘modern men’, and consequently we are not inclined to participate in the mendacious racial self-admiration and obscenity that parades in Germany today as a sign of a German way of thinking and that is doubly false and indecent among the people of the ‘historical sense’. In a word – and let this be our word of honour – we are good Europeans, the rich heirs of millennia of European spirit, with too many provisions but also too many obligations. As such, we have also outgrown Christianity and are averse to it – precisely because we have grown out of it, because our ancestors were Christians who in their Christianity were mercilessly upright: for their faith they willingly sacrificed possessions, blood, position, and fatherland. We – do the same. But for what? For our unbelief? For every kind of unbelief? No, you know better than that, my friends! The hidden Yes in you is stronger than all Nos and Maybes that afflict you and your age like a disease; and you must sail the seas, you emigrants, you too are compelled to this by – a faith!