Tragedy without a Tragic Consciousness

It is a perverse desire, to want to survive in a tragic age that has lost the feeling for tragedy. Tragic consciousness presupposes recognition of guilt, also and especially of the powerful, of the victors of today, and the consciousness of destiny. Where this is expected of others or falsely sustained, tragedy is not possible. Whoever remains at these levels of blindness clings to the past without maturity for the future, wresting the whole world, along with himself, into the abyss of the annihilating present.

In art, says Friedrich Schiller, beauty means freedom in appearance. It must indeed mean people who are not interested in the tenure of the market attitude and the intentions of the ideologues, beyond the impulse for cheap intoxication, in the spirit of that passion which strives for that which is sublime, free of the democratic progress of this century, overcoming everything respectable and all suavities of taste, especially also because of the experiences of this century, but taking into account the hand-crafted, the magic and metaphysics of that purity which we seek in the beauty of the feelings of life, of truth, from plants and animals, as the basic necessity for action and for politics.

Standing on the precipice, indicted, tolerated for the pettiest reason, up to the fall of the continent of this culture, as it was.