Still, after every awakening, rubbing one’s eyes, if it is really true, in comparison to the world of a year ago. Slowly the field clears. An epoch came to an end. An unfortunate one. Here it is described.
While writing there arose sketches of new possibilities. The way does not go left, nor right, not over the Auschwitz of the businessmen and Sunday speeches of our educators, not through laments of our own losses with a bonus for suffering for the purpose of usurping the world and art.
But unity once again, after its split and the smashing of the atomized elements, and of ourselves, like a reunification of country and continent, would be a goal. Like the happiness of another art.
From there, to base the homeland on the losses and prohibitions in which we had been would be the film of the author, like a world-theater of the childhood of those fathers without land now and of the losses of mothers after the post-war neuroses of the last decades. From that burnt province, from the famous children’s song of the war, whose name had to be expunged so that the rump-state swallowed as the booty of the war could be better digested, and so that the disappeared Prussia of one’s northern home provinces would be robbed, even in the recollection of the mental geography of our memories. From so much downfall did Plato build his Atlantis and others their Vineta of utopian states and ideas and legends.
Standing on free ground, the film of thoughts and memories in each of us, like a homeland of prohibitions and losses. The offer stands. And us? The theaters around us — so we hear — are empty, not only in the East, so also the cinemas on the other side of consumerism. Just as the museums are overfull with people, longing, before the old art.
Now it will become apparent whether our art still correlates with life, whether it is sufficient, deals with something or has degenerated long ago in the deadly lie of an incest of alienation. In the last flaring of a fellah happiness into the garish styling of art neuroses, every presentiment, even of only a tragic world-consciousness, drowning in the possibilities of the anti-natural. And a people, who beat on our breast, the breast of our art, and ask, what do we have to do with it, with this art, in the end?
For the situation is new. After a long time, art may be possible without external pressure to provoke and without the destructive pathologies coming from a lost identity. Art would be possible from that inner authenticity, the rediscovered, of a liberation coming from the people themselves, those burnt out, gleaming from within.
Everyone should make the politics of his geographical situation. That was Napoleon’s advice. And will art too look like that then? Germany with the mandate for the center and the appropriate reactions coming from that? And will therefore the people, whoever they may be, in the center thus not from their will, good or bad, be hated because of mistrust or be important? After 1945, the re-education up to the point of the denial of one’s being into sheer consumer satisfaction, previously the interplay of yes and no, from Dürer to Expressionism, from Hitlerian art between a blood and soil attitude to the scorched earth result. The people of the center with the denial of the art of the center, which it represented and hunted to the extreme, to assert and experience itself by resisting itself?
The reaction of the present-day generation to the past will not be that to history, but to the evidence of the present and the image of the past as it arose from the rituals of the mendacities against this past. The reaction will be like that of our descendants to the career-pressure of role models — who do not say everything — and to their businesses. One will be able to measure the honesty of our offspring by how they react, the way they are confronted not with history, but with their present in which history is mirrored and to which no service will be rendered through faked or false conscience. History does not arise through remembrance but by growing out of it.
The situation in the eastern part of the German remnant states teaches even the enemies. About themselves. Those of the self-righteous gait. There are historical moments in which one does not act oneself, where the roles devolve upon us as in the war, like the war where one recognizes oneself later as having been seduced and punished through one’s own action, in roles however wished for or forcibly allotted, independently of the why and the degree of the levels of inhibition for which we are liable, helpless, just as the victors now can do nothing about the defeated against the will to unity of history from the spirit of the people, whom they educated as democratic.
Helpless as before the Apocalypse, which we are to ourselves?
But we are in the condition of men who recognize Nature, up to its smallest and most remote parts, and who in the end must find the healing herbs more poisoned — due to ourselves — than our chemical substitute.
We hear much about freedom and democracy and even art as never before and look, perhaps only silently, at the temple of the ancients on the mountains and at the sea, or quietly at their marble divine images of men, and we know everything about the case of human development up to today when we look silently at wilting flowers or at the tree which survives us like a cave dweller, before we fell it, in that image of it, which makes us possible.
All around emptiness. The gloom of defeat. Everything false and different? It will be difficult to find a yes from the no of the last decades. A new aesthetics and art are always the yes from the tragic, from the lament, from the tears, to find the yes from the rage itself, from the aesthetics of the destructive neuroses after the last war, like a final victory of joy after the silence, the music of nevertheless quite different bases — from which we have really been. From the Bonn finance-democracy to that in Berlin, like a last push even of the powerless and defeated. Only one who is not empty within, only one who did not waste himself in the establishment, who remained unharmed, authentic from memory, has the strength of suffering, will survive, be needed, conscious of the fragility of the world, rising up from the scorched earth, born into the lost houses, to find himself in the newfound simplicity, find power once again from the core of things, and conscious of the heart? Could there be, in the future celebration of the victory of the remains and the reunited, an ear and an eye, so that it may be seen and heard like a warning recollection in the history that grows out of it, and could there be, in art commissioned by all and borne for them, the old “divine spark,” that which has become music, or everything will have been in vain. After this decline and fall, struck by the hubris from the history of centuries against men and countries, and now against Nature, and after so many losses, most recently that of Nature, one’s own, would finding innocence once again in the traumatic self-liberation, like a new naivety, in the eastern provinces and countries, those often hardly to be recognized again, be a matter of the heart for the center of Europe too?
April 1990