One can be oppressed to the point of poverty; one can take away whole countries. East Prussia was once the country of Slavs; Silesia was Polish and Austrian; West Pomerania was once Swedish; Alsace changed hands from Germany to France. One can change governments and nationalities, but what happened here was to drive men from their homes, from their cultural forms of eating, clothing and speech, from the centuries-old graves of their ancestors. They were condemned to silence, under the contempt and taboo of art for its victims. They were not allowed to speak. Beaten. And it was a migration of peoples not only of these provinces east of the Elbe, but also that of the Baltic before that, and of the Tyrol under Hitler, who also planned to relocate the whole of Holland, and the Burgenland. To this also belong the displacement under Stalin and the displacement of around a third to a half of the entire population of the Poles.
Not to speak of the chapter of the Jews. For that is really another case. And one has destroyed the remaining provinces, the borders of Saxony, of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, West Pomerania, Thuringia, the foundations of identity transformed into new districts, in order to radically erase their identity. The sites of culture were destroyed and nobody was allowed to lament it. There is material here to last for centuries for a Homer, an Iliad, an Aeneid. Hecuba has lamented fully.102
Hecuba’s lament fills whole dramas, her children violated, enslaved, murdered, the country, the city burnt, her husband killed, herself killed. Visions of the downfall heralded for the victors. How many killed themselves in 1945 in dark silence? The countries were liberated by friends and the homeland divided as a just cause, all the houses and provinces taken away as a gift of some for others. The children were turned towards hatred against their fathers, and art became a case of neurosis as a sign of repression. Everybody was enticed with wealth, intimidated with guilt, brought up to be grateful, and the meaning of thought and life was threatened and all values changed. All those invited — anybody who goes along with it is saved — betrayed nature, the others falling through the net. Zero hour began in Germany, in the middle of Europe, the two remnant countries like a world leader in progress, social and democratic, wary of the freedom of their last defenders. The era that began with Christ, the distant god from the East, ended with Hitler’s death. Jerusalem conquers finally, for all, through the others for us. The heart of Europe, now finally arrived at the fringe of Western culture, of the old powers and values and aesthetics, at the end of aura and myth.
Under Hitler, the people of Europe, suppressed and Christianized in a bloody manner through the Oriental god, had, after a long, latent wait, finally taken revenge — misguidedly — on the false god, that of the Old Testament. So long do the myths of the people sleep in the souls of men, until they erupt, the stuff of whole epics and tragedies and cathedrals of memory, and catharsis for the removal of the blame it brings with it. Yet woe to the people who powerlessly degenerate in the impotence brought on by the museum-like maintenance of memory and Enlightenment institutes, enticed and intimidated into a mangling technology that only allows escape forwards, but not removal, which would be the right of every history that becomes culture. But preventing purification retains unforgiveness in remembrance, and that is anti-art.