by Potential Frolic

There is this silly german song that conveys in its lyrics something which I think is interesting to think about.  In listening to it I’m reminded of attempts by both sides to trap our people, or our Folk, into various boxes they have set up for the purpose.

There’s the left which condemns us to be the passive principle in our own lands, beholden to whatever groups allowed to “act” as such should choose to do with or to us, and holding onto “us” as a kind of historical memory from which one takes unwilling leave as one goes into the future.  There could hardly be a more consistently conveyed message of 90s media, as I recall it, than the idea that we belonged to some sort of inescapable passing away, that our dwindling was inevitably foreseen but impossible to disagree with.  We were relics, waiting to be retired to our final resting spot.  Having pure ancestry was forecast as being something “quaint” in future times.

And in reaction to that, in rejection of that, there is the furious attempt at rediscovery in forms sometimes militarist - the insistence upon our heroism, our glory, our grandeur - sometimes cultural: Shakespeare, Milton, and whatnot.  Sometimes the literary pantheon is brought in as being a source of glory, other times it is left out, as it is in the most hardcore redoubts of germanocentric militarist religion because people clearly perceive that the soul-hardening which occurs in this pursuit of weaponization is antithetical to the demands of flowering literary culture.  One is reminded here of the difficulties felt by Frederick the Great and Heinrich von Kleist in reconciling their “higher faculties” with the subordination and borishness endemic to their culture.

There is a pious belief in military glory which will argue that this circle can be squared, that after enough soul-hardening “glory”, one also achieves heights of poetic splendor unknowable to others. Yet my reading of poetry and literature dissuades me of this personally.  I think Prussian literature is at its best when its tortured philosophers are wracking their brains to understand how best to fulfill their “duty”, as with Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and for anything touching inwardness of another quality one is left with an empty roster.

Anyway, the words are as follows:

Come to the window, come here to me
Do you see over there behind the iron fence
Over there in front of the store
They graved our image into stone.

Come out in the street, come here to me
Everywhere flowers and garlands, half rumpelled up
It appears that they took our monument tonight
and unveiled it without us.

Go fetch the sledge-hammer!

They raised a monument to us
and every sane person knows
how that destroys real love.

I’ll call the worst graffitti artists of this town together
At night we’ll spray slogans on the rubble that remains.

After another refrain, there is a haunting part which reminds me always of the enforced obsolescence which Anglo-Saxons accept as their role in American society, and apparently also in Britain; the slow waiting game, waiting on our own death, which is the only action which is supposedly morally allowable to us:

Do you see the inscription down there, by the shoes?
It says in golden letters, that we should rest in eternal peace.

Go fetch the sledge-hammer!

The band is called, pertinently enough, “We are heroes”!