When the directorship of the new opera in Paris — one of the most expensive and dreariest concrete buildings of the present-day world, on the site of the Bastille,125 where the Revolution had begun, about which so much is spoken today as the beginning of our epoch of freedom and equality and all manner of wealth on which we live — had to be assigned, the man designated for it demanded as much money for a year, out of which he would work only a few months there, as other men do not earn in their whole life to be able to provide their families a home to live in and to feed them and to educate their children. That was the money for the administration of art, which others created and, in the comparable poverty of past times, as one says today, for which they died.
When the man who was invited to the post was not to receive that, there was anger and almost all the great names of the art business of our age showed solidarity with him, worldwide and as taken for granted. For all of them live in this way for art, which they kill. Through this world, which pays them.
Tolstoy had, in the last years of his life, withdrawn to the country. He wrote of the life of the simple people around him, of the strawberries in the woods, of the misfortune of a horse’s death for the peasants, in comparison to the rich table at which he sat and which he was used to. He was angry with his people, from whom he came, and he thought and thought about it. The last texts of the count were those of a monk of his country. The photos of these years show a simple bed on a wooden floor and a table such as secretaries use. The book-cases show prints of Raphael and some photos of the family and of his life, and the leather sofa is as we would like to have it today, almost plain and without art, but carefully worked. The poor people around him in the country were, as far as I know, careful, clean and simple. The language of his texts was not interested in fine expressions, and without brilliance, as the foreword says, “brittle, fresco-like, of little elegance, weightier in its declarations, with repetitions, sentences built in a parallel manner, lapses, contrasts, violations of rules, without corrections, the external form second-rate.”
He wrote confessional appeals, fragmentary narratives and his confession, in which he recanted his earlier works, which made him important and well-known, as a confession also of another life and goal and artistic work after them. For his contemporaries, he was often a puzzle, and at the end, he disappeared to die in the wide expanse of his country. He had thrown away everything and moved within the seclusion and simplicity of his country life, which became increasingly clearer, as he learned of it from the peasants, from the things and plants and animals. He knew that art, pressed through much struggle in order to impose itself against itself and others, and from vanity, if it wishes to be art and is art, has to go into the center of all movements and to the highest height of our possibilities, and that it itself, and precisely then, has a fatal tendency to be, in the most sacred moment, once again vain and belligerent, which puts all the earlier efforts at purification into question and that it often, mostly even then, is wrecked, again at the last moment, on that which it was all about, losing everything achieved earlier. The truth of life at the end, notices, letters, tales like pictures, the daily life, observations, the coming and going of men, seasons, worries and joys, harvest and sowing. He abandoned much from his earlier life that was important to his art. But only one who has something can abandon it. So the world wallows on, fat in the meantime like its art, which, however, should be its highest judge.
For the first twelve years I lived in West Pomerania, a flat country, where corn and potatoes and turnips were cultivated, between paddocks and gardens full of fruit trees; everything that we ate came from the garden or from our own management of the farm. The children of the people, as one said there in the house in which I grew up, and as one called the day-laborers, were my intimate friends during these first years, and I preferred to sit in the kitchens with them than at home at the table, upright and with washed hands and silent as a fish. For it was said, “Children at the table, silent as fish.” Everything that I learned I learned from them, the names of things and about the world. I did not go back there, from where we did not indeed flee but moved out, at night, just two years after 1945, to the northern city. And I cannot go back there, not because childhood cannot be relived, but because there is something else there. The land is gone, nothing else in its place, for the square of those times is gone and it was the bad time for Germany which my father was right in fearing. And the world of this house was not healthy, as regards the family. I cannot go back into this country of a Tolstoy, because the world, where the worst thing was still better than this, is no longer there, because the simplicity is gone, that of the simple things and words and pictures and their innate being.
Tolstoy wrote letters, notices, narratives, of things he knew, or sketches of art. And it was for the drawers, the safes, hidden from the censors of Tsarist Russia, and he shouted about shame and horror and outrage and with hatred, and sympathized with the maliciously betrayed people, and imagine if one could say such things about the present-day people, the powerful, the victors, without their falling upon one like dogs as upon a renegade who has been freed, as free as a bird among medieval kings.
Yes, I despise this system of irresponsibility, where factual constraints, all the wrong decisions make it plainly clear where appeal is made to the weak — who draw us down — by the few who acquire power cynically for themselves in order to dominate the majority by deceptive means, declaring that it is for the good of all. And where those ruling at any time, in order to come to power on behalf of the real powers that run things in the present age and in order to obtain the deceived majority, promise more and more things, which is, however, eventually recognized, meaning the end — in silence, which has become the precondition of all conformity.
