Nationalism and Culture (93 page)

The Revolution of 1848 proved how deeply this spirit had taken root J not even the blood of the June massacre could drown it out. Full of promise and drunk with hope the call of the International rang later through the lands, seeking to weld together the disinherited of society into a world-encompassing alliance of labor. No longer was the sweat of the poor to feed parasites j the earth was to become once more a home for manj and the fruits of labor, food for all. It was not crumbs from the tables of the rich that they wanted, but justice, and bread and freedom for everyone. Labor was no longer to be the scullion of society, the poor Lazarus who made a show of his suffering before the doors of the rich to soften their hearts. A great yearning surged through the world of the damned. The ideal of a better future had shaken up their deadened souls and filled them with enthusiasm. Now they stretched their hands beyond the boundaries of states, for they felt how everywhere the same need gnawed at their lives, the same hopes burned in their hearts. And

SO they formed the great Union of Militant Labor out of which a new society was to issue.

Art, too, was seized by this spirit. Depict what is, became the watchword of realism. The artist was no longer to be compelled to represent only the "beautiful," which was borrowed from other worlds and was often only a sugar-coated lie. So the world of labor appeared on canvas, men in tattered garments with hard faces in which care had carved its runes. And men discovered with astonishment that even in this world there dwells hidden beauty that they had not perceived before.

Francois Millet was one of the first apostles of the new evangel of productive labor. Although in his whole nature utterly unpolitical he recognized, nevertheless, the social significance of labor in its deepest sense. Himself a peasant, the man of the furrows had a special place in his heart, for he loved the soil, loved everything that bore its signs and breathed out the fragrance of new-plowed fields. Millet's peasants are no figures of the imagination. In his art there is no place for the pastoral romanticism of fantastic visionaries for whom the products of the imagination must supplant the realities of life. What he presented is hard, unvarnished reality: the man of the soil here has his say, and straightforwardly and eloquently he testifies of the content of his existence. Millet painted his knurled and calloused hands, his bent back, his weather-beaten, bony facej he showed him in his intimate native union with the soil that he tilled and made fruitful with his sweat. These are not the peasants whom we know from Auerbach's village tales, who often produce the impression that they have just had their hair curled and been dressed in their Sunday best to make them fit for the parlor j no. Millet's peasants are genuine. And still there hangs over everything that he produced an air of quiet solemnity which is not artificially conceived but arises from the subject itself. It is the deep breathing of the earth, which keeps time with the eternal rhythm of labor and calls to life in the soul of the beholder that strange vibration which comes close to understanding the unison of all growth. Pictures like The Gleaners, The Man with the Hoe, The Shepherdess, or The Angelt^ are monumental in the straightforward greatness of their expression.

It had no easy position, this new art. How they attacked Gustave Courbet, the friend of Proudhon, the "supporter of every revolution," as he called himself, when he dared to "profane the principle of beauty" by putting proletarians on canvas in their work-clothes and proclaiming a new art which no longer borrowed from the classic prototypes of a dead past but drew its material and its inspiration from the modern life that roared about the artist on every side. Works like The Stonebreakers, The Burial in Ornane, The Man with the Pipe, whose artistic qualities we cannot sufiiciently admire today, were scorned by the academicians

and appraised as evidence of -a horrible aberration of taste. Yet the realism of Courbet was no more than an attempt to see men and the world in a new light, in which he touched on matters which none before him had perceived. This is shown by his splendid landscapes, their palpable pregnancy and superabundance of life, like a hymn to the principle of fertility.

What inner beauty can be discovered in the world of labor no one has shown better than Constantin Meunier, who was such a fanatical worshiper of the antique beauty of form. Still, amid the reeking chimneys, the pit-mouth structures and the smelting furnaces of the Borinage he felt the hurried pulse-beat of that realm of steel which breathes with iron lungs and moves its mighty limibs in time with the machines. There came to him, too, the knowledge that he belonged to his time and that his art must strike root in it. His yearning for the forms of the antique blended with the powerful impressions that the artist received in the heart of Belgian industry. So he created those mighty figures of labor, which are permeated with yearning for a new world and despite all the hardships of their harsh existence look the present in the eye confident of victory. What strength lives in these figures that swing pickaxes in the bowels of the earth, pour melted steel illumined by a magic glory, stride across dark fields and scatter fertile seeds, or bear great burdens on their sturdy shoulders. Weighty path-breakers of a new time are these, heralds of a new beginning which no power on earth can check. There is an antique greatness in these figures, who advance with firm steps to meet the red dawn of a new day. And just as powerful is the effect of the Cyclopean realm in which they walk and strengthen their desire.

