Authors: Karl Kraus
68
.
“Once Kraus’s mentor, Maximilian Harden (1861–1927) had become Kraus’s enemy by the time he wrote ‘Heine and the Consequences.’
That they split shouldn’t have surprised anyone.
What else tends to happen when you have two big egos—who share a love of invective—relating to each other within a mentor-mentee dynamic?
But if the break was a matter of time, it was also a function of principle.
In 1907 Harden used the platform of his newspaper
The Future
to expose Count Philip Eulenberg, a close adviser to Wilhelm II, as a homosexual.
This act—as well as the moralizing that accompanied it—ran counter to a cause that Kraus had been pushing for years.
Since 1902, Kraus had been insisting that modern journalism’s pursuit of sex scandals has the same dangerous effect as the regulation of sexual conduct through modern ‘ethics laws.’
“Kraus liked to play up his proclivity for erotic exploration—‘because it is illegal to keep wild animals, and house pets give me no pleasure, I’d rather stay unmarried’—and for him the threat of public shaming promotes a conformity that makes life less colorful and less fun.
Even worse is that this threat shuts down ethical deliberation where consenting adults should be honing their ethical faculties, in the most intimate sphere: the bedroom.
Thus Kraus believed that, like the ‘ethics court,’ Harden’s treatment of Eulenberg did nothing but produce ‘unethical individuals,’ and Kraus said as much in print.
His doing so, or having done so, gives his reference to Harden in ‘Heine and the Consequences’ its meaning.
It’s what allows the line about Heine anticipating Harden to serve as a segue into Kraus’s critique of Heine’s ‘Platen polemic,’ a section of
The Baths of Lucca
(1830) that takes aim at the homosexuality of another aristocrat, Count von Platen.
While he was feuding with Harden, Kraus boasted that he had, in effect, ‘rubbed out’ his opponent.
This is why Kraus gave a subsequent polemic the title ‘Maximilian Harden: An Obituary’ (1908), and also why he speaks here of ‘the late Maximilian Harden.’” —PR
69
.
“It was Heine who started the fight with Platen, or, more properly, with Count August von Platen-Hallermünde, a poet whose homosexuality was a kind of open secret.
Heine acknowledged Platen’s gifts as a writer, to be sure: his talent as a sonneteer was undeniable.
But Heine, who regarded homosexuality as a perversion, also felt that there was something off about Platen’s poetry.
Even before the ‘Platen polemic,’ Heine had connected Platen’s lyrical inclinations—i.e., his attachment to ancient Greek and Persian verse forms and his choice of motifs—with his sexual leanings.
Indeed, Heine had complained that he could hear a ‘sighing after pederasty’ in Platen’s work.
This, though, was in private.
Publicly, Heine contented himself at first with pouring scorn on the Persia-inspired formalism with which Platen was associated.
The idea here was to disparage another formalistic poet as well, one whose sexual orientation wasn’t an issue, so jokes about homosexuality would have been difficult to pull off.
But even without such humor, the initial affront was too much for Platen.
His response stemmed in part from his high opinion of himself—he saw himself as Goethe’s successor—and in part from his low opinion of Heine, which, in turn, stemmed partly from a snobbish antisemitism.
Without really knowing much about Heine, Platen swiftly set about trying to put him in his (Jewish) place.
The counterattack took the form of a play,
The Romantic Oedipus
, which appeared in 1829, and contains quite a few antisemitic barbs.
Having recently been subjected to an even sharper anti-Jewish obloquy, Heine was in no mood to accept Platen’s insults as a fair settling of the score.
Instead he opted for escalation, and thus the ‘Platen polemic’ came to be.
It begins with a mischievous bit of editing: Heine lops off part of a line of Platen’s poetry, so that what’s left reads, ‘I am like woman to man.’
From there Heine keeps going and going: not even Platen’s use of antisemitic discourse escapes the charge of effeteness.
As Heine brings his case against Platen to a close, he demonstrates how much more forcefully he can hurl antisemitic abuse.
Heine’s readers weren’t impressed, however.
Most thought that he had crossed the line; Goethe, for instance, remarked that assaults like Heine’s have no place in the world of letters.” —PR
70
.
Daniel Kehlmann unpacks this: “‘Warm’ in German is a code word for gay.
So the sentence means: ‘The one [I, Heine] may enjoy eating onions [may be Jewish], but the other [Platen] has more feeling for men [is gay], and to me even a crooked cook [an ugly, coarse woman] is preferable to a gay aesthete.’
Heine destroyed Platen by outing him, and Kraus, in turn, can’t forgive him for that.
Rightly so, I think.”
71
.
Kehlmann again: “Kraus is quoting a late poem of Heine’s in which Heine avows that this manure-smelling milkmaid is dearer to him than his entire posthumous reputation as a poet.
Kraus isn’t finding fault with the thought itself, but he considers it dishonest and finds the image of the cook and the milkmaid, which recurs constantly in Heine, stale to the point of cliché.
To Kraus, when it comes to sexuality, Heine is narrow-mindedly judgmental in a journalistic way.”
Exactly.
What Platen did with boys is vile.
72
.
“Moritz Saphir (1795–1858) was a German-Jewish satirist and journalist who has often been seen as forming some kind of cultural continuum with his fellow German Jews Börne and Heine, even though, as Kraus implies, Saphir’s humor tended to be considerably lower brow.” —PR
73
.
Hirsch-Hyacinth is a character in Heine’s
The Baths of Lucca
.
74
.
“In
Ludwig Börne
, Heine quotes both the conversations he had with Börne and Börne’s
Letters from Paris
(1830–34), where Börne blasts Heine for lacking political seriousness.
