The third taboo was that aesthetics of “blood and soil” propagated by Hitler — actually inviolable on account of the approval of the masses of our democracy — which means the aesthetics grown from an agrarian culture such as had determined European art through aristocratic principles of hierarchies of good and bad until the beginning of Modernism. The commissioning aristocracy came from the land where they were based, and this land was for a long time not purchasable by all. One had to acquire it through accomplishments, beyond money, with privileges of birth or of class, determined by God, whose sparks were borne by every man in himself, from which this God, choosing in an ideal way, projected the kingship principle. A chapter on the Ufa films on the subject of the homeland and its downfall after 1945, when identity was lost,66 would be a long one.
Hitler’s attempt to put his ideology into practice appears as a caricature of these traditions and was doomed to failure, as we know today. And yet it is a cultural historical epoch of European art, from the Heimatfilm to the new classicism of a frightful “Strength-through-Joy” gesture in sculpture, architecture and painting. It corresponds to a longing, however trivial, of men become a mass people and to the intellectual isolation at the height of the industrial epoch and is the other side of Modernism. Even before Hitler, Modernism had developed from the period of Goya and the French Revolution in a straight line to Surrealism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Futurism, Bauhaus, New Objectivity and Naturalism as a counterculture to the rural hierarchy up to then determined by the elements, of which only good and bad remained as a value standard, though now determined by market agents and the public opinion industry. Although those tendencies of Modernism were combated by Hitler, they also determined his politics and his performance as artwork up to the absurdity of this war and his concrete bunker clandestinely as a style of the mass culture of Modernism, that is, where the trivial is realized in vulgarity and the banal bends itself into the gigantic as a war aesthetics. This art stands not only as an offense to the consensus of the majority of the people, the first and last authority of the democratic idea, and therefore as challenging to all serious thinkers, if one takes democracy, especially in art, seriously, but this Hitlerian art is, at the same time, the hottest taboo in the poison cabinet of all “museum talk.”
For this art of perspective became, especially under Hitler, a reality of life and a supposed world-concept of that majority of the masses as the only majority art — which did not represent the people, but yet was what it had to be about, namely, the unity of those represented through the nation and the people itself. Only in this way could Hitler understand the newsreels of his war, he himself having examined, approved and captioned or corrected them, as the highest fulfillment of his work and of his “manifestation,” routine films of the war that signified the destruction and, at the same time, the final goal of all the developments leading up to it. After 1945, there remained the taboo of agrarian-determined culture in motifs used or displayed, as in the laws of symmetry, or those of the conveyed sense of height and depth or of materials, which affected the renunciation of the elements. Nature as a standard was sacrificed. Ernst Jünger was thus, in spite of his battles and resistance against the NS regime, a man of this respected aesthetics. And Hitler knew this, since he protected him, just as Brecht did, who protected him on account of his honesty of an old and particular quality. And so was Heidegger, in all his judgments on Hölderlin up to Rilke and in all his talks on his philosophy, until his death, a man of this culture, which derived its nourishment from the soil from which he was born, and was protected by his pupil Hannah Arendt. The loss of the eastern provinces of Germany and the downfall of Prussia would be less significant than this, if that loss was not a symbol of the intellectual situation of Europe up to the misfortune of Poland. There were poems after ’45, Ingeborg Bachmann67 convinces every skeptic of despair, up to Thomas Bernhard and those suppressed Marian hymns of his first period, for the taboo of the prohibition of poetry remains deep in all the arts until art is surrendered to the base enemies of art. And, like nature-based art, Nature itself was handed over, in the minds of men, to concreting over and clearing forests.
Since Hitler claimed them for himself, all defenders of this nature and these arts using nature as their yardstick were weak and Hitler accelerated this process of collapse in art as in politics, accelerated what had to come in an alarming way. A world was allowed to arise which today frightens its own followers. The enemies had won and, with them, an aesthetics that excluded and scorned all natural laws and rules, in form, words and in the innermost feelings. What the nature of the feelings, senses and reason had earlier classified as outlandish, dark and sick was not allowed to be pitifully bemoaned or combatted, or to appear as something to be overcome, but it triumphed insolently as the final victory over everything that was once valid as the hardships in the strenuousness of life. Hell celebrated victory without ceremony, disgusted by itself. Anyone who wanted something else crumbled in the impotence of a ridiculously weak sectarianism. Thus, the reconstruction of Germany was not characterized by the gratitude of those rescued, but the already existing was torn down and modernized in the new style of the aesthetics of the victors, above all against the nature of life, through that contamination of the seas and rivers or wind and earth in fear of the apocalyptic fire, so that no lyrical signs were suitable any more. In order to justify the flatness, sharp-edgedness, lineal, quickness, cheapness, practicality and comfort of murdered nature, they called it beautiful — without saying beautiful, or good — as a new style of death, and everything that is given life from this is already dead before its death. Not like before, when old age and death belonged to life, which was beautiful. And whoever says anything different knows that he lies, as they all know that they are poor as never before amidst the greatest prosperity of that “freedom,” as the politicians call it.