Apprenticed to the masters of both East and West, to the theaters of Brecht and Korntner and, through my own work, obtained an entry ticket to the contemporary stage, not to the worst one.
This work became, in spite of all the unwanted Yeses and the domestic Noes in Germany, recognized and described from Paris to New York as the most authentic from Germany, and that in the most ill-treated art of the century, film. So, when I speak here, I am not speaking from just anywhere.
During childhood grew up in the countryside under Hitler in Pomerania. Went to school during the time of Stalin in Rostock, and attended university in the West in the 50s in Munich. A university not required, and everything gathered, gained contrary to it, and now indeed characterized by this distance of a learned integrity.
According to the wishes of the frightened publisher, gladly, what now comes to mind:
I am for Thomas Bernhard40 without reservation, the sadly desperate arch-rogue in our dangers.
I am for Anselm Kiefer’s41 pictorial myths of personal visions and aesthetics. And for Tarkovsky42 as author and innovator, who could now no longer experience Gorbachev. And am for Gorbachev, as well as for Masur and Vaçlav Havel43 and Walesa,44 the simple-minded and the clever and the humanists and the brave, just as I bow before Ernst Jünger,45 the authentic, the poète maudit46 of the Socialist president of France,47 and before Heidegger, the describer of the country, the intellectual aspect of its life, the teacher of his beloved pupil, Hannah Arendt, as well as the master of post-war philosophy in France.48 I commemorate the beautiful Sulamith49 as the bride and maiden of Solomon, who was a different one, was full of error but of life itself and sated with life, and commemorate Moses of Egypt or the Biblical David, the sad, Rembrandt, as well as those kings of righteousness as the model of the later ones. And commemorate their prophets and sibyls of Michelangelo before the restoration.50 Elevated above the present-day, just like as of the Greek lovers of wisdom who came from the sun, from Pythagoras to Plato, and of their strictness with regard to art, even and precisely when it is destructive.
After their first reading of this manuscript, my friends advised me to make an open and clear statement that H. was a mass murderer and that whatever he had done or permitted in history and art was basically wrong.
So then: I consider him to be a brilliant medium for the world spirit in a daemonic concern for this technological century of mass movements. My concern with him bears witness to my closest approximation to the point of sympathy towards those who followed him and who are naturally partially strangers to me, or else how sinister or hostile they would have been to me. Rapprochement to the people by autumn ’89. Now freeing myself from many phobias. From the point of view of that which is my own or really important to me, a frightening phenomenon of a concentration of energy catapulting itself from the mediocrity of that which is hostile to me into the gigantic scope of the possibilities of this century. A figure in whom everything came together, accelerating and performing, using and used, as in the people, whom the historical situation of this century in Germany technically, socially, and morally appointed as the center of Europe after the lost war, to whom they all, contiguously and by assigning, contributed as actors and victims in changing positions, after a war that was won, and as the attacked. A frightening figure about whom I said years ago, in connection to my film bearing his name, about those who had voted for him: what would be the use if he won the world and were not loved, a message that is directed at everybody in the Bible, and it were he who took everything of value to me as a measure of the world, as an instrument to serve the interest of the beneficiaries, and with the loss of which I live today. That is more than just the circle of my own life and concerns.
But those who like to define and emancipate themselves through democracy must know that H. would not have come to power without democracy, and Auschwitz is its price, Auschwitz, at whose disposal Art put itself as the highest virtue of our culture,51 just as his election was perhaps the answer to the violent removal of the Kaiser, and he only a symbol of other possibilities, because of the neighboring nations of the time, without a people, which makes all complaining against the injuries suffered because of him risible.
Besides, this book could only come about because H. was no longer its subject. A career-obsessed, inhibiting subject. His guilt, no longer measurable through human measurements, or a dark greatness, however yet frightening and astonishing, is like a whetstone for knives well suited for careers, or a good distraction from their own problems of guilt for the ones who are sorry and are, in the meantime, united with the victors in the partition of the world, but leading to nothing good. With him it led to Auschwitz and to the downfall of Prussia and to his opponent Stalin, with more dead on his hands than himself and indeed among our own friends, and to the atom bomb, with the alibi of the war against him. But. We read of the explosion at Chernobyl, we read how leaves which are usually 10 centimeters long are now 30, of animals which, normally born with four legs, are now born with six. Everything mutates into the immoderate and the country is barren and empty. Peace. The peaceful exploitation. Everything is shot into unhealthy corruption with full praise, with full democracy. And, so, with the will of the people? Why Heidegger stayed quiet. H. was only a stage in development. One who says that we have it under control must be joking or a liar whom we gladly follow considering what we may receive from him. Whoever deals with H. seriously deals with one’s own dark places, even those, and precisely those, which were and are against oneself. Democracy is however only the guarantee for the better partition of the booty which one makes use of in a more undisguised manner, and art which is well made is no longer good, becoming important for what it stands for, but is it still an art that does any good?
