Miss Frazer was an old English spinstress; her profile was as knightly and sharp as that of a nobleman. On the other hand, her face, when viewed from the front, was round and red as an apple, with a sweet sprinkling of girlishness beneath her white hair. Whether she was also sweet-natured, no one knew. Except for the unavoidable civilities, she never exchanged a word with us. Perhaps she despised our idleness, our prattle, our immorality. Not even the Swiss gentleman, who for the last six hundred years had been a republican, did she grace with an intimate exchange. She knew everything about us, for she was always in our midst, and was the only person of whom we had no idea why she was there. All in all, with her crocheting, her lessons, and that red-apple smile, she might well have been there for no other reason than for pleasure and to share our company.
1
Ever since the Russian variety show teams introduced them to us, these black hussars, these death’s head grenadiers, these Arditi* seem to exist in every army on earth. They swore an oath of victory or death, and sport tailor-made black uniforms with white baldrics that look like the ribs of death; thus adorned, they parade around as they please to the everlasting delight of the ladies until they peacefully die – that is, as long as there is no war. They live by certain songs that have a somber accompaniment which lends them a dark radiance ideally suited for bedroom lighting.
As the curtain went up, seven such hussars sat around together on the little stage; it was rather dark and the bright snow outside shone through the windows. With their black uniforms and their painfully propped-up heads they were scattered about in hypnotic formation in the dim light and accompanied by a loudly singing comrade in the pitch-black luminous pianissimo. “Hear the horses pound the steppes with their mighty hooves,” they sang, all the way through to the inevitable “if lady luck should run amuck, when the swallows wander –.”
2
An enigmatic soul suggests: If this were a painted picture, then we would have a textbook example of kitsch. If it were a “tableau vivant,” we would have before us the unnerving sentimentality of a once beloved parlor game, that is, something half kitsch and half sad, like a glockenspiel that has just been played. But since it is a singing tableau vivant, what is it then? There is a certain sugary lustre to the trifles performed by these splendid Russian emigrants, but one only snickers in retrospect, whereas one would surely have fumed before an oil painting of the same type: Could it be possible that kitsch grows ever more tolerable and ever less kitschy if one, and then two, dimensions of kitsch are added to it?
This hypothesis can neither be presumed nor denied.
But what happens if still another dimension of the same is added, and it becomes reality? Have we not huddled in bunkers, while some premonition of tomorrow hung in the air and a comrade started singing? Oh, it felt so melancholy! And it was kitsch. But it was the sort of kitsch that lay like another layer of sadness over our sadness, like an unconfessed rancor at this forced camaraderie. There is so much that one might have felt at this last eternal hour, and the articulation of the fearful image of death is not necessarily best rendered in oil.
Is not art then a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life? Layer by layer art strips life bare. The more abstract it gets, the more transparent the air is. Can it be that the farther it is removed from life, the clearer art becomes? What a backwards contention it is to claim that life is more important than art! Life is good as long as it holds up to art: That in life which cannot be employed for art’s sake is kitsch!
But what is kitsch?
3
In a somewhat less propitious time, the poet X would have become a popular hack on a family magazine. He would then have presupposed that the heart always responds to certain situations with the same set feelings. Noble-mindedness would always have been recognizably noble, the abandoned child lamentable, and the summer landscape stirring. Notice that in this way, a firm, clear-cut, and immutable relationship would have been established between the feelings and the words, true to the nature of the term kitsch. Thus kitsch, which prides itself so much on sentiment, turns sentiments into concepts.
As a function of the times, however, X, instead of being a good family magazine hack, has become a bad Expressionist. Consequently, his work causes intellectual short-circuiting. He appeals to Man, God, the Spirit, Goodness, Chaos; and out of such big words he squeezes sophisticated sentences. He could not possibly do so, were he to imagine the totality of their meaning, or at least grasp their utter unimaginability. But long before this time, these words had already taken on connotations meaningful and meaningless, in books and newspapers; our Expressionist has often seen them wedged together, and the words need only be loaded with the least little bit of significance for him to perceive sparks flying between them. This, however, is only a consequence of the fact that he had not learned how to think based on the experience of his own imagination, but rather, with the aid of borrowed terms.
In both of the aforementioned instances, kitsch affirms itself as something that peels life off of language. Layer by layer, it strips language bare. The more abstract kitsch becomes, the more it becomes kitsch. The intellect is effective so long as it stands up to life.
But what is life?
4
Life is living: you cannot describe it to someone who does not know it.
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