Germany after 1945 as the airfield of modern Europe, in view of a strategy of intellectual imperialism, if one observes the CIA influences and indeed the culture magazines after 1945 in France, England, Italy, Austria and Germany. What was until now represented as an East-West conflict of the Cold War has been also, and above all, a strategy for the occupation of opinions and interpretations of the old continent, wherein Germany was an open battlefield because of its defeat. Today it may be asked if Germany is still in a position, without the help of the East, to play a role, based on its own identity, in the European concert, where even the other countries have lost their authenticity.
40 years of post-war history stand at one’s disposal and even if it be for just one moment of that truth of the question to oneself about what every person has done in his part of the downfall and of the victory. GDR or Federal Republic reunited? Swabia with Saxony, the Rhineland with Thuringia, Bavaria and Brandenburg, Mecklenburg and Holstein, Pomerania and Westphalia, would be partners. Before them do we have to justify ourselves, before this past and future, a future that could grow out of it, unfailingly with those provinces of East Prussia, Silesia, East Pomerania at the heart of memory, which it is necessary to face up to, if art should have a meaning hereafter. But where are they now, the friends of the Enlightenment intelligentsia who speak of the happiness of the eastern peoples under Communism. Where Willy Brandt, who spoke of Germany as a country without outstanding issues, the man who praises himself and is celebrated as the inventor and hero of the Eastern treaties. And if everything degenerates, collapses, once again, one thing has become clear, the peoples, however much they may also sink once again into their daily routine, have shown how it is for them, in spite of the torchlight processions before the powerful, in spite of the occasional applause and the silence. The utopia of Communism looks like this. To speak in the name of Germany will always have to be to speak of it from Kant’s Königsberg to Beuys’ Kleve, from Runge’s Prussia to Hauptmann’s Silesia and from Kleist’s West Pomerania to Heidegger’s Freiburg. Everything else is, however respectable for personal reasons, without the right of identity and not authentic to itself, as without the mandate of history, which is the people in their culture, which must grow out of the provinces of the country.
That which does not speak from the memory of this ancestry, taking into consideration everything that arises, is as something spoken in vain; it was never and will never be the truth, like a vain bauble of the moment, without the significance of the people and their history, which arises from centuries, just as peoples, even after 2000 years, still look for, and are capable of finding, their way, and even if it is against the whole world. That is the lost world, and so will it be, unless the gravediggers too have long ago lost it and therewith themselves, like a death without a grave. And if one asks why Germany, the cultured people in the middle of Europe, was capable of this, as in its recent past, then one must answer, it had to be precisely this country, the most neglected among the nations of the world, the men who sacrifice their life to the eternity of art, the most doltish and ridiculous, between pathos and gnomishness when it was a question of the inventions of the senses, and in cuisine, incapable of love and untalented. They were needed for the eeriness of the historical deed, for the world-spirit has walked over corpses and art has consumed the world, from the victims of Christianization and those of the Crusades, via slave trade and witch trials, with the murders of the Protestants by the Catholics and vice-versa, and to the conquests of the colonialists. In the end, the eagle shakes the dust from its wings and flies towards the sun — if there are still eagles and men capable of seeing them, and of finding out what the sun is, and means — renewing itself for new deeds.