Authors: Karl Kraus
28
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“A popular advertising slogan used to sell home furnishings and decor.
Kraus lampooned it more than once.” —PR
29
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“Kraus may well be naming a title here, in which case he would have in mind
Der österreichische Volkswirt
[The Austrian Economist], a newspaper that was founded in 1908 and that focused on economics and politics—its contributors would include such heavyweights as Josef Schumpeter and Friedrich von Hayek.
Kraus could be implying that even newspapers without literary pretentions are afflicted by feuilletonism.
Or he could simply be referencing the heading of the business insert in many Austrian papers: the ‘Volkswirt.’” —PR
30
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“Henry van de Velde (1863–1957), a Belgian artist and theorist, was treated by the members of the Wiener Werkstätte as a source of inspiration.
Some of the Werkstätte’s champions found him inspiring, too.
I’m thinking, in particular, of Kraus’s nemesis Hermann Bahr, who once called van de Velde ‘the greatest master of interior design working today.’
Loos, by contrast, proposed that prisons looking to institute harsh new forms of punishment should simply hire van de Velde to decorate their cells.
This was something van de Velde would be happy to do, Loos intimated with some justification.
In the 1890s, van de Velde repeatedly enjoined artists to enter into the world of crafts and design, and ‘impress beauty on every aspect of our lives.’” —PR
31
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I.e., presumably, by buying a morning and an evening paper.
It’s worth keeping in mind that Kraus isn’t speaking metaphorically of “thieves.”
Newspapers such as the
Neue Freie Presse
really were engaged in stock-market manipulation, smear campaigns, real-estate speculation, advertisements masquerading as editorial content, and Hearst-like (Fox News–like!) political machinations, all of it under a gauze of Viennese aestheticism.
“The founder of
Die Presse
, an important Viennese daily, was once quoted as saying that his goal was to own a paper in which every single line was paid for—i.e., bought by someone with the means and will to manipulate the news.” —PR
32
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Kraus is making fun of the prevailing style of prewar Viennese impressionistic journalism, heavy on adjectives and larded with “deep thoughts,” but his line “Everything suits everything always” will ring true to any contemporary America Online subscriber who has suffered through the recent tabloidization of AOL’s home page, with its revolving lazy Susan of news items and of advertisements masquerading as news items.
What’s great about these items, in a horrible way (or horrible in a great way), is that their format is rigidly fixed, regardless of their content.
Thus we might find, consecutively,
New Missing Girl Clues Point to Horror
Sierra LaMar, 15, was last seen a month ago leaving her Northern California home to attend high school.
She never made it.
Discovery suggests “worst case” scenario
and
Eyebrow-Raising Way She Lures Men
Actress Jennifer Love Hewitt says that she keeps a kitchen item stashed in her purse—and apparently, it’s a proven love potion.
Strange thing she dabs all over her body
If Kraus were alive today, he might reprint these two items side by side in
Die Fackel
, perhaps with a one-line gloss suggesting that the final hot link of the first be exchanged with that of the second, since the prurience of the two items is identical.
You could object that Kraus, whose favorvite targets were middlebrow, wouldn’t have bothered to satirize a tabloidized website.
But today’s middlebrow American papers, like
The
New York Times
and
The Washington Post
, are the products of a mid-twentieth-century ideal of journalistic objectivity.
The best examples of the earnest triviality and subjective grandstanding that characterized Vienna’s liberal press are now found on cable TV and the Internet.
And many of AOL’s hyperlinks lead to respectable news services; the grotesqueries are in the headlines, reflecting the commercial Internet’s number one imperative, which is to generate clicks.
Considering how many respectable writers and newspapers (including the
Times
) are big fans of the Internet these days, it seems fair to take a Krausian look at the asininities that the click-imperative engenders—to imagine the fun Kraus might have had with AOL’s self-deconstructing juxtaposition of
Do You Know When Suri Was Born?
Tom and Katie’s fashionable tot was born at a time of year that signals “new beginnings”—and she isn’t the only famous offspring who was.
What she shares with Mariah Carey’s twins
with
Are You Too Obsessed with Celebs?
Sure, a juicy headline about pregnancy or divorce tends to spark the interests of many—but experts say it could be damaging.
Think you’re addicted?
Click here
Where to begin with the glossing of this one?
The tin-eared deployment of the word “tot”?
The elegant one-line self-satirization of the commercial Internet?
(Think you’re addicted?
Click here!) The reverent invocation of “experts”?
And obsessed is okay?
Just don’t be “too” obsessed to function as a consumer?
I suspect that Kraus, who believed that linguistic mistakes are never accidental—that bad morals and bad faith reveal themselves in bad usage—would have seized on the deliciously wrong word “interests,” which, being plural, can only mean “advantages” in this context.
He might have supplied the missing word “corporate” before it, or suggested that “many” be replaced by “the privileged” or “the few.”
In the same spirit that inclined me to sympathize with the personified PC and hate the personified Mac, I remained loyal to AOL for thirteen years.
