Everything was poisoned, matted and interwoven, and faked with tricks and banalities. Mockery and deceit and triviality pervade life, but here they were insolently recommended.
One must start from the fact that all strategic points of our thought — no item, no important book, no theater, no film, no exhibition, no image and no music, in no country of the last decades — even in the East without the Communist Party, without ideological denomination in science and politics here — appeared in this way without this unquestioning consensus of all the participants, or other than as an Enlightenment democratic leftist global interpretation, of history and the present, and that even all discussions and protests and oppositions were only mock-battles for further strengthening, and whoever did not go along with it fell through the net that holds everything together, of the media of this democratic public life — as, in former times, of the court — for the strengthening of the same political Moderns or of aesthetic fashions ante and post 1945, and served as intellectual exploitation of our own nature, recently hardened into the senility of functionaries, who drove out, smothered, persecuted the inventors themselves. At the end there remained only Nature, which had been violated. And even if it is very innocent and needs a long time to regenerate itself — still only in this way is there hope and the unique wealth, which it is all about. In everyone, there is also “the other” hidden, slumbering, suppressed, and there it is through the generations, through centuries, resting, under the blanket of the quick and cheap exploitation-systems of those false enriching careers, and needs only be awakened. Only a few were free of it, but all waited just for this real liberation, of which they normally spoke so maliciously, that liberation which deadened them, the false one, which captivated, to the point of nausea, behind which they wish for that which now once again has appeared, the new unity into a whole, at whatever price. And not because other ideologies, personalities achieve, confirm that, but the people. Through the junk of our progress beats the heart of the miserable.
I know the same people, not others, who today often say “We are the people,” praise in the newspapers and show on TV where Honecker’s parades have just been seen, who yesterday bore the Stalin flags and not always under compulsion, or earlier followed Hitler into the wars and are today strict anti-Fascists and tomorrow will, swaying, confirm the TV folklore from America on the show “Musikantenstadl,” as they used to be the audience for the homeland films196 from Ufa197 to Gloria Palast,198 as they betray today the same homeland of trees and animals. Only a Shakespeare of souls will realize it, only a Beethoven joy, a Leonardo devotion and hatred, cruelty; a magic potion makes the ass love199 and foes the beloved, but only the music of words and instruments from the heart makes life. What is sought for is the art that harmonizes things in such a way that men recognize themselves, weep in the positive sense; only that is valid, and recognition stands at the beginning of knowledge, that only this is an art of life, of the world today and always. Spiritual art is sought for in the currents and layers, in the close-ups and long shots, panoramas and things on the ground, beyond physics, vibrations of the senses, and it is still always man and the world, the cosmos of animals and plants, that is important, in him and in it. Representing that, this battle, is, was and will be our art, just in newer forms of our historical responsibility in each case. At the peak of technological possibilities, even with its denial where it restricts, according to the standard that was given to us, or which we have won.
On the other hand, we should not be unjust. How can anything like freedom ever come from these men of books, of the arts, the theater and films or music, when they were the first victims of the re-education, the favorite children of the privileges, of the refined pressure of soft seductions directly into the head. Contaminated from youth onwards and for decades. Assholes, said Thomas Bernhard, and he knew what he was talking about, in darkest despair.
Rescue can come only from below, from the uncontaminated and the poorest, from the East. One used to say from the simple people, from the illiterate, from those who are occupied only with life. And Physis200 is indeed to be won too, and weak, as we know, to deceive, but finally of another nature in the battle of the conscience. Capable of regeneration.
To be sure, there are also other examples, countries, times, children ... but that is a broad field.
Germany without borders, without western and eastern borders for customs and walls, as in the North and the South.
Europe like a Holy Empire of European cultured nations with individual state provinces. As something unnatural therein the expulsion from the homeland and history, and the prohibition of complaint. Unity, as before the drawing of borders, Poland, in Bohemia, Romania or Austria. And suddenly it becomes clear why everything had to go, the center, the consciousness of unity, and why the downfall triumphed up to the catastrophe in which that had to lead, like a Fury of the disappearance of the West, from the power-center of its life with pop-neuroses, freak-decadence, punk-arbitrariness, the Realism of the downfall,201 or Existentialism, towards the liberation from lies of 1945, and with the Socialist Realism of the East, devoid of blood and soil, the art of the eunuchs of power. Where a new beginning can be only as one of archaic origin from the center of losses, if the truth of feelings regulates understanding, where honorable weeping and laughing drives out everything unnatural — What leads through the world from the song in praise of love to the song of its mockery, that leads from the golden calf to the dance on the ruins of the lost world — where the states are founded anew according to the new law of freedom, which, under the influence of the manipulated opinions, is not unlimited but free, where it means being free from the pressure of intimidation and false enticements. And where democracy is not the expression of the majority, where equality does not always have to be right, but which should be represented by a necessary minority of a higher level of quality — as art, as a model, may demonstrate.
A question for art in West Germany, whether it can recognize the seduction and how it will deal with this recognition.
You will say again: A dull exhilaration, anti-Enlightenment, canaille, nationalists. Everything is “Nazis.” Thus will it happen. Quite simple. Those on the streets, who are for freedom. Once again. There, as here, the anti-fascist bloc. Demonizing, intimidating and enticing, anyone who comes to us has a future. Will that still happen? The old formulas of anti-Semitism, revanchism, reaction. Functionaries and intellectuals as constant partners? And the people burn out or vote in herds in fear, the child having been berated so long that it finally falls, so that it can be led once again by the impotent, so that it may be distracted from its trembling at their power?
You say that Hitler did all that. The wall, the partition, that Silesia is Polish and 1945 the year of the Russian raping as liberation, for which we are now thankful.
