[2]

Then there is another point, namely the reading! You will get a reading list without any special prescription--there is no prescribed reading in these lectures, but there are recommended books which will help you--for what?--for resisting me! And that is exacty what I want. For this reason, these books are chosen, and in due time (probably not before the beginning of next week) you will get a list of such books in all the different realms of culture to which I will refer very soon.

Then the question which is unfortunately predominant in the hearts of some students, namely "What are the requirements?!" Now I believe most or all of you take these lectures for a grade, and therefore I think I must say a few words about it. At the end of each semester there will be small term papers--"small" meaning no more than 20 pages, but there is no limit towards less than that, especially for those who, like Einstein, are able to write fundamental ideas on three pages! For others, I would recommend not to go too much below 15 pages. So take this as a very non-academic measurement, and one great desire: don’t use handwriting for these papers (l will remind you of this later), but use typing, because handwriting is a matter of guessing, and the professor might guess wrongly, and then it is your damage!

I will probably develop perhaps 10 or 20 questions from the range we will have covered in each semester, so that you must choose three or four of them in the different realms of culture we will discuss, and write four to five pages about each of these questions, NOT repeating what I said (that will never give you more than a low "B"), but criticizing what I said and developing your own ideas--that can immediately bring you into "A". But we will deal with this much later.

Lastly, there are rules in this university that a full-swing [course of] lecture[s] should have three hours. Now I can give only the two hours, on Tuesday and Thursday, and the Saturday hour will be given by my colleague and assistant, Professor [Walter] Leibrecht^a. He will discuss what has happened the week before..., answer questions of understanding, and leading to the problems which will then appear in the list of questions for the term papers, so that it is of great advantage that all of you (at least those who want to take the lecture[s] for a grade) attend these Saturday hours... Now this is all about technicalities, which are a nuisance but unavoidable...

We now go into the matter itself, namely the outline of the lecture[s], which is [...] matter itself, because the outline is identical with the structure of our Western culture. To give you this outline, I must immediately go into the difficult task of finding out what