I have looked this quote up on the net and its meaning can be interpreted in the following way. I mean no disrespect to any German people as it is not my interpretation. On one hand,about half of the heritage of Western humanism and learning is of German origin. On the other, some philosophers /writers in cluding Goethe believed that there was also an impulse to barbarism that has cost world civilization dearly in World War 2 and that found its hideous expression in the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps, the madmen who invented it, and the people who were in charge of them. A lot of Germans said after the war that they knew nothing about these camps and what went on in them. Goethe could have been talking about these events when he said, “I have often felt a bitter sorrow at the thought of the German people, which are so estimable in the individual and so wretched in the generality?”