The Deutsches Kolleg exposes World Cultural Heritage as a monument to dead cultures and the global civilization built upon their graves.
This is an English translation of an essay originally published in 2007 and available in German here.
Before the work of a culture can be declared part of a cultural heritage, the one who leaves it behind must be dead. Until all the cultures of the world have died, their works cannot be declared World Cultural Heritage by a sole heir. Without the death of all cultures, there can be no World Cultural Heritage.
In both private and public life, there are sinister individuals and organizations that defraud aunts from whom they expect an inheritance, seeking to obtain their estates through deception, and even some who murder those whose property they wish to seize. Just as with any other inheritance, cultural heritage also provides a motive for fraud, robbery, and murder.
Historical actors who offer the works of their culture to the United Nations as so-called World Cultural Heritage demonstrate their willingness to surrender their national culture to a global authority, which then proclaims it World Cultural Heritage for its own glory. To humiliate the disinherited peoples, a UN inscription is subsequently affixed to the objects in question. These inscriptions resemble those found on gravestones in cemeteries.
Just as heirs presuppose an inheritance, and an inheritance presupposes someone who has died, so too a culture that has become heritage is a body of cultural practices that has died out and a collection of cultural works that have fallen out of use. For culture is what a particular people customarily does on the land it cultivates, what it habitually does through the actions, objects, and works of its culture, which become heritage only after that culture has died. The supposed world culture into whose heritage the deceased national culture has been absorbed is intended to console the dethroned people. But this so-called world culture is merely a global civilization. Civilization is the condition of the world after the death of the cultures of its peoples.
Civilization is a form of civic life with two dimensions: citizenship in the state and participation in society. The latter sphere is also known as civil or bourgeois society. Since the Earth’s surface has been divided among states, every human being possesses citizenship in a state, and this would remain true even if the entire Earth were subjected to a single state, the world state. Some states claim that the civil societies of other states are underdeveloped or that their capitalist faction, namely liberalism, has not yet achieved sufficient dominance. This expresses the globalist will to establish a world state. Yet membership in civil society is just as universal, applying to every individual, as citizenship of the state. These two forms of civic life, together with a set of technical foundations and developments inherited from the dead cultures of defeated peoples, constitute contemporary civilization.
Global civil society, blessed with the “World Cultural Heritage of the international community,” represents the paradoxical condition now observable throughout the world: the universality of peculiarity, arising from the totalitarianism of the Particular Estate, which inevitably emerges under any system of parliamentary government. Within this totalitarian peculiarity, what spreads is not so much the frequently cited phenomenon of “induced insanity” as a neurological disorder affecting the cultural memory of peoples trapped in the peculiarity of parliamentarism. To diagnose a mental illness would attribute too much intellect to the condition. What we are witnessing is collective Alzheimer’s disease.
The peoples, therefore, have not gone mad; they have developed a neurological disorder. The “barbarism of reflection” in Vico’s sense, the destruction of one’s own culture through the loss of the capacity for community, manifested in the atomization of individuals, belongs to yesterday. Today, neurologically induced idiocy prevails, a complete loss of memory that calls itself a “culture of remembrance,” corresponding to the calm, late stage of Alzheimer’s disease. By now, people have become indifferent to everything, including the UN’s own culture. As though to illustrate this state of affairs, a great-granddaughter of Richard Wagner declared at this year’s Bayreuth Festival, in justification of her system-conforming and idiotic production of The Mastersingers: “There is no German culture anymore!” Coming from a director who need not be able to write poetry, compose music, act, play an instrument, or sing, and who is consequently neither an artist nor a performer of art but merely a secondary interpreter of art, this almost qualifies as a flash of genius!
Relativism everywhere, as the German pope lamented long ago. Cultural relativism first announced itself when the clumsy Left—the former Left, which had become reactionary and descended into anti-Germanism—began babbling about multicultural society. When those who considered themselves conservatives responded by proposing a German Leitkultur, or guiding culture, every remaining trace of conceptual clarity disappeared. For introducing a guiding culture is merely a further development of multiculturalism, since it presupposes the existence of numerous cultures to be guided! (This is nothing other than the relationship between a leading currency and the currencies that follow it in foreign-exchange trading.) The recognition of a culture as the guiding culture would presuppose its victory in a struggle between cultures. However, under late capitalism, cultures no longer exist, each of which, in its race and nation, is always unique. There is only global civilization. This civilization cannot be overcome directly by the old culture, but only by the two principal objects of capitalist exploitation: the natural world of the Earth and the labor power of its peoples.
The UN’s tendency towards the murder of cultures, and thereby the murder of peoples, can only be understood by recalling that the United Nations emerged after the Second World War from the murder of the German Reich under international law. The reason was that the German Reich, as a power capable of reshaping the world order, had been in a position to call into question the continued existence of the overwhelming majority of states. As an ethnonational power, the German Reich could have reorganized the world according to the principle of one people, one state; at least, its propaganda pointed in that direction. Most existing states would have faced demands for secession and dissolution, along with demands from their peoples to establish ethnically exclusive states, meaning genuine nations or nation-states instead of merely formal nations or states defined by citizenship. The majority of existing states joined the United Nations voluntarily, almost as though joining an insurance company that would protect them against the demands of the peoples they had incorporated into their territories.
Peoples are like Jesus: they can rise again. Before that happens, they may decline, die out, be crucified, or grow old—and yet they can still rise once more through popular uprisings, wars of national liberation, and social revolutions, rejuvenating themselves and ascending again, both culturally and politically. Under the sign of the Cross, the peoples will triumph—or descend into Hell in the claws of Mammon.
(Translated from the German)
Thank you.