“Born of Nature,” said Schiller of Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea.103 Goya named Rembrandt, Velázquez and Nature as his teachers. Whole pages fill the lexicons of art, comparing these to nature and invocations of nature through art, and speak of the effort of imitation. “Paint the external things the inner eye sees, or else leave painting altogether,” said Caspar David Friedrich.104 And Friedrich Schlegel:105 “If Germany were to lose its woods, it would lose itself.” We can indeed define the art business of today, as against those who once chose nature as a yardstick, as anti-nature, and just as earlier there was a “return to nature,” so today there is an art of opposition to nature. All sensibilities, proficiencies, instincts and powers of imitation are withered, debauched, and ridiculed, as much as of the landscape and of the soul and the feelings. The peasants have a chance in the representation of high culture only through forms of ironic trivialities, flowers no longer being a subject, and the love of the landscape lying under the same taboo as love itself, in a time of artificial insemination. That corresponds to our exploitation of society and the world, inside and outside. The exploitation of one nation by another, of one social order by another, of man by man, if one wishes to see it thus, has become an exploitation or suppression and enslavement, and expropriation or destruction of nature by man, as art demonstrates.
Nature is used by everyone, just as, earlier, the ruins of the conquered temples of the enemy were. Animals, plants and landscape are surrendered unprotected, unless we speak of nature in the pots of the pedestrianized zones with concrete plants, and of the recreation parks in the state horticultural shows as being equal to nature. Every trip by car into the countryside by people from the urban agglomerations in their free time is proof of incompetence, with the whole scale from destruction to crippling and from contempt to sentimentality, in accordance with the stage, literature, film and museums. Mother Nature, once an important expression, is gotten rid of in the age of women’s liberation and of the hatred for the fathers in the country of disintegrating art, from its original foundations in the history of creation of this culture.
But real disfigurement of the world has for a long time abandoned stages, films, concert halls, galleries and books, it no longer occurring via the transgression of former boundaries, via individual perversity and aesthetic discussions about film as an avant-garde act.
It is an attack, beyond the arts, on thought and reason through the invasion of noise, stench, eye-ache, and the death of the elements, where there is a memory of a culture of taste, up to the loss of the unique characteristics of fruits in the daily farmer’s market, fruits that disguise, with ever more luscious excitation, the lie that lies hidden in everything. Even retreat and renunciation are outshone by the radiance from all remote places, and the longed-for distant islands are the first that are to be sacrificed for atomic tests. The liberation and lie of equality penetrates all cracks, and there rules a war against the nature of sense. Evil instincts are awakened — an apocalypse, but from within. Choking on abundance, a diabolical trick, in contrast, how harmless are the most perverse artistic provocations of our craven culture-freaks of the earlier scenes. In no other epoch did every change bring with it so much horror. If in earlier times one was proud of the new rooms in the house — more light, cheerful rituals and new life, and wished for oneself, from generation to generation, new steps into a better future — now every enticement to renewal is related to an increase of comfort, perhaps for the owner and initiator of this renewal, yet with horror for all the people around who must share in it with their eyes or ears or noses. The house in the meadow, at the edge of a wood, by the sea, on the mountain causes more damage to the community than any palace once wasted energy for its builder. Who today can still afford a meadow, a stream, a riverbank, without discarding them at once through construction and its activities? The world is becoming poorer so that one has to be afraid at every step. That is nature at whose expense this life, this art, which declines with every movement, expands. In the middle of Europe, there arose a bundle of neuroses of a homeless loss of identity, of restlessly oppressive desolation, of self-righteousness, paired with suppressed longing for that which has been driven out and forgotten, to awaken once again that which overcomes — nature, which has been overcome. It is a matter of the asserted ancient certainty that asserts itself, always threatened by decay and loss and destruction of memory, which is about disrupting the reawakening of the forgotten, even if it is to prevent the lamentation and the tragic event, so that art, as the only powerful act, may not save.