On 31 December 1989. Leipzig, Gewandhaus, live, at the end of this Beethoven year. Ninth Symphony, Kurt Masur — is it just imagination? — thanks. The man who, a few weeks ago, interrupted his musical work, in the same house now that a Honecker made possible, for which he thanked himself, after this public fall from grace, from the same square that a Václav Neumann left when the GDR marched into Prague, now he who took up the torch, grown from this soil, now also in Leipzig here as, a short while ago, in Prague, there, Václav Neumann, with the same music for the joy of the successful liberation, that Ode to Joy, the one regained, in the middle of the countries soon without forests, when the still destroyed provinces awaken from the hubris of all humiliations. Is it imagination, these faces, projections, this face, one who knows what it means, saw, intervened, so that a people, a country at the central point of the continent of a culture, was saved and thereby had participated. Who else but from this culture, and now again at work, knowing, whence and wherefore, from the heart of the land that is soaked in sorrow, joy over a continent from Berlin and Prague to Leipzig. And they know that it is written for that reason, as if drawn from life, what 200 years ago began a revolution and failed, equally soaked in tyranny, and those who provide the occasion know why and to whom. A war is over, and one before it, and everything after. They know where the trumpery is and where truth begins and what it means, “your magic binds together again what fashion has strictly divided,”206 or “embrace each other,” who else may say it than these who produce this music and those who listen to them, who else? Less technology and more heart, of simple knowledge.
After leaving Pomerania, I became acquainted with this music through loss. Now it is worth finding that which was lost once again in it.
How on the way must everything not have been suspicious and contrary to me that here pollutes, or derides, or squanders the goal, the origin and the difficulty of coming close. And how will everything that is similar in its own way, that is in the end always the same, not appear lovely and familiar, everywhere and at all times, peculiar to people as long as they are people.
Lucky again, people say when one has happily escaped from a calamity. Only, what is luck, or happiness? In a more complicated age, it was happiness to indeed be accepted in schools and universities with so much effort and to free oneself from the dangers waiting there, the misfortune of happiness? Or would it have been a misfortune to go the other way, to withdraw from the difficulty of happiness, since, in this society of direct work in a trade union and plastic canteens without warmth of community, life is no longer to be studied that can become art. Happiness from the misfortune, misfortune from the happiness. Germany, you are better off. Certainly, this was possible only in this way, radically and totally, from the roots, and comprehensively.