Authors: Karl Kraus
91
.
“Gustav Karpeles (1848–1909) was a proudly Jewish literary critic who, in 1868, had made the case that Heine was essentially a Jewish writer.
Adolf Bartels (1862–1945) was the antisemitic literary critic who had been leading the fight to deny Heine a statue in Germany, his argument being that Heine was essentially a Jewish writer, and not a German one.
By grouping together Karpeles and Bartels on the same ‘cultural subcommittee,’ Kraus is doing something he had done elsewhere, most notably in his critique of Zionism: he’s pointing to structural parallels between the language of Jewish self-consciousness and that of antisemitic discourse.
In Kraus’s view, both sides were obsessed with identifying the Jewishness of works by secular Jewish writers; and as they tried to identify that Jewishness, critics of both Karpeles’s and Bartels’s ilk relied on crude ideas about how an author’s Jewish heritage could manifest itself in his or her literary output.” —PR
And, thus, Kraus’s observation that it doesn’t matter which side wins the debate.
92
.
“Kraus is working with a line by Goethe, a line that underscores the resemblance, in German, between the words ‘speak’ [
sprechen
] and ‘language’ [
Sprache
]—‘
Ein jeder, weil er spricht, glaubt auch über die Sprache sprechen zu können
’ [‘every person believes, because he speaks, that he can speak about language’].
Following Goethe, Kraus, too, is suggesting that as a result of the
sprechen
-
Sprache
resemblance, the German language is particularly vulnerable to the problem: all speakers see themselves as capable of comprehending it.” —PR
93
.
Although the word “personality,” as applied to people like Paris Hilton and Charles Barkley, has taken on adspeak flavor in English, Kraus is using it approvingly here.
Kraus will get into the problem of technology and the Mind more extensively in “Nestroy and Posterity.”
But a lot of good writers have lately been fretting, mostly in private, about what it means that they can’t interest themselves in Facebook and Twitter.
I think it means that they have personalities.
This feels like strangely meager consolation, though, when you see the rest of the world giving itself heedlessly (I almost wrote “headlessly”) to the new technologies.
Immersing myself in Kraus in my twenties helped innoculate me against technology envy.
I internalized his distrust and made it my own, even though, in the early 1980s, technology to me meant little more than TV, airliners, nuclear weaponry, and the minibus-size computer at the seismology lab where I worked part-time.
Because I’d used computers in high school and college and was an early adopter of computerized word processing, I’ve persisted in the quaint conviction that technology is a tool, not a way of life.
The metastatic and culturally transformative technological advances of the last two decades have struck me as vindications of Kraus’s warnings.
In 1910 he was already not impressed; and his work showed me the way to not being impressed myself.
But even I am not immune to feelings of dread and, yes, envy when I see books being routed by electronics in the sexiness contest.
94
.
From an aphorism in Nietzsche’s
Dawn
(1881).
95
.
“Kraus is reworking, and repurposing against Heine, yet another of Heine’s own lines, which is itself a reworking of a line by Börne.
Heine writes in the long poem
Atta Troll
(1847), ‘No talent, and yet a character!’” —PR
96
.
Here is Reitter’s helpful parsing in
The Anti-Journalist:
“Kraus’s Heine is a Jewish parvenu.
He deals in the sweet, non-nourishing superficialities of Western culture.
But again, as a Moses, Heine remains a transformative moment for the Jews.
Thus Kraus suggests that Heine’s feuilletonistic writing, a verbal eau de cologne, has a kind of foundational significance in German-Jewish culture, or, for the turn-of-the-century Jewish literati, ‘the consequences.’
If Heine is a foppish Moses in assimilated Jewish culture, his textual legacy, feuilletonism, would amount to its saccharine sacred text.”
97
.
The heroine of the Goethe tragedy
Iphigenie auf Tauris
.
98
.
This is Kraus’s most concise formulation of the paradox of linguistic originality.
“Farewell,” a very old word, is born anew by Goethe’s use of it in
Iphigenie
.
Nestroy and Posterity (1912)
1
.
Johann Nestroy (1801–1862) was a leading figure in the golden age of Viennese theater, in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Although virtually unknown outside Austria (owing in part to the Austrian inflection of his lower-class characters’ language), he was widely loved at home for his comic genius.
Like Shakespeare, Nestroy was an inveterate borrower of well-worn plots, which he executed with unapologetic panache, and he had a Shakespearean gift for rendering his buffoons at once ridiculous and sympathetic.
His language was brilliant and his plot structures were crisp, but because so much of his work was mistakable for what Kraus will here call “routine,” and because comedy is everywhere (and especially in Germany) held in lower esteem than tragedy, his reputation at the time of Kraus’s celebration of him was closer to Gilbert and Sullivan’s than to Shakespeare’s.
In “Nestroy and Posterity” (1912), Kraus was doing the inverse of what he’d done two years earlier in “Heine and the Consequences”—championing an underrated writer rather than taking down an overrated one.
The reader should be warned that the Nestroy essay is, in places, even denser than the Heine.
But here again Kraus is leveraging a seemingly intramural literary fight into a very broad cultural critique, which is the essence of his method: he jumps directly from a small ill (the fact that Nestroy is underrated, misread, and substantially forgotten) to the largest of ills (the dehumanizations of technology, the false promises of Progress and Enlightenment).
