Heroism

Heroism means to totally devote oneself to a great idea, to consume oneself like a torch in the flame of a mighty ideal, to see only one great ideal in sight and in mind and in marching step. Heroism is being stirred, obsessed, fulfilled with a very great task.

His own personality no longer plays a role for the hero. Desire and suffering, life and death, step back for him behind the tremendous obligation toward the work for which Providence has called him. Heroic deeds are done not out of ambition and egoism, rather out of ultimate selflessness, unselfishness and personal devotion. Infinite faith in work, calling and idea fill and give wings to the deeds and the bearing of the hero.

Heroism differentiates Itself from insanity, fantasy and senseless self-sacrifice.

In every age there have been people who, misled by false doctrines or driven by a hysterical disposition, were devoted to senseless and ineffective idols and fantasies and became pitiful, poor martyrs of life-alien religious teachings.

And there have been people who, above all, under the influence of the most diverse religions, viewed self-mutilation, unnatural castigations of the body and deadening of all natural forces as heroism.

Genuine heroism lives in reality and reckons with reality. Genuine heroism is supported by the natural laws of life and grows from the infinitely deep soil of folk, homeland and family. Only in the framework of this divine order of creation can a genuine heroism exist. Only in the service of real life - created and wanted by God - can a person become a hero. And only this earthly reality connects the hero to the divine.

Man’s heroic, ultimate effort for life often takes place in a brand framework visible from afar.

But often heroism grows in all quietness and seclusion. Heroic women and mothers, heroic soldiers and heroic workers are at work by the thousands in large cities and small villages, on all life’s battlegrounds and in all the folk’s workplaces.

The great heroes often awaken hundreds of thousands, yes, millions of people within a folk and pull them along to victorious charges and ultimate effort. Like shining torches, they often being life, movement and glow into a dark night. Fortune is the folk for whom in every age, but above all in difficult hours, heroes arise.

Not everyone is selected by Providence for this radiant heroism.

But everyone can brighten and encourage his small surroundings as a quiet hero of daily life, save them from exhaustion numbness, and lead them to a victorious life.

In a folk’s hours of decision and in the peaceful periods of confirmation, these quiet heroes are no less important than the great heroic figures. These quiet heroes hold the front together, always give new strength, again and again bring light and joy. They create calm where agitation threatens to cause damage and bring motion where a stoppage could mean danger. Hundreds of thousands of people owe it to the silent working of an unknown hero that they have preserved their faith and their idealism, that they have remained decent people or become ones again, that they hold their position soldierly at the place where Providence has put them.

If among a thousand people one quiet hero, man or woman, walks and works, then this heroic example will radiate onto them all, then our whole folk will grow together into a great, eternal front.

Each of us can be this quiet hero, at whom others looks, to whom they turn, even if no command calls for it.

But there can also come hours in life in which we face the choice either to be heroes or cowards, either to be men or traitors.

There are events in which a middle line between heroism and baseness is not longer possible.

Whoever proves heroic bearing in the quiet life struggle, will in these fateful hours all by himself grow to great heroism.

Heroism is the dream of all youth.

Heroes are the shapers of all events.

God is with the heroes.



by Anton Holzner, Eternal Front