In every country there arose exemplars and interpreters of this new art, in whose works the need of the times came to life and struggled to expression. I-n their productions are mirrored the discord of our social order, its double standard of morals, its heartless egoism, its lack of genuine humanity, the whole moral corrosion of a time that had set up Mammon as Lord of the Earth. And yet another emotion lived in these works: the thunderous hymn of world-encircling labor and the feverish glow of revolutionary popular movements, the timorous longing for a new community of true freedom and justice. A long line of names appears before our eyes, artists from every country ruled by masters, united by the invisible bonds of inner experience and—each in his own way— cooperating in the work of social reconstruction. Charles de Grouxand and A. Th. Steinlen, Leon Frederic and Antoine Wiertz, Segantini and Luce, Charles Hermanns and E. Laermans, Felicien Rops and Vincent van Gogh, G. F. Watts and Kathe Kollwitz, Franz Masereel, Heinrich Zille, Georg Grosz, Diego Rivera and countless others—they all have their roots in the great social phenomena of their time, and their art has as good as no relation at all to the accident of their national descent.

This applies, however, not only to those artists in whose works a more or less clear social attack finds expression, but to all. Every artist is in the end only a member of a great cultural unity which, along with his personal endowments, determines his workj and in this nationality plays an entirely subordinate role. In art also one recognizes the same universal phenomena that are revealed in every other field of human workj here, too, mutual invigoration within the same culture circle, of which the nation is only a fragment, plays a decisive role. Let us remember the words of Anselm Feuerbach, who was certainly no man of revolutionary trend. "Men have been pleased to represent me as preeminently a German artist, I solemnly protest against this designation, for that which I am I owe in part to myself, in part to the Frenchmen of 1848 and to the old Italians."

It is further significant that this allegedly so German artist was during his lifetime altogether proscribed in Germany itself, and so thoroughly that he was even denied to have any talent as a painter. The nation as such, therefore, not only produces no artists, it lacks all the preconceptions that make it possible to appreciate properly a work of art. The "voice of the blood" was never yet in a position to discover the "race-related features" in a work of art, otherwise the number of the artists who have been so terribly misunderstood, despised and slandered by their contemporaries in their own nation would not be so large.

Let us just keep in mind what a strong influence the various trends in art have exercised over the work of individual artists j from it their nationality has been quite powerless to free them. The diflFerent tendencies in art have their source not in the nation, but in the time and the social conditions of the time. Classicism and romanticism, expressionism and impressionism, cubism and futurism are time-phenomena on which the nation has no influence. The close relation between artists who belong, not to the same nation, but to the same school of art is recognizable at the first glance; between two descendants of the same nation, however, of whom one is an adherent of classicism, while the other follows the path of cubism or futurism, there is—so far as concerns their art—no point of contact whatever. This holds good for all arts and also for literature. Between Zola and the adherents of naturalism in other countries there exists an unmistakable kinship j but between Zola and De Viliier or De Nerval, although they ^re all Frenchmen ; between Huysmans and Maeterlinck, although they are both Belgians; between Poe and Mark Twain, although they are both Americans; there yawns a wide abyss. All the talk about the "national core" which allegedly lies at the basis of every work of art lacks any deep foundation and is nothing more than a wish-concept.

