nd focus: Old age: The dangerous old ones

A late work can be many things, even brilliant. But one thing is not: another early work. Just as an old person cannot become a young person again, an experienced person can no longer become a beginner. Time is irreversible, as Goethe knew, as he carried the Faust theme with him throughout his life. Despite all his experience, he was no longer able to write a “Werther” like the one he published in 1774 when he was 25 years old. However, he only completed the second part of “Faust” at the age of 82 – after keeping the unfinished manuscript under lock and key for 30 years.

Shortly before his death he took it out again. Was there still something missing? Yes, the outcome of the bet between Faust and Mephisto. Only the old Goethe on the verge of death could decide how it should end. And he decided, albeit in an extremely ambivalent way. Because Faust, Goethe’s alter ego, remains what he was – a restless spirit who exclaims about the “capable”: “As he moves forward he finds torment and happiness, he!” unsatisfied every moment.” Then darkness falls over Faust, Mephisto is already having his grave dug, but the blind Faust thinks that something new is being built here, that the swamp is being drained. Everything is going according to plan, but he’s out of the game!

So this is the truth, which can be called bitter – or redemptive. And who is this “capable man” if not himself? Goethe resorts to a highly dialectical maneuver, because all confession is behind him. Blaise Pascal says that those who knew how to hide well lived well. But should that apply to a representative like Goethe?

Yes, because representing was also a mask for him that protected him from the malice and ridicule poured out on him by so-called experts. How they attacked his theory of the primordial plant, the premaxillary bone, the theory of colors, laughed at the stone collector who preferred to occupy himself with outlandish things that interested no one but himself.

But it was precisely this curiosity in the (apparently) remote that kept him creative for more than six decades. It was later meticulously reconstructed how the old Goethe spent his days: he read new authors such as Walter Scott, Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac in the original, wrote about Serbian poetry, but also about “water nuts, mango seeds, Batavian plants, about Mexican mines , Helgoland granite and stearic acid, about the soot of plants, the slime of the will-o’-the-wisps and the entrails of the kangaroo” (Emil Ludwig). It is clear that he chose such topics himself. Napoleon remains a secret godfather to his Faust, and the unstable, instinctive Lord Byron is as close to him as his own son August could never be.

Gottfried Benn gave Goethe a lot of space in his 1954 essay “Aging as a Problem for Artists.” Maybe because he himself wouldn’t have expected how confidently our “Olympic great-grandfather” would react to the demands of old age. First with a measure that literally checkmates the new young people who are pushing forward, these powerful naives: make yourself incomprehensible to them! That’s why in the second part of “Faust” he writes about lamias, griffins, pulcinellas, imsens and empuses, creates imaginary landscapes and confuses with jumps in time – a whole demonic counterworld is called up. Everything here is directed against what is too close, which, as Goethe knows, is always wrong. He notes in his “Maxims and Reflections”: “Growing old means starting a new business yourself, all circumstances change and you either have to stop acting completely or take on the new role with will and awareness.”

But when do you actually become old? When does your late work begin? That remains a question of perspective. Because age is also a discrediting word in the battle of generations. In 1925, Rainer Mara Rilke, when he was 49 years old (and died the following year), came to Paris for a while from his hermitage in Muzot, Switzerland, and visited the salons where the literary scene met. But here 30-year-old avant-garde poets, most of whom are no longer known today, turn away from the poet fossil with a scornful look and simply leave him standing.

Young people often think they are superior to those who have created a work over a long period of time, often quietly and with little public attention. They don’t care. Not only because they are only interested in themselves, sometimes even without any work as pure self-performers. This isn’t all that new, just think of how the established art world reacted to Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” which in their eyes was a morally dubious work that only served to increase the suicide rate among unstable natures!

The often-rumored sentence comes from George Bernard Shaw: “Old men are dangerous because they don’t care at all about the future.” Shaw himself lived to be 94 and wanted the inconsideration of age to be seen as an advantage. But which masterpieces actually emerge in old age? Probably just as few as at an early age.

The poets Büchner, Kleist, Heym, Schubert and Trakl died young, as did the composer Franz Schubert and the painters Franz Marc and August Macke (killed in the First World War) – but what about Beethoven and his late compositions (especially those of someone who was increasingly deaf) or the pictures of the old Titian, who lived to be 99 years old? They look mercilessly at what remains of the shattered ideals of the beginning and practice the art of what is still possible. Benn can say about Rembrandt’s late work that it was “closeted, cautious, cold: without me.” The old Beethoven revolutionized music once again.

Some people’s creative power dries up sooner than others. Those who create works that are respected well into old age seem to have one thing in common: they repeatedly break down previous roles, even – and especially – those that brought them success. The film director Jean-Luc Godard is perhaps the best example of this. At the beginning of the 1960s he suddenly became famous with masterpieces such as “Out of Breath” and “Contempt,” becoming the epitome of the Nouvelle Vague. But he didn’t want to have anything to do with that anymore and went down the path of becoming a political activist, only to finally rigorously end this phase and turn to new – increasingly experimental – forms of film, which became expeditions into the realm of images.

What is an image anyway, and what manipulative function does it have in a media world that uses images to advertise products and ideologies in equal measure, and even more: creates them? In 2019, at the age of almost 90, Godard shot his “Picture Book”, a declaration of love for the fascination of worlds of images and at the same time a penetrating analytical perspective. His claim: Seeing needs to be learned just as much as reading. Without forming one’s own power of judgment, people remain a mere object of other people’s interests.

But not everyone has the strength to constantly change and to ignore the art business – which ultimately helps them make money and reputation. But anyone who repeatedly repeats a role that once made them popular quickly sinks into insignificance. It’s more logical to get out completely. For example, Brigitte Bardot appeared notoriously feminine, pretty and seductive in Godard’s “Contempt” alongside Michel Piccoli – but with the keen instinct that she was being used by her lover (Piccoli as a screenwriter) as bait for the US -American producers are used. She then refuses him. B. B., the sex symbol of the 1960s, actually left the film business and today – at almost 90 years old – lives her second life as an animal rights activist.

Other world-famous directors such as Woody Allen (88) remain true to their skepticism against any idealism. Maybe that’s a good thing. Because humans are notoriously indecisive creatures. And the choice between strict artistic standards for the few and clever entertainment for the many can only be made on a case-by-case basis. Allen remains true to the attitude of the urban neurotic to this day – with varying success and a new film every year. In 2020 he shot “Rifkin’s Festival,” a melancholic reference to the greats of film history. Then we saw Christoph Waltz as Death playing chess, like Allen’s idol Ingmar Bergman in “The Seventh Seal” in 1957.

Hermann Hesse completed his late work “The Glass Bead Game” in 1943 – a plea for true education against the evil spirit of Nazi ideology. Difficult to read, also because he plays with the pietistic treatise form of his missionary parents and at the same time sets up a science fiction setting. Something new at the end that uses the traditional in an original way. After that, he was an author without any other work for almost two decades, writing letters, painting in watercolors and burning brushwood in the garden while contemplating. If that isn’t true wisdom of old age!