But to derive recognition from the complaints of art, of the honorable sort, that is the only just judge on earth, if it grows beyond itself, and surpasses us in beauty so that we may say: I was there. As in old games, in front of the doorstep, children on the asphalt signal to one another. So that we can say with honor that can be written down, that states some day: we were there.
As regards Hitler’s person, just the greeting in his name suffices. How was it thinkable that German generals of a Prussian tradition raised their arm in the name of one not delegated by God, which they did not do even under kings and emperors? Just by not doing this and certainly by refusing, however stupidly and defiantly, would have meant my death.
Blood and soil and scorched earth belong together like Heaven and Hell in the Middle Ages, witch trials and Tilman Riemenschneider.52 Under Hitler, at the point of intersection of a crisis in Europe, as the farthest extremes of the self-determining goal and as the expectation of an age, which is now the form of the masses and technology.
We must make ourselves responsible for all that happens today, more than in monarchical structures, or in those of the dictatorial type of state. The same for the election of Hitler and the consequences of that. And yet one must not forget that our powerlessness grows in equal measure and we are still more clearly prisoners of a general historical impulse arising from many factors like time, the environment and inevitability, which could have been attributed to historical figures or to the world spirit or to destiny. It is from us in the same measure as around us, and coming to us, our decisions, like old wishes or a frightening nightmare in which we as individuals can do nothing against it — even though individual freedom has become greater, apparently.
So perhaps it is not enough to supervise the poets and to require them to stamp their poems with an image of good character, or else to refrain from composing poetry in our state? We must supervise the entirety of artists and artisans and prevent them from impressing their representations of living beings, their constructions or any other works by their hands with a bad character, anything licentious, base, improper. If they cannot comply with this, then we must forbid the practice of their art in our state. For our guards should not be brought up with images of a reprehensible sort, should not, like cattle which graze on a bad meadow, consume day by day a little of the abundance which surrounds them and thus unnoticed causes a great illness in their soul. Rather we must look for such artists who have character and therefore also know how to express the beautiful and the worthy. Then our youth will live in a healthy country and everything will be a blessing to them that is transmitted to their eyes and ears from the beautiful works, like a breath of wind which transmits good health from good regions. It will imperceptibly make them, from childhood on, like a beautiful poem and give them love for such and harmony with it.
Plato, The Republic
On democracy, so often mentioned, that of the daily life: that experienced here, no, that of the party management of solicitors, of offices and fractions, as one tellingly says, the party management, no. The democracy of “We are the people” on the streets and squares, speeches there without notes, from the heart, and without safeguards or institutions, indeed, of social orders or councils, always yes; orders or councils which vote for themselves the king-president as a model of themselves, that he may preside over, and bind together, even enemies and the isolated members of minorities, always and everywhere, yes.
If the criteria that have existed until now, the basis of thought, are different, that is, liberation from intimidation and enticement, the colonialism of our consciousness, as they call it, it is worthless without an analysis of the aesthetics existing up to now and the change of activities, and not useful even here as a precondition for an escape from a blocked and deadlocked situation equally important for developments in the East. For it is a question of the environmental pollution of the soul. Of the death of the soul, not only in the East. In the cultural system of our intellectual constitution, the first item must be dropped: the claim to leadership of the aesthetics up to now. In the theater, in exhibitions, film, books, music, etc. It is important to reconsider, to question. Without systems of intimidation and enticement, according to the real criteria of life, to the world and the nature of the self, without any investment control from the bonus of education and from vulgar opinion-psychology, and confronted with other possibilities in free competition — in the media, among the public, in the market and in state benefits.
It would be rather grotesque to base a patriotism on the hitherto existing colonialism and ideologization of our intellectual constitution instead of on the land and soil of the lost, or voluntarily abandoned, provinces of our emotional foundation, which has grown out of the embrace, from East and from West, of a forcibly divided country.
