6. The Old and the Young

Anyone who has come to a view of how peoples and ages have achieved great and significant things through contemplation of the historical past cannot help but feel bitter when he looks around him today and sees the spiritual goings-on in the world. It looks rather old-fashioned, the lament into which we are breaking out here, we know that. But we give ourselves up to the hope that there is still enough sense for the natural development of peoples and people to find a hearing for these laments. These are not the complaints of the "old", who no longer want to and can no longer understand the "young" because they cannot get out of their historically inherited prejudices, but rather the complaints of a "young" who could never gain the conviction that "greenness", ignorance and lack of education are worth more than a mind schooled in the great examples of the past.

Recently, one of the "young" gave us the wise advice: we could get along after all. Young people leave their French tutors, salon ladies and so on to old people; they should just leave their worn-out waitresses, modest pimps and drunkards to them. We don't quite understand this peace proposal. For we have never had any desire for the used waitresses and so on; so they remain with the "young gentlemen". But when complete immaturity puts forward such aesthetic drivel in order to justify its insane filthy writing as a direction equal to dignified art, then we reject such an insult to the German national spirit. The German nation must never again tolerate people in its midst giving themselves the honorary title of poet who, in their writings and rhymes, deal with things that, when read, produce nothing in us but the suggestion of a disgusting smell.

We wouldn't pay any further attention to the pundits in question, we would simply leave them to one side as the scribbling rabble, if we hadn't recognized an eminent danger in their appearance. In few periods of time has there been such an aversion to thoroughness and depth as there is today. Where there is a need for spiritual contemplation, a serious engagement with problems, modern man turns away. This is probably because liberalism has exerted its "educational and progressive influence" over many decades! When these intellectually inert people, who are indifferent to idealistic interests, are offered such banal fare as, for example, recently in "Modern Poetry" and similar magazines, and with the pretension that this means just as much as those difficult intellectual tasks of a better age, then their self-confidence, which is based on nothing, grows. She thinks her narrow-mindedness is greatness.

In our view, this "modernity" is nothing but the delusional drivel of the immature sex, acting without the aspiration of maturity. These "moderns" despise the old not out of knowledge, for deeper reasons, but out of ignorance. And this ignorance is the fruit of that laziness that has never wanted to learn anything proper.

Only those who have become masters of the old, who have absorbed it and allowed themselves to be saturated by it, have the right to speak of a longing for the new. When a school of thought and artistic movement has lived out its full potential, when it has brought to fruition all the secret seeds slumbering within it, then it steps away from the stage of history of its own accord, then it gives birth to the new from within itself. It is downright outrageous when the green youth take credit for this "greenness", when they claim it as an advantage, as something special. No, dear "young gentlemen", young people have always been green, but never as cheeky as they are today. Twenty-year-old boys have always written poems and the like, but it has never occurred to them to proclaim themselves the bearers of entirely new epochs.

We appreciate youth because we love strength. We also understand the Sturm und Drang that overshoots the mark, but we firmly reject youthful, powerless, rabble-rousing megalomania.

It must fill us with melancholy when we hear judgments about Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Grillparzer from this side. Without even the slightest hint of a sense of spiritual depth, hollowness takes center stage, without any awareness of the fact that it is unconscionable of the most disgusting kind to pass judgment on a product of the mind that one does not understand.

What we would like to shout to the gentlemen of "Modern Poetry", "Society" and the other representatives of the "Green" principle is: learn something! Nothing is more dangerous than judging before one has reached spiritual maturity. Anyone who sits in the critical judgement seat too early in the face of a spiritual phenomenon makes it impossible for them to allow it to have the proper effect on them.

We do not want to go into the details here. For whether Conrad writes a novel in which things are told that are otherwise done in secluded rooms in order to spare the sense of smell, or whether Hermann Bahr writes a "critical article" in which he announces that the "great death" of the ideal has finally begun and the age of dirt has arrived, or whether a third party sings about the eyes "with the black rim", we are basically indifferent. However, we would like to make a different suggestion to the recent proposal made by the "young" to the "old". Keep the used waitresses, we'll even let you keep the modest pimps; but keep all the riff-raff. For we do not wish to use our noses for aesthetic pleasure even when they are pleasant, let alone when they are touched unpleasantly. For we stick to our old aesthetics to the extent that only the higher senses are aesthetic.

We know well what will be said about these lines in the circles concerned: this is written by a person who is still afflicted by the "old" view of art, who still believes in this garbage of aesthetics and so on, a person who lacks any understanding of the spirit of the age. But my dear "young ones", only believe this: if anything is easy to understand, it is you. For the rest of us need only remember what we understood before we learned anything, then we can grasp you. We are not impressed by such shallowness, by such immaturity.

But if one of "our own" should ask us why we have written this, since more serious people should hardly be interested in dealing with such things, we will answer him: we have written with the feelings of a person who, out of sanitary considerations, feels moved to speak a word when unhealthy elements all around threaten to pollute the air of life.