Posthumous Papers of a Living Author

ILL-TEMPERED OBSERVATIONS

Black Magic

1

Ever since the Russian variety show teams introduced them to us, these black hussars, these death’s head grenadiers, these Arditi* seem to exist in every army on earth. They swore an oath of victory or death, and sport tailor-made black uniforms with white baldrics that look like the ribs of death; thus adorned, they parade around as they please to the everlasting delight of the ladies until they peacefully die — that is, as long as there is no war. They live by certain songs that have a somber accompaniment which lends them a dark radiance ideally suited for bedroom lighting.

As the curtain went up, seven such hussars sat around together on the little stage; it was rather dark and the bright snow outside shone through the windows. With their black uniforms and their painfully propped-up heads they were scattered about in hypnotic formation in the dim light and accompanied by a loudly singing comrade in the pitch-black luminous pianissimo. “Hear the horses pound the steppes with their mighty hooves,” they sang, all the way through to the inevitable “if lady luck should run amuck, when the swallows wander —.”

2

An enigmatic soul suggests: If this were a painted picture, then we would have a textbook example of kitsch. If it were a “tableau vivant,” we would have before us the unnerving sentimentality of a once beloved parlor game, that is, something half kitsch and half sad, like a glockenspiel that has just been played. But since it is a singing tableau vivant, what is it then? There is a certain sugary lustre to the trifles performed by these splendid Russian emigrants, but one only snickers in retrospect, whereas one would surely have fumed before an oil painting of the same type: Could it be possible that kitsch grows ever more tolerable and ever less kitschy if one, and then two, dimensions of kitsch are added to it?

This hypothesis can neither be presumed nor denied.

But what happens if still another dimension of the same is added, and it becomes reality? Have we not huddled in bunkers, while some premonition of tomorrow hung in the air and a comrade started singing? Oh, it felt so melancholy! And it was kitsch. But it was the sort of kitsch that lay like another layer of sadness over our sadness, like an unconfessed rancor at this forced camaraderie. There is so much that one might have felt at this last eternal hour, and the articulation of the fearful image of death is not necessarily best rendered in oil.

Is not art then a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life? Layer by layer art strips life bare. The more abstract it gets, the more transparent the air is. Can it be that the farther it is removed from life, the clearer art becomes? What a backwards contention it is to claim that life is more important than art! Life is good as long as it holds up to art: That in life which cannot be employed for art’s sake is kitsch!

But what is kitsch?

3

In a somewhat less propitious time, the poet X would have become a popular hack on a family magazine. He would then have presupposed that the heart always responds to certain situations with the same set feelings. Noble-mindedness would always have been recognizably noble, the abandoned child lamentable, and the summer landscape stirring. Notice that in this way, a firm, clear-cut, and immutable relationship would have been established between the feelings and the words, true to the nature of the term kitsch. Thus kitsch, which prides itself so much on sentiment, turns sentiments into concepts.

As a function of the times, however, X, instead of being a good family magazine hack, has become a bad Expressionist. Consequently, his work causes intellectual short-circuiting. He appeals to Man, God, the Spirit, Goodness, Chaos; and out of such big words he squeezes sophisticated sentences. He could not possibly do so, were he to imagine the totality of their meaning, or at least grasp their utter unimaginability. But long before this time, these words had already taken on connotations meaningful and meaningless, in books and newspapers; our Expressionist has often seen them wedged together, and the words need only be loaded with the least little bit of significance for him to perceive sparks flying between them. This, however, is only a consequence of the fact that he had not learned how to think based on the experience of his own imagination, but rather, with the aid of borrowed terms.

In both of the aforementioned instances, kitsch affirms itself as something that peels life off of language. Layer by layer, it strips language bare. The more abstract kitsch becomes, the more it becomes kitsch. The intellect is effective so long as it stands up to life.

But what is life?

4

Life is living: you cannot describe it to someone who does not know it. It is friendship and enmity, enthusiasm and disenchantment, peristalsis and ideology. Thinking has, among other functions, to establish an intellectual order in life. As well as to destroy that order. Every concept combines many disparate phenomena in life, and just as frequently, a single phenomenon will give rise to many new concepts. It is common knowledge that our poets have stopped wanting to think ever since they thought they heard the philosophers say that thought is no longer supposed to be a matter of thinking, but rather of living.

Life is to blame for everything.

But in God’s name: What is living?

5

Two syllogisms emerge from these assertions.

Art peels kitsch off of life.

Kitsch peels life off of language.

And: The more abstract art becomes, the more it becomes art.

Also: The more abstract kitsch becomes, the more it becomes kitsch.

These are two splendid syllogisms. If only we could resolve them!

According to the second, it appears that kitsch equals art. According to the first, however, kitsch equals language minus life. Art equals life minus kitsch equals life minus language plus life equals two lives minus language. But according to the second, life equals three times kitsch and, therefore, art equals six times kitsch minus language.

So what is art?

6

A black hussar has it so good. The black hussars swore an oath of victory or death and meanwhile stroll around in this uniform to the delight of all the ladies. That is not art! That’s life!

But why then do we maintain that it’s just a tableau vivant?

Doors and Portals

Doors are a thing of the past, even if back doors are still said to crop up at architectural competitions.

A door consists of a rectangular wooden frame set in the wall, on which a moveable board is fastened. This board at least is still barely comprehensible. For it is supposed to be light enough to be easily pivoted, and it fits within the oak and walnut paneling that until recently adorned every proper living room. Yet even this board has already lost most of its significance. Up until the middle of the last century you could listen in with your ear pressed against it, and what secrets you could sometimes hear! The count had disowned his stepdaughter, and the hero, who was supposed to marry her, heard just in time that they planned to poison him. Let anybody try such a feat in a contemporary house! Before he even got to listen in at the door, he’d have long since heard everything through the walls. And what’s more: not even the faintest thought would have escaped his ear. Why has no radio-poet yet taken advantage of the possibilities of the modern concrete structure?! It is undoubtedly the predestined stage for the radio play!

Still far more outdated than the door itself is the doorframe. If you cast a glance past open doors, through a suite of rooms, you’d think you were experiencing the nightmare vision of a soccer forward faced by an infinite succession of goal posts. There is also a kind of gallows of which it reminds us. Why do they do it this way? Technically, a snug closure could be achieved without these doorposts; in fact, they are only there to please the eye. It is assumed that the eye would find it too bare if the door were fastened to the wall or to an invisible metal band. To the studied eye this would be no different than the absence of a cuff peering forth between the hand and the arm. Indeed, these door frames have a similar history to that of the detachable cuffs. When rooms were still vaulted, such a feature was unknown; the door turned on two lovely cast-iron hinges. Later they learned to build flat roofs that were supported by heavy wooden beams; proud of this innovation, they left the beams visible and likewise covered the spaces between them with wood, and the result was those beautiful wainscoted ceilings. Later still, they covered the beams beneath a stuccoed ceiling, but around the doors a narrow wooden rim was preserved.

And finally, today, they build walls of reinforced concrete instead of brick. But the narrow wooden rim, lonesome, senseless, that seems to come out of nowhere and is related only to the window frame, is left as a remnant of the custom. Isn’t that exactly the same as the history of the shirt, which first began as a wide, visible garment with neck and hand frills? Later it disappeared beneath the frock coat, but collar and cuff still peaked forth beneath the neck and sleeves of the suit. Then the collar and cuff were separated from the shirt, and finally, prior to any further improvement, the removable collar and cuff became solitary symbols of culture, which, in order to demonstrate proper manners, were buttoned onto a hidden undergarment.

