Behind everything, beyond all public confessions, hiding itself latently for centuries, if there is still time for future generations, stands that fear of having failed when one took one’s chances. The expulsion of intuition and conscience that everything is different, that one really wants and should want something different, the hiding of the self beyond longing. One recognizes that in everybody, in the houses, the cities, the streets instead of paths, in politics, in life, in the world that is being built, in the culture which they have lost and in the conscience about which nobody speaks any more. I myself should speak more definitely of my birth, of the constellation under which I was born, my relations with my parents, the schools, the places, the East-West change, university studies and career and works, and their relations to the public up to now. Had I not also sought to attract attention among the public, to make myself comfortable, or through provocation, with the irony of kitsch, in the homosexual scene of the international art business, hiding real things, ideally to suit many if possible; would I also not have had to confess how even I mentioned social problems in the wished-for public manner in order to ingratiate myself psychologically so that I was conformable to the wished-for analyses, through rebelliousness and discord, but still in such a way that the agencies which give money, the parties, churches, trade union groups promoted my projects, that I passed within the spectrum of plurality, fulfilled the consensus, of course not in line with the Vietnam protester or the ’68er, but still in such a way that I erased my position or origin, even if not in a proletarian and resistant way, still in an anti-fascist one, as one says, even if not using Hitler as the whetstone of my career, that never, and did I not hide for long the fact of being a man from the country, from the hierarchical structures of nature and closer to those of the aristocratically formed systems of norms than to the neurotic attitudes of the incestuous business here? Did I not know of the differences of social orders through birth, and was silent? Different the classes and races and merits, as among plants, animals, so also the human destinies. I was silent. As in the East, before the switch to the West, on questionnaires, in order to secure benefits for myself as much as possible. Had I also not gone along, coquettishly, wanted recognition in their media, fought over my sustenance, waited for Hollywood calls, sought box-office success as a sign of recognition like the highest democratic accolade of a proof of majority? I knew of the degradations of the Enlightenment, fighting it, and still spoke with their tongues and avoided everything that might harm and, if not, then in the hope that resistance would finally be discovered and honored and praised, like the good at the end of fairy-tales, and knew however for a long time that the artistic business had lost that instinct that, like the investigative instinct of the hunter, looks for the core of things. Good for him who is free of it. In the last summer of his life, Kleist wrote in a letter: “Sometimes, at a reading or in the theater, there blows a gust of wind from my earliest youth. Life, which lies completely desolate before me, acquires at once a wonderfully splendid vista and powers stir in me which I thought had died. Then I want to follow my heart fully where it leads me and to consider absolutely nothing apart from my own inner satisfaction. The judgment of men has up to now ruled me too much.” Knowledge at the end. So I was certainly not among their leaders but was I not also a participant in the times, a part of those courting recognition and contending, contesting to the point of admiration, surrounded by the business of liberation leftists and an arts scene that sought for the judgment of the media like parasites that sate themselves on the abundance of the sham life?
Did I not also seek to make myself the darling among the generation of emigrants128 as the sole authority who, unharmed by the guilt of the fathers, interpret the world intellectually, guarantee the past and the future, who connected worldwide power, progress and understanding as the authority of suffering and I knew that whoever finds recognition here gets ahead, far beyond Germany, the cursed, just as religious fervor was the basis of all culture in the ages of the Christian domination of our culture, with the fear of the curse of excommunication of their intellectual popes. There, there were disagreements, possibilities for discussion and capacities for empathy, recognition, as the only one still possible here, and the old form, which those people found here, in that what these works were, was something no longer permitted in Germany, that had become unfit, did not succeed any more, was persecuted on account of its difference, which however was characteristic. They were the only ones who could understand to a certain degree the lost aesthetics breaking through the taboo and demanding art of the old laws to a certain degree, for they had not been there when temptation became a punishment, guilt, and they were, on account of their fatal situation, excluded from the sufferings of this guilt for other deeds.
A collage aesthetics arose from that of the documentary one, in associations, blocks, montages, situations, citations, ideas, chance — verified no matter how — with an artistic aura, in search of the place, strictly regulated by its own order, instead of the unity of feeling and of breadth that arises from the certainty of life’s coordinates in heaven and hell, or from time and space. It was a fragmented age that strove towards a whole, however desperately, uncertain of the space in which we live.
“Quarry of history” I once said. From Füssli129 to Ingres,130 and projected the world history of art and put in music from Lehar to Wagner and set in images of compositions from Nietzsche to Brecht next to one another, instead of life, of the suppressed, made striking or interesting, favored by an international aesthetics of the age, discussed, contested, or praised. But if boycotted and scorned by Germany then certainly not for doctrinal or any other critical reasons. But all around, everything lives from it, on the theater stages, in copy after copy, through the histories of art. Much can be said for it. But also: instead of one’s own life, one’s own creative imagination, or from fear of the lie that lives in the destruction through that which is base?
Thus, would even this author be caught here as a long-time collaborator of our Western welfare organs of the re-education systems, also as one who in a cowardly manner, and blindly, buried his head and lied? Who himself only survived on the margins and got through some fruits as a sign that there is something other than the usual? And who only came through with the help of foreign countries and the victors themselves, finding understanding there alone from unbroken hearts, an understanding of the productions after and before? And tolerated by them on the international markets of reputation, scolded, commissioned, and secretly used the benefits of pluralism in the downfall, and one who knows that even the confession of a Nietzsche, still surviving in madness in the Kaiser Reich of the turn of the century, would not be thinkable in the present-day democracies, in the free and censorless (Antichrist, Ecce Homo).
