We have become impoverished. We have given up one portion of the human heritage after another, and have often left it at the pawnbroker’s for a hundredth of its true value, in exchange for the small change of ‘the con temporary.’ The economic crisis is at the door, and behind it is the shadow of the approaching war. Holding on to things has become the monopoly of a few powerful people, who, God knows, are no more human than the many; for the most part, they are more barbaric, but not in the good way. Everyone else has to adapt-beginning anew and with few resources. They rely on the men who have adopted the cause of the absolutely new and have founded it on insight and renunciation. In its buildings, pictures, and stories, mankind is preparing to outlive culture, if need be. And the main thing is that it does so with a laugh. This laughter may occasionally sound barbaric. Well and good. Let us hope that from time to time the individual will give a little humanity to the masses, who one day will repay him with compound interest. — Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 2: Part 1, 1927-1930, ed. Michael W Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 735.