This discovery — that wooden doors are removable cuffs — must be credited to the famous architect who realized that since man is born in a clinic and dies in a hospital, he likewise requires aseptic restraint in the design of his living space. We call this sort of phenomenon a spontaneous architectural development born out of the spirit of the times; but evidently things are a little difficult nowadays. The man of former times, whether lord of the manor or city-dweller, lived in his house; his station in life manifested itself therein, had accumulated there. In the Bierdermeier period you still held open house; today we merely imitate the custom. Back then your house served the purpose of maintaining appearances for which there is always money at hand; today, however, there are other objects that satisfy this same purpose: travel, cars, sports, winter vacations, suites in luxury hotels. Nowadays, the fantasy of showing what you are is lived out in this way, and if a rich man nevertheless builds himself a house, there is something artificial, something private in the act, which is no longer the fulfillment of a universal wish. And how then should there be doors if there is no “house”?! The only original door conceived by our time is the glass revolving door of the hotel and the department store.

In former times, the door, as part of the whole, represented the entire house, just as the house one owned and the house which one was having built were intended to show the social standing of its owner. The door was an entrance into a society of privilege, which was opened or shut in the face of the new arrival, depending on who he was; generally it decided his fate. However, it was likewise perfectly well-suited to the little man who didn’t count for much outside, but who behind his door could immediately play god. For this reason, the door was cherished by all and fulfilled a living purpose in the popular imagination. The noble folk could open or shut their doors, and the burgher could moreover keep knocking when the door is already open. He could also force it open. He could transact his business in the doorway, as it were. He could turn away from his own or a stranger’s door. He could shut the door in someone’s face, could show him to the door; indeed, he could even throw him out the door: This was an abundance of relations with respect to life, and they demonstrate that excellent mixture of realism and symbolism that language achieves when something is very important to us.

The great age of doors is behind us! It may be very spectacular to call out to someone that you are going to throw them out the door, but who has ever really seen someone “flying” out? Even if it is attempted, the procedure seldom still has that one-sided quality which constitutes its charm, for the required competence and strength is sadly lacking nowadays. We don’t even slam the door in anyone’s face anymore, but rather refuse to receive the telephoned announcement of an unwanted visit in advance; and to sweep in front of one’s door — that is, to mind one’s own business — has become an inconceivable suggestion. These have long since become unreasonable figures of speech and are nothing now but sweet illusions that creep up on us with a sentimental longing every time we look at an old-fashioned portal. It is the fading history surrounding a hole that, for the time being, has still been left open to the carpenter.

Monuments

Aside from the fact that you never know whether to refer to them as monuments or memorials, monuments do have all kinds of other characteristics. The most salient of these is a bit contradictory, namely, that monuments are so conspicuously inconspicuous. There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument. They are no doubt erected to be seen — indeed to attract attention. But at the same time they are impregnated with something that repels attention, causing the glance to roll right off, like water droplets off an oilcloth, without even pausing for a moment. You can walk down the same street for months, know every address, every show window, every policeman along the way, and you won’t even miss a dime that someone dropped on the sidewalk; but you are very surprised when one day, staring up at a pretty chambermaid on the first floor of a building, you notice a not-at-all-tiny metal plaque on which, engraved in indelible letters, you read that from eighteen hundred and such and such to eighteen hundred and a little more the unforgettable So-and-so lived and created here.

Many people have this same experience even with larger-than-life-sized statues. Every day you have to walk around them, or use their pedestal as a haven of rest, you employ them as a compass or a distance marker; when you happen upon the well-known square, you sense them as you would a tree, as part of the street scenery, and you would be momentarily stunned were they to be missing one morning: But you never look at them, and do not generally have the slightest notion of whom they are supposed to represent, except that maybe you know if it’s a man or a woman.

It would be wrong to let ourselves be deceived by certain exceptions to the rule. As, for instance, those few statues which, Baedecker in hand, we seek out, like the Gattamelata or the Colleoni, this being a very particular example; or memorial towers that block off an entire landscape; or monuments that form a series, like the Bismark monuments scattered all over Germany.

Such forceful monuments do exist; and then there are also those that embody the expression of a living thought or feeling: It is, however, the purpose of most ordinary monuments to first conjure up a remembrance, or to grab hold of our attention and give a pious bent to our feelings, for this, it is assumed, is what we more or less need; and it is in this, their prime purpose, that monuments always fall short. They repel the very thing they are supposed to attract. One cannot say they “de-notice” us, they elude our perceptive faculties: This is a down-right vandalism-inciting quality of theirs!

This can no doubt be explained. Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression. Anything that constitutes the walls of our life, the backdrop of our consciousness, so to speak, forfeits its capacity to play a role in that consciousness. A constant, bothersome sound becomes inaudible after several hours. Pictures that we hang up on the wall are in a matter of days soaked up by the wall; only very rarely do we stand before them and look at them. Half-read books once replaced among the splendid rows of books in our library will never be read to the end. Indeed, it is enough for some sensitive souls to buy a book whose beginning they like, and then never pick it up again. In this case, the attitude is already becoming outright aggressive; one can, however, also follow its inexorable course in the realm of feelings, in which case it is always aggressive, in the family life, for instance. Here the firm bond of marriage is distinguished from the fickleness of desire by the much-repeated sentence: Do I have to tell you every fifteen minutes that I love you?! And to what heightened degree must these psychological detriments of durability manifest themselves in bronze and marble!

If we mean well by monuments, we must inevitably come to the conclusion that they make demands on us that run contrary to our nature, and for the fulfillment of which very particular preparations are required. It would be a crime to want to make the danger signs for cars as inconspicuously monochrome as monuments. Locomotives, after all, blow shrill, not sleepy tones, and even mailboxes are accorded alluring colors. In short, monuments ought also to try a little harder, as we must all do nowadays! It is easy for them to stand around quietly, accepting occasional glances; we have a right to ask more out of monuments today. Once we have grasped this idea — which, thanks to certain current conceptual tendencies, is slowly making inroads — we recognize how backward our monument art is in comparison to contemporary developments in advertising. Why doesn’t our bronze-cast hero at least resort to the gimmick, long since outdated elsewhere, of tapping with his finger on a pane of glass? Why don’t the figures in a marble group turn, like those better-made figures in show windows do, or at least blink their eyes open and shut? The very minimum that we ought to ask of monuments, to make them attract attention, would be tried and true logos, like “Goethe’s Faust is the best!” or “The dramatic ideas of poet X are the cheapest!”

Unfortunately, the sculptors won’t have any of this. They do not, so it seems, comprehend our age of noise and movement. If they represent a man in civilian clothes, he sits motionlessly in a chair or stands there, his hand stuck in between the second and third button of his jacket. Sometimes he also holds a scroll in his hand, and no expression flutters across his face. He generally looks like one of the acute melancholics in the mental hospitals. If people were not oblivious to monuments and could observe what was going on up there, they’d shudder when passing, as you do beside the walls of a madhouse. It is even more frightening when the sculptors depict a general or a prince. His flag is waving in his hand, and there’s no wind. His sword is drawn and no one draws back in fear. His arm motions imperiously forwards, and no man would think of following him. Even his horse, rearing, with sprayed nostrils, ready to jump, remains balanced on his hindlegs, astonished that the people down below, instead of stepping aside, quietly stuff a sandwich into their mouths or buy a paper. By God, the figures in monuments never make a move and yet remain forever frozen in a faux pas. It is a desperate situation.