The stakes here are even higher and more directly relevant to our own times.
2
.
Sic
.
Although it’s no excuse for misspelling his name, Kraus hated Shaw for some of the same reasons he hated Heine.
“For Kraus,” says Daniel Kehlmann, “Shaw is the prototype of the modern, shallow, media-compatible journalist-litterateur whose fame rests largely on having interesting opinions and giving original interviews: who talks to every newspaper and doesn’t have the least interest in language itself.”
Even in
Pygmalion
, which appears to be preoccupied with language, Henry Higgins is presented as a
scientist
of spoken English.
Shaw gives Higgins a big and predictable emotional blind spot—our egghead has a lesson to learn about the human heart, etc.—while remaining palpably infatuated with Higgins’s smarty-pants scientific hauteur.
Regarding Roosevelt, Paul Reitter comments: “No fan of America, Kraus disliked Theodore Roosevelt, who seemed so very American; he even commented snidely on Roosevelt’s game attempt, in 1910, to speak a little German to a German choral group.
In this sentence, though, Kraus has in mind Roosevelt’s push for technological progress, his modernizing streak.
Kraus wasn’t a technophobe in his everyday life.
In 1914, when Vienna had few automobiles and many automobile accidents (see the first scene in Musil’s
The Man Without Qualities
), Kraus bought a car and had himself driven around by a chauffeur.
Nor was Kraus averse, later on, to air travel.
But around 1908 he came to believe that our technological capabilities and our imaginative faculties were going in opposite directions—the former were going up and, as a result, the latter down—and this thought really scared him.
It’s what made him into the ‘apocalyptic satirist.’
In the essay ‘Apocalypse’ (1908), he writes, ‘Culture can’t catch its breath, and in the end a dead humanity lies next to its works, whose invention cost us so much of our intellect that we had none left to put them to use.
We were complicated enough to build machines and too primitive to make them serve us.
We operate a worldwide system of traffic along a narrow route in the brain.’”
Culture can’t catch its breath
: to me the most impressive thing about Kraus as a thinker may be how early and clearly he recognized the divergence of technological progress from moral and spiritual progress.
A succeeding century of the former, involving scientific advances that would have seemed miraculous not long ago, has resulted in high-resolution smartphone videos of dudes dropping Mentos into liter bottles of Diet Pepsi and shouting “Whoa!”
while they geyser.
Technovisionaries of the 1990s promised that the Internet would usher in a new world of peace, love, and understanding, and Twitter executives are still banging the utopianist drum, claiming foundational credit for the Arab Spring.
To listen to them, you’d think it was inconceivable that Eastern Europe could liberate itself from the Soviets without the benefit of cell phones, or that a bunch of Americans revolted against the British and produced the U.S.
Constitution without 4G capability.
3
.
Nowadays, the refrain is that “there’s no stopping our powerful new technologies.”
Grassroots resistance to these technologies is almost entirely confined to health and safety issues, and meanwhile various logics—of war theory, of technology, of the marketplace—keep unfolding automatically.
We find ourselves living in a world with hydrogen bombs because uranium bombs just weren’t going to get the job done; we find ourselves spending most of our waking hours texting and e-mailing and tweeting and posting on color-screen gadgets because Moore’s law said we could.
We’re told that, to remain competitive economically, we need to forget about the humanities and teach our children “passion” (to use Thomas Friedman’s word in a 2013
Times
column) for digital technology and prepare them to spend their entire lives incessantly reeducating themselves to keep up with it.
The logic says that if we want things like
Zappos.com
or home DVR capability—and who wouldn’t want them?—we need to say goodbye to job stability and hello to a lifetime of anxiety.
We need to become as restless as capitalism itself.
Not only am I not a Luddite, I’m not even sure the original Luddites were Luddites.
(They had no systematic beef with technology; it simply seemed practical to them to smash the steam-powered looms that were putting them out of work.) In developing this book, I’m relying on software and silicon to facilitate discussions with Kehlmann and Reitter in two other time zones, and I’m enchanted with everything about my new Lenovo ultrabook computer except its name.
(Working on something called an IdeaPad tempts me to refuse to have ideas.) I don’t mind technology as my servant; I mind it only as my master.
But not long ago, when I was intemperate enough to call Twitter “dumb” in public, the response of Twitter addicts was to call me a Luddite.
Nyah, nyah, nyah!
It was as if I’d said it was “dumb” to smoke cigarettes, except that in this case I had no medical evidence to back me up.
People did worry, for a while, that cell phones might cause brain cancer, but the purported link has been revealed to be feeble to nonexistent, and now nobody has to worry anymore.
4
.
No matter how many times I read it, I can’t make full sense of this sentence, although it does help, a little bit, to plug in the example of the anterior thoughts of the Framers of our Constitution and their benefit to our current planet.
Kehlmann also helpfully notes: “The sentence elaborates on a line of thought that Kraus began in his poem ‘To Eternal Peace’: that there’s nothing more noble than the pleasure (a pleasure experienced by Kant, whom the poem is about) of knowing that future generations will have things better than one’s own.
Our present does exactly the opposite, not only not working for later generations but actually making things worse for them.”