People From Bavaria

"He [Kirchner] dwelled here in a living situation that a bourgeois would deem uncharacteristic, materially simple, but sophisticated in his artistic sensibility. He worked feverishly, without concerning himself with the time of day."

"Kirchner lived in an Atelier that he had assembled out of an attic apartment. Every piece of furniture, every carpet was created by him. When one entered his room, one felt as if they were on another star or a faraway century."

"[Kirchner's studio was] that of a real bohemian, full of paintings lying all over the place, drawings, books and artist's materials — much more like an artist's romantic lodgings than the home of a well-organised architecture student."

"We [Kirchner and Bleyl] established [c. 1902-03, in Dresden] a friendly relationship at once, and, striving for the same goals, we quickly developed a close friendship. We were constantly together, either at the Hochschule [Architecture], in our lodgings, or taking walks in the evenings, in the Grosser Garten in Dresden. We were never without pencil and paper."

"A colourfully painted curtain concealed a large collection of paintings [in Kirchner's studio in Berlin]. When we began to look at them, he came alive. Together with me, he saw all his experiences drift by on canvas, the small, timid-looking woman set aside what we had seen and brought a bottle of wine. He made short explanatory remarks in a weary voice. Each picture had its own particular colourful character, a great sadness was present in all of them; what I had previously found to be incomprehensible and unfinished now created the same delicate and sensitive impression as his personality. Everywhere a search for style, for psychological understanding of his figures. The most moving was a self-portrait in uniform with his right hand cut off. Then he showed me his travel permit for Switzerland. He wanted to go back to Davos.. ..and implored me to ask father for a medical certificate.."

"Eberhard Grisebach, in a letter March 1917 to Helen Spengler; as quoted by E. W. Kornfield, Stauffer, Christine E. Stauffer (1992). Biography Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Kirchner Museum Davos. Retrieved March 21, 2016; from Wikipedia: Kirchner"

"'a true victim of the war; the hellish delusion of being sent back into battle had deranged him and flung him helplessly onto the shabby bed of a third-class hotel.. .In Davos I found an emaciated man with a piercing, feverish gaze, who saw imminent death before his eyes."

"A tragedy had been quietly enacted here over the last few months. Because of the defamation in Germany [in 1937 a total of 639 works by Kirchner were confiscated by the Nazi-regime: Degenerate Art] and the failure of the November exhibition in Basle.. ..he [=Kirchner] chose a radiantly beautiful day, 15 June, to put an end to his life. I shall spare you the details. He had been suffering grievously until he was able to make this decision."

"..one day [c. 1905-07], Kirchner brought with him a volume from some bookstore with pictures of Meier-Graefe about the modern French artists. We were enthralled."

"In the days that I spent in Dresden [before 1911].. ..I was together with Kirchner and Heckel a great deal.. .Here they led a singular bohemian life, liberated from any ordering of day-times and mealtimes; when they had the impulse they worked the whole night through and slept through the morning. I was convinced that they not infrequently lived on coffee, cake, and cigarettes.. .When the lamps were lit, we sat on benches and crouched over the batik-ed fabrics that were spread around the low table and looked at the portfolios with hand drawings and printed sheets; all the time strange, grotesque sculptures peered over our shoulders. The two showed me how they etched their lithographs, printed their etchings, and Kirchner drew two.. ..portraits of me with the dry-point needle."

"In spring 1915, the recruit, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, was furloughed from his field artillery unit because he did not prove adequate to the demand of service. The diagnosis said: "because of affected lungs and feebleness." But the true cause was a profound physical and spiritual crisis, which brought him to a sanatorium in Königstein, Taunus. Artistic efforts at overcoming the trauma are revealed in works such as the 1915 'Self-Portrait as a Soldier'. The artist presents himself in the masquerade of a uniform: his face is a mask of isolation: a bleeding arm stump looms out of the right sleeve; the painter's active hand seems chopped off."

"Kirchner superimposes [in his series Street Scene painting from Berlin], () a jaded artificiality over its excitement and glamour, situating the garish yet exotic streetwalker in an atmosphere suggesting loneliness and alienation, as well as agitation and danger. Paint is applied in spontaneous, splintered brushstrokes that create jagged forms and express an immediacy and energy that approximate the stimulating yet hectic urban environment."

"More than any of the other artists, Kirchner translated the staccato rhythm of the music into visual means; the legs of dancers become solid entities and almost dashes in his 1910 Hamburger Tänzerinnen (Hamburg Dancers) (Fig. 34). All weight of this image is on the legs, as they are the largest parts of the scene and are rendered fully in black. Moreover, the repeating subject of the three dancers each doing identical leg lifts creates a vibrating back-and-forth. In this quick sketch, Kirchner manages to relay the unified spirit of this performance."

