The arts section is the most useless part of a newspaper. It proves its greatest usefulness precisely when it lives up to its reputation.

Nothing against medium-sized cities. They have a cultural heart that often still touches the hearts of their citizens. I recently had the privilege of giving a speech about literature in such a medium-sized German city. The medium-sized mayor introduced me to the audience in all my professional facets. After the lecture, there was a reception, buoyed by wine and rolls. As is customary at such events, people stood around chatting happily for a while. Antiquarians and people from reading circles, German studies students, and random guests. Very pleasant crowd.

Then, I almost said, out of nowhere, an older gentleman appeared. His already triumphant expression showed that he'd been thinking about a question. He quickly got to the point. A question, let's say, with good-natured malice. He wanted to know how I lived.

The professional profile offered by the mayor didn't seem to interest him, and so the elderly man's lurking ambush was able to calmly build to a punchline. The punchline went something like this: Being a columnist isn't really a profession. You do something like that for fun, at best.

In his practiced sophistication, this man was careful not to say it openly, but the thrust was clear. It became even clearer because there was a second punchline: Now the gentleman wanted me to guess what he did for a living. I correctly guessed lawyer. But that alone wasn't enough for him. It was a bit reminiscent of the TV show "What am I?" I couldn't figure it out.

That was a good thing, because the person I was talking to was now able to thunder out a sentence I hadn't expected: "I was a legislator!" While I was still marveling for a Kafkaesque moment that something as abstract as the legislator could suddenly appear before me, I was soon enlightened. The man had served as a member of the Hessian state parliament, for a party that now provides the chancellor in Germany.

The beauty of reality: It can happen that two completely different realities collide in the smallest of spaces. If we interpret what has been recounted here symbolically, we can say: Politics, as important as it is, no longer even deigns to view culture as competition at the venue of a medium-sized city event. The older gentleman viewed culture as a purely charitable business, concluded between charitable businessmen who finance the fun in life this way, or even create it in the first place.

You can certainly see it that way. And who in the so-called cultural sector doesn't respect the legislature, which can simply cut off its funding? The days are over when culture could influence politics, or, to put it another way, when it could influence politics.

It's been 60 years since the writer Günter Grass began giving party-political speeches in Germany. These lectures were campaign advertisements for the Social Democratic Party (SPD). The first speech, adapted from a quotation by Walt Whitman, was titled "I sing to you, Democracy: It's up for election." It was not only delivered by the future Literature Prize winner in 1965, but was also recorded and published in booklet form by Luchterhand Verlag.

For eleven years, Grass wrote speeches for Willy Brandt and acted as an opinion maker himself. He also founded the "Election Office of German Writers," which also included other SPD-affiliated writers and intellectuals, such as Friedrich Christian Delius, Peter Härtling, Klaus Wagenbach, and Günter Herburger. In 1976, Günter Grass stopped giving speeches for the SPD.

It has to be said: The temporal buffer that exists between then and now has something calming about it. Pathos of that kind no longer exists. At the beginning of the year, it would have been tragicomic if someone like Daniel Kehlmann had declared himself the champion of democracy and campaigned for Olaf Scholz. Or for Christian Lindner. Even though the tireless newspaper essayist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas bravely denies this fact, artists and intellectuals have lost status in the public perception.

A final way to get into the conversation through a media backdoor is through open letters. They're written with a bold belief in one's own importance, sometimes even in cases of uncertainty about their own importance. They always deal with big issues. About the coronavirus, the war in Ukraine, etc.

We live in times in which institutions are having to accept a loss of significance. We in our cultured bubble take it for granted that art, too, is an institution. Something important. But this important thing has diversified. Its boundaries and forms are no longer so clearly recognizable. The unquestioned canon of high culture no longer exists. That mountain of refinement of the educated middle class, on which the arts pages also had their base camp.

In recent decades, new ideas have often emerged from the depths of pop culture. The compulsion to repeat high art, which was evident at Bayreuth, at the Salzburg Festival, or in the German curriculum of upper secondary schools, has waned. Today, instead of Goethe, students read the smarmy, contemporary bestsellers of Ferdinand von Schirach. Presumably, so they can learn something for life.

A few years ago, the Berlin Pop Culture Festival condensed Richard Wagner's "Ring" into a one-hour opera. To better understand the notoriously complex plot, intertitles were presented. For example: "Fricka calls Wotan a pig because of his children's behavior." During Siegmund's encounter with his twin sister Sieglinde, the title was: "Incestuous tension hangs in the air."

Thomas Bernhard created less incestuous than intertextual tensions when he brought together pop and high culture. His play "Heldenplatz," which premiered in 1988 at the Vienna Burgtheater, was adapted from Helmut Dietl's television series "Kir Royal." The episode "Adieu Claire" features an old woman who, after the Holocaust, still hears the voices of the masses incited by Hitler. Thomas Bernhard took over this project, and thus a portion of "Kir Royal" eventually came to the Burgtheater. However, the television series had already caused a scandal among viewers two years earlier.

Of course, pop culture has its significance in the arts sections. If the culture nerds there still don't want to take it entirely seriously, they attack it with the tools of elitist arrogance and declare it a phenomenon. Or part of even larger phenomena. These are usually of a general social nature. Thus, an elevation of significance takes place, against whose misunderstandings the elevated ones cannot defend themselves.

Pop culture is a matter of the heart and soul of the masses. It must be mined to provide substance for the brains of feature readers. However, nothing ages worse than the phrase "We must also think of our young readers" that was familiar to editors of a certain era.

A particularly beautiful example of being torn between feelings of distance and overwhelm was provided by a concert review in the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung," which had a lovely online headline: "Taylor Swift in Gelsenkirchen. Better than therapy." The arts section of the "FAZ" featured the following sentences: "Every soul, whether in the crowd or in the stands, is thrilled. It smells of popcorn, soda, and gummy bears." Souls in the crowd, souls in the stands.

The sophisticated cultural writing of quality newspapers today faces crucial questions: What should go in? Or rather, what can go out? If something comes in, something must go. Newspapers are pretty much the opposite of a hoarder's apartment. The question of how many things can fit is not a matter of discretion, but a question of economics—that is, of money.

Anyone who still writes or talks about the arts section today has to be realistic. Perhaps it is no coincidence that realism has also taken hold stylistically in this part of the newspaper. The penchant for literature, for working with and on language, even in newspaper columns, has, to put it mildly, fallen into disrepute. And not just because arts writers are becoming increasingly worse at writing. Sometimes they are not even supposed to write well anymore. They are supposed to simply say what is, and that is that. No more twirling the curls on your bald head, as Karl Kraus says, no more aperçus. Even the word aperçu is now being edited out of arts texts because no one knows what an aperçu is anymore.

There's a natural law of education: stupidity is the beginning of education. I must confess that my love for the arts pages stems from the fact that they made it clear to me very early and very directly how much I didn't know. As a young person, I read international newspapers with foreign dictionaries in hand to learn something.

Today, when you don't even need printed dictionaries anymore, but can Google everything, you don't even want to subject readers to that anymore. You're depriving them of an educational opportunity if you don't want to overwhelm them. Can all this go away, does it all have to go away? The old-school columnist says no, the click rates say yes. More complex texts are read less than simple ones. It's a dilemma.

Can the arts section still be saved? To return to the concept of the legislator: Reality is an unpleasant legislator. Every day, it creates facts for which the delicate plants of language are not made. The speechlessness of the arts sections in the face of global crises is evident in a Babylonian tangle of diverse voices. Purchased expert opinions sit side by side with the editors' apocalyptic diagnoses of the present. A preacher who believes he is always standing on the brink of an abyss can easily feel exalted.

If the last few years have shown anything, it's a true paradox: the more complicated the global situation, the greater the need for opinions. Everyone wants to have a say, and it's probably due to the reconception of the self driven by social media that everyone actually believes they have a say. There's no lack of self-confidence when it comes to expressing their own opinions. The number of Middle East experts has grown exponentially with the continuation of the war in the Gaza Strip.