It’s in the
Letters
that Börne describes Heine as someone with ‘talent’ but no ‘character.’
Strangely, Heine often cites Börne’s damaging accusations and formulations without doing anything to debunk them.” —PR
75
.
“
Ludwig Börne
includes an extended anecdote about porcelain.
As Heine has it, Börne once explained to him that it was by publicly smashing a tea service that Napoleon tamed Europe’s aristocrats.
Fearing for their beloved porcelain, they became more compliant.
Next, according to Heine, Börne proceeded to confess that upon acquiring a ‘sumptuous’ tea service of his own, he began to appreciate how those aristocrats felt.
He even started to worry about how his activities as a critic might affect his porcelain.
How would his porcelain fare if he had to flee across the border and there was no time to pack carefully?
In the end, however, Börne gets his priorities in order.
Heine closes out the anecdote by (imaginatively) citing Börne as saying, ‘“But I am still strong enough to break my porcelain bonds, and if the authorities make it hot for me, truly, the beautiful gilded teapot, and the scenes of marital bliss and St.
Catherine’s tower and the Guard Headquarters and the homeland, will all fly out the window, and I will be a free man again.”’” —PR
76
.
Cf.
Hemingway vs.
Faulkner.
77
.
“Having once been amorously involved with Jeanette Wohl, Börne later cohabited with her and her husband.
Heine presents the arrangement in
Ludwig Börne
as being both unseemly and the result of sexual deficiencies on Börne’s part.
On the other hand, Heine also plays with the idea that it should have been difficult for Börne to sustain his erotic desire for Wohl.
According to Heine, her face grew to resemble ‘an old piece of matzoh.’
It was insults of this kind that landed Heine in a near-fatal duel.
Ludwig Börne
scandalized a lot of people—Friedrich Engels called the book ‘the most execrable thing ever written in German’—but it put Wohl’s husband, Salomon Strauß, in a positively murderous frame of mind.
After a few rounds of verbal sparring, Strauß issued a challenge, and on September 7, 1841, a shot from his pistol nicked Heine in the hip.
There was, however, another side to the reception of
Ludwig Börne
.
When friends tried to warn Heine that the book’s content might cause trouble, he riposted, ‘But isn’t it beautifully written?’
Over the years, quite a few readers would reinforce that opinion.
Thomas Mann, for example, effused that
Ludwig Börne
features ‘the most brilliant German prose before Nietzsche.’
So by questioning the literary quality of the book, Kraus was expanding the objections to what was already Heine’s most unpopular work.
By implication, moreover, Kraus was upholding a principle dear to him: that ethical and stylistic problems tend to go together.” —PR
78
.
I suspect that the word “rootlessness” is loaded, since assimilated German-Jewish writers were commonly reproached, by both antisemites and Zionists, for their rootlessness.
According to the stereotype, they could be only mimics or parasites of more authentic literary traditions—hence their overrepresentation in feuilletons.
The best German-Jewish writers of the early twentieth century, Kafka and Benjamin as well as Kraus, were all searching for deeper identities in which to root themselves.
Kraus, a world-class mimic, would have felt the reproach of rootlessness the most keenly.
His defense, as Reitter argues in his excellent Kraus study,
The Anti-Journalist
, was to problematize the pairing of “imitation with superficiality and of originality with authenticity.
It is as if the way to establish a truly radical position as a Jewish journalist was to take an avant-garde stand,
in both theory and practice
, on precisely these issues.”
The result, Reitter contends, was “a radical performance of German-Jewish identity.”
Kafka seems to have recognized this aspect of Kraus’s project while questioning its success as a tactic for escaping the terrible in-between position in which German-Jewish writers found themselves.
Kafka is said to have remarked, “Karl Kraus locks Jewish writers in his hell, watches over them, disciplines them strictly.
However, he forgets that he, too, belongs in this hell.”
Kafka was no doubt partly right about this: no matter how strenuously Kraus avowed that he was writing for posterity, posterity will always struggle with his having radically performed his German-Jewish identity on texts and controversies that grow ever more antiquated and inaccessible.
But I think that Kraus was also genuinely liberated by his ferocious attachment to the German language and to a culturally transcendent spirit of literature running from Greek myth and Shakespeare through Goethe and Nestroy.
79
.
“Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825) wrote under the name Jean Paul.
The author of bildungsromane, edgy satires of the old regime, and novels that brood over the oppositions between poetry and reality, Jean Paul connected with some of the big intellectual movements of his age: the Enlightenment, Classicism, Romanticism.
But he was always something of an outsider in the German literary culture.
Having tried hard to diminish Goethe’s standing, he was in turn largely dismissed by the Romantics.
In 1804 he moved from Berlin to Bayreuth, and from then on he stayed away from the literary scene, while continuing to write.
Thus Jean Paul took on an aura of independence, which formed part of his appeal for Kraus, his fellow loner.” —PR
80
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I.e., like Kraus’s own.
He could almost be a rapper here, boasting of his potency and belittling his adversary’s.
And I, as a late adolescent, was susceptible to it, as I was to the humor of a phrase like “would mainly like to escape with its life.”
I was blissfully unaware of the dangerous territory Kraus was entering with his talk of a “flood of filth” unleashed by the Jew Heine.
(The raw sincerity of the phrase, in this context, contrasts with his more playful and sophisticated use of antisemitic tropes elsewhere in the essay.) But Kraus’s call for a return to purity, and his offer of a complete system for making sense of the world in terms of its contamination: this I could respond to, the way a twenty-two-year-old today might respond to local organic farming or to radical Islam.