Besides the aesthetics of our diminution and all the pathological self-destruction, the devastation of nature and of history after 1945 was our trademark of identity loss, just as the land consolidation served the businesses of the destruction of natural growth, up to the tearing up of all reason, like the car-compatible city with the idea of urban agglomeration areas for the consuming mass market of our democratic welfare, as never before. To that corresponded the absent Eros in art. The bed was understood as the stage for political action, the business of sexual liberation defeating the Enlightenment playfulness. The acceptance of pills without reproduction, long wished for, was the answer to the fecundity of the “blood and soil” myth of a dying West. A car instead of a child was the logical motto of the intellectual inheritance. These intellectual educational shows were understood as provocations of the wished-for commerce with the body as a commodity. The cultural action of Eros became an art without the Eros of love, just as the godhead became an impotent evil spirit of a eunuch’s lasciviousness of raucous heartlessness. How could there be love in a nation that invented Auschwitz? Germany was intellectually out of the game of nations and therewith in a concert without sound, which left the world, in spite of all the dissonances of the cultural business, cold. For to die without lamentation is love without pleasure, and death without love like art without Eros, or eroticism without art.
In November and October of this year in Germany, it was as if they had discovered once again the passion of tears. And even if art stopped the intellectuals from taking up the flag before this passion of pure joy disintegrated into the maelstrom of careers of political parties and democratic bureaucracies of our global compulsions, it was still the happiness of the plastic-bag bliss for 100 marks and stinking Trabant cars, like a belated happiness that remained from the recorded trauma of silent centuries.