Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/226/en

What course did agriculture now take against the background of these historical events? Its foundation — the organism principle — remained intact. But it became tradition without a continuing spiritual impulse-force: the cultivated landscapes that had arisen from peasant working had to be maintained, as the centuries advanced, just as laboriously as the buildings of the Romanesque churches and Gothic cathedrals that had once formed a unity with them. First in single drops, individual courageous people tied up their bundle and migrated to the rising cities. Then, from the seventeenth century onward, they followed in waves of migration the call «Stadtluft macht frei» («city air makes free»). They accepted the loss of village security and peace; they pressed outward from the narrowness and unfreedom of life bound to nature, and sought, in existential uncertainty, free self-determination in newly arising occupations. This lonely path into the unknown is described with exemplary force and heart-touching quality by the later ophthalmologist and poet Jung-Stilling (1740–1812), whom Goethe helped out of many an existential emergency by resolute intervention. More and more the cities drew people out of agriculture; academic life and the natural sciences flourished, and with them the technical application of the laws of inorganic nature that had been recognised. In contrast to the wholly human, universal orientation of the work in agriculture, people now immersed themselves in the division-of-labour world of industry. Those who were still entirely bound to the folk consciousness found themselves challenged, in existential uncertainty, toward individual self-awareness. Out of the peasant came the modern, emancipated human being — the proletarian. He could gain nothing from the division-of-labour process except his wages; the humanistic education of his time could give him no answer to his life-questions, any more than the natural sciences could, which traced his humanity back to the ape. As the modern era advances, the peasant culture sinks into a tradition bound by inheritance, from which no impulses for renewal could arise any more. This tragedy marks the course of development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Already the summer-cropping of the fallow with clover in the eighteenth century was an impulse coming from outside, which met with resistance — not least because of the fact that the

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