And who made Hitler? Who removed the Kaiser from Germany, the Germans? The Soviets? A revolutionary insight on the streets, as now? Who humiliated, taught old power politics after the lost war, who educated a people to revenge through their own, who made them poor and craving the greatness of the people and the mass outcry in connection with technological possibilities, since everything had been taken away beforehand, who made them lust for the power of mass violence and made them blind and weird beforehand, and even in art?
It speaks of the honesty of the men today on the streets that they find party politics and their own deployment of power so difficult in the sense of the usual democratic compromises and arrangements up to swindles and corruption.
Many of the older generation speak of a second or another life, when they speak of life today. And they mean by the first that of the homeland, from which they were driven out and which they have actually written off, or they mean secretly that of the dangers of the war, where they were called upon to life and death, even for others. They speak of the first life as of a secret love and something unchangeably real, even when it lies in guilt or was a sin. The consequence is formidable for those who speak thus, for their children and that which they do or forbear to do or what they are silent about. The art from them will have to decide if it gives an account honestly, or how it equivocates, and then mostly more against itself than against the world.
We are used to European history beginning in Greece. Art becoming Nature, around the ideal nude in the sun of the Mediterranean. And yet the way went further, through destruction, from below, of a lower sort, to come to the New, of the individuality of a spiritual nature and order in the Christian art that had to unite with the archaic one of the native Nordic peoples. The floor mosaics of heathen houses and of elegant life in the basilicas of the merchants turned into divine images in the buildings of new religious power. Long is the way to the cathedrals of the spirit of light and their destruction once again. Long up to the pride of Humanism and the Classical, Romantic development. Many things — even the dark that constantly wants evil and creates good — drive forwards, productively, have their function in the ups and downs of the tossing world-spirit. There was battle, blood, oppression and symbiosis only when the forces were authorized by the opposed sides. Once again, we stand before a new cultural epoch, downfall and losses being described, last drive of the old from the elements, blood and soil, having failed, weakened, powerless, rightly or not, without a chance. Blood has flowed and the peoples have only now regained consciousness, in Eastern Europe, through those after them. Countries, people, governments, churches and art stand before a new age. Earlier it required centuries, only now can it begin, the abyss is likewise visibly close. Thus are we at the end of this century, all these people of Europe once again there, where they stood at the beginning, in the first half, and now in the second. But differently, smaller, poorer, lost, destroyed, matured, the men who have shaken off everything from before. At the beginning of what?
Art through suffering.
Even the recently respected buildings of the Gründerstil202 appeared once showy and to many unbearable. Have the sufferings not made them more valuable to us? Much arises at first through opposition, through which it passes, exists, bleeding, having become guilty. In this way, many a historical deed, or form or ideological direction becomes clear only after, or in, the downfall. It is not compassion, but the productive deed of the hostile opposite that strengthens, produces insight and makes it ripe for the opposite, even from us ourselves, without accepting the position of the other therewith. This painful recognition process is that of art, and it is comparable to those of priests, or doctors and judges. Without this effort, art is not allowed, no truth possible, and only this confirms the work.
But whoever seeks these battles out of a productive incentive, and does not avoid them so long and as well as he can, makes himself guilty, just as whoever flees from the real ones.
Myself: so, in the end, instructed, lost, in the most pleasant sort of insight? Everything refuted, cries of Cassandra, apocalyptic visions repudiated by the non-violence of the developments in the East, by the democratic structures of this new freedom for us all, by the importance of the media as a revolutionary member in the chain of the song of liberation up to Romania, where in the studio the battle was not only mirrored but decided on, by the not at all coquettish aesthetics of a plastic poverty of people in distress, and by the necessity with which art and politics became one, even today, and faith gave the churches new power, and to public life, instead of the utopias, the ideological, and — since representatives grow from this symbiosis — for them. Indeed, we, I, doubting we stand, beaten by life, which has been beaten out of our real land and lifeblood.
Everything else is a question all the more and more urgent for our situation in the West, and what art will reply and what it is still capable of. For all this will have no future and be in vain without its guarantee of tones and images that give us a significance and bear witness to us and maintain us or if art is used again only as a means of business and exploitation, wherewith we would be once again at the beginning, or if otherwise, it can become for us Nature, capable of becoming a homeland for us, a second house, after we have lost the first. For then everything, however honorably thought and felt, and from whatever motives, in the politics of living together, that does not find a form as a faith beyond this reality, in the spirit — which holds and leads us and which has become art that elevates us, which lets men alone bear everything else, losses and gain, and makes them illustrious as no other living being — will be as if it never was.
Now the question arises about art for the new heroes of the people and for its awakening. From that time which left behind this Brechtian state and from a freedom for which they have fallen.
And it may be questioned as to whether we still create it. Jan Palach,203 who died in Prague against the Russians for that freedom, ought to receive a monument as a visible sign and warning and so that men know where and when and against whom and why and what it looks like. After Hitler, art came into the museums amidst great alarm over its actual effect on the people. Into the museum, where, from history, with baby in its plastic arm and in groups on a Sunday, it stands on display for the visits of art interpreters, that which was once made for daily use, and has now become the great field of work for the hosting academics of interpretation.
Now art, which was always thought and made for something, was brought directly into the market of the museums, an art without any amount of practical use; Stalin was a warning example. Our commemorative art did not locate people either in Auschwitz nor before the places of death of a Sophie Scholl204 or of those of 20 July.205 Or there arose a public resistance against this new art, in these places, an art that must be protected by police, as in Vienna, avoided with mistrust even by the affected victims.
If they were asked in a democratic election, would perhaps that art between 1933 and 1945 be voted for as the only art of the century and everything else voted out by the majority in spite of all the campaigns? What is wrong here? The people? Vote for another people?
No democracy, at least not in questions of art, who decides, what is missing?