There is the latent knowledge which is handed down from generation to generation — the forgotten, saved over the centuries, which waits to be awakened (Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud). And it is being chosen in the guilt of a nation that is damned. When a German is cursed today — not only in war films, as a caricature of the ever guilty, without identity in Central Europe, always watching what the others say, like in no other country in the world — it in turn has an effect. He is also really ugly, and really loud, and really prefect-like, dutiful, striving and really democratic, as in the picture-books of his teachers. And he knows also that the disadvantaged will be at an advantage — the rootless, those disadvantaged by nature, the disabled and the pathological cases, those without income, the fat and the sleazy, and those without a country, without sense, without talent and without inclination, and capable of no virtue. And he will also know that those are at an advantage who can detach themselves without a farewell, here today and there tomorrow, and one who does not know about good and gives up everything that was once good and true, and one who is internally without spirit, a man of the herd, as Nietzsche would say. Consumers, who are fodder, as they were earlier for cannon, for the quick and cheap business of peace, of baseness. Booty. Horror of the centuries, terror of all ordered cultural epochs, of the barbarians, who seized power, mark my words, dear boy. But they are also rich in quite another way, for the experiences from the humiliating defeat, from the richness of the suffering through fear of bombs, and from the mourning of fallen sons and fathers, and from the misery of sacrificed daughters and wives and lost lands, mourned in reverse as a lie, without possessions, in the abandonment of characteristics.
How could art coming out of that be any different: the counter-image of a destroyed world in the delirium of the false wealth of the victors resulting from a relinquishment of victory, the fire-kindling of higher thoughts that nobody now misses and that are today annoying as a curse from the past, that curse of old age that excludes wisdom. And what was once poor became sated, and what once sated degenerated into fast food, and what was once love became sexual liberation, and what the roofs of houses the warming hearth once protected became plastic areas made of the parts of prefabricated houses.
Art, however, became the show business of the leisure industry.