"What is not supposed to be my concern! First and foremost, the Good Cause, then God's cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice; further, the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally, even the cause of Mind, and a thousand other causes. Only my cause is never to be my concern. "Shame on the egoist who thinks only of himself!""

"The conflict between individual and society, like the conflict between the child and mother, comes from the adult preference for a less suffocating environment, and society, like the mother, must strive to destroy the individual's autonomy and inhibit her maturity if the original relationship is to be maintained."

"Stirner makes no attempt to distinguish between feeling 'at home' and being subjugated. 'Belong­ing' can of course connote being a part of as well as being the rightful possession of; 'bonds' can similarly suggest solidarity as well as that which shackles; 'ties' can provide security as well as bind. Stirner, however, never seriously considers the possibility that these communities might fulfil, still less that they can empower, individuals. It seems that belonging to a 'natural' community is equivalent to being owned by another, and 'the individual', writes Stirner, 'is the irrecon­cilable enemy of . . . every tie, every fetter' ( p. 192)."

"Individuals have also been held to have obligations generated by their membership of communities that they neither create nor choose to belong to, communities bound by 'natural ligature[s]' (p. 276 ) such as 'blood', locality, language, class, and common disposition. Stirner's predictable response to the resulting conflict between such obli­gations and 'ownness' is to reject the value of community in all its forms. The sentimental blandishments of German nationhood, for example, are ridiculed as 'general, abstract, an empty, lifeless, concept' (p. 205) ; patriotism, he insists, is incompatible with egoism (p. 32 ). Similarly, because of the potential conflict between family obligations and personal interests, Stirner insists that individuals should act autonomously and follow their own good, rather than succumbing out of 'weakness' to either the will of another family member or the sacred in the form of 'family honour'; 'the forming of family ties', claims Stirner, 'binds a man' (p. 102)."

"In contrast to Stirner's rejection of civil disobedience is his notori­ous endorsement of crime. Stirner denies that crime is peculiarly concerned with direct relations between individuals; rather, it mediates the relation between an individual and the sacred (in the form of legality). The criminal is punished not by individuals for actions which have harmed them, but by the state for actions which have undermined some fixed idea (without the legal recognition of the sanctity of marriage, for example, infidelity is not a 'crime' what­ever its effects on individuals). Crime will accordingly disappear with the epoch of egoism, when actions are judged by their effect on individual interests (not their effect on the sacred). Meanwhile, Stirner defends the individual act of crime as an assertion of individ­ual autonomy against its chief usurper, weakening the 'cement' (respect for law) which holds the state together. In more generalized form - and drawing a distinction between 'revolution' (which seeks to erect a new social order) and 'insurrection' (which represents the opposition of individuals to any order) - Stirner even suggests that crime has a unique insurrectionary potential which might eventually destroy the state."

"Socrates was a 'fool' to concede to the Athenians the right to con­demn him; his failure to escape was a 'weakness', a product of his 'delusion' that he was a member of a community rather than an individual, and of his failure to understand that the Athenians were his 'enemies', that he himself and no one else could be his only judge (p. 191). Alcibiades, in contrast - who, amongst other infamies, fled Athens to avoid trial when he was suspected of complicity in the mutilation of the Hermae - is praised as an 'intriguer of genius' (p. 191), an egoist who undermined the state precisely by breaking with the ancient prejudice that individuals were free only if, and to the extent that, they were members of a free community."

"Stirnerian self-mastery thus has both external and internal dimen­sions, demanding not only that we avoid subordinating ourselves to others, but also that we avoid submitting to our own appetites or ends. Stirner accepts the claim that if any idea or desire 'plants itself firmly in me, and becomes indissoluble', then I have 'become its prisoner and servant, a possessed man' (p. 127). This attack on the Christian 'fixedity' of ideas does not entail that the egoist can no longer allow herself to have ideas, but rather that she must never allow an idea to make her 'a tool of its realization' (p. 302). The egoist must exercise 'power' not only over 'the exactions and violences of the world', but also exercise this 'power over my nature' and avoid becoming the 'slave of my appetites' (p. 295). Stirner thus encourages the individual to cultivate and extend an ideal of emotional detach­ment towards both her passions and her ideas."

"Take the example of the 'avaricious man' who sacrifices everything else in order 'to gather treasures' (p. 70); his actions are clearly self-interested (he acts only to enrich himself ), but it is an egoism that Stirner rejects as 'a one-sided, unopened, narrow egoism' (p. 70), because with the subordination of everything to a single end, that end begins to 'inspire, enthuse, fanaticize' us, it 'becomes our - master' (p' 58). In short, this one­ sided, 'self-sacrificing' egoism is rejected because it violates our 'ownness'; the avaricious man, Stirner suggests, rather than being self-determining, is 'dragged along' (p. 56) by his appetites."

