Authors: Karl Kraus
81
.
Halbweltschmerz
: literally “half-world-weariness,” which in German combines ‘demimonde’ with ‘weltschmerz.’
Characteristic Krausian wordplay.
82
.
The Heine poem Kraus is referencing, “Old Rose” (“Alte Rose”), is notably nasty.
Heine compares a beautiful girl whom he knew in his youth to a budding rose.
He pursued her when she burst into bloom, but she fought him off with her thorns.
Now, when she’s old and faded, she’s pursuing
him
, looking for love, but there’s a bristle on a wart on her chin—a new kind of thorn.
It sticks him as she tries to kiss him, and he tells her to shave.
This kind of thing may be rarer in Heine’s late poetry, but I’m with Kraus: it speaks to Heine’s moral character.
83
.
“God will pardon me, that’s his job.”
Reitter: “According to one witness, this was Heine’s deathbed response to the question: How do things stand with you and God?”
84
.
“A reference to Offenbach’s operetta
Bluebeard
(1866), which Kraus adored.” —PR
Kraus is having fun with with Heine’s poem “The Asra,” which, in good Romantic fashion, is set in an exotic sultanate.
Every evening, the sultan’s beautiful daughter takes a walk in her garden and sees a young slave boy who’s getting paler day by day.
Finally she asks him who he is, and he tells her that he’s from a Yemeni tribe, the Asra, “who die when they love.”
With the comparison with Offenbach, Kraus is mocking both the secondhand “misery” of the poem and the passive, unmasculine suffering of its author’s persona.
85
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“‘What Does the Lonely Tear Want?’
(‘Was will die einsame Träne?’) is the title of one of Heine’s most famous ‘songs.’
Robert Schumann set the poem to music in 1840.” —PR
86
.
Why was Kraus so angry?
Consider the facts.
He was a late child in a prosperous, well-assimilated Jewish family whose business generated a large enough and steady enough income to make him financially independent for life.
This in turn enabled him to publish
Die Fackel
exactly as he wished, without making concessions to advertisers or subscribers.
He had a close circle of good friends and a much larger circle of admirers, many of them fanatical, some of them famous.
He was an electrifying public speaker, capable of filling the largest theaters, which went a long way toward satisfying his youthful ambition to be an actor.
Although he never married, he had some brilliant affairs and a deep long-term relationship with Sidonie.
He seems to have suffered nothing like the conflicts with his father that Kafka had with his, nor to have regretted not having children.
His only significant health problem was a curvature of the spine, and even this had the benefit of exempting him from military service.
So how did a person so extremely fortunate become the Great Hater?
Kafka once diagnosed in German-Jewish writers a “terrible inner state,” related to a bad relationship with Judaism.
A bad inner state can certainly be discerned in Kraus’s agon with Heine, as in a handful of other Kraus texts (including “He’s Still a Jew” and his short play
Literatur
) and in his strikingly personal vendetta against certain Jews, including the publisher of the
Neue Freie Presse
.
But Kraus’s Jewish problem seems to me at most a supporting element in his larger project—his exposure of Austrian hypocrisies and corruption, his championing of language and literature he considered authentic and underappreciated.
And although there was certainly plenty to be angry about in Austrian society, there’s plenty to be angry about in every society; most people find ways to keep their anger from consuming their lives.
You could understand a Viennese laborer with a sixty-hour workweek in bad conditions being enraged.
But the privileged and sociable Kraus?
I wonder if he was so angry
because
he was so privileged.
In “Nestroy and Posterity,” the Great Hater defends his hatred like this: “acid wants the gleam, and the rust says it’s only being corrosive.”
Kraus hated bad language because he loved good language—because he had the gifts, both intellectual and financial, to cultivate that love.
And the person who’s been lucky in life can’t help expecting the world to keep going his way; when the world insists on going wrong ways, corrupt and tasteless ways, he feels betrayed by it.
He could have enjoyed a good life if only the bad world hadn’t spoiled it.
And so he gets angry, and the anger itself then further isolates him and heightens his sense of specialness.