Thus was I, in spite of all difference, not free of that cramp and played along even in my own way, while life since 1945 choked in lies and enrichment, in losses, which allows one to say many things — that it is already more than five minutes to twelve. The result of the world situation after Hitler. In the middle of Europe. Only a return helps, nothing else helps any more, and who is strong enough for that. It would mean renouncing everything, even finally those fairytale beliefs that in the end the good wins and the prince or his good deed will be discovered in spite of all the slanderers and it is worth renouncing the raging strife, as a mission and right and belief for a better world that means and is art in life.
The old Tolstoy withdrew to the country. What he left, was repelled by, that from which he distanced himself, was the Russian society of the cities. He could return to himself in the simple things, in men. And when this old Tolstoy withdrew to the country of his origin, from the lies of society, he discovered poverty, simplicity and old age. He lived among those who knew why one moved the pole up and down so that indeed the water would be pumped onto the land and the other gathered fruit and there would be together a whole, which is the loneliness of isolation scorned today, the emigration trauma of those who have got on in life in hubbub and stench. I still know in such an old place from the past, in the mountains, a pair of old people in this isolation with one or two cows, whose milk they, now restricted, can only sell. Where already the children and grandchildren wait for the death of the old, until they can thereafter spoil their lands, on which they lived for centuries, with buildings, and drink and waste their money in exotic travels. And the settlers from the cities wait for their hard-edged houses with the marble baths and the businessmen who provide everything. Where would the simple be found among the educated, the simple room in the luxury of the sated, this room with modest light which the people before us knew — among the hard-edged surfaces of artificial walls and floors loaded with artificial lamination, illuminated with lamps without light. Where is the old happiness of those faithful to art, when the people have become poor due to prosperity as never before?
What used to be the other side of the good and the beautiful and of the bright, of the sun, was hell and night. Today one will, and must, go beyond, beyond the night, evil, and irony and the ugliness of violence and rage and stupidity in the luxury of democratic prosperity and its abundance, of the media happiness born of cynicism as the idyll of their baseness.
Thus have I mingled in the crowds at festivals, degraded myself in maintaining my life for prizes, rebelled against the judgments of their public officials in a ridiculous way, wallowed in stench and hubbub, killed trees, dirtied water, driven out birds, by participating in this system of suppression and enslavement, in which we were born and bred in our annihilating age, simply by participating in daily living, and allowing myself to rush into their diabolical system, when attention was not paid or when it became very bad. But where is the land to which Tolstoy withdrew, where this ancestry, where the ease, the simplicity of poverty and its expressions? Only after that, after an abjuration of this system would a freedom be possible, the one from inside, the other one about which it always really was. Beyond the night that surrounds us. Every additional means of technique, of the budget that, along with simple pen and paper, is necessary to be a warning and joy to the meanest expression of thoughts, is not allowed and is fit to speak against us before the highest judge, the last. Thus did I write recently to a man: worlds, universes of thought and meaning, the nature of history, return to the first years of life, as always, otherwise brought up, but now by one’s own knowledge. Thus, only that is allowed which nobody wants from the present-day functionaries and ideologues and businessmen, rather than that which is still possible in the other part of the night, far from the businesses and when all are asleep, outside of the working hours of their brothels, like revolutionary deeds beyond the ugliness of all the bestialities of these democracies, like something never seen or heard of before by the daily senses, visible and audible. Beyond the night. Autographs of the soul. Have I also not made it too comfortable for myself, when another way was also given, was possible, and the solutions harder, in order to weigh myself down then with hardship and burdens in a wanton manner in order to justify myself.
When I, as the son of a previously ruling class, could not really go to the high school like so many of my pedigree — in the Czechoslovakia of the present president,131 for example — did I not like finding an intercession that would salvage for me a more comfortable way than that through the simple strata of people and work? However dependent still on my parents and needing education urgently. When, finally fleeing from there, from school and the parental home, from this state, I did not find theater and film, did I not like huddling by the warm oven of a scholarship at a hated school once again, evading the threatening offers, as an unlearned refugee, from farming and mining, in order to hide there, and, finally freed from this time of martyrdom, from this school, like an exile, as it came to a natural end, however hard, did I not go again to a life out of the way and choose the bookish university in Munich thanks to secure scholarships, instead of encounters with men where they fight for their life? That other school and university, where authors and art grow out of life instead of out of papers? A typical way of our age, which says it all, what it was good for, and that nothing else has happened to many others now. But how hard it is to discover that from which the books, those of the age, arise and to avoid getting one’s hands dirty. It would require much idleness and a lack of demand perhaps, and peace, which is now really forced. One could also say the life of a drone of the intelligentsia of this age that has not been killed because this age has grown precisely from this anti-Nature.
I confess and apologize that I, even I, followed at that time, for a while, the false search for the self-fulfillment of a Günter Grass. I regret the consequences that that must have by now. For there were many decisive things involved in it and the wrath of these is now certainly tricky.