Gesammelte Werke

philosophical issues, the participants, about thirty, were mostly musicologists. In the first meeting I asked who was capable of writing the Siegfried motif, the most famous of all Wagnerian
leitmotifs,
on the blackboard. Nobody was.
    This little event is symptomatic not only of the oblivion into which Wagner had fallen but of a much broader issue, which has something to do with the rise of Hitlerism and will by no means have been settled by his defeat. You may call it the decultivation of the German middle classes, demonstrated in the field of music but noticeable in every aspect of German life.
    During the 19th century there existed certain groups which, without being professional musicians or artists, were in real contact with music and the arts, were moved by the ideas expressed by music, and were capable of a subtle and discriminating understanding. The attitude of writers such as Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard or Nietzsche toward music was not understandable without the existence of such a nucleus of musically truly cultured non-musicians. This nucleus has disappeared. Musical knowledge and understanding has become the privilege of experts and professionals.
    I cannot go into the reasons for this process which is deeply connected with certain changes undergone by the whole German middle class. On the basis of their own material interests, they became more and more alienated from the same culture which their fathers and grandfathers had brought about. It is this decultivation, this loss of any life relationship with what is supposed to be the tradition of great German culture, upheld merely as an empty claim that has contributed more to the Fascist climate than the allegiance to even so nationalistic and chauvinistic an author as Richard Wagner.
    We should be quite clear with regard to what we mean by this process of decultivation. It is not simply lack of knowledge or erudition, although the processes in question tend also to lower all acquaintance with the manifestations of culture in a most elementary sense. Nor is it the ever-increasing aloofness of artistic products from the empirical life of society, a process that can be dated back to the time when art lost its locus within the order of the all-embracing Catholic Church. I refer to something much more specific. It may be called the neutralization of culture in general and of the arts in particular.
    Since philosophy in the broadest sense, the general consciousness of the people, has been brought more and more under the sway of science and technical civilization, the relationship between art and truth has been profoundly affected. There is no longer any unifying common focus between knowledge or science on the one hand and art on the other, as there is no common focus between science and philosophy or religion. Dr. Horkheimer has pointed this out in his lecture. What has been called the »idea« of arts during the age of great speculative philosophy has come to be regarded as an obsolescent metaphysical prejudice. Instead of being a decisive means to express fundamentals about human existence and human society, art has assumed the function of a realm of consumer goods among others, measured only according to what people »can get out of it«, the amount of gratification or pleasure it provides them with or, to a certain extent, its historical or educational value. This does not merely pertain to the products of today's cultural industry which are conceived and produced in terms of consumer goods anyway, but this generally also affects the present attitude towards traditional works. They are, and were long before the rise of Fascism, in a certain way »on exhibition«, things to look at, maybe to admire, maybe to enjoy, perhaps even emotional stimuli, but they became within the general consciousness of the consuming audiences, more or less deprived of any intrinsic and compelling meaning of their own.
    This has sucked their life blood away even if their façade was still intact in German opera houses, concert halls and art galleries. Their own essence was gradually lost, and they were experienced in terms of the want of entertainment which they had satisfied only incidentally. While the public apparently became their master who has the choice among the infinite variety of cultural goods, the public actually was the victim of this whole process since the works became mute to the listener and lost any deeper hold on his experience, his development and his