Fled in my early years. Parental house and country, fatherland taken away, plundered, shattered, divided, watched. Disregarded by the powerful of the state, on account of my birth. Second class on every form on account of my father. Excluded. Fear of death glorified as liberation.
Later to my parents. Once again everything gone. “Who has?”, “Where is that?” lives today in the things left behind. Back. Revenge, reckoning, reversal of the trend, making amends once again, re-educating, dictation of accomplishments, guilt, functionaries, collaborators, denouncers, informers, names, mistrust. Memories.
From 1945 to ’90. A fate of millions. Comparable. Life in the age of the masses, like masks over the real. But praised with an eye on those who praise it. Due to whatever reasons, for whatever.
Emigrant situation. Self-righteousness, a bonus for suffering, privileges, a crisis of over-privileging: one used to call that hubris, and the punishments were those of life, the one unlived from the memories turned back. Whoever wants to save their life will also acquire it here time and again, in order to possess it.
Possess? Only art will help here and more beautifully than the reality of Nature ever has, for all.
It is interesting, in all discussions of the changes through a unification of both German parts, how the right to property in the case of land proprietorship has been neglected. In Moscow, one requests the help of the victorious power, speaks of a revolutionary act, and even the western Agriculture Minister counts the votes among the small settlers and speaks of the re-establishment of old rights, and means thereby those at the time of the dispossession during the forced collectivization. It is interesting also that, among these, the claims of Jewish proprietors who lost their land on account of the Nazis should remain untouched by it. On the other hand, there is also the recognized right of the proprietor to city property. In this context, even the incorporation of those expelled in the eastern provinces beyond the Oder-Neisse border is sought and ought not to be threatened. Affected are the old, monarchistic, Prussian land rights, which distributed land according to accomplishments and by the king. Here the cosmos of the agrarian culture is as a whole affected in a typical way. The industrialization of agriculture in the West corresponds to that of the forced collectivization in the East, that culture having been lost from which the art of the earlier centuries grew.