European Culture I do not think that European culture has much to offer, now. The problem is that, at least in Germany, as far as I can see, the high culture still persists with its need to have a "profile" different from from low culture, so it must be difficult to understand, and that often causes boredom. An example is the painter Baselitz who paints blurred figures upside-down so that the viewer could not be distracted from the high value of his art by trying to figure out what it means. It sells, though. Peter Handke writes in favor of the Serbs because that way he can attack the all-powerful media, celebrate his freedom from a big power. Though individual Serbs are most probably much more decent than their present leaders, I have difficulties deriving a message of freedom from Serbian nationalism. In German literature there was a difference in the literature of the latest phase of the German Democratic Republic. A Writers like Christoph Hein and Monika Maron used their texts to question the effects of an all-powerful state ideology in books like Horns Ende (Horn's End, Hein), Der Tangospieler (The Piano Player, Hein) or Flugasche (Flight of Ashes, Maron). Since this was the only public opposition (often difficult to get through the censor) it had to engage the reader. We know what freedom means much better when there is a clear-cut oppression. French academics have discovered, a few decades ago, that their rationalistic tradition, which may have been oppressive in French academia, is not everything, and expressed that in provocative philosophies. American academics who did not suffer such oppression, nevertheless find the French liberation so liberating and exciting that they docilely imitate it. As a consequence the movement degenerates into meaningless arbitrariness, unfortunately using real issues like the liberation of women from the patriarchal yoke which would liberate men too, or racism. It is called by the oxymoronic name postmodernity and is of little value for the survival of culture, if any. One sometimes wonder why there is not more conservative protest against academic waste of time and good will, or why there is so little protest from the left against the academic withdrawal into dense obscurity. The survival of culture depends on clearer and clearer writing which cannot be learned from Derrida or Foucault. Culture in this country is not that separated from low
culture, culture that people could relate to. I know that that is also bad because money
can be made by not challenging viewers or readers. Hollywood's happy endings being the
lasting examples even though they have become less primitive lately. But at least the road
is open for occasional novels like William Styron's Sophie's Choice, of which
even the film was a reflection, playing with the problems in the culture common to Europe
and this country? Is it the background of oppression in this book that makes its
representation of freedom so fascinatingly problematic? Or the insanity of the liberator
with his make-believe-freedom who, because of being Jewish, was only recently liberated
himself? Idea Man Magellan's Log front page |