Being angry at newspapers beloved by the bourgeoisie was a way for Kraus to say “I don’t belong to you” to a bourgeoisie whose upward striving was uncomfortably close to his own.
His anger at the privileged writers who pulled strings to escape combat in the First World War was a kind of homeopathic attack on the even greater privilege that he himself enjoyed, the privilege of a morally pure medical excuse not to serve.
He was a journalist who savaged other journalists, most of whom, unlike him, had to work for a living.
Anger relieved some of the discomfort of his own privilege, by reassuring him that he was also a victim.
Kraus, like any artist, wanted above all to be an individual, and his anger can further be seen as a violent shrugging-off of categories that threatened his individual integrity.
His privilege was just one of these categories.
As the scholar Edward Timms writes in his magisterial study of Kraus, “He was a Jew by birth, an Austrian by nationality, a Viennese by residence, a German by language, a journalist by profession, bourgeois by social status and a rentier by economic position.
Amid the ideological turmoil of Austria-Hungary, all of these ascribed identities seemed like falsifications.”
For much of his life Kraus was defiantly antipolitical; he seemed to form professional alliances almost with the intention of later torpedoing them spectacularly; and he was given to paradoxical utterances like “It is known that my hatred of the Jewish press is exceeded only by my hatred of the antisemitic press, while my hatred of the antisemitic press is exceeded only by my hatred of the Jewish press.”
Since it is also known that Kraus’s favorite play was
King Lear
, I wonder if he might have seen his own fate in Cordelia, the cherished late child who loves the king and who, precisely because she’s been the privileged daughter, secure in the king’s love, has the personal integrity to refuse to debase her language and lie to him in his dotage.
Privilege set Kraus, too, on the road to being an independent individual, but the world seemed bent on thwarting him.
It disappointed him the way Lear disappoints Cordelia, and in Kraus this became a recipe for anger.
In his yearning for a better world, in which true individuality was possible, he kept applying the acid of his anger to everything that was false.
Let me turn to my own example, since I’ve been reading it into Kraus’s story anyway.
I was a late child in a loving family that, although it wasn’t nearly prosperous enough to make me a rentier, did have enough money to place me in a good public school district and send me to an excellent college, where I learned to love literature and language.
I was a white male heterosexual American with good friends and perfect health, and beyond all this I had the immeasurably good fortune not only to discover very early what I wanted to do with my life but to have the freedom and the talent to pursue it.
I had such an embarrassment of riches that I can barely stand to enumerate them here.
And yet, for all my privileges, I became an extremely angry person.
Anger descended on me so near in time to when I fell in love with Kraus’s writing that the two occurrences are practically indistinguishable.
I wasn’t born angry.
If anything, I was born the opposite.
It may sound like an exaggeration, but I think it’s accurate to say that I knew nothing of anger until I was twenty-two.
As an adolescent, I’d had my moments of sullenness and rebellion against authority, but, like Kraus, I’d had minimal conflict with my father, and the worst that could be said of me and my mother was that we bickered like an old married couple.
Real anger, anger as a way of life, was foreign to me until one particular afternoon in April 1982.
I was on a deserted train platform in Hannover.
I’d come from Munich and was waiting for a train to Berlin, it was a dark gray German day, and I took a handful of German coins out of my pocket and started throwing them on the platform.
There was an element of anti-German hostility in this, because I’d recently had a horrible experience with a penny-pinching old German woman, and it did me good to imagine other penny-pinching old German women bending down to pick the coins up, as I knew they would, and thereby aggravating their knee and hip pains.
The way I hurled the coins, though, was more generally angry.
I was angry at the world in a way I’d never been before.
The proximate cause of my anger was my failure to have sex with an unbelievably pretty girl in Munich, except that it hadn’t actually been a failure, it had been a decision on my part.
A few hours later, on the platform in Hannover, I marked my entry into the life that came after that decision by throwing away my coins.
Then I boarded a train and went back to Berlin and enrolled in a class on Karl Kraus.
Paul Reitter kindly refines my theory and elaborates:
“Kraus hated his fellow German-Jewish writers for many reasons, not the least of which was that they wasted what he himself was so determined to use: privilege.
