The main action and acts of state in plays about kings, in those about royal families warring against one another, were models of the world. If the kings of the subjects changed, they themselves, the people, still remained in place, under whatever king, by the grace of God. It was the same God. The ages of the classical artistic ideal were conscious of their fragility. Art was wrested from this knowledge as a victory. The royal family was therefore a model, because it precisely exemplified this fragility, just as, in the peasant theater, laughter, rascality, and weakness guarantee a happy ending and confirm to the public that even at the top, it is everywhere just as it is at home, in how one deals with things and how everything goes on. The democratic governments or parties praise themselves according to self-defined progress as the best solution of history and are convinced of the worth of their missionary purpose, that every new development of progress shall be the end and everything before it regression. Their art conforms to this. The art of the democracies of the twentieth century in Central Europe lives off the imperative of the ugliness of the prohibited and suppressed knowledge of beauty in the definition of art as an act of sublimation of the unattained levels of life. Art as a substitute action, and with the mandate that it must be ugly as a model and mirror of an ugly world that vaunts itself as the best of all worlds, of the lie itself — art as life. And it creates the art of lies, as it itself is a lie.
The art of earlier ages was the model of an ideal from a world that was not ideal. The art of today is the model of the rottenness of a democratic reality praised as the best of all worlds, which masks its lies in such a form that it must preach the art of ugliness as truth. The classical epochs, independently of the misery of the individual martyrdom of the creators of their art, understood their artistic ideal as the global right of spiritual happiness. German Idealism, before its downfall in this century and the final victory of everything base, transferred these laws of the spirit to the happiness of life in clothing, domesticity, food, and communal life, at least as a human right to beauty — and thereby not sublimated and suppressed — as a practical task in the world of an earthly God. Nature served as the measure of the naturally grown, for the agrarian culture of Weimar to that of Prussia, for Hölderlin’s Odes to the Rhine91 and the Greece of his ideal, which set art as the summum bonum92 of the nature of earthly self-discipline and of the spiritual correction of a fragile life. But the goal was life, to realise art, and beauty as the highest freedom, up to the event of 1945, which let the sons of this idealism fall in rows on the battlefields of this century. They were compliant victims, whether well-selected or selected randomly or mature. For the progress of this century required this end. But art as a model of life aimed at realization. Weimar was an art state, and Prussia’s philosophers saw their ideal Berlin in such a way, Plato’s model of the world in a secularized version, up to Bayreuth as an island of the music of the spheres of the downfall. And was art not always so, the cathedrals as the place of God in the cities, the palaces as the representative community of peace of a class-oriented life, the festivals and gardens, the court, the theater as a model of the world in miniature, always including the clothing, the food, the manners and fragility of the families as rituals, like the wars until Hitler, who formed his artistic demands in this state of the downfall?