Authors: Karl Kraus
36
.
“In his acclaimed study
Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
, Carl Schorske observes that ‘in the feuilleton writer’s style, the adjectives engulfed the nouns, the personal tint virtually obliterated the object of discourse.’
On the causes and true nature of this style, however, Kraus and Schorske differ.
Schorske’s theory is that the culture of Vienna in 1900 was, in a way, a function of politics.
Or, rather, of political failure.
Disaffected by the collapse of the liberal governments their fathers had labored to build up, quite a few energetic Viennese ‘sons’ turned inward to psychological discovery and radical self-reflection.
While this trend produced a variety of cultural innovations, it also led, Schorske contends, to some not-so-salutary developments.
And the adjective-happy, very ‘subjective’ response of the critic or reporter that we find in the feuilleton is one of them.” —PR
At the risk of overstating the parallels with our own time, I might point out that despair about national politics has likewise led a lot of American sons (and daughters) to retreat into subjectivity, which is the essence of the blog.
37
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“In the mid-1890s Bahr (1863–1934) established himself as a leader within Vienna’s emerging culture of modernism, thanks in large part to his theoretical essays.
It was Bahr who gave the German term ‘
Moderne
,’ which had simply meant ‘modernity,’ the added connotation of ‘modernism.’
But Bahr also achieved a leadership role by working the coffeehouse scene.
Older than most of the writers associated with the ‘Young Vienna’ movement, and outfitted with flowing locks, a big beard, and great connections, Bahr fashioned himself as the avuncular guru of those writers, whom he encouraged to gather around his table at the Café Griensteidl.
So when Kraus decided to distance himself from the Griensteidl authors—on the grounds that they were morbidly, and faddishly, obsessed with the condition of their nerves—he made Bahr his point of attack.
This was in 1896; and thus began a feud that would stretch into the 1930s.
Its duration is easy enough to understand.
For one thing, Bahr successfully brought a defamation suit against Kraus in 1900, and Kraus wasn’t the kind of person who could get over such a defeat.
For another, Bahr continued to align himself with all the wrong causes, as Kraus saw it, e.g., expressionism.
And Bahr’s cultural reportage strikes just the feuilletonistic tone that Kraus found so formulaic and so insufferable.” —PR
38
.
“Here is another puzzling aspect of Kraus’s genealogy of the feuilleton.
When Heine died, he was one of Europe’s most widely read authors.
According to some accounts, in fact, Heine is the very first writer who could amply support himself through book sales.
Yet in Kraus’s essay, the predominance of Heine’s journalistic ‘model’ is a fin de siècle problem, a problem that seems to both contribute to and arise from the cultural moment of the Wiener Werkstätte.
In lionizing Ludwig Speidel, Kraus doesn’t make the chronological picture any clearer.
If Speidel, a Viennese feuilletonist born in 1830, was an exceptional case, what about the rule from which Speidel deviated?
How far did Speidel’s colleagues get in institutionalizing Heine’s style?
Complaining about the generation of feuilletonists between Heine and Hermann Bahr, Nietzsche spoke of the ‘repulsive stamp of our aesthetic journalism.’
But in ‘Heine and the Consequences’ Kraus has nothing more to say about them.” —PR
Point taken.
But, again, Kraus isn’t even pretending to write a conventional history.
I confess I haven’t read Speidel, but I like to imagine that his writing was striking for the same kind of freshness, humor, and authenticity that Russell Baker’s old columns in the
Times
had.
To which, Reitter again: “An apt comparison, though Baker is a lot funnier than Speidel.
To come back to Kraus, I agree and would like to take the claim one step further: Kraus couldn’t have written a conventional history even if he’d wanted to.
His mind just didn’t work that way.
Furthermore, there were principles behind this avoidance.
In one aphorism, Kraus uses the same brush to tar both conventional history writing and conventional journalism: ‘Historians are often just backward-turned journalists.’
In another, he makes historians out to be even less appealing: ‘Journalism has sullied the world with talent; historicism has done the same thing without it.’
It’s striking, nevertheless, how little interested Kraus is in how the feuilleton actually entrenched itself in the decades after Heine’s death.
Since Kraus sees this development as hugely important, you’d think that, somewhere in his essay, he’d say something that would make the biggest gaps in his story a little smaller.
But he doesn’t.”
39
.
“Schmock is the name of a disreputable Jewish journalist in Gustav Freytag’s drama of 1854,
The Journalists
.
Freytag himself, by contrast, commanded a lot of respect.
He even functioned as a sort of arbiter of good sense in late-nineteenth-century Germany, among both Germans and German Jews.
Indeed, Freytag’s novel
Credit and Debit
(1855), which features another scurrilous Jewish figure (Feitel Itzig), was often given as a bar mitzvah gift, presumably because the givers thought the book had didactic value for young German Jews.
The term ‘Schmock,’ in any case, could be used the way we use ‘Lothario’—i.e., to indicate that someone has the same qualities as the literary character.
This is what Kraus is doing with it in ‘Heine and the Consequences.’
He’s insulting the journalist Hugo Wittmann and, above all, Moriz Benedikt, the all-powerful editor of the
Neue Freie Presse
, whose obituary for Speidel was appended to the essay by Wittmann that introduces Speidel’s collected works, which were published in 1910.