No, art is not national, any more than science or any other sphere

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE ^IJ

of our intellectual and material life. Let it be granted that climate and external surroundings have a certain influence upon the spiritual status of men, and consequently upon the artist j but this frequently occurs in the same country and within the same nation. That from it there can be deduced no law of nationality is shown by the fact that every northern people that has moved to the south and settled there, like the Normans in Sicily or the Goths in Spain, has not only forgotten its ancient speech in the new homeland, but has also adapted itself to the new surroundings in its emotional life. The national standard, if it could be enforced, would condemn all art to dreary imitation, and take from it just that which alone makes it art—its inner inspiration. What is usually called the "national" is as a rule only the clinging to the past, the despotism of tradition. Even the traditional may be beautiful and may inspire the artist to create j but it must not become the sole compass of life and crush everything new under the weight of a dead past. Where men try to awaken the past to new life, as is happening today so grotesquely in Germany, life becomes dreary and stale, a mere caricature of what has been. For there is no bridge that leads back to the past. Just as a grown man, despite all his longing, can never return to the years of his childhood, but must go on and finish his course of life, so also a people cannot recall to being the history of its past. Every cultural product is universal, most of all, art. It was none other than Hanns Heinz Ewers, who now basks in Adolf Hitler's grace, who gave this truth expression in the words:

Whole worlds separate the man of culture in Germany from his fellow countrymen, whom he sees every day on the street; but a mere nothing, just a trivial bit of water, separates him from the man of culture in America. Heine felt this and cast it in the teeth of the Frankfurters. Edgar Allan Poe uttered it even more clearly. But most of the artists and scholars and educated men of every people have had so little understanding of it that even to our day Horace's fine Odi frofanum has been incorrectly interpreted! The artist who wishes to create for "his people" is striving after something impossible and often neglects in doing this something attainable and even higher: to create for the whole world. Above the Germans, above Britons and Frenchmen stands a higher nation: the nation of culture; to create for it is the only task worthy of an artist.^

Art and culture stand above the nation, above the state. Just as no true artist creates only for a particular people, so art as such can never be stretched on the Procrustean bed of the nation. It will rather, as the finest interpreter of social life, contribute to the preparation for a higher social culture which will overthrow state and nation to open for humankind the portals of a new community which is the goal of their desires.

^ Edgar Allan Poe. Berlin and Leipzig, 1905, p. 39.

THE NATIONAL STATE AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE OLD COMMUNITY. THE ERA OF REVOLUTION A RESULT OF LOST SOCIAL EQUILIBRIUM. HISTORICAL CONNECTIONS AS CULTURAL PHENOMENA. THE WEAKENING OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND PERSONAL INDEPENDENCE. THE FATALISTIC CHARACTER OF OUR THINKING AND OF THE BELIEF IN THE DETERMINISM OF SOCIAL EVENTS. THE GIANT STATE AND ECONOMIC MONOPOLY AS SCOURGES OF MANKIND. MAN AND MACHINE. INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC CHAOS. TECHNOCRATIC SCHEMES. THE SOCIAL QUESTION A PROBLEM OF CONSUMPTION. IS STATE CAPITALISM A SOLUTION? INTERNATIONALIZATION OF REGIONS SUPPLYING RAW MATERIAL. WORLD ECONOMY, NOT WORLD EXPLOITATION. WHAT THE STATE COSTS US. THE MATERIAL LOSSES OF THE WORLD WAR. THE MADNESS OF THE TIMES. OVERCOMING THE STATE AND THE NATION BY THE NEW COMMUNITY.

AFTER the decline of the old city culture and the period of federalism in Europe the real purpose of social existence was gradually forgotten. Society is today no longer the natural relation of man to man which finds expression in community of intellectual and material interests. With the appearance of the national state all social activity gradually becomes an instrument to serve the special ends of organizations for political power; no longer to serve the interests of the community but the wishes and necessities of privileged classes and castes in the state. Society thus loses its intrinsic stability and becomes subject to periodic convulsions, arising from conscious or unconscious efforts to restore the lost coherence.

Louis Blanc traces the germ of the French Revolution back to the age of the Reformation. In fact, with the Reformation begins a new chapter of European history which has not to this day reached a definite end. It has rightly been called the "Era of Revolution," a designation justified by the fact that all the peoples of the continent were equally seized and influenced by it. In his enlightening essay, Die Revolution^ Gustav Landauer sought to distinguish the various stages of this epoch and to give them a definite sequence. He refers to one of them thus: