perhaps they were not quite able to ponder the consequences; but in the struggle against it they failed totally, and instead of thoroughgoing reforms preferred to take pitiful measures. They tinkered with the disease and left the causes untouched. They submitted the individual prostitute to a medical examination, supervised her as best they could, and, in case they established disease, put her in some hospital from which after a superficial cure they again let her loose on the rest of humanity.

To be sure, they had introduced a ‘protective paragraph’ according to which anyone who was not entirely healthy or cured must avoid sexual intercourse under penalty of the law. Surely this measure is sound in itself, but in its practical application it was almost a total failure. In the first place, the woman, in case she is smitten by misfortune­if only due to our, or rather her, education­will in most cases refuse to be dragged into court as a witness against the wretched thief of her health­often under the most embarrassing attendant circumstances. She, in particular, has little to gain from it; in most cases she will be the one to suffer most­for she will be struck much harder by the contempt of her loveless fellow creatures than would be the case with a man. Finally, imagine the situation if the conveyor of the disease is her own husband. Should she accuse him? Or what else should she do?

In the case of the man, there is the additional fact that unfortunately he often runs across the path of this plague after ample consumption of alcohol, since in this condition he is least able to judge the qualities of his ‘fair one,’ a fact which is only too well known to the diseased prostitute, and always causes her to angle after men in this ideal condition. And the upshot of it all is that the man who gets an unpleasant surprise later can, even by thoroughly racking his brains, not remember his kind benefactress, which should not be surprising in a city like Berlin or even Munich. In addition, it must be considered that often we have to deal with visitors from the provinces who are completely befuddled by all the magic of the big city.

Finally, however: who can know whether he is sick or healthy? Are there not numerous cases in which a patient apparently cured relapses and causes frightful mischief without himself suspecting it at first?

Thus, the practical effect of this protection by legal punishment of a guilty infection is in reality practically nil. Exactly the same is true of the supervision of prostitutes; and finally, the cure itself, even today, is dubious. Only one thing is certain: despite all measures the plague spread more and more, giving striking confirmation of their ineffectualness.

The fight against the prostitution of the people’s soul was a failure all along the line, or rather, that is, nothing at all was done.

Let anyone who is inclined to take this lightly just study the basic statistical facts on the dissemination of this plague, compare its growth in the last hundred years, and then imagine its further development­and he would really need the simplicity of an ass to keep an unpleasant shudder from running down his back.

The weakness and halfheartedness of the position taken in old Germany toward so terrible a phenomenon may be evaluated as a visible sign of a people’s decay. If the power to fight for one’s own health is no longer present, the right to live in this world of struggle ends. This world belongs only to the forceful ‘whole’ man and not to the weak ‘half ‘ man.

One of the most obvious manifestations of decay in the old Reich was the slow decline of the cultural level, and by culture I do not mean what today is designated by the word ‘ civilization.’ The latter, on the contrary, rather seems hostile to a truly high standard of thinking and living.

Even before the turn of the century an element began to intrude into our art which up to that time could be regarded as entirely foreign and unknown. To be sure, even in earlier times there were occasional aberrations of taste, but such cases were rather artistic derailments, to which posterity could attribute at least a certain historical value, than products no longer of an artistic degeneration, but of a spiritual degeneration that had reached the point of destroying the spirit. In them the political collapse, which later became more visible, was culturally indicated.

Art Bolshevism is the only possible cultural form and spiritual expression of Bolshevism as a whole.

Anyone to whom this seems strange need only subject the art of the happily Bolshevized states to an examination, and, to his horror, he will be confronted by the morbid excrescences of insane and degenerate men, with which, since the turn of the century, we have become familiar under the collective concepts of cubism and dadaism, as the official and recognized art of those states. Even in the short period of the Bavarian Republic of Councils, this phenomenon appeared. Even here it could be seen that all the official posters, propagandist drawings in the newspapers, etc., bore the imprint, not only of political but of cultural decay.

