Since the European catastrophe, culture hangs on like houses in the cities accidentally spared by bombs or indifferently patched together. Nobody really believes in “culture” any more, the backbone of spirit has been broken, and anyone who pays no attention to this and acts as though nothing had happened, must crawl like an insect, not walk upright. The only authentic artworks produced today are those that in their inner organization measure themselves by the fullest experience of horror, and there is scarcely anyone, except Schoenberg or Picasso, who can depend on himself to have the power to do this.

a companion piece to Picasso's Guernica – in which Schoenberg made the impossible possible, standing up to the contemporary horror in its most extreme form, the murder of the Jews, in art. This alone would be enough to earn him every right to the thanks of a generation that scorns him, not least because in his music that inexpressible thing quivers that no one any longer wants to know about. If music is to escape from the nullity that threatens it … then it can only hope to do so if it accomplishes what Schoenberg accomplished in the Survivor from Warsaw – if it confronts the utter negativity, the most extreme, by which the entire complexion of reality is made manifest.