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 alcohoclass="underline" 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.