ACHSENZEITEN

ACHSENZEIT, this term was coined by the well-known philosopher Karl Jaspers. He explicitly referred to the historical moment in which fundamental changes take place and the foundations are laid for a new era. He thus defined the SIXTY YEARS as the beginning of an ACHSENZEIT.

This decade is characterized by the fact that it incorporates fundamental findings of pre-war modernism through formal adaptations , but also their further development. They were essentially based on the findings and experiences of American magazine design , which have since been documented in published examples worldwide. I am reminded here of TWEN and Willy Fleckhaus - subsequently of American advertising -I am reminded here of the series of advertisements for VWpublished in Germany "There are forms that cannot be improved", designed by Doyle, Dane, Bernbach in New York. They were based on the insights of the Swiss Style, the Russian and European avant-garde, the Bauhäusler, the Ulm School and the program and grid ideologist Karl Gerstner.

The technical advances from lead typesetting to phototypesetting to complete digitization were virtually twinned with this. The triumph of photographic techniques, developments in machines, inks and papers.

Ultimately, the Mac conquered the scene and replaced the lithographers, type foundries and composing companies in their activities.

The ACHSENZEIT, located here at the beginning of the sixties , coincides with the slowly germinating beginnings of globalization , individualization , a capitalism that detaches itself from companies, becomes more and more immaterial, lives from new ideas and images.

Karl Jaspers predicts that this EIGHTEENTH CENTURY will have a lifespan of FIVE FOLLOWING CENTURIES - that would take us to the year 2000. Then begins a development that Karl Jaspers , who died in 1969, could not have foreseen, could not have seen, could not have predicted:

The beginning of digitalization in the mid-1980s , which visibly crumbled the previous, primarily practiced craft, and especially the decade of the new century finally and visibly gave the new media and their manifestations validity.

We are therefore in the midst of a new, a SECOND ACHSENZEIT. In a currently visible and visibly strange mixture of insights with those from the FIRST ACHSENZEIT , which, you could call it disorganized, now meet the SECOND ACHSENZEIT with all its new forms of application.

Frictions are now breaking out everywhere: the global, digital, fast-paced economic world, the new capitalism, the openness of societies - all of this is under pressure.

So we are currently sailing on a turbulent, very choppy sea with huge waves and heavy breakers , which are hitting the existing land and disposal mass of the FIRST ACHSENZEIT, which has grown over five decades, with brute force.

Who is being hit here? It's us. People who used to be called the audience, or the viewers, the readers, the users, the recipients.

Many are now broadcasters themselves, as mini-video and GIF producers, as Instagram and Facebook online commentators, uploaders, consumer-producer-Twitters, they are all out there, sometimes in a jumble, sometimes like members of hostile tribes.

There are the very young, whose lives are a big, colorful screen time, who have their smartphone or mini tablet in front of them for hours every day. There are the couples who go to bed with Netflix. There are the heavy users, the news junkies, journalists, civil servants, politicians, scientists, people who always know where in the world a bomb is about to explode and what to make of it.

There are the coffee parties who share photos of bouquets of flowers on Instagram. The girls who are constantly pictured doing sport and applying make-up. There are the preachers of hate who only see the world through toilet seats.

There are the falsifiers and confusers who create legends and lies that have not been checked by any authority. And then there are the elderly 70 plus , often mocked but powerful, who have no smartphone, no tablet, no internet, and who gather at the regulars' table on Sundays to watch Rosamunde Pilcher on ZDF .

This raises questions to which no one knows satisfactory answers: WHO makes Twitter trends and how? WHAT is the value of the globally circulating currency "Likes"? IS it possible to be famous in the Facebook universe but completely insignificant in society? ARE a million video views on YouTube a lot or a little? AND is the current US president playing politics on Twitter or just having fun?

There is only one common, uncomfortable themein these questions without an answer:

The loss of reality.

When no one knows what status or meaning a US president's statement has, the unpredictability of the world becomes very threatening.

Ultimately, this is what the famous philosopher Habermas was concerned with in his timeless work: that society finds sensible rules for its communication. That one side cannot impose its truth on the other , but that truth comes about in a social discourse in which all rational, verifiable arguments participate in the search for a viable consensus.

One would think that the world has hardly ever moved as far away from this ideal as it has today, even though the opportunities for having a say have multiplied so dramatically. But if you look around the Internet, you will find little good will to reach a consensus , but a lot of evil desire for dissent.

The net, once idealized as THE technical prerequisite for a better world, populated and played with by the free and the equal, has become a fairground of vanities, a fantastic treasure trove, certainly, but also for all kinds of mental garbage and for smear campaigns that would have been completely unthinkable in earlier times.

In these "earlier times", "the media" were more or less well-functioning filters that obeyed rules, both universal and self-imposed.

It went without saying that factual claims had to be substantiated, facts had to be verifiable, there had to be sources for quotations and, in the case of controversial issues, the opposing opinion at least had to be heard.

If society is to remain rational , we must find answers to all the questions and problems raised here.

It needs a few rules. It needs filters, it needs standards, it needs them to be checked, it needs the philosophical ideal of truth in the background, and it needs a practical passion for reality.

J. W. Goethe wrote more than 200 years ago: Man is born to a limited situation; he is able to see simple, near, definite purposes... but as soon as he comes into the distance, he knows neither what he wants nor what he ought to do."

(Keynote on the occasion of the presentation of the publication "SCHWARZDENKER" on March 13, 2020 in Munich)