January 10ths (Alpha States)

1/10/1898 (Berlin)

(Harry Kessler Diary)

Economic development rests upon the destruction of the small middlemen and entrepreneurs, that is, the present middle class. One must try and assure that the profit, which they have reaped until now, is not siphoned upward by the large companies and great capitalists but is distributed downward toward the workers. Then they would eventually be able to secure the same standard of living that the middle class has enjoyed up to now.

1/10/1903 (Weimar)

(Harry Kessler Diary)

There is no longer any culture of peasants or of the middle class. What still exists are remnants, a flood plain that will be hopelessly engulfed. Even their lack of taste is not positive, but rather a mirror. They stare at themselves in the upper classes. The only way to heal them is to improve the model. Every cultural reform today must begin with the upper classes. This follows from facts that anyone who wishes to can observe (shops, homes, manners of the “common people” today). Everything else, the enthusiasm for “folk” culture, "folk” art, “folk” literature, is a blind fantasy. It contradicts a living force, the urge to imitate on the part of the poorer. What is really desirable is that the culture of the upper orders consists of forms that could also serve the broad masses, suited to the given economic relations, climatic needs, and intellectual and emotional predispositions. For a part of the upper classes can certainly surmount these, but the broad masses will never be able to. A model that does not meet these conditions is therefore useless and often harmful because its imitation creates an artificial disharmony alongside the natural one of life, precisely the disharmony from which we suffer. The opposite example of England and America where the culture of the upper classes is really suited for the lower.

[What did Kessler mean by “really suited for the lower”?. A typo would now be more exact: “Rarely suited for the lower”.]

1/10/2012

Photo walk at lunch to generate more images for my Alpha States series. 

    Cold rush hour. January Street: