Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/338/en

What development did agriculture undergo against the background of this historical process? Its foundation, the organism principle, persisted. But without a continuing spiritual impulse-force it became tradition: the cultural landscapes that had grown out of peasant working had to be maintained, in the advancing course of the centuries, with the same laborious effort as the buildings of the Romanesque churches and Gothic cathedrals that had once formed a unity with them. At first, drop by drop, individual courageous men and women tied up their bundle and moved away to the rising cities. Then, from the seventeenth century onward, they followed in waves of migration the call "city air makes free." They accepted the loss of village shelter and peace; they pressed out from the confinement and unfreedom of life bound to nature and sought, in existential insecurity, free self-determination in newly emerging occupations. Exemplary in its telling and close to the heart is the account of this solitary way into the unknown given by the later ophthalmologist and poet Jung-Stilling (1740–1812), whom Goethe helped out of many an existential hardship by resolute intervention. More and more the cities sucked the people out of agriculture; academic life, the natural sciences blossomed — and with them the technical application of the recognized laws of inorganic nature. Over against the fully human, universal orientation of work in agriculture, people now plunged into the labor-divided world of industry. They, who were still entirely bound to folk consciousness, found themselves challenged, in existential insecurity, to an individual awakening of self-consciousness. Out of the peasant grew the modern, emancipated human being — the proletarian. He could gain nothing from the labor-divided process beyond his wage; humanistic education could give him no answer to his life-questions, nor could the natural sciences, which, on the question of his humanness, derived him from the ape. As the modern era advanced, peasant culture sank into an inherited tradition from which no impulses for renewal could any longer arise. This tragedy marks the course of development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Already the summering of the fallow with clover in the eighteenth century was an impulse coming from outside, one that met with resistance — not least on account of the fact that the