I believe that I have in these remarks contributed a little something to the understanding of monument figures, memorial plaques, and the like. Maybe someone or other will henceforth look at them on his way home. But what I find ever more incomprehensible, the more I think about it, is the question: Why then, matters being the way they are, are monuments erected precisely for great men? This seems to be a carefully calculated insult. Since we can do them no more harm in life, we thrust them with a memorial stone hung around their neck into the sea of oblivion.

The Paintspreader

If over the course of the years you are compelled to pass through painting exhibitions, then surely one day you are bound to invent the term paintspreader. He is to the painter what the penpusher is to the poet. The term gives order to a hodgepodge of disparate phenomena. Since the beginning of our reckoning of time penpushers have lived off adaptations of the ten commandments and a few fables handed down to them by antiquity; the assumption that paintspreading is likewise based on a few fundamental principles is not therefore altogether out of the question.

Ten such principles would not be too few. For if you apply ten artistic principles effectively, that is, combined in alternating order, the result, mistakes in calculation notwithstanding, is three million, six-hundred twenty-eight thousand, and eight hundred different combinations. Each of these combinations would be different from the others, and all of them nonetheless still the same. The connoisseur could spend his life counting: one-two-three-four-five. ., two-one-three-four-five. ., three-two-one-four-five. ., and so on. Naturally the connoisseur would be indignant and would perceive this as a threat to his accomplished abilities.

It also seems that after several hundred thousand paintspreaders the whole business would become ridiculous, and they would then switch artistic “directions.” You can see what an artistic direction is the moment you set foot in an exhibition hall. You would be more hard-pressed to recognize it if you had to pass before a single solitary painting; but spread over many walls, artistic schools, directions, and periods are as easily distinguishable, one from another, as wallpaper patterns. On the other hand, the theoretical underpinnings of these various schools, directions, and periods usually remain unclear. This is by no means meant as a slight upon the paintspreaders; they produce honest work, are well-versed in their craft and are personally, for the most part, distinctive fellows. But the production statistics level out all differences.

We do, however, have to acknowledge one disadvantage that works against them: the fact that their paintings hang openly on the wall. Books have the advantage of being bound, and often uncut. They therefore stay famous longer; they maintain their freshness, and fame, after all, begins at that point at which you have heard of something but are not familiar with it. The paintspreaders, on the other hand, have the advantage of being more regularly sought out and “written up” than the penpushers. If it weren’t for the art market, how difficult it would be to decide which work you prefer! Christ, in his day, drove the dealers out of the Temple: I, however, am convinced that if you possess the true faith, you must also be able to sell it; then you could also adorn yourself with it, and then there would be a great deal more faith in the world than there is now!

Another advantage enjoyed by painting is that there is a method to it. Anyone can write. Perhaps everyone can paint too, but this fact is less well known. Techniques and styles were invented to envelop painting in a shroud of mystery. Not everyone can paint like someone else; to do that, you have to first learn how. Those elementary school children so rightfully admired nowadays for their painting talents would flunk out in any art academy, but the academic painter must likewise take great pains to unlearn his acquired technique in order to drop his conventions and draw like a child. It is, all in all, a historic error to believe that the master makes the school; the students make it!

If we examine the matter more closely, however, it is not true either that anyone can write; quite the contrary, nobody can — everyone can merely take dictation and copy. It is impossible that a poem of Goethe’s could come into being today; even if by some miracle, Goethe were to write it himself, it would still be an anachronistic and in many ways dubious new poem, even though a splendid masterpiece of old! Is there any other explanation for this mystery than that this poem would not seem as though it had been copied from any contemporary poem, except perhaps for those poems that were themselves copied from it? Contemporaneity always means copying. Our ancestors wrote prose in long, beautiful sentences, convoluted like curls; although we still learn to do it that way in school, we write short sentences that cut more quickly to the heart of the matter; and no one in the world can free his thinking from the manner in which time wears the cloak of language. Thus no man can know to what extent he actually means what he writes, and in writing it is far less that people twist words than it is that words twist people.

Is it possible then too that not everyone can paint after all? Clearly, the painter cannot, not in the sense that the paintspreader associates with the word. The painter and the poet are above all, in the eyes of their contemporaries, those who cannot do what the paintspreaders and the penpushers can do. This is why so many penpushers consider themselves poets and so many paintspreaders painters. The difference usually only becomes apparent once it’s too late. For by that time, a new generation of pushers and spreaders have come of age who already know what the painter and the poet have only just learned.

This also explains why the painter and the poet always appear to belong to the past or the future; they are forever being awaited or declared extinct. If, however, on occasion, one actually happens to pass for the real thing, it isn’t always necessarily the right one.

A Culture Question

Can you tell us what a poet is?

This question ought some time to appear in one of those intellectual competitions in which people dispute the issue: “Who murdered Mr. Stein? (in the novel whose serialization begins in tomorrow’s Sunday supplement)” Or: “What should Roman-three do, if Roman-one makes a different play from the one suggested in the last bridge congress?”

It is not, however, to be expected that a newspaper would readily follow this suggestion, and if it did, then the editors would phrase the question in a more engaging manner. Like this, for instance: “Who is your favorite poet?” But also like this: “Who in your opinion is the greatest contemporary poet?” and “What was the best book of the year?” (Also: “of the month?”) Such questions seem to suggest themselves because of their stimulating effect.

In this way, people learn from time to time what kinds of poets there are, and there are always the greatest, the most important, the most genuine, the most recognized, and the most read. But what, without a superlative, a poet is, and when someone who simply writes is a poet, and not the “well-known author of. .,” — this question has been raised since time immemorial. The issue is clear, and yet the world is ashamed of asking such a question, as though it smacked of the archaic! Yet it will surely come to pass that you will be able to say with certainty what Kaffee Hag, a Rolls Royce, and a glider are, but will be at a loss, when your children’s children ask eagerly: “Great-grandpa, in your day you still had poets; what’s that?”

Perhaps you will try to convince them that poets were about as real as Hell. For we will say with the greatest conviction: “Aw, hell!” “Go to hell!” “Hell’s bells!” “Come hell or high water!” and the like, without really believing in Hell. It’s just a question of the life of a language, and no insurance company would put the smallest premium on the life of the German language. But this argument can easily be rebutted. For however insignificant a role the word “poet” may play in the intellectual history of our time, future generations will find its unexpected, albeit inextinguishable, traces in our economic history! Consider how many people nowadays live off the word poet — the number is almost infinite, even if we completely ignore the wondrous lie claimed by the state, that its sole purpose is the cultivation of the arts and sciences. We might begin by counting the literary professorships and seminars, and proceed to include the entire university structure with its bursars, proctors, secretaries, and others involved in its administration. Or else we can begin with the publishers, and then move on to the publishing concerns with their employees, the agents, the retail booksellers, the printers, the paper and press manufacturers, the trains, the post office, the tax collection office, the newspapers, the ministerial department heads, the superintendents — in short, with enough patience, anyone could spend an entire day calculating the web of these connections. What will always remain a constant is the fact that all of these thousands of people live — some well, some badly, some completely, some in part — off the existence of poets: although no one knows what a poet is, no one can say for certain that he has ever seen a poet, and all of the prize competitions, academies, honors, honoraria, and distributions of honorific titles cannot give any assurance that you can find a living example.