But I finally read one too many items like:
Grandpa Found Guilty of Bizarre Abuse
An Indiana man forced his three grandsons on grueling hikes in the Grand Canyon, withheld water and choked and kicked them.
What he did with broccoli is vile
What is vile is for AOL to use the word “vile”: to invade my privacy by presuming that I would use the same word to describe what the grandfather did.
And so I’ve quit AOL and signed on with hegemonic Gmail.
Which at least, in messages to me like
“It’s pretty quiet here.
Time to expand your circles?
Try one of these links,”
is up-front about the fact that it’s invading my privacy.
Up-front, too, about the norm by which it is deeming my circle of contacts insufficient.
Paul Reitter believes that AOL might indeed have interested Kraus.
“This will sound a bit glib,” he says, “but for Kraus the one thing scarier than people reading the
Neue Freie Presse
may have been people not reading it.
In 1904 he wrote that ‘next to the Jewish press, the antisemitic press has a lower degree of dangerousness, and thus doesn’t require such sharp monitoring, because of its greater degree of talentlessness.’
But the first real, illustrated, tabloidlike Viennese newspaper, the
Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt
, was also a recurring target in
Die Fackel
.
Furthermore, when Vienna got an even more sensationalistic and, from our perspective, modern-seeming tabloid in 1923 (
Die Stunde
), Kraus paid a lot of attention to it, describing its new formula as ‘murder, sports, crossword puzzles.’
Its journalism was less duplicitous, but its greater rapacity and inanity were alarming.
Kraus eventually went after that inanity and got into a feud with the paper’s publisher, Imre Békessy, who used vicious means against him, including retouched photographs on the front page of the paper.
(Kraus in turn managed to dig up dirt on Békessy and drive him back to his native Hungary.) Kraus was always interested in how the news was disseminated, and the Internet would surely have commanded his attention, because that’s where the news is disseminated these days.
And if
Die Fackel
can feel bloglike, the feuilleton resembles the blog even more closely.
Indeed, with the intermingling of blogs and non-blog journalism in the most respected places (the online
New Yorker
, the online
Times
), we’re experiencing a reemergence of one of the problems that Kraus was fixated with: the ascendance of an impressionistic journalistic form that has institutional cachet but is of questionable quality as both reportage and self-expression.”
33
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Reitter has kindly supplied a pair of examples of the sameness of the adjective-loving journalistic talents of Kraus’s time.
The translations are mine:
General Fitschew is a stocky, medium-tall man whose face is round and full and whose skin has a rosiness to it and seems transparently delicate.
Only a few white strands are mixed into his dark mustache, and his small eyes are lightning-quick in their animation, roving restlessly back and forth, as if trying to deny their own rootedness, as if wanting to look simultaneously both outward and inward.
One has to have seen this pale, fine-featured face with its dull gray eyes and its drooping, reddish-blond mustache, one has to have heard this tired and unspeakably mild man speaking, to arrive at an exact appreciation of his value.
He sits there, impassive and indifferent, his face resigned, his entire figure sunk into itself, every feature suggesting the sufferer, the unfortunate—then suddenly he is gripped by a chance word—and now he stretches his head upward, life returns to the motionless organism, his hands go to work, his eyes flash, and out of his mouth spring short, wild sentences full of deep, lively wisdom.
This kind of writing is uniquely awful, but is it really that different from what you can find in the
Times
today?
Consider the lede of a front-page Arts and Leisure piece from May 13, 2012:
If anyone has a right to feel on top of the world, it’s Howard Stern—especially inside his elegant, cumulus-high apartment on the West Side of Manhattan, dominated by a solariumlike living room with views on one side extending far up the Hudson and the other encompassing the entire bucolic breadth of Central Park.
Here, too, the tell is in the adjectives.
34
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This is one of my favorite lines.
It applies beautifully to today’s cable-TV news anchors, who bring the identical tone of urgent wonderment to whatever story they happen to be following, whether it’s a tornado in Texas, a new weight-loss drug, another actress having another baby, or an assassination in the Middle East.
The tone can be found on AOL, too, with an additional garbled note of condescension:
Old People Are Miserable
OK so that’s not really true.
In fact, it’s a major misconception about getting older—and that’s not the only thing we’re getting wrong.
What you don’t know about aging
Here again, with the confusion of “you” and “we,” I feel my privacy being invaded.
35
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“Leopoldstadt was the Lower East Side of fin de siècle Vienna.
It was the location of Vienna’s ‘Jewish section’ and thus had an air of the exotic.
Playing on this, as well as on the similarity between its name and ‘Leopoldville,’ the city in the Congo that H.
M.
Stanley (of Stanley and Livingston fame) founded in 1881, Kraus is associating Leopoldstadt with Stanley’s report about searching for and finding Livingston in what is now Tanzania: the report was published in German under the title
Im dunkelsten Afrika
(
In Darkest Africa
, 1890).” —PR