Authors: Karl Kraus
17
.
“Heine began producing literary travel reportage—that is, feuilletonistic writing—about a decade before he relocated to Paris: his
Letters from Berlin
appeared in 1822.
Kraus and his earliest readers would have been aware of this fact—almost everyone who read Kraus had read Heine—and it would have prompted at least some of Kraus’s readers to wonder about the status of his genealogy.
Is Kraus really trying to tell the story of how the feuilleton got to Germany?
Or is he doing something else?” —PR
Taking the bait of Prof.
Reitter’s two pedagogically flavored questions, I’ll venture to say that Kraus is doing something else.
The seeming weakness of the essay—a weakness advertised in its very title—is Kraus’s failure to “prove” that Heine is the
cause
of bad journalistic writing in Kraus’s Vienna.
I think Reitter is right to suggest that at least some of Kraus’s readers recognized the title as an absurd claim, deliberately exaggerated for comic effect.
What Kraus seems really to be doing is combining his agon with Heine with his critique of his journalistic competitors and manufacturing a make-believe genealogy: because there’s a
kinship
between the bad writing of Heine and that of his feuilletonistic successors, let’s make believe that there’s a direct
inheritance
.
I’m put in mind of a rock-and-roll lyric by my beloved Mekons: “Call it intuition, call it luck / But we’re right in all that we distrust.”
A satirist has to believe this in order to write with any force.
Kraus distrusts Heine, he distrusts the feuilletonists, and his trust in his gut sweeps aside the need for fact-based literary-historical argument.
Reitter adds: “Kraus’s genealogy is also designed to provoke.
It bears an egregious resemblance to a highly influential antisemitic narrative spread by Richard Wagner, among many others: Jewish journalists ruin German
Kultur
by importing into it decadent, fraudulent foreign models.”
18
.
“Kraus is playing with a proverb that was better known in his day,
‘hic Rhodus, hic salta’—
here is Rhodes, here you should leap.
This comes from an Aesop’s fable and has to do with an athlete who purports to have executed a mighty jump on Rhodes.
But since Heine himself had played with the same proverb in his poem “Plateniden,” Kraus is also playing on a quotation, which he’ll cite more directly later in the essay.
The poem’s title is a mocking reference to Count von Platen, whose feud with Heine Kraus (and these footnotes) will also take up later.” —PR
19
.
“A lightly reworked line from one of Heine’s ballads, ‘The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar’ (‘Die Wallfahrt nach Kevlaar’).
The original reads ‘many a person who otherwise didn’t have a single healthy finger can now play the viola.’” —PR
20
.
This sentence is very funny in German.
I can’t translate it any better, and so I have to resort, dismally, to trying to explain the humor.
Kraus is again going after
easiness
—here, the ease with which foreign travel lends spice to writing.
The joke is, approximately, that the jungle is fascinating to us non–jungle dwellers, and that we mistake this fascination for talent on the writer’s part.
Thus: people are very talented in the jungle.
Kraus ridicules this phenomenon by way of contrasting himself with Heine, whose best-known prose was his travel writing and his dispatches from Paris.
Although Kraus vacationed abroad and spent parts of the First World War in Switzerland, his life’s work was focused exclusively on Vienna, and it obviously galled him to hear foreign-traveling writers praised for their “talent.”
It galled him so much that he turned against the word “talent” itself; later in the essay he’ll use it directly against Heine, connecting it with an absence of “character” (as Heine’s rival Ludwig Börne famously had).
But here I think his venom is directed more at admirers of jungle writing than at its producers.
The former are perpetrating bad literary values, the latter merely making the most of such talent as they have.
There is, after all, a long tradition of writers venturing overseas for material.
The funniest fictional example may be the young man Otto, who, in William Gaddis’s
The Recognitions
, goes to Central America in quest of the character he natively lacks, but the inverse relationship between travel and character is found in real life, too.
