For a long time, we heard of the reproach about the life of abundance of the ruling class, that was the nobility and then the bourgeoisie. It has been only a short while that our society, at least in Germany, has been called a society of abundance. Everybody drives with two dozen horsepower; everybody has a right to flowing water and comfortable baths, obviously in his apartment or in a flat with others under the same roof. And everybody has many servants in the form of gadgets around one and yet one does not need a chamber for them and no stable for the horses and no coal-cellar for the bath water and nobody feels obliged and affected by what we would call art; it is not necessary for the perpetuation of our history, as long as it mentions us, if only the son studies, so that he, like all the others, has it better.
We know the story of how the old Rothschild was asked by his worker about the distribution of money to all, and how he had, affably and smilingly, given him, the man from the people, a penny, his share. Neither of the two, nobody, knew then at whose cost the revolutionizing of the democratic republic would be. Art today does not mirror development. It goes ahead of it as a nature-estranging culture of the artificial surrogate man.
The war, for years the greatest evil since childhood days, a nightmare of radio announcements and trails of the deadly silver birds of those bombers etched against the cities over the skies up to the treks of those fleeing, changed to peace so that the children’s saying came true that recommended that the war be enjoyed, for the peace would be frightening. It is the peace of anxious good living where the removal of this threat signifies catastrophes and poisoning for everyone who throws down his weapons. Must we? We must. Not in order to get food. Not for the body, for we are sated and destroy the abundance for premiums so that that which remains becomes more expensive, and we do not nurture the mind.
We must, because we must, like the death-instinct that destines anyone born to death. In the meantime, personal drive, and whoever is lucky, makes something of it, which is the art of our life. Instead of aristocracy, the media elite of film and television stars emerged from fashion and elected politicians, changing every four years, and sportsmen for a short time or interpreters and commentators of current affairs and old music scores and texts. And thus instead of order and nobility, prizes, from Nobel to Oscar in Hollywood, and always money, which measures in terms of monetary value instead of honor. The amount of the monetary sums denotes the merit that one calls success, and one means thereby the cash-register and the masses. And where earlier knightly property was given with seemly conditions to honored people and whence, later on, everybody could buy land and name for himself, the country itself, like the land, became worthless.
I fought for this republic and democracy, when it was threatened by terror from “Hitler’s children,” who would not be democratized between the democratic lie and pluralistic practical constraints. The kingly idea of the past centuries guaranteed more to a few than the democratic system promised little to many, an enrichment at the cost of the survival of the world. We stand before the question of global downfall and the task of the artistic conception of immortality, and of the hierarchies of quality and rank, favoring a short unhappy wealth of the many, wallowing in the pleasure orgies of practical comfort. Thus he spake and was not anywhere near the end, always a man one could laugh at.
Through the model of rural culture, a world shone in which man is not the main thing. Even if the world can mirror itself in his face, he is still only a part and responsible in a greater interrelationship, where the animals and plants, paths and trees, factories and houses, and house and yard and herd are a whole only together and not according to use, though they were usefully considered and taken care of. There it can so happen that the cry of a living being, whether as a tree or in the glance of a cow, becomes more important than our interests, and that the corn before the storm during its harvest is more important than trade-union business. Men come and go, but art, which was of Nature, remains. Perhaps one says then this art is inhuman or disinterested in man. But how can that be, when man is a part of Nature, but art the most human activity of nature, divine not as human projects but human as a natural divine gift.
The lost equality of man and animal, of plants and the earth only produces the tragedy of our present-day feeling for the world, after man has led his existence as a species to the thresholds of the abyss, triumphing, but with a victory over animals, plants and the earth that will be his downfall, where there remains only a lament about the curse that condemns him to it, as already foreshadowed in the old artworks, especially those of the Greek beginnings.
When, in 1945, the victors of the West came to liberate, as they say today, it happened as a great crime, and the liberators appeared not only as men who took revenge on the enemies, but as avengers against the whole of Nature, for “when one wishes to substitute a superior order for another, one must set up a highest, most general ideal and one understandable to all the people” and “the violence of the old regime will only be destroyed by non-participation in violence, and not at all by the new and foolish acts of violence, which are now being committed” (Tolstoy).
And those who now appeared in Eastern Europe appeared as if ordered, as the misfortune of the world-revolution, as a furor over the world from Europe to Vietnam. These sufferings that we see before us in exemplary form in the German eastern provinces in 1945, with images of guilt and screams and humiliation and tears of revenge, stand before us like a commission for a tragic poem, of that honor as the only truth that permits art, and even if it be suppressed, as in the old prohibition of pictures, as signs of old laments, and if it be as the last deed of the overcoming art that brings forth the beautiful, even if, like horror, only to be thought of and fought for with difficulty.