I would estimate that in the whole world today no more than a few dozen of them are still to be found. It is uncertain whether they can live off the fact that we live off of them: Some will succeed at this, others will not — it is an open-ended issue. If we wanted to cite a similar situation for comparison’s sake, we might say that countless people live off the fact that there are chickens, or that there are fish; yet the fish and chickens do not live from this, but rather die from it. In fact, we might add that even our chickens and fish live for a short while off the fact that they must die. But this entire comparison proves untenable when we consider that at least we know what these creatures are, that they actually exist and that they constitute no disruption to the fish- and chicken-breeding industry, whereas the poet, quite the contrary, constitutes a definite disturbance to the businesses built up around his handiwork. If he has money or luck, no one will bother too much over him; but as soon as he makes so bold, lacking the two aforementioned commodities, as to claim his birthright, wherever he happens to come from, he necessarily resembles a ghost who has the gall to remind us of a loan granted to our forefathers at the time of the ancient Greeks.

After a few trivial idealistic protestations by the publishers, he would be asked whether he believed he could produce a piece of literature that could guarantee a minimum sales run of thirty thousand copies; and the editors would recommend that he write short stories, which, however, would have to conform, as is only natural, to the needs of a newspaper. He, however, would necessarily reply that he could not consent to such terms; and he could likewise expect to arouse an equally legitimate displeasure at stage guilds, literary councils, and other cultural organizations. For everyone means well by him, and considering the fact that he can neither write popular plays, best-selling novels nor movies, we are inclined to come to the dark conclusion that if we were to add up all the things that this man cannot do, all that might perhaps be left over would be the fact that he possesses an uncommon talent. This being the case, we cannot help him either, and we would have to be inhuman not to hold it against him, not to want to be free of him.

When on one occasion such a needy ghost scoured the Berlin literary depots, an adroit, young, smartly dressed penpusher who had mastered the most out-of-the-way means of making a living, and for that reason believed that he too had been through the treadmill, expressed this by bursting forth with the following impassioned statement: “My God, if I had as much talent as this jackass, what couldn’t I accomplish!” He was mistaken.

Surrounded by Poets and Thinkers

They say that books have no magnitude nowadays and that writers are no longer able to write lengthy works. This may undoubtedly be so; but, for once, why not look at it the other way around, and consider the possibility that the German reader no longer knows how to read? Does not the reader develop in ever greater measure, the longer the text, an as yet unexplained resistance (not to be confused with displeasure), particularly if the text is genuinely poetic? It is as though the portal through which the book must pass were pathologically chafed and had shut itself up tight. When faced with the task of reading a book, many people nowadays find themselves thrust into an unnatural frame of mind; they feel as though they were made to undergo a disagreeable operation in which they have no confidence.

If we search for the reason and listen in on conversations on the subject, we find that the reader — the good reader, who would not miss a single important book, and who is quick to name the geniuses of the day and age! — we find that even this reader will almost always faithlessly concede, as soon as he is confronted with strong opposition to his opinion, that in all seriousness his favored genius may in fact not be a genius at all, and that there are no real geniuses around these days. This discovery, however, is by no means restricted to the belles lettres. Medicine has faltered, mathematics is up in the clouds, philosophy has lost its sense of purpose: Everywhere you turn today, the layman has lost his respect for the expert. And since every expert is also a layman in hundreds of other fields, the result is a great profusion of serious misgivings.

It is of course difficult to say just exactly how great today’s poets, thinkers, and scientists really are; but that has nothing whatsoever to do with the subject of our deliberations, for, as we readily discover, this phenomenon resembles in its structure the well-known children’s card game, “Old Maid.” The poets do not after all find fault in themselves, but rather in the scientists, thinkers, technicians, and other luminaries; and the same is true for the others. In short, the bulk of this cultural pessimism that seems to oppress everyone is always shifted onto someone else’s shoulders; and plainly put, man as culture-consumer is, in an insidious way, dissatisfied with man as culture-producer. This claim, however, accords wonderfully well with its opposite; for just as you hear the complaint that true genius no longer exists, so you too might be inclined to remark in private that there is nothing but genius left. Just take a moment to leaf through the news and reviews in our magazines and newspapers, and you will truly be amazed at how many deeply moving, prophetic, greatest, deepest, and very great masters appear over the course of a few months; and how often in the span of such a brief period, “finally another true poet” has been granted to the nation; and how often the most beautiful animal story and the best novel of the last ten years is written. A few weeks later hardly anyone can still remember the unforgettable impression they made.

Here we may add the second observation, that all such judgments derive from diverse circles hermetically closed off to each other. They are formed by related publishers, authors, critics, newspapers, readers, and miscellaneous successes, each of whom does not have contact with anyone outside his particular circle; and all of these large and small circles, whose cohesiveness may well be compared to that of a romantic entanglement or a political party, have their own geniuses or at least their “No-one-else more worthy of the title.” True, a circle is formed of the most successful people from different circles, but we should not be deceived by this; it would appear as if the truly significant would not after all go unnoticed, and that a nation were eagerly waiting to take such significance in, but in reality, the all-around success is the progeny of a rather discordant set of parents; for what is admired is not so much that which has something to say to everyone, but rather that which leaves each his own. And just as fame is a mixed bag, so too are the famous a motley crew.

If we do not limit ourselves to the realm of belle lettres, their image as a group is overwhelming. For the circle, the ring of people, the school, or the widespread success that emanates from anyone involved in an intellectual activity is negligible compared to the plenitude of sects whose souls are nourished on eating cherries, on the theater of the great outdoors, on musical gymnastics, on Eubiotics, or any one of a thousand other oddities. It is impossible to say how many such Romes there are, each of which has its own Pope, whose name the uninitiated have never heard, whose followers, however, look to him for the salvation of mankind. All of Germany is teeming with such spiritual brotherhoods: and from this great Germany, in which famous scientists can live only by their teaching and select poets at best by marketing journalistic bagatelles, from this same Germany, innumerable lunatics are swarmed with the means and participants for the development of their whims, for the printing of their books and for the founding of their periodicals. For that reason, before bad times recently set in in Germany, more than a thousand magazines were founded annually and more than thirty thousand books appeared, and this was deemed the sign of a towering intellectual achievement.

It is unfortunately to be assumed with infinitely greater certainty that this will rather turn out to have been a sign, not recognized early enough, of the spread of a dangerous group-mania. Infected by this mania, thousands of little groups each peddle their own set notion of life, so that it ought not to surprise us if soon a genuine paranoiac will hardly still be able to resist competing with the amateurs.

Art Anniversary

“It is easier to predict what the world will be doing a hundred years from now than to predict how it will write in a hundred years. Why? The entire answer isn’t fit for a dinner table conversation.” (From an unfinished book that will offer a more serious answer to the question.)

If, as is the case from time to time, you happen to reencounter a play or a novel which twenty years ago grabbed hold of your soul, along with the souls of many others, you experience something which has actually never been explained, since apparently everyone takes it for granted: the sparkle is gone, the importance has disappeared, dust and moths fly off at your touch. But why this aging must take place, and what exactly is altered in the process, this no one knows. The comedy of all art anniversaries consists of the old admirers making solemn, uneasy faces, as if their collar-button had slipped down behind their shirt front.

It is not the same as reencountering a flame of your youth who has not grown any prettier over the years. For in the latter case you no longer even comprehend what once made you stutter, although at least it has something to do with the touching transitory nature of all earthly pursuits and the notoriously fickle nature of love. But a work of literature that you reencounter is like an old sweetheart who for twenty years has been embalmed in alcohol: not a hair is different, and not a fleck of her rosy epidermis has changed. A shiver rolls down your spine! Now you are supposed to be once again who you were: one semblance demands another. It is a stretching torture, in the course of which the soles have remained in place, but the rest of the body has been twisted a thousand times around the revolving world!

Reliving a former art experience is also different from meeting the other ghosts of old arousals and infatuations: enemies, friends, wild nights, passions endured and surmounted. All this and the conditions that surround it sink into oblivion as soon as the fling is over: It has fulfilled some purpose and was absorbed by the fulfillment; it was a denial in one’s life or a stage in the development of your personality. But bygone art served nothing; its former effect has disappeared unnoticed, lost itself along the way; it is a stage for no one. For do you really feel yourself to be standing on a higher plateau when looking down upon a once-admired work? You stand no higher, just elsewhere! Indeed, to tell the truth, even if, while standing before an old painting, you realize with a comfortable, hardly suppressed yawn that you no longer need be enthusiastic about it, you are still far from being enthused by the fact that there are new paintings to be admired. You simply feel yourself to have slipped from one timely compulsion to another, which by no means excludes the fact that you went about it perfectly voluntarily and actively; voluntary and involuntary behavior are not after all direct opposites, they also blend in equal parts, so that ultimately, you involuntarily overindulge in voluntary behavior, or voluntarily the involuntary, as is often the case in life.

Still, in this elsewhere you will find a remarkable dose of transcendence. It is, we realize, if appearances do not deceive, related to fashion. Fashion, after all, is not only marked by the one characteristic, namely that you find it ridiculous in retrospect, but also by the other, that as long as a fashion lasts, you can hardly imagine taking seriously the opinions of a man who is not dressed from head to toe just as ridiculously as you yourself are. I would not know what in our admiration of antiquity could shield a budding philosopher from suicide, if not the fact that Plato and Aristotle wore no pants; pants have contributed far more than you might think to the intellectual development of Europe, for without them, Europeans would most likely never have gotten over their classical-humanistic inferiority complex vis-à-vis the antique. Thus we hold our time’s most profound feeling — that we would not barter with anyone who wasn’t dressed in contemporary clothing. And even of art we only feel for that same reason a sense of progress with each new year; although it may simply be a coincidence that art exhibits, like the latest fashion, appear in the spring and fall. This sense of progress is not pleasant. It reminds you, in the most extreme way, of a dream in which you are seated on a horse and cannot get off, because the horse never stands still. You would gladly take pleasure in progress, if only it took a pause. If only we could stop for a moment on our high horse, look back, and say to the past: Look where I am now! But already the uncanny process continues, and after experiencing it several times, you begin to feel queasy in the stomach with those four strange legs trotting beneath you, constantly carrying you forward.

But what conclusions may we draw from the fact that it is just as ridiculously unpleasant to look at old fashions (so long as they have not yet become costumes), as it is ridiculously unpleasant to look at old pictures, or the outmoded façades of old-style houses, and to read yesterday’s books? Clearly, there is no other conclusion except that we become unpleasant to ourselves the moment we gain some distance from what we were. This stretch of self-loathing begins several years before now and ends approximately with our grandparents, that is, the time to which we begin to be indifferent. It is only then that what was is no longer outdated, but begins to be old; it is our past, and no longer that which passed away from us. But what we ourselves did and were lies almost completely in the realm of self-loathing. It would indeed be intolerable to be reminded of everything that we once considered most important, and the great majority of people would remain surprisingly little moved if, at an advanced age, you were to show them again, in the form of a movie, their grandest gestures and once most stirring scenes.

How are we to make sense of this? Apparently inherent to the nature of temporal matters is a certain degree of exaggeration, a “superplus” and superabundance. Even a slap in the face requires more rage than you can be accountable for. This enthusiasm of “now” burns up, and as soon as it has become superfluous, it is extinguished by forgetting, a very productive and fertile activity by means of which we only really first become — and are ever and anew reconstituted as — that easygoing, pleasant, and consequent person for whose sake we excuse everything on earth.

Art rocks the boat in this regard. Nothing emanates from it that could endure without enthusiasm. It is, as it were, nothing but enthusiasm without bones and ashes, pure enthusiasm that burns for no reason and nonetheless is stuck in a frame or in between the covers of a book, as though nothing had happened. It never becomes our past, but always remains that which has passed from us. It is understandable then that we should look back at it every ten or twenty-five years with an uneasy eye!

Only great art, that indeed which alone, strictly speaking, merits being called art, constitutes an exception. But the latter has never really fit that well in the society of the living.

Binoculars

Slow motion pictures dive beneath the agitated surface, and it is their magic that permits the spectator to see himself with open eyes, as it were, swimming among the objects of life. Movies may have popularized this phenomenon; but it has long been available to us by a means still recommended nowadays because of its convenience: by looking, that is, through a telescope at objects that one would usually not watch through a telescope. An experiment of this sort is described in the following pages.

The first object of our attention was a sign on the gate of a beautiful old building located directly opposite our observation post, a building that houses a well-known government agency. This sign proclaimed, through the binoculars lens, that the government agency held office hours from nine to four. This already elicited the observer’s surprise; for it was three o’clock, and not only was there no official in sight, but the observer could not recall ever having seen with his naked eye an official in the agency at this hour. Finally he discovered two tiny figures standing close together behind a remote window, drumming their fingers on the windowpane and staring down at the street. And no sooner had he discovered them, than, as they stood there trapped in the little circle of his instrument, he understood with warm sympathy and realized with pride how important this telescoping function might yet become for bureaucrats, and for men in general who have a sacrosanct number of hours to sit out in an office.

The second object of his attention was the building itself. It was an old palace with a festoon of fruit on the capital of the stone pillars and a beautiful articulation of the façade in height and breadth, and while the spyglass still searched for the officials in attendance, the observer was already struck by how clearly this support structure, these windows and cornices had positioned themselves in the circle of his looking glass; now that he had taken it all in with a single glance, he was almost startled at the stony perspectival exactitude with which it all returned his gaze. He suddenly realized that these horizontal lines that conjoined at some point toward the back of the building, these contracting windows that became all the more trapezoid the farther to the side that they were situated — indeed, this entire avalanche of reasonable, familiar limitations into a funnel of foreshortening located somewhere to the side and to the rear — that all this had until now struck him as a Renaissance nightmare: an awful painter’s legend, actually, of disappearing lines, reputedly exaggerated, though there may also be some truth to it. But now he saw it before his very eyes, magnified to more than life-size, and looking far worse than the most unlikely rumor.

And if you don’t believe that the world is really like this, just focus on a streetcar. The trolley made an S-shaped double curve in front of the palace. Countless times from his second story window, the observer had witnessed it approaching, seen it make this very S-shaped double curve and drive away again: at every stage of this development, the same elongated red train. But when he watched it through the binoculars, he noticed something completely different: An inexplicable force suddenly pressed this contraption together like a cardboard box, its walls squeezed ever more obliquely together (any minute it would be completely flat); then the force let up, the car grew wide to the rear, a movement swept once again over all its surfaces, and while the flabbergasted eyewitness released the breath he had held in his breast, the trusty old red box was back to its normal shape again. All this happened so clearly, so out in the open, as he watched it with his lens (and not just in the private chamber of his eye), that he could have sworn it was no less real than watching a fan being opened and shut. And if you don’t believe it, you can try it yourself. All you need is an apartment toward which a streetcar approaches in an S-shaped curve.

Once this discovery had been made, the discoverer naturally turned to watching women; and thus was revealed to him the whole inescapable significance of human architectonics. That which in a woman is round, and according to the fashion of the day was then more painstakingly hidden than it is today (so that it looked like nothing more than a small rhythmic irregularity in the otherwise boyish flow of motion), arched inward again, under the incorruptible eye of the binoculars, turning back into those ancient simple hills that constitute the eternal landscape of love. And round about, unexpectedly, a myriad of whispering folds, aroused by every step, opened and shut in her dress. They announced to the naked eye the inviolable appearance of the wearer or the talents of the tailor, and secretly revealed that which is not shown; for when magnified, impulses are actualized, and when viewed through the tube of the looking glass, every woman becomes a psychologically spied Susannah in the bath of her dress. But it was amazing how soon such a sophisticated curiosity evaporated under the immovable and clearly somewhat spiteful equanimity of the binoculars’ glance; and nothing remained but the trifling and flicker of those eternally constant values that require no psychology.

Enough of this! The best way to insure against an obscene misuse of this philosophical tool is to ponder its theory, “Isolation.” We always see things amidst their surroundings and generally perceive them according to what function they serve in that context. But remove them from that context and they suddenly become incomprehensible and terrible, the way things must have been on the first day after creation, before the new phenomena had yet grown accustomed to each other and to us. So, too, in the luminous solitude of our telescopic circle, everything becomes clearer and larger, but above all, things become more arcane and demonic. A hat which, according to common custom crowns the masculine figure and is synonymous with the overall appearance of the man of worldly influence and power (an altogether skittish form, belonging to the body as well as the soul), instantly degenerates into something insane when the binoculars strip it of its romantic attachments to the world around it and restore its true isolated optical presence. A woman’s charm is fatally undercut as soon as the lens perceives her from the hem of her skirt upwards as a sack-like space from which the two twisted little slits peer forth. And how frightening does the ivory flashing of love become, and how infinitely comical is anger, when both are separated from their effect, isolated in the circle of the lens! There is between our clothes and ourselves, and between our customs and ourselves, a convoluted relationship of moral credit according to which we first lend customs and clothes their entire significance, and then borrow it back again, paying interest on the interest; and this is why we border on bankruptcy when we cut off their line of credit.

Naturally this has some bearing on the much ridiculed absurdities of fashion, which one year make us longer and shorten us the next, which make us first fat and then skinny, sometimes wide on top and narrow on the bottom, sometimes narrow on top and wide down below, which one year prescribe that everything be combed upwards, and the next year insist that everything be combed back downwards again, impelling us now to brush our hair forwards and backwards, now to the right and to the left. If we consider it all from a wholly unsympathetic standpoint, fashion offers us an astoundingly limited number of geometric possibilities, among which we alternate in the most passionate way, without ever totally disrupting the tradition. If we likewise include the fashions of thought, feeling, and action, about which practically the same can be said, then our entire history must appear to the sensitized eye as nothing but a corral, within the confines of which the human hoard stampedes senselessly back and forth. And yet how willingly we follow the leaders, who themselves merely charge ahead of us out of terror, and what joy grins back at us in the mirror when we connect with the fashionable norm, looking exactly like everyone else, even though everyone looks different than they did yesterday! Why do we need all this?! Perhaps we fear, and rightfully so, that our character would scatter like a powder if we did not pack it into a publicly approved container.

The observer ended finally at foot level, that is, at the point where a man raised himself upright out of the animal domain. And how uncanny is that spot in the case of the communion between man and woman! We do after all have some prior knowledge of this sphere from the movies, in which famous heroes and heroines waddle rapidly toward us like ducks. But the cinema serves our love of life, and makes every effort to beautify its deficiencies, at which purpose it succeeds with ever greater technical proficiency. Not so our binoculars! They persist unrelentingly in showing us how ridiculously the legs disengage themselves from the hips and how clumsily they land on the heel and sole; not only does this organ swing inhumanly and land fat-end first, but it likewise manages meanwhile to effect the most revealing personal grimaces.

The man with his eye to the instrument noticed two such instances in the course of five minutes. Hardly had he aimed at a young fellow decked out in a sportscap (whose socks were striped like the neck of a ring dove), when he likewise noticed how with a concentrated and tiny jerk in each of his slow steps, this fellow knocked the leg of the girl sauntering beside him out of sync. No doctor, no girl, not even he himself had any inkling of the awful prospects that lay ahead; only the binoculars detached this tiny gesture of helplessness from the universal harmony of brutality and allowed the approaching figure to appear in the site! Something more harmless happened to the plump and friendly man in his prime who came quickly walking by and offered the world a kindly, obliging stride: according to a line down the middle of the site that neatly severed the legs one from another, it became apparent that his feet were repulsively twisted inwards; and now that at this one spot the curtain of truth had been lifted, one could see that his arms also swung selfishly in their shoulder sockets, that his shoulders tugged on the nape of his neck, and instead of revealing a benevolent overall appearance, all at once revealed a human system solely concerned with itself, a personality that couldn’t give a hoot about anyone else!

In this way, the binoculars contribute both to our understanding of the individual, as well as to an ever deepening lack of comprehension of the nature of humanity. By dissolving the commonplace connections and discovering new ones, it in fact replaces the practice of genius, or is at least a primary exercise. And yet perhaps for this very reason we recommend this instrument in vain. Do not people, after all, employ it even at the theater to heighten the illusion, or during intermission to see who else is there, thereby seeking not the unfamiliar, but rather, the comforting aspects of familiar faces?

It’s Lovely Here

There are many people who on their vacations are drawn to famous places. They drink beer in their hotel gardens, and if in addition they happen to make pleasant acquaintances, they already look forward to the memories. On the last day of their vacation they go to the nearest stationers; they buy postcards there, and then buy more postcards from the waiter back at the hotel. The picture postcards that these people buy look the same all over the world. They are tinted: the trees and lawns, poison green; the sky, peacock blue; the cliffs are gray and red. The houses are presented in downright painful relief, as though at any moment they might spring up out of the surface; and the color is so intense that a narrow band of it generally forms a contour on the flip side of the card. If the world really looked like that, one could indeed do nothing better than affix a stamp to it and toss it in the nearest mailbox. On these picture postcards people write: “It is indescribably beautiful here.” Or “It’s lovely here.” Or: “Too bad you couldn’t be here with me to see all this beauty.” Sometimes they also write: “You have no idea how beautiful it is here.” Or: “What a swell time we’re having here!”