A little later, Kraus saw fit to stress that being a ‘Schmock’ generally meant having a Jewish background.
‘Nothing is more convoluted,’ he wrote, ‘than a non-Jewish Schmock.’” —PR
40
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“Speidel was indeed too modest to issue a collection of his works, while other journalists eagerly published their own collections.
And not long before the edition of Speidel’s works finally appeared, the journalist Ludwig Hevesi wrote a book-length ‘biographical appreciation’ of Speidel.
Hevesi, who sometimes wrote under the odd pseudonym Onkel Tom (Uncle Tom), was known for coining the phrase inscribed over the entrance to Josef Olbrich’s Secession building: ‘To each age its own art, to art its freedom.’
Kraus mocked the slogan, along with the movement that adopted it, and he thought poorly of Hevesi.
Which is another reason why Kraus felt that Speidel needed to be rescued from his commemorators.” —PR
41
.
I am happy to be confirming the truth of this line by translating Kraus rather than feuilletons from the
Neue Freie Presse
.
42
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“Kraus founded
Die Fackel
, his satirical not-quite weekly, in 1899.
The first issue appeared, not by chance, on April Fools’ Day, and the magazine ran for 922 numbers.
It was, again, in 1911 that Kraus stopped publishing contributions from other authors.
Despite the difficulty of its sentences,
Die Fackel
had a fairly large circulation—about thirty thousand readers at its peak—and they included many important minds: Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg, Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, W.
H.
Auden, and Gershom Scholem, among others.
Kraus’s topics ranged widely, covering everything from preposition usage to the employment of poison gas in the First World War, but the thematic nub of
Die Fackel
was always Kraus’s critique of the Viennese press.
This, too, gives Kraus’s magazine a bloglike feel.
He would often start with a press clipping that he would reproduce and dissect, which is the method of a lot of blogs today: cut, paste, and conquer.
Die Fackel
is available online at
http://corpus1.aac.ac.at/fackel
.” —PR
43
.
“Kraus thought that people failed to appreciate what he himself saw as the essential paradox of his journalism, which, therefore, he kept on reformulating: ‘My readers believe that I write for the day because I write about the day, so I will have to wait until my works become old.
Then they’ll be relevant.’
Kraus also told his readers that he wanted to locate ‘the chords of eternity’ in the ‘noises of the day.’” —PR
44
.
Insel—literally “Island”—is the name of a venerable literary publisher.
45
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Again with the antisemitism.
Reitter informatively adds: “‘Itzig,’ the term of opprobrium Kraus uses here, gained prominence through a character in Gustav Freytag’s novel
Debit and Credit
, the unscrupulous
Ostjude
(Eastern Jew) Feitel Itzig.
But Itzig was also the name of an important figure in the German-Jewish Enlightenment, Daniel Itzig (1723–1799), whose son Elias had it changed to Hitzig, which sounded less Jewish.
Heine, in his poem ‘Jehuda ben Halevy,’ while chiding Hitzig for altering the family nomenclature, has some fun with the phonetic proximity of ‘Itzig’ to ‘Hitzig.’
Thus, with ‘Itzig Witzig’ (Itzak Wisecrack), Kraus is smearing Jewish journalists with a term whose meaning had changed since Heine’s time, as well as slighting Heine’s style of wordplay.”
46
.
In the original, it’s “
ästhetisch auf Teetisch zu sagen
.”
Reitter comments: “‘Aesthetic’ in German sounds like ‘tea table.’
The pun, with its trivializing and ultimately meaningless irony, originated with Heine.”
I’m indebted to Reitter for suggesting “cherry bomb” later in the sentence and for his help with numerous other problematic lines.
47
.
J.
D.
Salinger might be an example of an American writer whose reputation has similarly benefited from being read in people’s youth.
But consider here, too, the periodic arguments from Bob Dylan fans that Dylan deserves the Nobel Prize in Literature.
48
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“Du hast Diamanten und Perlen,” one of the more famous poems in Heine’s
Book of Songs
.
49
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“Hugo Salus (1866–1929) was a German-Jewish poet (and gynecologist) based in Prague.
He had discerning admirers, e.g., Max Brod, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Arnold Schönberg.
But Kraus wasn’t a fan; indeed, Kraus viewed Salus as an aesthete whose poetry exhibited the vices of the feuilleton.
Its figures didn’t stand up to close scrutiny, and its ‘contemplative’ tone masked an underlying superficiality.
Or so Kraus repeatedly tried to show.” —PR
50
.
The Viennese amusement park with the giant Ferris wheel featured in
The Third Man
.
51
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“Friedrich von Flotow (1812–1883), that is, whose ‘The Last Rose’ (‘Die letzte Rose’) comes from his opera
Martha
(1847).” —PR
52
.
To this line my friend Daniel Kehlmann, who is an actual Viennese and a deep student of Kraus, offers the comment: “Who the hell knows what Kraus is really saying here.”
53
.
For somebody who claims not to be musical, Kraus knows an awful lot about music.
But his resistance to music while working is a point of identification with me.
I’m always amazed when writers report listening to Beethoven or Arcade Fire while at work.
How do they pay attention to two things at once?