Still — on one side — in soft arches through the cooling foliage of the trees. Damp smell from the soil of nocturnal hard work, from mountain water and autumn leaves. From the other side, the other shore, the stench of car noise threatens, here still the steep slopes supported with human effort, painstakingly, meter upon meter, with a forceful hand and wrested from nature. The wooded terrain, the edges made by logs on the steep slope, and the steps with lumber across the end and fixed in the earth, so that it does not slip. Human circumspection and help, detectable with every step by the tree roots and the addition of sympathetic constructions of these people who were active here, lead in a friendly way around the deeply declining mountain into the lake. At the end, the road. They had tried to level this path of the generations with a road around the lake with digging and sawing. Workplaces, the flow of traffic — the buses and tourists who go to the lake’s end still have to come back on the same route — all should, and want also to, have it comfortable.
Money from the provincial capital supports such plans, politicians want to be elected; whoever draws a lot of money from the pots is the victor.
The houses, which were once guesthouses, want to be filled and they are filled with the masses. There, where the last remainder of the route divides, a signpost has been affixed in such a way that the wanderer is led over the new macadamized road, far from the old path, whose last part was immediately allowed to fall into disrepair. On the signpost is written: Go at your own risk, that is, that the bridges over the streams are decayed and unsound, and the man is forced onto the main road so that the old, loving effort will no longer be expected of him as a travail. And he sees the people who come from the other side. They come with faces bloated with hormones and appear like the victims of the age. And he sees the rickety or schizophrenically neurotic women, dyed and trimmed. And he sees the exposed thighs reddening in their too short trousers. And they come in underwear with plastic rucksacks and trainers, they come with mountain bikes, prams, which they carry over the roots with piquant deodorant, the stench of people against the smell of the wood and the mountain. And if they are now pallid or plumply tanned with bitten-off hair, or long hanging or with shaved bald head, whatever they do, with a car or without, is really of no importance. Only the way is still there, like an old life, without the trees of the wood still...
And when they cut down the primeval forests now, they say there: “and you?” Even they want to have it as we do. Everything accessible, for every physically handicapped person, the world of spiritual crippling.
I know they will triumph. This way is still a complaint against the age. Their houses will triumph, the barbed-wire fences instead of the wooden, the gravel, the crippled plants, the stench and the noise, the drugs of the children who no longer resist it, the lies and the chemicals and the sale of choking elation in the joy of achievement. And the pseudo-discussions of the revolts will triumph in confirmation. Germany as the praised country finally, into whose West one flees. From the East of the road, in the center of Europe, of a Poland which speaks of catastrophes if these here do not help, and a Russia whose ideological flop of the century does not make anyone hold his breath any more, and of an exhausted Bohemia and Moravia and of a neurotic West whose Christianity, without creative strength, is weakened and exploited. I know it will be smothered by the well-intentioned, by all that must come, everything else is only a complaint of the age.
I know that all this will disappear. The streams, the shores of the lake, the meadows, no lake will invite one to bathe, no bird, no tree will exist, no window to be opened, wide and free, to the outside, and inside, no floors that wear out, so that they become older, like already now the clothes of old custom, the hearths, the fires. Gone the coming over the slope of green meadows, blue in their shadows, the gaily colored clothes, purple, red and pink and black and green and white, the blouses, on gently twisting paths.
Just as in the East and North, whence I came, through a hard rift more than 40 years ago, everything ended, centuries-old cultures, so here too, and voluntarily, everything will gradually disappear, disappear through sale and exploitation. What does not suit the new socially and psychologically analyzed community of the democratic power systems has no chance. The hard-edge will come, as from the slum of the worst nightmare, to displace all views, on all slopes, before all welcoming woods and meadows, the paths asphalted and straight and treeless and wide, for only the wide and the straight is supported with funds from the head office.
Yes, everything belongs to them; they have appropriated it, the windows that close with a handle, the doors that no longer make a sound, walls without cracks or signs of age forever, like love without a consequence, consequences without love, every vista altered that no image any more applies to the old poetry of our ancestry. The old guests, the ones much praised today, from Freud, the archaeologist of the soul, to Theodor Herzl,150 whose bicycle still stands in his native country museum, before he set off for his promised land, to lead his people to Israel, from Hofmannsthal151 via H. Broch152 to Gustav Mahler,153 who would all, as the farmer says from the neighborhood, “ride out from the chests and enter in like lightning into the chimney” if they saw what has grown out of their doctrines and countries. The last remnant of life before the natural downfall, the glimpses and faces, the words and songs, hand tools and customs, clothes and smells, the meadows and the country, not yet spoiled with buildings, in the last corner of the western world. At the time of the entrance of the plague, of the evil from the welfare slum of our suburbs. Certain that everything that enters here has already for a long time been the present of our daily habits outside, what surrounds us and is our life, daily, as “prosperity,” exploited land and images and tones and words, smooth and hard around us, the future cheap and loveless, in all our travels, paid for dearly. The race of superior men finally seduced, fat booty of corruption and business, of comfort, the land of poets and thinkers.
I know that one day even these already worn-out floors and planks must be exchanged, because they are old, and that the new will not be like the old, not so broad, not so thick, narrow and recessed, dried without difficulty, waxed quickly and without value. Like the new houses. And I know that one day all places will be built over, every meadow and the freedom of view that will, one day, have been of a past art of life. And the feet will no longer go over these soils; they will no longer climb the outworn steps of the generations; everything will be replaced by the modernization of a future that is a curse, unstoppable. But I, when I came from the North and East of Germany, fleeing from the destroyed cultures of dispossession and division and re-education, brutally and directly, still came from the country, from the old Empire, of a childhood, of an old social order, I saw still the peasant dances, of love, afterwards, barely, while the others around me, my generation of art, prepared themselves to go along, to the conquest of the new world at the side of, and before, the powerful people of the success of the modern world. I still saw the old rites, heard the streams in the night, still found verdant ground and the woods and the grass around the houses made of wood, was among the pride of these men of simple birth and touched their happiness once more, as before the end of the world, as if doomed to hold on, like a warning, incapable of holding on to the daily deception which itself cannot hold, pursued by images and tones of another life, to recall once again that which has been, in art, which nobody wants any more, but has always sought for, stamped by this taint from losses, most recently by the power of lamenting, imprisoned for its knowledge. Knowing also that they have been divided, violated, re-educated, turned upside-down, enticed and threatened and have had awakened in them false instincts, against themselves, who have lost everything in the greatest prosperity of the world since its existence. Yes, they will triumph, their feet will no longer go over old thick planks, hewn by hand, through rooms and over steps and balconies, footbridges and steps and paths thought of by caring hands; they will go over asphalt motorways and macadam, under the burning sun, producing allergies, between artificial plants, and forget the network of these carefully considered bridges and paths and ways and lands and grounds which once led and decayed, were no longer used and cleared, reoriented, into the bare and the straight and the brutal, familiar to the automobile-man. The web of bridges and ways and grounds, developed and maintained through centuries and generations, new every year, over mountains and valleys, through rivers and lands and places, touching houses and seas or lakes, decayed, rotted, gone. But I can say I have still experienced it, this country and homeland, of art eventually, and the house and yard and the elements of things of daily work, looked after by the sweat of the hands, the innocence of the faces and the hierarchy of the social orders that held everything together.