No more than a political collapse of the present magnitude would have been conceivable sixty years ago was a cultural collapse such as began to manifest itself in futurist and cubist works since 1900 thinkable. Sixty years ago an exhibition of so­called dadaistic ‘experiences’ would have seemed simply impossible and its organizers would have ended up in the madhouse, while today they even preside over art associations. This plague could not appear at that time, because neither would public opinion have tolerated it nor the state calmly looked on. For it is the business of the state, in other words, of its leaders, to prevent a people from being driven into the arms of spiritual madness. And this is where such a development would some day inevitably end. For on the day when this type of art really corresponded to the general view of things, one of the gravest transformations of humanity would have occurred: the regressive development of the human mind would have begun and the end would be scarcely conceivable.

Once we pass the development of our cultural life in the last twenty­five years in review from this standpoint, we shall be horrified to see how far we are already engaged in this regression. Everywhere we encounter seeds which represent the beginnings of parasitic growths which must sooner or later be the ruin of our culture. In them, too, we can recognize the symptoms of decay of a slowly rotting world. Woe to the peoples who can no longer master this disease!

Such diseases could be seen in Germany in nearly every field of art and culture. Everything seemed to have passed the high point and to be hastening toward the abyss. The theater was sinking manifestly lower and even then would have disappeared completely as a cultural factor if the Court Theaters at least had not turned against the prostitution of art. If we disregard them and a few other praiseworthy examples, the offerings of the stage were of such a nature that it would have been more profitable for the nation to keep away from them entirely. It was a sad sign of inner decay that the youth could no longer be sent into most of these so­called ‘ abodes of art ‘­a fact which was admitted with shameless frankness by a general display of the penny­arcade warning: ‘Young people are not admitted!’

Bear in mind that such precautionary measures had to be taken in the places which should have existed primarily for the education of the youth and not for the delectation of old and jaded sections of the population. What would the great dramatists of all times have said to such a regulation, and what, above all, to the circumstances which caused it? How Schiller would have flared up, how Goethe would have turned away in indignation!

But after all, what are Schiller, Goethe, or Shakespeare compared to the heroes of the newer German poetic art? Old, outworn, outmoded, nay, obsolete. For that was the characteristic thing about that period: not that the period itself produced nothing but filth, but that in the bargain it befouled everything that was really great in the past. This, to be sure, is a phenomenon that can always be observed at such times. The baser and more contemptible the products of the time and its people, the Lore it hates the witnesses to the greater nobility and dignity of a former day. In such times the people would best like to efface the memory of mankind’s past completely, so that by excluding every possibility of comparison they could pass off their own trash as ‘art.’ Hence every new institution, the more wretched and miserable it is, will try all the harder to extinguish the last traces of the past time, whereas every true renascence of humanity can start with an easy mind from the good achievements of past generations; in fact, can often make them truly appreciated for the first time. It does not have to fear that it will pale before the past; no, of itself it contributes so valuable an addition to the general store of human culture that often, in order to make this culture fully appreciated, it strives to keep alive the memory of former achievements, thus making sure that the present will fully understand the new gift. Only those who can give nothing valuable to the world, but try to act as if they were going to give it God knows what, will hate everything that was previously gives and would best like to negate or even destroy it.

The truth of this is by no means limited to the field of general culture, but applies to politics as well. Revolutionary new movements will hate the old forms in proportion to their own inferiority. Here, too, we can see how eagerness to make their own trash appear to be something noteworthy leads to blind hatred against the superior good of the past. As long, for example, as the historical memory of Frederick the Great is not dead, Friedrich Ebert can arouse nothing but limited amazement. The hero of Sans­Souci is to the former Bremen saloon keeper approximately as the sun to the moon; only when the rays of the sun die can the moon shine. Consequently, the hatred of all new moons of humanity for the fixed stars is only too comprehensible. In political life, such nonentities, if Fate temporarily casts power in their lap, not only besmirch and befoul the past with untiring zeal, but also remove themselves from general criticism by the most extreme methods. The new German Reich’s legislation for the defense of the Republic may pass as an example of this.

