One can exploit nature for the sake of comfortable technology. But one can also use technology instead of being its slave, live with it and for it and for us, to the limit of the possibilities of science, technology and reason at any time, in the spirit of knowledge, where the limit is that knowledge of what man is, how the world can be, and even if it be as the smallest model of serving knowledge and regulating humility, in the name of the universe, which it is all about, however changing and different the ways, goals and forms are, not only to judge or to avenge, but declaring judgment about what is good or wrong, bright or dark, without businesses and scorn, erring, fighting and reconciling, and always new.
And everything that is is always from the knowledge of provenance, in the battle with later life. Here, from the rural measure of a universal family, from animals and plants and men throughout the seasons of sowing, ripening and harvesting, up and down with the raging weather, as with the duties and the loyalty therein, in the yes or no, above and below, of fertility and aridity, chaos and order, devil and god, heaven and hell, denudation and shame, fear and happiness, birth and death. But the entire wealth that has been handed to us lies in the balance. Lost worlds.
A model. And that may then lead, as a complaint and lament bent over the despair, to a lack of words, or to the abyss. But still in the face of the end, and precisely then, art will strengthen, even if it is for our own survival in it. One recognizes it thereby. And something more. The truthful art of the future will have to have more heart and less brilliance of technique and money, the invaluable heart, which grows from the soil, when it is old and full of life.
End of the world, yet the center for the wide view into a not very pleasant place, where the daily course of things is clearly arranged, and the village is a world, being careful and simple, like a model of art, and, in the end, good.
The melancholic findings from the last summer of the West: like a curse over Germany. A well-ordered country, sick in its soul, restless, exploited, as if dead in the prosperity of the times, as if something were missing, a part, like a lost house in dumb and joyless form.
Its cultured people not leftist, not rightist, but unhappy. And then, in the East, the liberation, the right one, from themselves. But the threats are only suppressed through the euphoria from Germany’s news and its eastern neighbors. And what threatened like an unstoppable downfall could stop the arts of the soul. It would be the miracle that those from the poorest were all waiting for. Already like an encouraging radiance in their faces.
The object of these thoughts is the representative art which for a time not only exists or initiates them but which elevates them. High art as the aspiration of a counter-world to the real. It must not be that of dream, of fantasy and utopias or ideas. What is meant is the temple, the palace, the devotional image, the sacred text, music as the sound of the spheres following the model of a world aspired to.
Since, in the time between 1933 and 1945, Germany became the art turned into a state of one man — however detested and with whatever consequences and wherever from — this representative mixture of art and state is that state art of the Third Reich developed geographically with its horror vacui,207 that state art in which the war becomes the last art-work of the masses and, even if in the downfall, like film documenting what once was and what it degenerated into, that which was once highly thought of. The film of our thoughts and most secret wishes of this age. Thereafter, damaged by the fear of contamination in its highest aspirations, art became a private matter, leisure culture and business. It was described as the power-instrument of the rulers who wished to adorn themselves. This post-war Germany became a model as a country which now banished art as a handmaid of politics to the back benches of life and to the interests, and understood it thus. In Israel, originally born from European roots, state buildings were understood representatively. Yad Vashem208 as a commemoration of Auschwitz is a construction such as would be no longer thinkable among ourselves after 1945, even not for the victims of the dictatorship. Only the lowest art was permitted. That meant an art without symmetry, without elevation of passion and enthusiasm, this art becoming an accident or side-note of history, like a church without God. The absurd and the insignificant became the style of the post-war art, which was opened to the technological media in this way. The artistic theory of sublimation meant art as a substitute for the real instead of apotheosis as a celebration of joy. In this way art became not an affirmation but a substitute. The phenomenon of greatness is also connected to the representative character of artistic elevation and has been lost, that which we recognize and designate in one glance as greatness in history, in however contradictory forms, from Charlemagne to Frederick the Great or Peter the Great as founders of an empire or nation. This concept was destroyed in that pursuit for a Greater Germany. Even figures of undoubted historical influence, and with the classical characteristics of measured action, clever diplomacy and decisive daring, we would today no longer characterize as great. The people, the rediscovered, emerge, in plastic shoes and anoraks.
With this loss of greatness even the characteristics were destroyed that were bound to the attainment of greatness, like slow growth and firm grounding with a far-reaching crown, so that the death of the oak today is an appropriate image for the dying out of these former historical figures, as well as how they made way for the comfortable and quick plastic life of chemical products.
We became free from the pressure of the burdens of the daimonic powers that were always bound with these figures — free for what — even in art. But art, as it is understood here, always means something else. The whole, the center, the high, the great, the elevating celebration of human action, the daimonic elevation to the good, even in the small aspect of the detail as an example of life as it should be.
These observations are more valid of the post-war epoch of these last two decades than of those of Brecht, Kortner, Gründgens209 in the theater, or of Wieland Wagner210 in the opera, who were still molded by the times before, willingly or not. All these analyses are perhaps special fruits of daily reflection from newspaper reading and evenings in front of the television or of an observant radio-listener, and would have been different in the distance of the countryside or not at all possible. One may think that one who is free of these or one who lets them go ahead, do and destroy themselves is fortunate, but it is also a rewarding burden, answering the questions, if one takes the trouble.