All the hitherto prevalent monstrosities of the so-called capital-oriented West would have to fall, as much as the finally acknowledged desperation of Communist aberrations in the eastern part of the country, as concealments of that which was really intended. And art will once again be a measure, just like Germany a model to other countries. Perhaps then what was previously cynical will suddenly give way to meekness, and the business of provocation will become a real distress call, as the emperor with no clothes suddenly no longer freezes, because we ourselves are warmed from within.
Suddenly we see in another light and without aggression even the exploited politicians of our parties, when the journalists meet them over there, as though plunged into healing fountains of virtue, and see the self-chosen malice of the journalists softening. The irritability of the loveless, of crippled souls, will also hopefully become tired in those who should recognize love as the first commandment, if art be their life.
Entire systems exist, like those of the hasty obedience of the subordinates towards the unspoken but very well-known wishes of their superiors right up to Stalingrad and Auschwitz. And what is true among administrative officials and those of the military is true also of the artistic man, from those active in the arts or in the culture section of the media and the public, to the buyer. Entire productions of highly reputed individuality and of the most diverse sort exist in such a manner from the actor’s subconscious ingratiating itself to the directors who do not interfere, to such an extent that one asks oneself how it is that, with the same actors who think themselves free, and with silent directors, different directions arise even if within the framework of the self-same aesthetic rules.
Just as the actor believes that the clever director gives him total freedom when he silently nods or not, as the case may be, and observes in a friendly way, but yet the wishes of the demiurge are well known and he fulfills them exactly when the latter silently nods, so too our entire system is fulfilled and is believed to be free while ever the ingratiating consciousness nods.
And so this is true of the spiritual environmental pollution of the self, as of every other kind in nature, that one who is in himself not pure will not take care of nature and his art will then reflect that.
What began as a critical determination of the discussion about the age and one’s own position in it and represented itself as before an apocalypse, became suddenly, in the process of writing, a review of a self-concluding post-war epoch of art as well. What had not been seen up to now, like the removal of a veil and everything becoming simple, has become a surprise to the most daring visionaries, everything being different. And if one also knows that the last will be the first, and that healing comes from the poorest alone, and that only the weapons which caused the wound heal,53 then everything here has become different and new. And starting after the humiliation, how strange how only the lowly that was formed by hardship had validity, and the naturally sick, and the small and dirty and poor, without the mockery and deceit and business interests of fashions. Reality has overtaken all the questions, taken over the leadership in the life of the simple and clear, as it should be. Art stands without envy before the nature of political developments and only the greatest still has validity. Shakespeare, for example, is the standard with his historical dramas, like the bedrock of antiquity, and Bach, Beethoven are to be consulted, as always, as well as everything that measures itself by these. We will not impose ourselves and be needy only in this way, when it comes to the need for joy. However annoying an art is that imposes itself, even more annoying is he who continually agitates in it as in an unwanted abundance and nothingness. The answer came from the people themselves. And art will only be that which stands against and answers it. One must be biased against that culture of re-education arisen after the war, which did not just begin with Hitler, and against a liberation that came out of violation and expropriation, and with penetrating questions about the democratic happiness of those driven out of their homeland and of the survivors of the last war.
One will have to be biased in order to emphasize one’s position away from a wounded participation in the age, but also from proximity to these sorts of perspectives. And if the ones questioned also err and invoke the ancients as incentive for their error and interpret these on the basis of their dark and supposedly repressed reasons, then this bias towards the pictures, texts, music viewed in this manner is unfair and erroneous to those ancients for whom the dark and abysmal was always a counterpoise to the bright, high and great and only allowed on account of that, just as one being brought forth is not permitted at the cost of the other. The worst however is wallowing in the abyss, and wantonly and insolently in the dirt, no matter what else may be possible. Little suffering on the trail of the knowledge out of which form may grow to joy, the only one originating in lamenting the tragedy of our existence.
The exploited life of the West has not yet reached the people in the East. The Eastern system has been discarded. Let us pause for a moment. Pure, like the world on the first day. The actual Zero Hour,54 when we look into the opened eyes of the liberated: and these are their words. Yet we must know, in the joy over the sudden victory of clarity and of the simplicity of the liberated, that the actual subject of the present-day world and of its threat from the Western democracies of progress and self-enrichment, their downfall was only delayed by these political-intellectual upheavals in the East. Whether from that a new strength grows for the deed previously repressed or whether everything only gets worse is the question now before everybody.
In June 1989 the Foreword, or the book, began in this way: