From Mein Kampf
If we study
the course of our cultural life during the last twenty-five years we shall be
astonished to note how far we have already gone in this process of
retrogression. Everywhere we find the presence of those germs which give rise
to protuberant growths that must sooner or later bring about the ruin of our
culture. Here we find undoubted symptoms of slow corruption; and woe to the
nations that are no longer able to bring that morbid process to a halt.
In almost all the various fields of German art and culture those morbid phenomena
may be observed. Here everything seems to have passed the culminating point of
its excellence and to have entered the curve of a hasty decline. At the
beginning of the century the theatres seemed already degenerating and ceasing
to be cultural factors, except the Court theatres, which opposed this
prostitution of the national art. With these exceptions, and also a few
other decent institutions, the plays produced on the stage were of such a
nature that the people would have benefited by not visiting them at all. A sad
symptom of decline was manifested by the fact that in the case of many ‘art
centres’ the sign was posted on the entrance doors: FOR ADULTS ONLY.
Let it be borne in mind that these precautions had to be taken in regard to
institutions whose main purpose should have been to promote the education of
the youth and not merely to provide amusement for sophisticated adults. What
would the great dramatists of other times have said of such measures and, above
all, of the conditions which made these measures necessary? How exasperated
Schiller would have been, and how Goethe would have turned away in disgust!
But what are Schiller, Goethe and Shakespeare when confronted with the
heroes of our modern German literature? Old and frowsy and outmoded and
finished. For it was typical of this epoch that not only were its own products
bad but that the authors of such products and their backers reviled everything
that had really been great in the past. This is a phenomenon that is very
characteristic of such epochs. The more vile and miserable are the men and
products of an epoch, the more they will hate and denigrate the ideal
achievements of former generations. What these people would like best would be
completely to destroy every vestige of the past, in order to do away with that
sole standard of comparison which prevents their own daubs from being looked
upon as art. Therefore the more lamentable and wretched are the products of
each new era, the more it will try to obliterate all the memorials of the past.
But any real innovation that is for the benefit of mankind can always face
comparison with the best of what has gone before; and frequently it happens
that those monuments of the past guarantee the acceptance of those modern
productions. There is no fear that modern productions of real worth will look
pale and worthless beside the monuments of the past. What is contributed to the
general treasury of human culture often fulfils a part that is necessary in
order to keep the memory of old achievements alive, because this memory alone
is the standard whereby our own works are properly appreciated. Only those who
have nothing of value to give to the world will oppose everything that already
exists and would have it destroyed at all costs.
And this holds good not only for new phenomena in the cultural domain but
also in politics. The more inferior new revolutionary movements are, the more
will they try to denigrate the old forms. Here again the desire to pawn off
their shoddy products as great and original achievements leads them into a
blind hatred against everything which belongs to the past and which is superior
to their own work. As long as the historical memory of Frederick the Great, for
instance, still lives, Frederic Ebert can arouse only a problematic admiration.
The relation of the hero of Sans Souci to the former republican of Bremen may
be compared to that of the sun to the moon; for the moon can shine only after
the direct rays of the sun have left the earth. Thus we can readily understand
why it is that all the new moons in human history have hated the fixed stars.
In the field of politics, if Fate should happen temporarily to place the ruling
power in the hands of those nonentities they are not only eager to defile and
revile the past but at the same time they will use all means to evade criticism
of their own acts. The Law for the Protection of the Republic, which the new
German State enacted, may be taken as one example of this truth.
One has good grounds to be suspicious in regard to any new idea, or any
doctrine or philosophy, any political or economical movement, which tries to
deny everything that the past has produced or to present it as inferior and
worthless. Any renovation which is really beneficial to human progress will
always have to begin its constructive work at the level where the last stones
of the structure have been laid. It need not blush to utilize those truths
which have already been established; for all human culture, as well as man
himself, is only the result of one long line of development, where each
generation has contributed but one stone to the building of the whole
structure. The meaning and purpose of revolutions cannot be to tear down the
whole building but to take away what has not been well fitted into it or is unsuitable,
and to rebuild the free space thus caused, after which the main construction of
the building will be carried on.