Therefore, if any new idea, a doctrine, a new philosophy, or even a political or economic movement tries to deny the entire past, tries to make it bad or worthless, for this reason alone we must be extremely cautious and suspicious. As a rule the reason for such hatred is either its own inferiority or even an evil intention as such. A really beneficial renascence of humanity will always have to continue building where the last good foundation stops. It will not have to be ashamed of using already existing truths. For the whole of human culture, as well as man himself is only the result of a single long development in which every generation contributed and fitted in its stone. Thus the meaning and purpose of revolutions is not to tear down the whole building but to remove what is bad or unsuitable and to continue building on the sound spot that has been laid bare.

Thus alone can we and may we speak of the progress of humanity. Otherwise the world would never be redeemed from chaos, since every generation would be entitled to reject the past and hence destroy the works of the past as the presupposition for its own work.

Thus, the saddest thing about the state of our whole culture of the pre­War period was not only the total impotence of artistic and cultural creative power in general, but the hatred with which the memory of the greater past was besmirched and effaced. In nearly all fields of art, especially in the theater and literature, we began around the turn of the century to produce less that was new and significant, but to disparage the best of the old work and represent it as inferior and surpassed; as though this epoch of the most humiliating inferiority could surpass anything at all. And from this effort to remove the past from the eyes of the present, the evil intent of the apostles of the future could clearly and distinctly be seen. By this it should have been recognized that these were no new, even if false, cultural conceptions, but a process of destroying all culture, paving the way for a stultification of healthy artistic feeling: the spiritual preparation of political Bolshevism. For if the age of Pericles seems embodied in the Parthenon, the Bolshevistic present is embodied in a cubist monstrosity.

In this connection we must also point to the cowardice which here again was manifest in the section of our people which on the basis of its education and position should have been obligated to resist this cultural disgrace. But from pure fear of the clamor raised by the apostles of Bolshevistic art, who furiously attacked anyone who didn’t want to recognize the crown of creation in them and pilloried him as a backward philistine, they renounced all serious resistance and reconciled themselves to what seemed after all inevitable. They were positively scared stiff that these half­wits or scoundrels would accuse them of lack of understanding; as though it were a disgrace not to understand the products of spiritual degenerates or slimy swindlers. These cultural disciples, it is true, possessed a very simple means of passing off their nonsense as something God knows how important: they passed off all sorts of incomprehensible and obviously crazy stuff on their amazed fellow men as a so­called inner experience, a cheap way of taking any word of opposition out of the mouths of most people in advance. For beyond a doubt this could be an inner experience; the doubtful part was whether it is permissible to dish up the hallucinations of lunatics or criminals to the healthy world. The works of a Moritz von Schwind, or of a Bocklin, were also an inner experience, but of artists graced by God and not of clowns.

Here was a good occasion to study the pitiful cowardice of our so­called intelligentsia, which dodged any serious resistance to this poisoning of the healthy instinct of our people and left it to the people themselves to deal with this insolent nonsense. In order not to be considered lacking in artistic understanding, people stood for every mockery of art and ended up by becoming really uncertain in the judgment of good and bad.

All in all, these were tokens of times that were getting very bad.

As another disquieting attribute, the following must yet be stated:

In the nineteenth century our cities began more and more to lose the character of cultural sites and to descend to the level of mere human settlements. The small attachment of our present big­city proletariat for the town they live in is the consequence of the fact that it is only the individual’s accidental local stopping place, and nothing more. This is partly connected with the frequent change of residence caused by social conditions, which do not give a man time to form a closer bond with the city, and another cause is to be found in the general cultural insignificance and poverty of our present­day cities per se.

