The Germans - the proud people of poets and thinkers? When the poets and thinkers themselves have their say, it becomes clear that national pride is not as strong as one might think: "We Germans are from yesterday" - this is Goethe's unflinching judgment on his people, and others do not hold back in their criticism when it comes to German identity: Hölderlin describes them as "action-poor and full of thought," while Nietzsche deemed them "arbitrarily dulled." This book gathers many great German intellectuals from the Middle Ages to the present: from Walther von der Vogelweide to Luther, Kant, Schiller, and on to Heidegger, Brecht, and Walser. What they all share is a skeptical view of their own country. The result is sobering, even devastating: the Germans - a coarse people without national character, a land of cultural adepts, full of "straw-dumb citizens," as Adenauer put it.