I’m thinking of Hemingway, whose style was as strong as his range of theme was narrow (would he actually have had anything to say if he’d been forced to stay at home?), and of Faulkner, a writer of real character whose best work began after he gave up his soldier dreams and his New Orleans flaneurship and returned to Mississippi.
You can’t really fault Hemingway for being aware of his own limitations, but you can (and Kraus would) fault the culture for making him the face of twentieth-century American literature.
Hemingway’s star seems to have faded a little, so a takedown of him now wouldn’t be as incendiary as Kraus’s takedown of Heine, but he’s an interestingly parallel case, not only in the general outlines (both he and Heine were expats in Paris, obsessed with their literary reputations, and famously nasty to writers they perceived as rivals) but in their literary methods.
Kraus’s critique of Heine’s writing—that it was fundamentally hack journalism, dressed up in an innovative and easily copied style—could apply to a lot of Hemingway’s work as well.
21
.
“Many of the Austrian feuilletonists whom Kraus detested spent part of their career in Paris.
For example, Theodor Herzl did a stint as the Paris correspondent for Vienna’s paper of record (the
Neue Freie Presse
).
And the hated Hermann Bahr had two formative years of work in Paris.
“The more direct reference is to a comedy by the Viennese author Ferdinand Raimund (
The Alp King and the Misanthrope
, 1828), in which there’s a servant named Habakuk who likes to mention that he spent two years in Paris, because, as he puts it, doing so gets him ‘a lot more respect.’
“The German version of ‘Heine and the Consequences’ in
Schriften zur Literatur
(1986), annotated by Christian Wagenknecht, helped me identify this and many other references.
Wagenknecht’s annotations to ‘Nestroy and Posterity,’ in the same volume, proved to be as vital a resource.
Wagenknecht has done a lot for Kraus readers, and it’s a pleasure to acknowledge my debt to his work.” —PR
22
.
“Johann Nestroy (1801–1862) was one of the few Austrian authors Kraus admired.
Kraus explains just how Nestroy speaks to him in the essay ‘Nestroy and Posterity’ (1912), whose title marks it as the companion piece to ‘Heine and the Consequences.’
Kraus applauds Nestroy for sending up some of the very populist ideals that Heine advanced; and Kraus salutes, as well, the ‘verbal barricades’ Nestroy put in the way of the process that Heine supposedly did so much to promote: the trivialization of culture.
Above all, Kraus underscores the value of Nestroy’s satirical techniques.
Where Heine ‘loosened the corsets of the German language,’ Nestroy realized its deepest linguistic possibilities.
Kraus’s compliment to Nestroy is that his is the first German satire in which ‘language forms thoughts about things.’
So, for Kraus, where Heine had consequences, his less famous and less celebrated contemporary Nestroy has relevance.” —PR
My translation of “
Nestroy and Posterity
”
23
.
“‘The going is good up to Stockerau, but from there on the journey is long.’
Nestroy is supposed to have said this about traveling from Vienna to America, and a version of the saying occurs in his play
Der alte Mann mit der jungen Frau
(
The Old Man with the Young Woman,
1849).
Later users of the epigram swapped out Stockerau and America for other place names, including the ones featured in Kraus’s reworking of it: St.
Pölten—like Stockerau, an old town, just north of Vienna—and Paris.
Kraus’s meaning appears to be that with the flair they’ve acquired in Paris, Austrian journalists can effortlessly dazzle readers in the provinces; however, once those journalists get close to Vienna, where feuilletonism is already rampant, the road to success becomes harder.” —PR
24
.
“With ‘local swindlers’ (
Heimatsschwindler
), Kraus is alluding to the regional writers (
Heimatdichter
) whose critical success he viewed as the culmination of acts of fraud.
Much to his chagrin, one of them, Karl Schönherr, had just been decorated with the prestigious Bauernfeld Prize.
