"A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces"
About this Quote
Bergamin turns Archimedes into cultural satire. A body immersed in water displaces its own volume; a German immersed in a foreign civilization, he suggests, displaces intelligence and loses weight in proportion to that displacement. The joke is not about physics but about cultural buoyancy. Intelligence here is not an innate quantity but a shared medium, the circulating wit, nuance, and codes of a place. Enter as a heavy, self-contained system, and you push that medium aside; fail to absorb it, and you forfeit your own gravity.
The line also plays with a long European argument about Kultur and civilization. Early twentieth-century German writers often opposed deep, inward Kultur to the supposedly superficial rationalism of Western civilization. Bergamin inverts the prestige. The foreign milieu becomes the intelligent fluid. The more you repel it with your ready-made categories and national certainties, the more you become lighter, less consequential, a body with no purchase in its surroundings. Weight is moral and intellectual seriousness that only exists in relation to a context; outside it, untransformed, it thins out.
Read against Bergamins barbed Catholic humanism and his exile-era aphorisms, the sentence is less a national insult than a warning about parochial minds anywhere. He uses the German as a figure for the dogmatic intellectual who travels without curiosity, who imposes rather than listens. Such a traveler mistakes solidity for depth and ends up buoyed to the surface, floating and weightless, while the displaced intelligence of the host culture closes around the gap.
The physics metaphor also implies a test: learn the density of the new medium or be measured by it. To gain weight abroad is to take on the volume of others thinking, to become denser with borrowed light. To cling to one own element is to become an object lesson in how intelligence is not a property but a relation.
The line also plays with a long European argument about Kultur and civilization. Early twentieth-century German writers often opposed deep, inward Kultur to the supposedly superficial rationalism of Western civilization. Bergamin inverts the prestige. The foreign milieu becomes the intelligent fluid. The more you repel it with your ready-made categories and national certainties, the more you become lighter, less consequential, a body with no purchase in its surroundings. Weight is moral and intellectual seriousness that only exists in relation to a context; outside it, untransformed, it thins out.
Read against Bergamins barbed Catholic humanism and his exile-era aphorisms, the sentence is less a national insult than a warning about parochial minds anywhere. He uses the German as a figure for the dogmatic intellectual who travels without curiosity, who imposes rather than listens. Such a traveler mistakes solidity for depth and ends up buoyed to the surface, floating and weightless, while the displaced intelligence of the host culture closes around the gap.
The physics metaphor also implies a test: learn the density of the new medium or be measured by it. To gain weight abroad is to take on the volume of others thinking, to become denser with borrowed light. To cling to one own element is to become an object lesson in how intelligence is not a property but a relation.
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| Topic | Sarcastic |
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