of being fair to him, is not a literary essay. It doesn’t exhaust the problem of Heine, but it does more than this.8 The most ridiculous reproach—that it holds Heine responsible as an individual culprit for his consequences—can’t touch it. The people who pretend to defend him are defending themselves and revealing the true direction of the attack. They should be held responsible for their existence, and the sputum that German intellectuals immediately coughed up is evidence that they feel themselves to be the responsible consequence. There were individuals severely enough punished by their own poetry or too gravely insulted by their own polemics to have needed to respond in detail. The few who were annoyed and the many who didn’t read have confirmed what was written.9 It wasn’t the danger of experiencing a desecration of Heine, but surely the fear of hearing the most hostile thing that can be said to this age of talents, that prevented the shout from having a stronger echo. It wasn’t an evaluation of Heinean poesy, but a critique of a form of life in which everything uncreative has once and for all found its place and its brilliantly wretched accommodation, that was essayed here. Not a denunciation of the invention of a pestilence, nor even of its importation, but a description of a spiritual condition on which ornaments fester. This offended the pride of the bacteria carriers. Here language is somehow released from everything it was obligated to outwit, and the power to acquire better content is celebrated. Here this very language declares itself a stranger to the calligraphic fraud that admires the beauty mongers from Paris to Palermo for the verve with which, in art and in the hotel bill, a five-note is made into a niner. This they didn’t understand, or recognized as dangerous enough that they didn’t want to hear it.
But so as not to chastise lack of ability, which is an honest effect of the gifted zeitgeist, more severely than the malice that social possibilities of every age have mobilized against thought, it must be said that a particular suspicion has compelled the author to ask the publisher Albert Langen for the reprint rights to this document. The author’s well-known persecution mania, which has gone so far as to whisper to him that he hasn’t managed to make himself loved in twelve years’ time, led him to believe that the pamphlet was intentionally suppressed.10 He imagined that bugs flushed from Heine’s mattress-grave had sprung into action and settled in precisely on the road they know so well, the one that leads from thinking to commerce. Fear of the press can move mountains and shutter halls; a hint is perhaps not even needed to make a Viennese bookseller tepid in marketing a dangerous pamphlet that generates only paltry profit.11 Especially not one of the ones who are even now still sore with Die Fackel about a civil action that its first printer brought against it. Is it not, then, a most indicative Viennese circumstance that not only will the glances of the strolling city be spared the irritation of my books, but that copies of Die Fackel—one line of which contains more literature than the collective show windows of every downtown bookstore, and on whose least comma more torment and love are expended than on a library of luxury editions by Insel—are compelled to offer themselves amid cigars, lottery tickets, and tabloids to cover the costs of a never-rewarded and never-appreciated labor, while an entire chorus of humor-loving vermin considers the thing lucrative and gloats over the idea of the “double issue.”12 A magazine that avoids like leprosy the most legitimate sponsorship,13 that in its desire to earn its own living makes life harder for itself, and that is book-born like hardly a book in contemporary Germany, has to do without the support of its own industry, which ought to have an obligation to it, and to get a taste, in Austrian exile, of the sort of ignominy that throws the person condemned for a political offense into jail with the pickpockets. The pack of liberals whose cosmic feeling is avarice, and whom you have to beg for the mercy of excusing you as crazy if you fail to make a profit: Does it have any idea how many pleasures it could buy with the money that my work of hate devours before it achieves the form with which a self-glorifier is never satisfied—because only then does it reveal to him the errors that the others don’t notice? But here, in his archive, he takes what he likes and collects what is liked nowhere else. Here nothing can disappoint him. A work that instead of twenty editions didn’t see a second one: here nothing more can happen to it. Its author, whose pleasure it is to reach into the spokes of his own wheel to shut down both himself and the machine when the tiniest point displeases him, will never again lend his assistance to an alien publishing concern.14 He will never again try to win a new audience. For him, Die Fackel is not a platform but a haven. Here the destiny of a work can move him only through the point of its completion, not through its dissemination. What’s being lived here may be resurrected in a book. But it’s recompense enough to be bound to one’s own wheel.15
FINAL WORD [TO “HEINE AND THE CONSEQUENCES”]
To report the insignificant fact that “Heine and the Consequences” is in its third edition in seven years, after having been circulated in Die Fackel as well, is not the motive for this supplement.1 The wish is to append something else, which likewise, in the guise of a correction, allows the correctness of a deeper observation to be recognized for the first time.2 Everything that’s said here, and in every chapter about the loss of life in contemporary life and the linguistic betrayal of German humanity, has a train of thought leading to the brink of this war, thanks to which my truths now also have the quality of self-evidence. An explanation is needed only at the point where, in my desperation to escape the machine, I said that I preferred an already fully dehumanized zone to that beauty-smitten thing that resisted the relentless march of progress with the leftover wreckage of humankind.3 This antithesis, now broken open by the war, was resolved in later aphorisms in favor of precisely the latter life-form, as the one with a yearning for life and for form, which, on account of just such a yearning, and of a self-preservative instinct as well, was obliged to undertake emergency defense against the tyranny of a valueless utility, according to which life is finished products and culture the trappings. The question “in which hell would the artist prefer to fry” gave way to the urgent verdict that humanity preferred not to fry in this hell, as a result of the corrective insight of the artist himself, who now no longer has the right and no longer the possibility of seeking to securely lock away his inner self, but only the duty of seeing which parties of mankind are struggling, like him, for the preservation of this kind of happiness and against the coercions of a philosophy of life that has squeezed all the motivations out of life, so as to save it solely for the profit motive. But the fact that those were the regions from whose character the disturbance came in peaceful times: to succumb to doubt about this would be wartime treason against the nature that is warding off the machine.4 It does it; and it does it, if need be, with the help of the machine itself, like the artist who isn’t above using the industrial methods of his times to preserve himself from them.5 Faced with the imperfection of life, he affirms the substitute for life; faced with half individuals, he affirms the patented system for avoiding personalities entirely. The person who helps himself to the machine is rewarded to the same extent that the people who help the machine are impoverished. Because the latter doesn’t liberate a person but makes him its slave, it brings him not to himself but under artillery fire. However, the kind of thinking that, unlike power, doesn’t need a “New Orientation”6 to reestablish its command knows that it was merely creating an emergency exit from the chaos of peace, and that what seemed contradictory about the division of values into “German-Romance” was merely the internal contradiction of modern life, which is today being resolved by way of events.7 The frame of reference that seemed unwilling to accept the “lazzarone as a cultural ideal alongside the German constable” thereby affirmed him more than