The Experience of Rupture
In 1890 Hermann Bahr published a short essay in which he formulated the younger
generation’s frustration with the culture that surrounded them. He expressed their
sense of disorientation, their feeling of having no genuine ties with the world around
them. The feeling that is dominant, he states, is one of agony and despair: “Fierce
pain permeates our time, and the agony has become intolerable. There is general
clamor for the Savior; everywhere we find the crucified. Has the plague descended
on this earth?” In the face of this catastrophe, however, one should not give up. Out
of the agony of those who seek the truth, a new age would be born, the age of the
modern: “That redemption will come from grief, and mercy from despair, that day
will break after this horrible night and art will dwell among people—this glorious and
rapturous resurrection is the faith of modernity.”^1Total
disillusionment
about the age
and nevertheless
an unreserved
profession of
loyalty to it...
Walter Benjamin, 1933