AFTERWORD TO “HEINE AND THE CONSEQUENCES”
The deepest confirmation of what was thought in this essay and accomplished by it is what happened to it: it found no readers. A printed thing that’s simultaneously a written thing finds none. Though it may have every outward merit in its favor—content that’s accessible and remains agreeable even under hostile scrutiny, a pleasing format, and even the lowest price1—the public isn’t fooled, it has the keenest nose against art, and even more surely than it knows its way to kitsch, it steers clear of value. Today only the novel, the work of language outside of language, which even in its most perfect form grants common sense some kind of hold and hope, can earn its author a living. Otherwise the people whose words to the reader abide with thought are in an endlessly difficult position compared with those who deceive him with words. He believes the latter immediately, the former only after a hundred years. And no earthly tear from eyes that see life buried by death will shorten the waiting period. Nothing helps. An age first has to rot past stinking to make the people who are what they can do as beloved as these people here, who can do what they are not. Except that this Today carries the particular curse of doubt: whether the head that survives the machine will also survive its consequences. Never before was the road from art to audience so long; but there has also never existed such an artificial hybrid,2 a thing that writes of its own accord and reads of its own accord, so that, indeed, they all can write and all can understand, and it’s merely social accident that determines who, among this horde of educated Huns who progress against the Spirit, emerges as writer and who as reader. The sole ability that they hold in honor as a trait inherited from nature: regurgitating what they’ve eaten seems welcome to them in the intellectual realm, as a trick through which it might be possible to unite two functions in one person, and it’s only because there are businesses more profitable than writing that so many of them have restrained themselves so far and satisfy themselves with eating what the others have regurgitated. Just as the same person is duplicated at a table of tavern regulars, a cellist, a lawyer, a philosopher, a horse trader, and a painter who are all of one mind and distinguishable to the waiter only by their trades: there’s no difference between author and reader. There’s only one person now, and that’s the feuilletonist. Art backs away from him like a glacier from an alpine hotel guest. There was a time, the guide boasts, when you could put your hands on it. If a reader today can put his hands on a work, the work must have a bad side. The publisher of this magazine is well aware that it owes its reputation mainly to a sensibility that doesn’t shrink from some excellent novelist merely because he’s also rumored to be an artist. He can confidently exploit the indulgence. The publisher of Die Fackel not infrequently has the feeling that he’s freeloading on it. It would be retracted irrevocably should his readers ever discover in what a state of insanity such witty happenstances came to be written, on what powers of self-annihilation such self-assurance lives, and how many hundredweight of suffering the lightest pen can carry. And how gloomy the thing that brightens the idler’s day.3 Their laughter, which doesn’t reach as far as my wit, would die in their mouths. If they could see that the petty material directly in front of them is just a shabby remnant of a thing they cannot touch, they would finally go away. Among those who flatter themselves that they’re my victims, I am not loved; but the people who look on with schadenfreude still give me far more credit than I deserve.4
Given that Die Fackel finds itself in so many wrong hands: if something I’ve written proceeds to venture into other print, few people will reach for it. With a collection of satires or aphorisms, this would be nothing to complain about.5 Things of that sort are content to find the rare reader for whom textual alteration signifies new work. But the essay “Heine and the Consequences,” which came to the book publisher as a manuscript, has made it clear that there no longer are any readers besides these few.6 And it, of all texts, can’t help feeling pained by this discovery. For its wish is to create readers, and it can’t succeed at this unless it finds readers. It enacts the misery of German-language letters, and it isn’t content to make itself the demonstration of its own truth. And so it treads the path of remorse, which leads from the book back into the magazine; and would that even this exigency might please it, as proof of the perversity of the business of the Spirit in our times. Here, in familiar environs, it will at least make the attempt to speak to more deaf ears than are to be had in the greater German public.
Because it’s not to be thought that they were simply deaf to the subject about which they were being addressed. They’re still happy to hear about Heine, even if they know not what it means.7 If the essay merely rejected the living value of his art, it would surely say nothing new to that contemporary sensibility that doesn’t even let itself be fooled by the collusions of the commentariat. It would surely sooner be brought around to begging for a Heine monument than to a reading of his books. And the hate that developed there, where not love but mere intellectual hypocrisy stands watch over the grave, would be greeted with some bitterness, to be sure, but not with any general interest. This text,