My neighbor, a retired vanilla dealer who walks his dog three times a day, has become one of them too. He wants to talk about the fact that he knows something. That he's formed an opinion. He wants to have a say. It's a bit reminiscent of the old joke where someone says, "I go to the theater so I can have a say." His counterpart then replies, "Doesn't that spoil the show?"

If the arts section used to be the place where people learned to deal with ambivalence, that has changed dramatically. The more ambivalent the world, the greater the need for clarity, and this brings us to another transformation that the arts sections are experiencing today. It concerns art, which is actually the traditional core area of ​​their work.

When it comes to observing the world, the traditional complicity between art and the arts pages is gradually dissolving. Cultural journalism is a way to critically examine reality through the eyes of art. It's an admittedly complicated apparatus. The artists' interest in knowledge is taken seriously in the arts pages, and the results of this interest in knowledge are put up for debate on the newspaper pages. That's the ideal. Reality today often looks different.

It's due to the times we live in today that our ideas about the arts section seem to be perfumed with a certain word, and that word is "earlier." In the past, there was still real arts, just as there used to be more tinsel. One name that will certainly be pulled out of the tinsel box is that of Joseph Roth. His sketches of everyday life, which aimed solely at describing, are considered the pinnacle of arts writing. They are concise and precise, revealing the small in all its grandeur.

Joseph Roth wrote his texts in the 1920s and 1930s, when the world around him was collapsing. In the 1920s, Berlin's streets filled with begging former soldiers and people impoverished by the economic crisis. Roth's compassionate feature articles were dedicated to an ever-growing segment of the population that no longer had anything and no longer had a voice. The paradox: The feature articles about people living below the poverty line enjoyed great popularity among the well-off feuilleton readers.

For the moralist Roth, engagement in the arts section was not an added bonus, but essential. Engagement, in turn, is connected to sincerity, and this author believes in literature as the language of sincerity. Style betrays people, and one can see it as a betrayal of Joseph Roth's legacy when the arts section today betrays this idea of ​​style.

The writer spent the last months of his life in a room in Paris that was not much larger than his bed. His earlier life was hardly an idyllic one. Many pieces for the newspaper were written in Berlin in the 1920s under great time pressure. Roth wrote for several papers simultaneously, and these papers printed several issues daily. He needed material, and thus what one might call physiognomies, portraits of people, emerged.

Joseph Roth drew the face of the times from many faces. This makes one wonder what the face of today would be. I believe the face of today is the realist. The realist is the personified form of an attitude familiar from political science. In questions of the distribution of power, realism stands for the belief in the necessity of one's own strength.

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin represent this belief system. They are committed to defeating their opponents on the international stage, and this can only succeed if they are believed to be capable of the worst. The antithesis of realism would be idealism, an optimistic attitude that is probably considered naive today.

Realism has a psychological implication. One can therefore also imagine the realist as an individual figure. The realist's motto is: Distrust the other. Be stronger than the weak. The rise of right-wing populism is undoubtedly also a rise of the realists, the proponents of the either/or approach.

To return to the classic feature section: Its strength lies in its ambiguity, in the imponderables and ambiguities of which the world is made visible through language. The realist doesn't need a feature section, because everything is already clear to him. The feature section makes him nervous, like a fly buzzing around his political self-confidence. In terms of meaning, it's also just a flyweight for him.

As a feature writer these days, you come into contact with realists more and more often. They want to defeat an opponent who eludes their ideas about the world. Some time ago, I wrote a short feature about how pleasant and self-disciplining it can be to read the printed newspaper. There's no digital commentary column that invites immediate disagreement with what you've just read. You have to endure the thoughts of others, or you can occupy your own thoughts with them until perhaps something like agreement emerges.

My article about reading the printed newspaper, of course, appeared not only in the printed newspaper, but also online. A reader immediately responded to what I had written with an online comment that was almost longer than my text. His verdict: What nonsense! He only reads the newspaper anymore so he can tell it his own opinion. Here we are today, grief-stricken and simultaneously amused by the loss of authority of the arts section.

The text is a slightly shortened version of a lecture given at the Liechtenstein Literature Days in Schaan at the beginning of June on the topic of “feuilleton”.