In the western world today, the Italians, as the descendants of ancient Rome, and we Germans, as the descendants of the Germanic peoples of that time, are the oldest peoples, and therefore the peoples who have been in contact the longest.
In my speech at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome on the occasion of my visit to Italy, I explained that it was indeed a misfortune that the mightiest civilized people of the ancient world and the young people of an emerging new world, owing to the absence of a natural separation [between them], and on account of many other circumstances, became involved in centuries of fruitless conflicts.
And yet, out of this thousand-year contact there arose a community that is not only connected by blood through countless bonds, but also, and above all, held incalculable significance historically and culturally.
What the Germanic people owe to antiquity as regards the organization of their state and thus the development of their Volk, as well as their general culture, is immeasurable in detail, immense in the aggregate. Since then nearly two thousand years have passed.
By now, however, we have made our contribution to culture to an abundant degree. But we always remained in close spiritual connection with the Italian Volk, its cultural and historical past. The nineteenth century brought a remarkably similar process of national unification. The German tribes united themselves into the German Reich, the Italian states into the Kingdom of Italy.
In fact, as fate would have it, in one year, 1866, the two peoples took to battle together for the creation of their new states.
Today we are experiencing this same development for the second time. A man of historic proportions was the first to successfully challenge a democratic spirit that had grown barren in his Volk with a new idea and then led it to victory within a few years. It is difficult to estimate what Fascism means for Italy. What it has achieved for the preservation of human culture is astronomical.
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