Page 189 - The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages - Alfred Rosenberg

Alfred Rosenberg

unobserved, does not give it equal importance with antidotes, but
preserves it carefully in black cabinets. That has finally happened -
after 2000 years - in the National Socialist Reich!
In the field of art, the same thing is to be said as in the other
fields of our life. The trend towards the external in our times has
placed its stamp also on it. Even the gentle Wackenroder had a
presentiment of this spirit when he wrote: "The moderns seem not
to wish at all that one should participate in what they represent to
us; they work for elegant lords who do not wish to be ennobled and
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moved by art but at best to be dazzled and titillated by it".
This dazzling and titillating is now the war-cry, and behind
it stands a concealed phalanx, the Jewish mind. The Jewish art-
dealer today asks only for works that could excite the senses, the
Jewish theatre director the same and the publisher even so. Today
our Jewish critics do not look for a serious striving for form but for
technique, for the structure of a work.
The Jewish artists have accordingly a favourable channel,
for, where the standard is an external one, there they can allow
themselves to be seen. 300 years ago, for example, the so highly
praised Max Tiebermann 407 would never have enjoyed recognition
as now. The man has a position in art history as a pedlar of French
art, and therein his significance is exhausted. For the technique of
his pictures can at most astonish but not conceal the inner emptiness.
The older Liebermann grew the more superficial his pictures became,
the more consciously full of effects. The young Jews stand mostly
in the camp of Artistic Bolshevism, of Futurism. That the
representatives of this crudeness were able to speak of the soul and
the inexpressible inner experiences is part of the madness of our
days until 1933.
A typical example of the Jewish artistic spirit are the
virtuosos who travel all over Europe. Singers, violinists, pianists
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Herzensergieflungen [eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1797)]. [Wilhelm
Heinrich Wackenroder (1773-1798) was, along with Ludwig Tieck, one of the
founders of German Romanticism. His Herzensergiefiungen (Outpourings of an
art-loving friar) was a eulogy of mediaeval and renaissance art and literature.]
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[Max Liebermann (1847-1935) was a German Jewish painter who propagated
Impressionism in Germany.]

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