But I also moved, came over from East Germany many years ago, arduously through a free decision, alone, as a 17-year old, and requested acceptance, went through many camps and was supported by the state until the end of my studies and was glad to be here because over there it was still worse, and was grateful, a grateful citizen, and received funds to make films, all with public monies, fought for with difficulty, criticized, awarded prizes; the details of this battle, which was often a hell, little suited for recollection, are related elsewhere.
And I know about the advantages of a pluralistic system, under which we live, when one falls into these structures of general majority rule that is feigned and justifying everything (which is the bottom line), when one falls from grace in one place and can have more luck in others to get that which one previously failed to obtain, and I know about the advantages when one, as in life — where a tree falls here and there another arises — can come through, still, even with enemies, to the extent that one has the energy to declare one´s interests and wants them to become known, and I know about the advantages of the freedom to do that. Thus, I am also a child of this age, have come here because of my own resolution, been raised by it, nourished by it, have gone through its schools battling, and always been loyal, even when in strife, and often had to harvest abroad in order to experience what was not allowed here due to dark dismissal and fear of contamination.
But when I consider the situation, the development, the interests in film of the last 20 years in Germany and in other countries, the programs of the festivals, and think how a beautiful art, once rich in the echo of the old, did not survive even two or three generations and how this officially subsidized art today has degenerated into an industry of success, where the maximization of profit is encouraged by the state with subsidies as a democratic goal, where it must be demonstrated at the cash register what is best and should survive. When I observe the theaters as an inbreeding of the fattened routine with the ambition to be involved wherever it is going evilly, when I see men, what they do, how they look and whence they came, deep within, often still hiding a core of that which they still really want, and when I see the technology, the chemistry and the progress, the long praised and now shamefully hidden, how it is killing us in the end, hopelessly, exploiting, dragging down our best feelings and thoughts, seductively and threateningly, then I must, like Tolstoy, be horrified at how one has betrayed the people maliciously, cruelly and irredeemably.
Then one should think, crying out: why? And I remember a ruler whom we have learned to call evil daily, as the promoter of painting (his, admittedly), architecture (his), but, principally, of music (to the very core of his decisions), everything revolving around art, up to the machinery of murder, of film as the expression of the heroic epic of his appearance that was wished for by them, as he said, made up of the weekly newsreels of his war, which became ours, and as the builder of the Autobahn, understood as technological parkways through the Reich, as the lord of those machines of death that Kafka had already foreseen, and I know also that this art abused the world and deployed men as pawns and as a plan of its own, which accelerated the doom and drew the century to its conclusion.
I know that I am now an opponent of this age, when it flogs this past, which is however its inheritance and lives from it, that it strikes powerfully and dishonorably, since one needs that past in order to have much and to do much and to be allowed much today, and not always the best. An aesthetics of our age would have to cure and overcome the basic neuroses of our artistic relations, lament the losses, the supremacy of the victors, who have unlimited power via a moral victory to say and to do what the others may not on account of their aesthetically directed guilt, or must out of a deep self-estrangement, on the basis of a fundamental lie that debilitates everybody. From this sickness grows the art that praises sickness, afraid that the charlatanry of that lie might come to light, as if it did not need evil to be powerful.
I say that from the perspective of lost childhood with a glance through the window at the nest of storks who have died out because they do not find any food any more among the men of these world-interests. I say that with a glance at the barn with the straw roof and wooden beams for cows and pigs, long since fallen down, like that stall for the horses and the straw in front with the smell of chaff and the saddles and the straps fallen down and rotted and thrown away and trampled upon, left lying, due to no longer being used. Belonging to this are the linden trees on the back terrace, dark, shady, and big, and the cobblestones on the yard, surrounded by that fence which encompassed everything, and belonging to this is the church across from the yard, over the dried up pond, when one goes out of the door, every day, and the churchyard on the way to the school, and belonging to this are the lanes to bathing in the river, dusty and between the corn, the fields and their smells, to go barefoot between the stubble, or leaping from heaven towards hell, in the spring sun, on the warming mud wall, and belonging to this are the caverns in the straw, long and labyrinthine and strictly forbidden, and belonging to this is the drift ice between winter and summer. That is the established order which it made sense and was pleasurable to transgress only because the responsibility for everything was assured, as with the faces, the daily assistance and the life between these Poles and French and Belgians of the war, prisoners around me, like the men of my own language.
All that collapsed in 1945. Cruel liberation through murder, rape, plunder, around us, fire and hatred and flight. But the monstrous thing was not the war that caused, as a revenge, the most barbarian instinct of man. The worst is that that was wished for which was earlier persecuted with horror even by the enemy, and that it was endorsed there, now here, by one’s own people, smirking, silently, fighting off even the possible laments of art that would promise justice in a victory in the battle-scene pediments126 where the beautiful still triumphs over the barbaric in the grief of the tragic.