like a virtuoso on an instrument.” Heine is objective. Against Börne: “The deeds of an author consist in words.” Against Platen: he calls his achievement “in words, a splendid deed”—“so entirely unfamiliar with the essence of poesy that he doesn’t even know that the word is a deed only for a rhetorician, whereas for a true poet the word is an event.”
Which was it for Heine? Neither deed nor event but intention or accident. Heine was a Moses who tapped his staff on the rocks of the German language. But speed isn’t sorcery, the water didn’t flow from the rock, he simply brought it up with his other hand; and it was eau de cologne.96 Heine turned the miracle of linguistic creation into a magic act. He achieved as much as can be achieved with language; greater still is what can be created out of language. He could write a hundred pages, but he couldn’t shape the language of the hundred pages that weren’t written. When Iphigenie97 begs for a kind parting word and the king says to her, “Farewell!” it’s as though leave were being taken for the first time in the world, and a “Farewell!” like this outweighs the Book of Songs and a hundred pages of Heine’s prose. The mystery of the birth of the old word was foreign to him.98 The language was at his command. Yet never did she reduce him to silent ecstasy. Never did her favor force him to his knees. Never did he follow paths invisible to the profane reader’s eye, approaching the place where love first begins. Oh, the marrow-burning rapture of experiences in language! The danger of the word is the delight of thought. What turned the corner there? Not even seen and already loved! I plunge into this adventure.
ON THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS DEATH
We cannot celebrate his memory the way a posterity ought to, by acknowledging a debt we’re called upon to honor, and so we want to celebrate his memory by confessing to a bankruptcy that dishonors us, we inhabitants of a time that has lost the capacity to be a posterity … How could the eternal Builder fail to learn from the experiences of this century? For as long as there have been geniuses, they’ve been placed into a time like temporary tenants, while the plaster was still drying; then they moved out and left things cozier for humanity. For as long as there have been engineers, however, the house has been getting less habitable. God have mercy on the development! Better that He not allow artists to be born than with the consolation that this future of ours will be better for their having lived before us. This world! Let it just try to feel like a posterity, and, at the insinuation that it owes its progress to a detour of the Mind, it will give out a laugh that seems to say: More Dentists Prefer Pepsodent. A laugh based on an idea of Roosevelt’s and orchestrated by Bernhard2 Shaw. It’s the laugh that’s done with everything and is capable of anything. For the technicians have burned the bridges, and the future is: whatever follows automatically.3 This velocity doesn’t realize that its achievement is important only in escaping itself. Present in body, repellent in spirit, perfect just the way they are, these times of ours are hoping to be overtaken by the times ahead, and hoping that the children, spawned by the union of sport and machine and nourished by newspaper, will be able to laugh even better then. There’s no scaring them; if a spirit comes along, the word is: we’ve already got everything we need. Science is set up to guarantee their hermetic isolation from anything from the beyond. Let art chase away their worries about which planet happens to be benefiting from the thoughts of the world anterior to them.4 This thing that calls itself a world because it can tour itself in fifty days is finished as soon as it can do the math.5 To look the question “What then?” resolutely in the eye, it still has the confidence to reckon with whatever doesn’t add up. It’s grateful to the authors who relieve it of the problem, whether by diversion or by dispute. But it has to curse the one—living or dead—whom it encounters as admonisher or spoilsport between business and success. And when cursing no longer suffices—because cursing implies reverence—it’s enough to forget. And the brain has barely an inkling that the day of the great drought has dawned. Then the last organ falls silent, but the last machine goes on humming until even it stands still, because its operator has forgotten the Word.6 For the intellect didn’t understand that, in the absence of spirit, it could grow well enough within its own generation but would lose the ability to reproduce itself.7 If two times two really is four, the way they say it is, it’s owing to the fact that Goethe wrote the poem “Stillness and Sea.” But now people know the product of two times two so exactly that in a hundred years they won’t be able to figure it out. Something that never before existed must have entered the world. An infernal machine of humanity.8 An invention for shattering the Koh-i-noor to make its light accessible to everyone who doesn’t have it.9 For fifty years now it’s been running, the machine into which the Mind is put in the front to emerge at the rear as print, diluting, distributing, destroying. The giver loses, the recipients are impoverished, and the middlemen make a living. A hybrid thing has settled in to subvert the values of life by turning them against each other. In the pestilential miasma of the intellect, art and mankind make their peace … A spirit who’s been dead for fifty years today, and who still isn’t alive, is the first victim of this festival of joy, about which reports by the column have appeared ever since. How it happened that a spirit like this was buried:10 it could only be the enormous content of his satirical thinking, and I believe he continues to create. He, Johann Nestroy, cannot tolerate that everything he found intolerable remained in place. Posterity repeats his text and doesn’t recognize him; it doesn’t laugh with him, it laughs against him, it refutes and confirms his satire through the undying nature of the subject matter.11 Unlike Heine, whose wit agrees with the world, who touched it where it wanted to be tickled, and whom it could always handle—the world won’t vanquish Nestroy the way it did Heine. It will do it the way the coward overcomes the strong man, by running away from him and getting a literary historian to spit on him. People will be ungrateful to Heine, they’ll enforce the laws of fashion against him, they won’t wear him anymore. But they’ll always say that he had wide horizons, that he was an emancipator, that he rubbed shoulders with statesmen and still had the presence of mind to write a love poem now and then. Not so Nestroy. No Kaddish will be said.12 No Friedjung13 will succeed in demonstrating that he had a political outlook, let alone the kind of outlook that turns a political outlook into an outlook in the first place. What mattered to him? So much, and therefore nothing of liberalism.14 While the cobblers outside were fighting for the most ideal of wares, he was having his tailors sing lampoons.15 He limited his partitioning of the world to small businessmen and landlords, to the up-and-coming and the down-and-out, to pensioners and unemployed porters. But that it was the world, not the editorial page, that he partitioned like this; that his wit was forever taking the road from social standing to humanity: conventional wisdom leafs past a chapter as incomprehensible as that.16 Flashes on a narrow horizon—the heavens opening over a grocery store—are not enlightening. Nestroy’s thinking proceeded from social status into the world, Heine’s from the world into the state. And that is more.17 Nestroy remains a joker because his jokes, which shot from the workbench to the stars, came from the workbench and we know nothing of the stars. An earthly politician says more to us than a cosmic buffoon. And since what matters to us is increasing our stores of conventional wisdom, we don’t mind