Kraus’s suggestion, in any case, is that instead of trying to make it as feuilletonists in Vienna, some of the returning authors cash in along the way, becoming regional writers who manage to couple their Parisian confections with provincial flavors.
The neologism
Heimatsschwindler
carries an echo of coupling driven by venality, because it’s also a play on the term
Heiratsschwindler
, or ‘marriage swindler.’
And since duplicitous marriage figures in Nestroy’s farce
Liebesgeschichten und Heiratssachen
(
Love Stories and Marriage Matters,
1843),
Heimatsschwindler
serves as well to thicken the web of references to Nestroy’s work in this passage.” —PR
25
.
Who has time to read literature when there are so many blogs to keep up with, so many food fights to follow on Twitter?
26
.
“Kraus was hardly alone with his contempt for the feuilleton.
Here, in fact, he’s creating a mash-up of two distinctive, if not always dissimilar, patterns of opposition to the form.
One we might call a high modernist critique.
For such figures as Robert Musil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and, above all, Kraus, the key problem with the feuilleton is that it objectifies what should be most subjective.
With its air of intimacy, its emphasis on evoking the mood of its author, and its abundance of clever observations, the classic fin de siècle feuilleton seems like nothing other than a highly subjective response to the world.
But read feuilletons closely, and you’ll see that they are the opposite of personal.
Feuilletons are mass-produced, fast-moving, seriously addictive commodities that are overrunning the space in which actual literature is read, and undermining the ability of newspaper readers to develop their own imaginative responses to the news—or to anything else, for that matter.
Thus, more or less, this thinking went.
At the same time, the feuilleton was a favorite target among antisemitic propagandists, who tended to portray it as a debauched and debauching un-German genre that Jews—especially Heine—had managed to bring into German culture.
Take the essay ‘The Sovereign Feuilleton,’ which was first published around 1890 and whose author, Heinrich von Treitschke, was an important figure in the early days of Germany’s antisemitic movement.
Having elsewhere claimed that Heine ‘shows Germans just what separates them from the Jews,’ Treitschke sketches Heine imbibing the feuilletonistic spirit by sucking down ‘the foam of the French passion drink’ in a state of high ‘arousal.’
Treitschke then accuses Heine and the feuilleton of dislodging
the
core value of German letters: the prizing of content over form.
Hence Theodor Lessing’s remark, in a feuilleton of 1929, that ‘the word feuilletonist’ is ‘the nastiest insult in the German language.’
Hence, too, the attempts by certain scholars to read ‘Heine and the Consequences’ as a ‘symptom’ of ‘Jewish self-hatred’ on Kraus’s part.” —PR
27
.
“Adolf Loos (1870–1933) was many things—for example, a polemicist, a music critic, and the cofounder of the short-lived culture magazine
The Other
.
But he achieved much more success—and notoriety—in his actual métier: architecture.
Finished in 1910, his starkly unornamented ‘Haus am Michaelerplatz,’ which stands opposite the Hofburg, repelled some members of the royal family so much that they avoided the doors that opened onto it.
Loos was also known for being one of Kraus’s closest friends and for leading a complicated personal life: he contracted syphilis as a young man, married a series of much-younger women, wound up at the center of a pederasty scandal, and died a pauper.
What Loos wasn’t was ‘American.’
However, he did spend a few formative years in the United States during the 1890s, and for the rest of his life he was quick to convey his enthusiasm for American culture, and especially for Anglo-American fashion trends.
This is why Kraus describes Loos as he does.
It’s hard to imagine, though, that Kraus means to frame Loos’s aesthetic outlook as somehow being American.
Kraus himself felt quite differently about the United States, and yet, as he stresses, he shared Loos’s stance on the conflating of art objects and use objects.
As Kraus puts it in an aphorism, ‘Adolf Loos and I—he literally and I verbally—have done nothing other than demonstrate that there’s a difference between an urn and a chamber pot, and that culture gets the space it needs to live from this difference.’” —PR