Summer with Tucholsky – are you interested in art?

The citizens of Central European countries have it with art; He is very proud of that.

He does it like this: Papa reads a “good book” in the evenings, possibly one that flatters his old school education and about which you can talk beautifully afterwards. Mama reads the new novel, in which she experiences the fuses of gender like an old sailor the description of foreign storms – Ellychen reads the same novel secretly; Karl was in the art exhibition and explains the green pictures for “nonsense kitsch” and the red ones for “extraordinarily modern”. So everyone does what they can do.

That would remain the private pleasure of the gentlemen if they didn’t even imagine so much. They seriously consider this art serve to what they call in their salons “culture” – and they also seriously believe that it is already something if one could have a more or less clever over Hodler, the Epigons CF Meyers, Honegger and Rodin. There are also a lot of families in which art is cultivated without snobism, quite reasonable and measured – but what overestimation of this action!

Of course, it is still better if smaller societies talk about Stravinsky than they poker. I just don’t think the difference is so huge. To make this understand, we think a bit of a salon entertainment from the eighteenth century, which we want to experience imaginatively. Half an hour of invisible guest in such a circle who breaks the tongues about the small model literature of the day, over the painters and musicians – and we speak: »Otherwise the gentlemen have no worries? That is what you deal with? Don’t you see for yourself? How is the farmers doing? What it looks like in your lusty prisons? How is the goods production regulated? That girls are tortured by their mates? ”All Lorgnon carriers turned away indignantly … what a cultural flail!

It is exactly the same today.

Not only are you proud of the fact that you enjoy art – you are even more proud when you make a judgment. A young, talented playwright France, Marcel Belvianes, recently wrote to me: “The reader feels superior to the author, simply by the fact that he gives his judgment about him.” Modern literary discussions, modern art conversations differ in no way from an stock exchange entertainment: wrote and unnoted values float in the air, which is good, the third is better – and one is very bad – and one Heaty, completely senseless debate lifts and never ends. “How do you like Rilke? How, you think he’s good? Do you still like him or good again? Paints Klee better than Cézanne? ”You can continue for years. However, the art of water is so biased in his stuff that he honestly believes that he has performed a performance with this chatter.

Art is a social game in moderate citizens. It has exactly the value of one and no longer weighs a gram. Richard Strauss, the evaluation of the Keller’s influence on modern prose, blind cow, Italian early Gothic and French late Renaissance – everything goes in one. The bourgeois art game is the distraction from the essential. It leads to nothing than to drive the time to pass the time anyway. It is overestimated, and it is deliberately overestimated because it is so beautifully harmless, because no interest in interest, no injustice of property on land, is not associated with agricultural reform. A music enthusiast rarely eats other people.

Not that is culture that any senior teacher can samble beautiful verses, understands a piece of music, a painting classifies properly – not that is culture. That is a tradition. Because it does not matter which country the most beautiful plays, the best dancers that produce the most complicated musicians, but it depends on the fact that every person who lives healthy and decent, nourishes himself, can wash himself and does not owe his life to the economic operations of the state. It is much more ungrateful, less amusing, sometimes more dangerous than Miss Minna to swarge the beauties of Thomas Mann’s.

Culture begins where bank director stops: with the active radical politics that the world wants to tear up.

The text was published in May 1926 in the “Zurich Student”. We cut it a little for the “ND”.