Thomas Bernhard, the author of his last work from the scornful despair of the apocalypse, died at the right time. The death of Beckett ends an epoch of post-war neuroses and fears. Because of the liberation, short shrift will be given the last functionary of the lack of freedom of the East. And so the last country of Europe comes back to its community. At the moment of this decision, poems were read there on the squares of death and on the TV, and with this last stone in the wall of Europe, the gate is being opened, if in a roundabout way and bloodily, and even if it is as a sign of what was spared the others. But the significance is the same. The peoples awaken not from Stalinism, but from Marxism as from the darkest nightmare, and Europe is once again one. And if art arises from sorrow, it has to be based here, as also the laments for the losses. In the North, the annexation of the Baltic states by Stalin’s Soviet Union is declared to be null and void. In Prague, a writer, just freed from the prison of the powerful, is elected by these persecutors themselves as president. The wall has fallen and its builders are excluded from the Party. The lie of rational Socialism is exposed and yet one must be thankful to the most powerful leader of this ideology for the new freedom. And all neurotic art, which was based on it, and all the intellectual systems of the left intellectuals will no longer be what they were. The people, in innermost reduction to their natural existence, are one once again and have discovered themselves. What remains is the poverty of anti-nature, as the greatest wealth of possible knowledge. The masks fall, the nets, the veil of a system of envy and aesthetics of hatred and all self-inflicted injuries, as the false falls from the limbs, faces and hearts of men. The stripping makes one freeze and warms from inside at the same time. The words liberation, degradation and scorn receive a new significance and reconfigure themselves. Initial transactions are made through internationalism where freedom is set up instead of that joy of music of Beethoven and Schiller, where the authentic sufferings of the place alone can attest to the new freedom. All art that does not take into account these new things would remain without reality. And all the reality of this development gives to the TV and radio daily visual and aural nourishment with a tension and directness that cannot be imitated by art. True art begins here. And it is as if history had taken a people quite simply by the hand and said, “Come, hush.” The nations, a continent at the end of its cultures. It is just that the peoples have been awakened, and long is the way from the mother to the productive wife in the form of the marble cheerfulness of classical warmth, of that strictness of art, even if it be as a torso of the distant memories of lived history.
Romanian TV images: the last bloody battle on European soil.
All power just been used against the bloodhounds of the Securitate194 in view of their atrocities of slashed and re-sutured corpses, rituals including child-violations of this sort. And then, when they summon the captives,195 pale and trembling like mangy dogs of misery, I find myself being their lawyer to find out why, what and who, and yet defend the creature that remains there. Suited as a soldier, less as a politician. Reconciliation afterwards. After Stalin and Hitler or Franco and Mussolini? And what led to them and what followed from them as downfall and victory. So long as there is land under one’s feet and the soil nourishes the heart, from which joy comes, life will always rise again from the blood of murdered life.
The peoples from the East teach us faint-hearted people something about truth, and all others to accept reality as their own, the losses of forests and the misery of those advanced in our plastic poverty.
And they teach what discipline is, what freedom without violence is and a new representation, like a power from below when the president really comes from the people. And they teach joy as an ode from Prague, while our joy is already occupied, when the conductor comes from the dissidents, as there. And it is that liberation in the East — which was not gifted as to those in the West, as they say — as a true breakup, not of the businesses, where even the noise is still a jubilation and the truth modest, simple and cautious. Passing the torch from country to country, once more. And one compares the mockery of 1968, of the neurotic impoverishment of the Western youth with that of today in the East, where the need for truth comes from within. The ugly Germany, the ugliest that ever was, has now been taken possession of. Without a foreign decree, without re-education and without forced and feigned praise for that which once defiled. Taken possession of by life to a new authenticity of sufferings that lead to art, or to nothing. We have the choice, once again.
The Poles have set the crown on their eagle once again. They know what a people is without a state, but also what a people is without a crown.