You really do have to understand these people correctly! They are very happy indeed to be on a vacation trip and to see so many beautiful things that others cannot see; but it causes them pain and embarrassment actually to have to look at these things. If a tower is taller than other towers, a precipice deeper than the common precipice or a famous painting particularly large or small, that is all right, for the difference can be ascertained and talked about; it is for this reason that they tend to seek out a famous palace that is particularly spacious or particularly old, and among landscapes they prefer the wild ones. If you could only trick them about train schedules, hotel rates, and uniforms (but that is just what they would never fall for!), and set them down unawares on a cliff in the Saxon Switzerland, you could no doubt convince them to feel a genuine Matterhorn thrill, for surely Saxony is dizzying enough. If, however, something is not high, deep, large, small, or strikingly painted, in short, if something is not a phenomenon worth talking about, but merely beautiful, they choke — as though on a big smooth bite that will neither go up nor down, a morsel too soft to suffocate on, and too tough to let a word pass. Thus emerge those Oohs! and Ahs! painful syllables of suffocation. You cannot very well reach with your fingers down your throat; and we have not yet found a better means of getting the necessary words out of our mouth. It isn’t right to make fun of this. Such exclamations express a very painful feeling of constriction.

Experienced art commentators naturally have their own special techniques about which we might well have something to say; but this would be going too far. And, moreover, even the uncorrupted average man, despite the disagreeable effects of his constriction, feels a genuine satisfaction when standing face to face, as it were, with something that is acknowledged by experts as beautiful. This satisfaction has its own curious nuances. It contains for instance some of the same pride you feel when you can say that you passed the bank building at the very same hour when the famous bank robber X must have made his escape; other people already feel enraptured just to set foot in the city in which Goethe spent eight days, or to know the cousin by marriage of the lady who first swam the English Channel; there are indeed people who find it particularly wonderful just to live in such a momentous era. It always seems to revolve around a having-been-there; though in general it requires some element of complication, it must have an air of personal exclusivity. For as much as people lie, pretending to be completely engrossed in their occupations, they take a childish delight in personal experiences and that incalculable sense of importance that such experiences give us. It is then that they feel touched by their own “personal destiny,” which is an altogether extraordinary thing: “He was just talking to me at that very moment when he slipped and broke his leg. .!” What they feel, were they to be able to put it into words, is as if, behind that great blue window with the cloud curtains, someone had been standing a long time watching them.

And you may not want to believe it, but it is usually for this very reason alone that we ourselves travel to those places depicted in the postcards we buy, a tendency which does not in and of itself make sense, since it would after all be much easier simply to order the cards by mail. And this is the reason why such postcards have to be so overbearingly and over-realistically beautiful; if ever they were to start looking natural, then mankind would have lost something. “So this is what it looks like here,” we say to ourselves and study the card mistrustfully; then we write below: “You can’t imagine how lovely it is. .!” It is the same manner of speaking by which one man confides in another: “You can’t imagine how much she loves me. .”

Who Made You, Oh Forest Fair. .?

When it is very hot outside and you see a forest, you sing: “Who made you, oh forest fair, rise so tall above the ground?” This occurs with automatic certainty and is one of the reflex actions of the German nation. The more unconsciously their heat-parched tongue knocks about in their mouth, and the more like a sharkskin their throat has become, the more passionately will they gather their last strength for a musical finale, and they solemnly affirm that they will sing praises to the master above as long as their voice fills the air. This song is sung with all the obduracy of that idealism which, when all sufferings have come to an end, deserves a drink.

Yet whoever you are, you need only to have been once, for an extended period of time, in the proximity of a sweltering 104° fever, at which the border between death and life begins, to drop all your scorn for this song. You lie there — assuming you have been through a serious accident, have been operated on, and are all patched up again — as a convalescent in the beautiful sanatorium of some health resort, all wrapped up in white sheets and blankets on an airy balcony, and the world is nothing but a distant hum; and chances are, if the sanatorium is so designed, you will also be bedded down in such a way that for weeks you will have nothing before your eyes but the steep, green canopy of trees hugging the side of a mountain. You become as patient as a pebble in a brook, over which the water rushes.

Your memory is still all afever, and you taste nothing but the residual sweet dryness after the anesthesia. And you humbly remember that in the days and nights during which life wrestled over you and the most profound and ultimate thoughts would have been appropriate, you had absolutely nothing on your mind but the same redundant image: on a hike in high summer you are approaching the cool edge of a forest. Again and again this illusion returns, stepping out of the bilious blaze of the sun into the dampness of the dark, only to have to be thrust back again, approaching the same destination through sun-parched fields. How little do paintings, novels, and philosophies count at such moments! In such a weakened state the meager remains of our corporal self close up like a feverish hand, in which our intellectual aspirations melt away like little ice cubes that cannot keep you cool. You resolve henceforth to live a life which is as ordinary as possible, replete with serious attempts to achieve affluence and its rewards, which are as simple and unchanging as the taste of coolness, pleasure, and a quiet occupation. Oh, how you abhor everything out of the ordinary, everything that demands effort and ingenuity when you are sick, and how you long for the eternal, healthy mediocrity common to all men. Is there a problem in that? Let it wait! Sometimes it is a more pressing question, whether in an hour there will be chicken broth or something more invigorating on the table, and you sing to yourself: “Who made you, oh forest fair, rise so tall above the ground?. .” Life seems bent so strangely straight, since, by the way, you never could keep a tune before.

But little by little your recovery proceeds, and with it the evil spirit of the intellect returns. You start observing things. Directly opposite your balcony that green canopy of trees still hugs the side of a mountain, and you still hum that grateful song to it, a habit which all of a sudden you can’t seem to shake; but one day you realize that the forest does not consist only of a series of notes, but of trees, which before you couldn’t tell for the forest. And if you look very closely, you can even recognize how these friendly giants struggle over light and ground with the envy of horses fighting over fodder. They stand quietly side by side, here perhaps a grove of spruce, there a grove of beech trees: it looks naturally dark and light as in a painting, and moralistically edifying as the touching togetherness of families. But, in fact, it is the eve of a thousand-year-long battle.

Are there not seasoned naturalists from whom we can learn that the stalwart oak, today a veritable epitome of solitude, once spread in hordes far and wide throughout Germany? That the spruce, which now supplants everything else, was a relatively recent interloper? That at some time in the past an era of the beech empire was established and, at another time, the imperialism of the alder dominated? There was a migration of the trees, just as there was a migration of the nations, and wherever you see a homogenous native forest, it is in fact an army that established a stronghold on the embattled promontory; and where a variety of trees seem to conjure up an image of happy coexistence, they are really scattered combatants, the surviving remnants of enemy hordes crowded together, too tired and exhausted to continue battle!

This, at any rate, is still poetry, even if it isn’t quite the poetry of peacefulness which we look for in the woods; real nature is above even that. Let nature revive your strength and — insofar as all the advantages of modern nature are put at your disposal — you will likewise make the second observation that a forest consists mostly of rows of boards bedecked by a little greenery. This is no discovery, but merely an avowal of the truth; I suspect that we could not even let our glance dip into the greenery, if all were not prearranged so that our glance was met by straight and even spaces. The sly foresters arrange for a little irregularity, for a tree that steps out of line to the rear of the columns just to catch our glance, for a diagonal branch or a toppled limb left lying there all summer. For they have a subtle sense of nature and know that we would not otherwise believe them. Virgin forests have something highly unnatural and degenerate about them. The unnatural, which has become a second nature in nature, recovers its natural aspect in woods like this. A German forest wouldn’t do such a thing.

A German forest is conscious of its duty, that we might sing of it: “Who made you, oh forest fair, rise so tall above the ground? May our master’s praise resound, as long as my voice fills the air!” That master is a master forester, a chief forester or forest commissioner, who built up the forest in such a way that he would by all rights be very angry if we did not immediately notice his expert handiwork. He provided for the light, the air, the selection of trees, access roads, the location of the lumber camps, and the removal of the tree stumps; and gave the trees that beautiful, perfectly aligned, well-kempt appearance that so delights us when we come home from the wild irregularity of the metropolis.