Thus alone will it be possible to talk of human progress; for otherwise the
world would never be free of chaos, since each generation would feel entitled
to reject the past and to destroy all the work of the past, as the necessary
preliminary to any new work of its own.
The saddest feature of the condition in which our whole civilization found
itself before the War was the fact that it was not only barren of any creative
force to produce its own works of art and civilization but that it hated,
defiled and tried to efface the memory of the superior works produced in the
past. About the end of the last century people were less interested in
producing new significant works of their own–particularly in the fields of
dramatic art and literature–than in defaming the best works of the past and in
presenting them as inferior and antiquated. As if this period of disgraceful
decadence had the slightest capacity to produce anything of superior quality!
The efforts made to conceal the past from the eyes of the present afforded
clear evidence of the fact that these apostles of the future acted from anevil
intent. These symptoms should have made it clear to all that it was not a
question of new, though wrong, cultural ideas but of a process which was
undermining the very foundations of civilization. It threw the artistic feeling
which had hitherto been quite sane into utter confusion, thus spiritually preparing
the way for political Bolshevism. If the creative spirit of the Periclean age
be manifested in the Parthenon, then the Bolshevist era is manifested through
its cubist grimace.
In this connection attention must be drawn once again to the want of courage
displayed by one section of our people, namely, by those who, in
virtue of their education and position, ought to have felt themselves obliged to take up a firm stand against this outrage on our culture. But they refrained from offering serious resistance and surrendered to what they considered the inevitable. This abdication of theirs was due, however, to sheer funk lest the apostles of Bolshevist art might raise a rumpus; for those apostles always violently attacked everyone who was not ready to recognize them as the choice spirits of artistic creation, and they tried to strangle all opposition by saying that it was the product of philistine and backwater minds. People trembled in fear lest they might be accused by these yahoos and swindlers of lacking artistic appreciation, as if it would have been a disgrace not to be able to understand and appreciate the effusions of those mental degenerates or arrant rogues. Those cultural disciples, however, had a very simple way of presenting their own effusions as works of the highest quality. They offered incomprehensible and manifestly crazy productions to their amazed contemporaries as what they called ‘an inner experience’. Thus they forestalled all adverse criticism at very little cost indeed. Of course, nobody ever doubted that there could have been inner experiences like that, but some doubt ought to have arisen as to whether or not there was any justification for exposing these hallucinations of psychopaths or criminals to the sane portion of human society. The works produced by a Moritz von Schwind or a Bocklin were also externalizations of an inner experience, but these were the experiences of divinely gifted artists and not of buffoons.
virtue of their education and position, ought to have felt themselves obliged to take up a firm stand against this outrage on our culture. But they refrained from offering serious resistance and surrendered to what they considered the inevitable. This abdication of theirs was due, however, to sheer funk lest the apostles of Bolshevist art might raise a rumpus; for those apostles always violently attacked everyone who was not ready to recognize them as the choice spirits of artistic creation, and they tried to strangle all opposition by saying that it was the product of philistine and backwater minds. People trembled in fear lest they might be accused by these yahoos and swindlers of lacking artistic appreciation, as if it would have been a disgrace not to be able to understand and appreciate the effusions of those mental degenerates or arrant rogues. Those cultural disciples, however, had a very simple way of presenting their own effusions as works of the highest quality. They offered incomprehensible and manifestly crazy productions to their amazed contemporaries as what they called ‘an inner experience’. Thus they forestalled all adverse criticism at very little cost indeed. Of course, nobody ever doubted that there could have been inner experiences like that, but some doubt ought to have arisen as to whether or not there was any justification for exposing these hallucinations of psychopaths or criminals to the sane portion of human society. The works produced by a Moritz von Schwind or a Bocklin were also externalizations of an inner experience, but these were the experiences of divinely gifted artists and not of buffoons.
This situation afforded a good opportunity of studying the miserable
cowardliness of our so-called intellectuals who shirked the duty of offering
serious resistance to the poisoning of the sound instincts of our people. They
left it to the people themselves to formulate their own attitude towards his
impudent nonsense. Lest they might be considered as understanding nothing of
art, they accepted every caricature of art, until they finally lost the power
of judging what is really good or bad.
Taken all in all, there were superabundant symptoms to show that a diseased
epoch had begun.
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