Certainly many German-Jewish writers had money troubles, and Kraus, to his credit, was quite sensitive to the problem of penury—he helped keep the (German-Jewish) poets Peter Altenberg and Else Lasker-Schüler afloat.
Yet a lot of fin de siècle German-Jewish authors were, as Kraus saw it, like him: well positioned to take some risks.
Like him (and, say, Stefan Zweig), they were the children of the newly emancipated and prosperous
Gründerzeit
generation.
If their fathers often tried to steer them into business, as Kraus himself suggests in his drama
Literatur
, there were resources to fall back on, something that ultimately made turning to letters much easier.
Nor was there any lack of talent; Kraus always claimed that the German-Jewish literati had an abundance of that.
But despite having so many advantages, these writers mostly chose to play it safe, reinforcing a bad paradigm of feuilletonism or parroting the latest style of expressionism, while treating such cultural authorities as the
Neue Freie Presse
with servile respect.
The psychological needs and assimilationist tendencies that drove German-Jewish authors to do this were of interest to Kraus: hence the play
Literatur
, which Kafka esteemed and which, in fact, inspired his famous meditations on the ‘terrible inner state’ of German-Jewish writers.
However, those needs and tendencies didn’t excuse anything.
As motives for bad linguistic behavior, they struck Kraus as tawdry.
“Could there be similar dynamics—minus the Jewish element—operating in some of our own contemporary literary scenes?
The anecdotal evidence keeps piling up.
Let’s say that someone has given you a recent novel.
You can’t recall seeing reviews of the book, but it looks like a high-end production.
The press that published it is a very good one, and on its cover are blurbs from respected figures in the world of letters.
Would you be surprised to learn that the author of the novel lives in Park Slope with a husband and two young children?
Would you be surprised to read, on the author’s website, that she grew up in Lake Forest, was educated at Brown, and teaches writing as an adjunct at the New School?
When I encounter such author information, I sometimes wonder how the economics work.
Advances are small, book sales are declining, teaching jobs don’t pay well, and Park Slope is very expensive, as are kids.
Maybe the family is just getting by.
But in an age of soaring college tuition and health insurance costs, not many people from an affluent background are willing to take upon themselves the hazards of real, open-ended downward mobility.
Maybe, then, the husband is a lawyer or in finance.
Yet mixed couples aren’t the norm, I’m told.
If the husband is a fellow author, it may well be that the couple has gotten help from its baby-boomer parents.
And if that’s so, writing doesn’t, and probably won’t ever, pay the biggest bills.
“But there’s still the desire as well as the pressure to succeed.
For literati, as for professors of literature, the increasingly steep straight path to recognizable signs of accomplishment is to produce conventional work of high quality.
I enjoy a lot of the writing created on this route, and I’m not about to echo Kraus’s apocalyptic condemnation of the talented authors who take it.
What feels sad, nevertheless, is that at a time when a relatively small percentage of the New York literary scene appears to be supporting itself through its writing, a high percentage of the scene is so very cautious.
Indeed, the scene routinely demands of itself and others both cautiousness and the display of the most uncontroversial virtues (balance, moderation, warmth, etc.).
God forbid that a novelist should be a little mean to her characters.
Much more than in previous eras, we find such authorial harshness framed as reason enough for a (cautiously) negative review.
Of course, sometimes the calls for niceness are themselves nasty.
But in the more august places, that’s certainly not the norm.
One can be generally for civility in reviewing and still be alarmed by the fact a measured, polite, unfavorable appraisal of
Joseph Anton
, which appeared in
The New York Review of Books
(and exhibits a particular dislike for the ‘egregiously uncharitable’ treatment of exes in Rushdie’s memoir), could win notoriety as a full-on ‘takedown’ job.
Or consider that a few years ago, the critic and novelist Dale Peck got a lot of attention merely by being rude to some well-known writers.
Consider also that even as brilliant a reviewer as the late John Leonard has been posthumously taken to task for the immoderation that was a function of his exuberance.
So what if his riffing and ranting wasn’t always comprehensible?
It was unfailingly fun, and the style was his alone.
But it made Leonard’s