Letters Pro and Con

Abstract

To the Editor: I should like to draw your attention to the article by J. P. Hodin in the June (1955) issue, in which he discusses what he calls a Contemporary German Problem. This is a lengthy discussion with a great amount of quotations and footnotes and packed with generalities which lead up to the statement: One feels how personally Mr. F6rster is concerned when presenting his mirror of a thousand years of great spiritual achievements to the ideologically confused German nation of today. ... We have had too many of these assertions lately. It is by no means certain that the German nation of today is ideologically more confused than any other nation or even Mr. Hodin himself, who causes the physicists to enter the lists to battle the lightly armored German art historian. Mr. Hodin concludes his article (which is really nothing but an accumulation of politically tinged generalities) by saying: will remain for the future to see how far the German art historian can move away from the terminology and a trend of thought which is more representative of the nineteenth than of the twentieth century, in what degree he can critically assimilate what foreign writers have brought forth in this field of studies... . This only proves that Mr. Hodin has read the wrong books. As he remarks himself, the work discussed is elaborated from lectures delivered 25 years ago. It is not clear why Mr. Hodin did not take the trouble to occupy himself with more prominent German art historians of our day like A. E. Brinckmann, professor emeritus, now living at Cologne, whose books Europageist und Europder, Europaische Humanitas and Welt der Kunst are just representative of the school of thought which Mr. Hodin fails to discover. Mr. Hodin's article as a whole is painfully reminiscent of Emile MAle's writings after the first world war and gives an entirely wrong picture of the real situation. Not so long ago you printed an article by Mr. Boas in which this scholar openly declared that he found Goethe's Faust boring. Now it is, of course, the privilege of Mr. Boas to find Faust boring and his own writings interesting. The only question that enters here is whether Mr. Boas was in earnest when proclaiming this wisdom or whether he tried to be witty. If he was serious, it would prove that the professor is in the wrong place as an educator; if he attempted to be funny, however, he reminds me of people of whom the author of Faust used to say that it is easy to be smart if you have no respect for anything. LEOPOLD LEvIs To the Editor: Dr. Levis seems to be ill informed about the real situation in present-day Germany, or, rather, he wishes us to forget too rapidly the deplorable state of the German mind and its repercussions during the last two decades. At the general assembly of the International Association of Art Critics, held at Oxford from the 3rd to the 9th of July 1955, the president of the German section, Dr. Franz Roh, give a shattering picture of the struggle against the growing reactionary forces, as he called it, in the art life of Germany. Under different pretexts, but obviously with one aim only, they fight any trend in art which has arisen since Impressionism. It is Prof. Hans Sedlmayr and not Prof. A. E. Brinckmann who dominates the German scene. Mr. Sedlmayr, who was a fervent Nazi, has taken with him into his disguise of a fervent Catholic the entire negative and nihilistic viewpoint of entartete His Verlust der Mitte is now followed by the widely read pamphlet of another Austrian, R. Melichar on the Abbau der modernen Kunst. Among the younger generation of art critics, it is only Werner Haftman who, in his recently published History of the Painting of the 20th Century, (in which the modern American effort is ignored) defends the modern spirit in art with a certain authority. There is a complete blackout in Germany in the evaluation of modern art among young students, and the same also applies, as Prof. Vollbach (Mainz) told me recently, to the field of music. The classicist trend of Hindemith's recent works is accepted, but anything else is booed at. The reasons for this attitude are too obvious: it is the lack of a positive tradition in modern art appreciation. As the blackout has its