"Stirner thus goes beyond both Marxism and anarchism, creating the possibility for a new way of theorizing politics—a possibility which will be developed by poststructuralism. Stirner occupies a point of rupture in this discussion: the point at which anarchism can no longer deal adequately with the very problematic that it created—the problem of the place of power. He is the catalyst, then, for an epistemological break, or perhaps more accurately, a break with epistemology altogether. Above all, Stirner’s explorations into the nature of power, morality, and subjectivity, have made it impossible to continue to conceptualize an uncontaminated point of departure, the pure place of resistance which anarchism relied so heavily upon. There is no longer any place outside power which confines power which political theory can find sanctuary in."

"Stirner occupied a disoriented historical moment, one before the experience of capitalism and industry had been filtered through the paradigmatic Marxian idioms. Moreover, Stirner did attempt to tackle the social phenomenon of "pauperism" (the progressive impoverishment of the lower social strata) which has been identified as the "dominant" social issue of "pre-March" period. [..] Pauperism differed much from traditional poverty. It was collective and structural rather than determined by individual contingencies. Stirner recognized this social phenomenon and discussed it at length in The Ego. He was not failing to grasp the true "social question" as Marx makes out; instead he was analyzing his own reality: the parochial, yet unique, pre-Industrial phase of German history – what Eric Hobsbawn called "the last, and perhaps worst, economic breakdown of the ancien régime".""

"I am happy to be called a Stirnerite anarchist, provided 'Stirnerite' means one who agrees with Stirner's general drift, not one who agrees with Stirner's every word. Please judge my arguments on their merits, not on the merits of Stirner's arguments, and not by the test of whether I conform to Stirner."

"A unique expression of libertarian ideas is to be found in Max Stirner's (Johann Kaspar Schmidt) (1806-1856) book, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, which, it is true, passed quickly into oblivion and had no influence on the development of the Anarchist movement as such. Stirner's book is predominantly a philosophic work which traces man's dependence on so-called higher powers through all its devious ways, and is not timid about drawing inferences from the knowledge gained by the survey. It is the book of a conscious and deliberate insurgent, which reveals no reverence for any authority, however exalted. and, therefore appeals powerfully to independent thinking."

"But it is easy to be intoxicated by a book-such as Stirner’s, – and fail to read what is written. What Stirner actually writes about is that there are basically two forms of interaction, namely that of standing as an I against a You versus meeting one another as predicate-filled objects. The understanding of this demands that one understands the difference between the Einzige that one is, and the objects we are conditioned by culture to see ourselves as."

"Stirner lays the foundation for a heretical Hegelianism that posits a non-teleological philosophy of history. Hegel's thinking is certainly the condition of possibility for the Stirnerian idea-system, but it's equally certain that the path of the Unique leads to the most radical rejection of Hegel's Spirit. In this sense we can maintain that Stirner was the seed sowed by Hegelianism for its own self-destruction (or, perhaps, for the final, unexpected, paradoxical post-speculative metamorphosis)."

"The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer's ideas or personality...It is the same narrow attitude which sees in Max Stirner naught but the apostle of the theory "each for himself, the devil take the hind one." That Stirner's individualism contains the greatest social possibilities is utterly ignored. Yet, it is nevertheless true that if society is ever to become free, it will be so through liberated individuals, whose free efforts make society."

"Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self."

"Egoism, as Stirner uses it, is not opposed to love nor to thought; it is no enemy of the sweet life of love, nor of devotion and sacrifice; it is no enemy of intimate warmth, but it is also no enemy of critique, nor of socialism, nor, in short, of any actual interest. It doesn’t exclude any interest."

"If a concept lacks an essence, nothing will ever be found that completely fits that concept. If you are lacking in the concept of human being, it will immediately expose that you are something individual, something that cannot be expressed by the term human being, thus, in every instance, an individual human being."

"Revolution is aimed at new arrangements; insurrection [Empörung] leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and set no glittering hopes on “institutions.”"

"Whoso is full of sacred (religious, moral, humane) love loves only the spook, the “true man,” and persecutes with dull mercilessness the individual, the real man."

"[...] Because the Egoist is to himself the warder of the human, and has nothing to say to the state except: "Get out of my sunshine!""

"Where the world comes in my way — and it comes in my way everywhere — I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but — my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use."

"If the press was to be free, nothing would be so important as precisely its liberation from every coercion that could be put on it in the name of a law. And, that it might come to that, I my own self should have to have absolved myself from obedience to the law."

"Human or general needs can be satisfied through society; for satisfaction of unique needs you must do some seeking. A friend and a friendly service, or even an individual's service, society cannot procure you. And yet you will every moment be in need of such a service, and on the slightest occasions require somebody who is helpful to you. Therefore do not rely on society, but see to it that you have the wherewithal to — purchase the fulfilment of your wishes."

