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PARTISAN REVIEW
generations into contact with modern literature and ideas. The renais–
sance was short-lived. Dolf Sternberger's
Wandlung
printed some lines
from
Four Quartets,·
and then the reinforcements came up from the rear
with the manuscripts of
Three Men on a Horse
and
The Voice of the
Turtle,
the latest films of Deanna Durbin and Mickey Rooney, books
of instruction on how to play baseball, everything but a selection of
current American comic-strips. (Curiously and happily enough no such
thing exists in Germany; not a single newspaper here carries a comic–
strip!)
The result has been disastrous. The German intelligentsia has learned
nothing, read nothing, since 1933, and it has forgotten much. Freud
.and Marx are only lingering memories, and to the younger generation
xpere calumnied names. Of Joyce, Eliot, Gide, Kafka, Silone, little is
known, and they are rarely discussed. In art there is not only ignorance
but also indifference and hostility. Paris has sent into Germany an
exhibition of modern French masters, and I caught the show
i~
Munich.
It was advertised as "Extremist Art," which still had a tone from the old
epoch of
entartete Kunst.
But degenerate only (forgive me for using that
ugly Nazi word) were the reactions and impressions of the public. Good-
~
willed exhibitors, dealers, critics, were scandalized and depressed. As
Erich Kaestner said bitterly, "The most intolerant, stupid, and vile re–
marks originate almost without exception with students and other young
people. Youth who were always the first and most enthusiastic partisans
of the artistic vanguard today fill the ranks of the Philistines. We Ger–
mans have the aesthetic ideals of old women, and honor only trash and
incompetence.... Art is once again free, but the students still spit on
everything they do not understand just as they were taught." At some
exhibitions there were incidents of mutilated canvases. And when the
professionals (students and gallery-goers) were actually questioned, most
of the great names meant nothing to them-Kandinsky, Grosz, Gropius,
Feininger. With Picasso there was some familiarity, but not enough to
offer any intelligent comment or comparison with the new works of
Germans (like Franz Marc) .
The very mention of these names reminds one how different the
old post-war epoch was. What energy, what activity there was! In art
with these masters (who are now all dead or living in other countries)–
in the cinema with
Caligari
and the films of Pabst and von Stroheim,
Lang, and Murnau-in poetry, in literature, in political theory. But. the
whole past lies today in ruins. The conquerors have no interest in sav–
ing any of the pieces, in helping to put together some stones for a new
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