The collapse of the Soviet Empire shows what it is all about. Already we hear the words “Marx is dead. Christ lives.” Two power blocs, religions, ideologies, battle for their territories. The countries liberated after the First World War find themselves faced with ruin. Economically impoverished, socially homeless, unmotivated, intellectually emptied, cultural ruins, that which once blossomed, Bohemia and Prague, Hungary and Budapest, Romania, the Baltic countries, Reval and Riga, Dorpat and Vilnius, and Poland (“better conquered by Germany than rescued by the Russians”), in changing borders under alternating masters, they have fallen into the eddy seeking the nearness of that maelstrom in the West that has secretly ruled our world from youth on. Art can only arise highly provoked from these ruins that Hitler, the leader of the proletariat, left behind, with mismatched pieces of suffering, coldly laughing or beyond all laments and memories, like a flower which grows from the darkness.
In the cultural symbiosis of the East before the first World War, Old Europe proved itself at a high level. Mozart could find his great success in Prague; Kafka wrote in the German language in the same Prague. The culture of the Baltic countries lived from this fruitful community of native-born people, of that from the upper levels of the nobility who immigrated centuries ago, of businessmen, of church-men and intellectuals with an increasingly interlacing class- and language-community of different nations in a cultural commingling. The violent fall of the German-speaking upper classes led to an impoverishment of all the liberated peoples, who today, for their survival, seek help among the exploited, neuroticized, democratic peoples of the West and precisely among those German-speaking democracies that they have now inherited, those murderous Republicans of Nature-destroying profiteers over all the seas and peoples and animals and plants. This disconcerting helplessness becomes a fall into the abyss of comfort in the misery of forms devoid of art. Sometimes, in the case of electronic phototypesetting, into a recollection of its incunabular origins. But everything else is the preparation for the great curse, destruction of the foundation, disintegration, burning of the ships, grievously devastating, full of battles and senseless actions. From Hitler’s “blood and soil” dream of powerless and deadly emptiness of the hollowed-out form to the end of an atom-bomb and missile generation with its electronic attack on the elements.