From a house, in a garden of remote peace in this otherwise loud world, which arose from the battle of its builder against the other gardens of his time, which he characterized as “the ugliest gardens ever made.” They were, to him, the ugliest gardens of his Victorian age coming to an end, exotic and denaturalized. Thus, he wrote the most famous garden book, changed the face of England, as one says, and founded this house in his garden, up to today with remnants of the former spirit as a proof; the quiet of peace is developed out of much battle. But the ugliest art that was ever made is that after 1945 in Germany and that which led to it and derived from it, against which this book stands.
A walk through any randomly chosen new housing settlement of our cities suffices. The country, the villages are like endless laments on the dead life.
Honecker before the court, as the inhabitant of a Protestant parsonage in the outskirts of Berlin, as the last escape, and in the Times it says “Germany will be united, says Gorbachev.” Two days later, in Munich, the announcement: “One out of four trees in the city is ‘terminally ill.’”
Thus, Germany, 45 years after the last war, is a broken country. In the East, obviously and mutilated, in the West, damaged by destruction and neglect, tolerating and inflicting, inwardly and outwardly. But if only all the concrete-hard strengths and hard-edged surfaces and the self-mutilating uglinesses against our nature made us capable of absorbing the damaged East of our country and of recognizing this as the victim and of taking it as such, and indeed for the supplementation of impaired growth and damaged life, then would it be good, and everything would have a meaning, and we would perhaps be able, with the help of the whole, to reverse the pollution of the world and that disregard of ourselves, as an example to others. But if world history is shaken anew and the cards are shuffled anew, and they politically brush entire nations and men and parties against the grain, then that train has long departed — why not also with its spirit and its art, after initial tension and fighting and helplessness — to new shores. For, only the united and the whole will give peace, when all recognize that even here there are memories of suffering just as there is guilt where the systems have now fallen, and the mourning of the pariahs and barbarians too is once again capable of art for the pediment of the temple for the people. But why speak, write, think aloud in this way? A movement of the people for unity without the voice of art would be like a unity without freedom, a new life without art. The country and its people without the crown of truth. After the mistake of the writers, those “engineers of the soul,” of Marxism and the intellectuals, after the revolts without the people and in silence now against the people, to whom they always appeal, sentenced to silence, one cannot return to daily life without speaking, confessions, dialogues and responses. For only culture alone can be responsible for survival and give a meaning to those who went before them.
Something dark, bad, unredeemed hung over the world, was cramped in the hearts, blocked the way, crept into the words and actions of the politicians and intellectuals, and lay also greedily in the peoples, frightening to see. To be silent, let things happen, look on, how it slowly goes away, scot-free, warm and sated, but without masters, its last, recently. And also there finally, and from us too, and if it were just that it would be good to say and to see this. It lies in the nature of this thing, would the peace of life come from the middle of the typhoon?
Not the quantitative suppression of Germany, but the qualitative one of the hearts in the middle of Europe is the surprising thing that comes to the forefront from even under the masks of the enemies, softens the faces of the politicians and hurls the self of the observer through the heights and depths of its possibilities.
So then, as has always been said by the enemies, economics would be the beginning and the new constellation of countries in the federation be the link. And Berlin the center, and culture historically consolidated to survive and to be tested anew in an art finally liberated from all post-war aesthetics in the East and West with the bonus of the sufferings under the different dictatorships, so that the people can speak of themselves once again and are valid as the only authority according to which everybody has to judge himself. Democracy without lies, however hard it may be.
In this new constellation, economics, for long a substitute for war, will be offered as the highest virtue of peaceful world conquest, becomes for us suddenly honorable once again, as money acquires a sense for other values. A spell may be broken where the commerce was only a replacement for national honor after the defeat, and its substitute celebrated as an “economic miracle” or as a socialist ideology.
These eastern provinces of the remaining Germany make it possible. The recovered people would give back a new morality and a new significance to the ethics lost for so long, to learn once again why and for what reason we work and live and are.
The true liberation would then come from there, from the lowest depths and from that victor who was the most barbaric, with solid ground under one’s feet, instead of from the heads of the illogical ideologues — and what was up to now the deceitful structure of democracy, economics, of national denial or denaturalized art, at best recognized as temporary, like an intermediate realm, will become meaningful once again?
Dared once again, like a dream, nightmare, the journey into the depths, into the land of the unbowed, those not misled, with head held high, from the heart of memory, man in the face of the misery of his self and what he makes of it?