At the time of the wars of liberations the German cities were not only small in number, but also modest as to size. The few really big cities were mostly princely residences, and as such nearly always possessed a certain cultural value and for the most part also a certain artistic picture. The few places with more than fifty thousand inhabitants were, compared to present­day cities with the same population, rich in scientific and artistic treasures When Munich numbered sixty thousand souls, it was already on its way to becoming one of the first German art centers; today nearly every factory town has reached this number, if not many times surpassed it, yet some cannot lay claim to the slightest real values. Masses of apartments and tenements, and nothing more How, in view of such emptiness, any special bond could be expected to arise with such a town must remain a mystery. No one will be particularly attached to a city which has nothing more to offer than every other, which lacks every individual note and in which everything has been carefully avoided which might even look like art or anything of the sort.

But, as if this were not enough, even the really big cities grow relatively poorer in real art treasures with the mounting increase in the population. They seem more and more standardized and give entirely the same picture as the poor little factory towns, though in larger dimensions. What recent times have added to the cultural content of our big cities is totally inadequate. All our cities are living on the fame and treasures of the past. For instance, take from present­day Munich everything that was created under Ludwig I,l and you will note with horror how poor the addition of significant artistic creations has been since that time. The same is true of Berlin and most other big cities.

The essential point, however, is the following: our big cities of today possess no monuments dominating the city picture, which might somehow be regarded as the symbols of the whole epoch. This was true in the cities of antiquity, since nearly every one possessed a special monument in which it took pride. The characteristic aspect of the ancient city did not lie in private buildings, but in the community monuments which seemed made, not for the moment, but for eternity, because they were intended to reflect, not the wealth of an individual owner, but the greatness and wealth of the community. Thus arose monuments which were very well suited to unite the individual inhabitant with his city in a way which today sometimes seems almost incomprehensible to us. For what the ancient had before his eyes was less the humble houses of private owners than the magnificent edifices of the whole community. Compared to them the dwelling house really sank to the level of an insignificant object of secondary importance.

Only if we compare the dimensions of the ancient state structures with contemporary dwelling houses can we understand the overpowering sweep and force of this emphasis on the principle of giving first place to public works. The few still towering colossuses which we admire in the ruins and wreckage of the ancient world are not former business palaces, but temples and state structures; in other words, works whose owner was the community. Even in the splendor of late Rome the first place was not taken by the villas and palaces of Individual citizens, but by the temples and baths, the stadiums, circuses, aqueducts, basilicas, etc., of the state, hence of the whole people.

Even the Germanic Middle Ages upheld the same guiding principle, though amid totally different conceptions of art. What in antiquity found its expression in the Acropolis or the Pantheon now cloaked itself in the forms of the Gothic Cathedral. Like giants these monumental structures towered over the swarming frames wooden, and brick buildings of the medieval city, and thus became symbols which even today, with the tenements climbing higher and higher beside them, determine the character and picture of these towns. Cathedrals, town halls, grain markets, and battlements are the visible signs of a Inception which in the last analysis was the same as that of antiquity.

Yet how truly deplorable the relation between state buildings and private buildings has become today! If the fate of Rome should strike Berlin, future generations would some day admire the department stores of a few Jews as the mightiest works of our era and the hotels of a few corporations as the characteristic expression of the culture of our times. Just compare the miserable discrepancy prevailing in a city like even Berlin between the structures of the Reich and those of finance and commerce Even the sum of money spent on state buildings is usually laughable and inadequate. Works are not built for eternity, but at most for the need of the moment. And in them there is no dominant higher idea. At the time of its construction, the Berlin Schloss was a work of different stature than the new library, for instance, in the setting of the present time. While a single battleship represented a value of approximately sixty millions, hardly half of this sum was approved for the first magnificent building of the Reich, intended to stand for eternity, the Reichstag Building. Indeed, when the question of interior furnishings came up for decision, the exalted house voted against the use of stone and ordered the walls trimmed with plaster; this time, I must admit, the parliamentarians did right for a change: stone walls are no place for plaster heads.

Thus, our cities of the present lack the outstanding symbol of national community which, we must therefore not be surprised to find, sees no symbol of itself in the cities. The inevitable result is a desolation whose practical effect is the total indifference of the big­city dweller to the destiny of his city.