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.