Politics & Power Quote by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

There is something deliciously barbed in Fischer-Dieskau’s complaint: a German artist, famous precisely because his voice sounded unmistakably like one man’s mind at work, warning that modern culture has learned to distrust the very thing great art requires - an individual who insists on being seen.

His target isn’t “America” as a place so much as “America” as a cultural export: the mass-market reflex to treat selfhood as branding, and branding as a kind of scam. In that atmosphere, attention becomes evidence of narcissism, originality gets recoded as ego, and standing out feels like cutting the line. The suspicion he names is a defensive posture: if everyone is performing a self, the safest assumption is that the performance is hollow.

Then he flips the knife. The real danger isn’t the loud self-promoter; it’s the quiet social pressure toward levelling, the soft tyranny of not seeming special. “Imitation of what others are already doing” captures how conformity now travels: not through strict rules, but through copyable templates, tasteful consensus, and professional caution. For a musician whose craft depends on interpretation - on taking the same Schubert song everyone knows and making it newly intimate - that’s an existential threat.

Read in postwar German context, the line also carries a distinct national anxiety. After catastrophes driven by collective fervor, suspicion of the individual can look like moral hygiene. Fischer-Dieskau argues it’s become something else: a flattened culture where the safest identity is indistinguishability, and where art’s job - to risk a singular voice - starts to feel socially impolite.