"People is the name of the body, State of the spirit, of that ruling person that has hitherto suppressed me."

"I am owner of my might, and I am so when I know myself as unique. In the unique one the owner himself returns into his creative nothing, of which he is born. Every higher essence above me, be it God, be it man, weakens the feeling of my uniqueness, and pales only before the sun of this consciousness. If I concern myself for myself, the unique one, then my concern rests on its transitory, mortal creator, who consumes himself, and I may say: All things are nothing to me."

"That the individual is of himself a world's history, and possesses his property in the rest of the world's history, goes beyond what is Christian. To the Christian the world's history is the higher thing, because it is the history of Christ or 'man'; to the egoist only his history has value, because he wants to develop only himself not the mankind-idea, not God's plan, not the purposes of Providence, not liberty, and the like. He does not look upon himself as a tool of the idea or a vessel of God, he recognizes no calling, he does not fancy that he exists for the further development of mankind and that he must contribute his mite to it, but he lives himself out, careless of how well or ill humanity may fare thereby."

"Look upon yourself as more powerful than they give you out for, and you have more power; look upon yourself as more, and you have more."

"Get away from me with your 'philanthropy'! Creep in, you philanthropist, into the 'dens of vice', linger awhile in the throng of the great city: will you not everywhere find sin, and sin, and again sin? Will you not wail over corrupt humanity, not lament at the monstrous egoism? Will you see a rich man without finding him pitiless and 'egoistic'? Perhaps you already call yourself an atheist, but you remain true to the Christian feeling that a camel will sooner go through a needle's eye than a rich man not be an 'un-man'. How many do you see anyhow that you would not throw into the 'egoistic mass'? What, therefore, has your philanthropy (love of man) found? Nothing but unlovable men! And where do they all come from? From you, from your philanthropy! You brought the sinner with you in your head, therefore you found him, therefore you inserted him everywhere. Do not call men sinners, and they are not: you alone are the creator of sinners; you, who fancy that you love men, are the very one to throw them into the mire of sin, the very one to divide them into vicious and virtuous, into men and un-men, the very one to befoul them with the spittle of your possessedness; for you love not men, but man. But I tell you, you have never seen a sinner, you have only – dreamed of him."

"All right, men are as they should be, can be. What should they be? Surely not more than they can be! And what can they be? Not more, again, than they – can, than they have the competence, the force, to be. But this they really are, because what they are not, they are incapable of being; for to be capable means – really to be. One is not capable for anything that one really is not; one is not capable of anything that one does not really do. Could a man blinded by cataract see? Oh, yes, if he had his cataract successfully removed. But now he cannot see because he does not see. Possibility and reality always coincide. One can do nothing that one does not, as one does nothing that one cannot."

"An appeal to men's self-sacrificing disposition and self-renouncing love ought at least to have lost its seductive plausibility when, after an activity of thousands of years, it has left nothing behind but the – misery of today. Why then still fruitlessly expect self-sacrifice to bring us better times? Why not rather hope for them from usurpation? Salvation comes no longer from the giver, the bestower, the loving one, but from the taker, the appropriator (usurper), the owner. Communism, and, consciously, egoism-reviling humanism, still count on love."

"A word of honour, an oath, is one only for him whom I entitle to receive it; he who forces me to it obtains only a forced, a hostile word, the word of a foe, whom one has no right to trust; for the foe does not give us the right."

"Do I write out of love to men? No, I write because I want to procure for my thoughts an existence in the world; and, even if I foresaw that these thoughts would deprive you of your rest and your peace, even if I saw the bloodiest wars and the fall of many generations springing up from this seed of thought – I would nevertheless scatter it. Do with it what you will and can, that is your affair and does not trouble me."

"Every love to which there clings but the smallest speck of obligation is an unselfish love, and, so far as this speck reaches, a possessedness. He who believes that he owes the object of his love anything loves romantically or religiously."

"I love men too, not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with the consciousness of egoism; I love them because love makes me happy, I love because loving is natural to me, because it pleases me. I know no 'commandment of love'."

"With competition is connected less the intention to do the thing best than the intention to make it as profitable, as productive, as possible. Hence people study to get into the civil service (study in order to get a well-paid job), study cringing and flattery, routine and 'acquaintance with business', work 'for appearance'. Hence, while it is apparently a matter of doing 'good service', in truth only a 'good business' and earning of money are looked out for. The job is done only ostensibly for the job's sake, but in fact on account of the gain that it yields. One would indeed prefer not to be censor, but one wants to be – advanced; one would like to judge, administer, etc., according to his best convictions, but one is afraid of transfer or even dismissal; one must, above all things – live."

"One is not worthy to have what one, through weakness, lets be taken from him; one is not worthy of it because one is not capable of it."