Behind this forest missionary, who with a simple heart preaches the gospel of the lumber business to the trees, there stands a grounds keeper, a land officer or princely appointee, who writes the rules. According to his ordinances, so many square feet of open space or young saplings are prescribed each year; he distributes the beautiful vistas and the cool shades. But it is not in his hands that the ultimate destiny of the forest lies. Still higher than this authority are the reigning woodland deities, the lumber dealers and their clients, the sawmills, wood pulp plants, building contractors, shipyards, cardboard and paper mills. . Here the connection dissolves in that nameless chaos, the spectral flow of goods and money which accords even the man whose poverty drives him to suicide the certainty that the consequences of his act will affect the economy; and promotes you to the status of superintendent of sheep and woods, all of which can go to hell, when in the sweltering big city summer your pants rub up against a wooden bench and the bench in turn rubs up against your pants.

Shall we then sing, “Who made you, oh lovely depot of technology and trade so fair, rise so tall above the ground? May our master’s praise — of the termites sucking sustenance from your wood chips; but also, depending on the circumstances, other methods of your utilization — resound, as long as my voice fills the air! — ?” To this question we will have to answer no, in principle. There still is the ozone that hangs over the trees, the forest’s soft green substance, its coolness, its stillness, its depth and solitude. These are unused by-products of the forester’s technology and are as splendidly superfluous as man is on vacation, when he is nothing but himself. Herein lies a deep affinity. Nature’s bosom may indeed be unnatural, but then man on vacation is likewise an artificial construct. He has resolved not to think about business, a resolve that constitutes a veritable inner ban of silence. After a short while everything grows unspeakably and delightfully still and empty in him.

How grateful he is, then, for the little signs, the quiet words that nature has in store for him! How lovely are those path markers, those inscriptions informing him that it is only another quarter hour’s walk to the Welcome Wayfarers Inn, those benches and weathered plaques that reveal the ten commandments of the forestry commission; nature waxes eloquent! How happy is he who finds others in whose company he can tread closer to nature: partners for his card game on the lawn or a punch bowl at sunset! Through such tiny aids, nature acquires the salient qualities of a lithograph, and much of the confusion is filtered out. A mountain is then a mountain, a brook is a brook, green and blue lie with consummate clarity side by side, and no ambiguities keep the observer from coming, by the quickest route, to the conviction that it is indeed a lovely thing that he possesses.

However, as soon as we have gotten this far, the so-called eternal values easily set in. Ask any man of today, not yet confused by critical chatter, what he prefers, a landscape painting or a lithograph, and he will answer without hesitation that he prefers a good lithograph. For the uncorrupted man loves clarity and idealism, and industry is infinitely better at both than art.

Such questions reveal the progressing convalescence of our patient. The doctor says to him: “Criticize as much as you like; bad temper is a sign of recovery.” — “That makes perfect sense!” replied the distressed patient, returning to consciousness.

Threatened Oedipus

Though malicious and one-sided, this critique lays no claim to scientific objectivity.

If ancient man had his Scylla and Charybdis, so modern man has his Wasserman test and his Oedipus complex; for if he succeeded in eluding the former, and effectively setting a little offspring on its own two feet, he can be all the more certain that the latter will catch up with his son. It may well be said that without Oedipus, next to nothing is possible nowadays, neither family life nor architecture.

Since I myself grew up without Oedipus, I must of course apply great caution in speaking my mind on such matters, but I admire the methods of Psychoanalysis. I remember the following from my youth: When one of us boys was so heaped with insults that, even with the best of intentions, he could not think up a retort that packed an equally powerful punch, he simply resorted to the little word “yourself,” which, when plugged into the silent pauses of his opponent’s tirade, promptly reversed all insults and sent them back to their source. And I was very pleased to discover in my study of psychoanalytical literature that all those persons who do not believe in the infallibility of Psychoanalysis are immediately shown to have their reasons for disbelieving, reasons which can naturally only be of a psychoanalytic nature. This is splendid proof of the fact that even scientific methods were acquired before puberty.

If, however, in its use of the “riposte,” medical science reminds us of the good old days of the mail coach, it does so, albeit unconsciously, certainly not without deep psychological associations. For it is one of medicine’s greatest achievements that, in light of the present scarcity of time, it educates us to a more leisurely use of time, indeed to an easy squandering of this fleeting natural product. The only thing you know after having placed yourself in the hands of the “soul-improvement expert” is that someday the treatment will come to an end, but you are satisfied all the same with the inroads you make. Impatient patients are quickly relieved of their neurosis, and immediately start in on a new one, but he who has arrived at an appreciation of the true pleasure of Psychoanalysis will not be so overeager. From the hustle and bustle of everyday life you step into your friend’s chamber, and if the world outside explodes with all its mechanical energies, here you find the good old time gently flowing. With solicitous care, you are asked how you slept and what you dreamed. The sense of family, otherwise so sadly neglected nowadays, is once again given its natural significance, and we learn that what Aunt Gerda said when the serving girl broke the plate is not at all ridiculous, but rather, if viewed in a proper light, more telling than one of Goethe’s recorded remarks. We even may ignore the fact that it is said to be not unpleasant to speak of the “bird in our brain” — as the German saying for being crazy goes — particularly if that “bird” happens to be a stork. For more important than any particulars, and clearly the most important object of such treatment, is that the individual, softly hypnotically coaxed, should learn once again to feel himself to be the measure of all things. For centuries he has been told that his behavior is beholden to a culture that is much more important than he himself; and since in the last generation we finally all but rid ourselves of this culture, it was henceforth the rampant spread of innovations and inventions beside which the individual felt like a nothing: but now Psychoanalysis takes this stunted individual by the hand and shows him that all he needs is courage and healthy gonads. May this noble science never end! This is my wish as a lay amateur: but I believe this wish is consistent with that of the experts.

I am therefore disturbed by a suspicion, which may well derive from my lay ignorance, but may also be true. For as far as I know, the aforementioned Oedipus complex is now, more than ever, central to the theory; almost all symptoms are traced back to it, and I fear that within one or two generations there will be no more Oedipus! We are cognizant of the fact that he springs out of the nature of the little man, who finds his pleasure in his mother’s lap, and is supposed to be jealous of his father, who drives him away from there. What, then, if the mother no longer has a lap?! We understand of course where this leads: the lap is after all not the only bodily region for which the word in its strictest sense was coined; but it also signifies psychologically the whole incubative mothering quality of the woman, the bosom, the warming fat, the calming and tender-loving softness; indeed, it signifies also, and not unjustifiably so, the skirt whose wide pleats form a secret nest. In this sense, the fundamental experiences of psychoanalysis definitely derive from the dress of the 1870s and 80s, and not from the ski outfit. And particularly if you consider the modern bathing suit: where is the lap in our day and age? If with psychoanalytic longing I attempt embryonically to imagine my way back to the lap in the running and swimming girls’ and women’s bodies that are fashionable nowadays, then, their curious beauty notwithstanding, I see no reason why the next generation might not be just as eager to crawl back into the father’s lap.

And what then?

Will we instead of Oedipus be given Orestes? Or will Psychoanalysis have to give up its beneficent effect?

*Members of the elite Italian assault troops.