One called the expropriation of a mostly landed property, or a factory, or large capital, from the possession of one person in favor of another or of the state “dispossession.” In this way, the Eastern regimes proceeded: for example, after 1945, even in East Germany, in the present-day territory of the GDR. This dispossession of property can take place also in the intellectual field and that occurs also especially in such cases with us here where the material dispossession was wished for, as they say, and did not take place. One who performs historical texts in the theater must decide if he aims at fidelity to the work, whereby he falls into the danger of sinking into the museum-like, or if he incorporates his own age more strongly in order to bring himself and the viewers closer to the historical text, or how far the present-day adapter himself realizes, in direction, representation and decor, what one then calls director’s theater. That often happens through film-like superimpositions as the aesthetics of the age — either of one’s own or of changeable levels determined by the era — also in the interest of ideologies determined by the era instead of the original ones of the works.
Here one must know that thereby are not meant the old texts or structures, of a Shakespeare, for example, or a Richard Wagner, but that by intentionally interpreting for originality, instead of providing the service lost to the work, other and one’s own wishes for realization are pushed forward to the point of exploitation, abuse or destruction of that which was originally meant. That is often the case, and not through a lack of competence, or absence of ingeniousness in comparison to the original, but intentional and dispossessing, not of a spiritual nature, and quite blatant. New for every generation. Ruthless exploitation. And that is often not a sign of a certain tragic sense and of life and survival without humility, but contemptuous and wished-for helplessness. Thus, enrichment for one’s own ends is meant.
With the dispossession in the countryside, there arose a social disordering of all motives in work and life, a change, and mostly destruction, of all cultures. Economically, we see formerly rich agrarian states today as hungry beggars. Facing this dispossession in the East stands that industrialization of the land in the West that regulates its prices through the destruction of surplus and with lands overfertilized with chemicals. The industrialized agriculture becomes an exploitative partner of the chemical industry in the interest of job protection, ��and the consumer stands at the other end of the advancement in production, in those old bread-and-salt rituals of a lifestyle that Hölderlin could call a bread-and-wine one.
It is dispossession from within. The poorest enrich themselves externally where, internally, the identity of the centuries-old culture is lost.