After 1945, there were two artistic taboos. Independent of that which is really meant and regardless of from what context it arose. They worked disastrously via public verdict in a certain direction and steered in another. One was that term of the “aestheticizing” of politics, which Hitler had conducted, in that he had all but made the masses themselves the artwork of his politics — most strikingly, ultimately, through their filming in the films of Leni Riefenstahl64 — into the subject of his art, and that with the modern means of technology. Here aesthetic meant beautiful and implicitly magical, in the sense of enchantment, myth, etc. So beauty fell victim to the taboo, the lie, since Hitler, according to the general consensus of all, stands as the evil par excellence of this age. Beauty as the lie of the evil fell victim absolutely to the prohibition of beauty. Everything that for centuries had been considered as the goal and expression of the freedom of man through his changing ideals had to be avoided, was considered as seductive and acquired a stain. Every counter-formula was demanded, from simple parody of the hero to the ugliness of the various forms of poverty of the intellect, without the eternity of the soul. All doors were opened to the realms opposed to the beautiful, grimacing and market-dominating, insolent.
The other taboo was the dictum that after Auschwitz no more poetry was possible. That was equivalent to a prohibition of images of the old sort, of the poetic word and of art in general. That may have its intellectual and emotional explanation in light of the monstrous events related to the war, but is only one reaction to death and downfall; there is another.
However meant or expressed, it worked plainly as a prohibition of poetry and feeling and worked in such a manner that every ridiculing of enthusiasm and depth or elevation and feeling, and thus a passion for reason, was demanded and praised, and every simple or complicated execution of the old basic values of art was scorned. If feelings and beauty were permitted and careers promised, it was only through layers of resistance, almost surreptitiously and as hidden as the lowest and farthest step of all ventures, which demands a special refinement of subtlety or force. With this resistance to or repression of passionate enthusiasm, the old category of Dionysian intoxication too was cursed and, with it, the origin of all catharsis, thus of that purification which is really what it is all about. There arises the suspicion as to whether this purification was not something highly unwanted. Disastrously, these taboos reveal themselves as prohibitions not only for those who produce something, but also for those who receive that which has been produced. The inability to produce something beautiful in the aesthetic sense corresponded to the inability to still understand, absorb or even tolerate beauty.
The word aesthetics, originally a doctrine of the essence of the beautiful as a description of and insight into it, was meant by Kant as a doctrine of the beautiful in its transcendental sense as a critique, that is, a capacity of discrimination, of the faculty of judgment. That presupposed values, and a scientific truth, the classification of knowledge and a powerful doctrine of space and time, in short, a science of all the principles of sense-experience a priori. Avoiding this proximity and relation to beauty not as something that is beautiful but that makes the beautiful (Heidegger — “beautiful art is not beautiful, but it is called so because it brings forth the beautiful”)65 was in general the death sentence for art in the ethical sense. The criticism of this doctrine as a euphemism or a formalism out of a fear of reality, and beauty so termed as an arbitrary excitation of the senses, had to bring this beauty of the transcendental sense-experience, a freedom of art, which is what art really means, into danger. This regulation for the most extreme exercise of artistic freedom within the logic of beauty became for a whole generation a “lie” and its defilement a curse that has had destructive repercussions.
One can also express it differently. No more poetry under the artistic commandment of intellectual beauty was a curse as a revenge for Auschwitz, acting, no matter how it was meant and came about, in vulgar reality as the highest law of post-war aesthetics coming out of Germany. It acted as a curse in the hands of vulgar authorities. What was born from grief, and as a warning, became a double taboo of poetic and fine art.