Excerpt from Die Harzreise And more especially as a combatant against German Philistinism. This kind of Philistinism is peculiar to the country; it does not consist, as elsewhere, in the absence of ideas, or in antagonism to them, for Germany really teems with ideas, and loves them at the same time; but her love is of a Platonic kind. She plays with ideas for the sake of the ideas themselves, but shrinks from any application of them. Hence the wide gap between the intellectual and literary, and the political and social Germany. In the French, Heine found a nation with whom he was in full sympathy. The French are open to new ideas, and when they imagine, either rightly or wrongly, that they have discovered a truth, they hasten to apply it. Heine, being what he was, must necessarily have loved a people who stand in the front rank in the war against medieval society and its abuses. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.