Authors: Karl Kraus
5
.
Kehlmann considers it a near certainty that somewhere in an earlier edition of
Die Fackel
is a reference to someone’s having circled the world in fifty days—a reference that Kraus’s readers would have recognized here.
Reitter suspects the reference is to Jules Verne’s
Around the World in Eighty Days
, amended to fifty because it’s fifty years since Nestroy’s death.
6
.
“The phrase about the operator forgetting the Word comes from Goethe’s poem ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.’” —PR
7
.
Here’s a little glimpse of what’s getting lost in translation: in the original, “the intellect didn’t understand” is the beautifully repetitive
der Verstand verstand nicht
.
Although the translator is mostly just grinning and bearing these losses, he thought he’d mention this one.
8
.
In the original, for “humanity,” Kraus unexpectedly uses the Latinate
Humanität
rather than the Germanic
Menschlichkeit
.
Kehlmann says: “My guess is that it’s an echo of Nietzsche, ‘O Voltaire, o humanity [
Humanität
], o idiocy!’
All of Kraus’s contemporary readers would have heard a faint echo of Nietzsche and his loathing of Enlightenment in that word.
But that’s just a guess.”
Following a tip from a fellow scholar, Reitter notes that Kraus is also probably echoing an often-cited rhyme by the Austrian writer Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872):
Der Weg der neuern Bildung geht:
Von Humanität,
Durch Nationalität,
Zur Bestialität.
(The road of modern education leads:
From humanity,
Through nationality,
To barbarity.)
I’d like to unpack this sentence fragment further, since, of all of Kraus’s lines, it’s probably the one that has meant the most to me.
An “infernal machine” is an explosive or destructive device constructed to deliberately cause harm; the German term,
Teufelswerk
(literally “devil’s work”), sharpens the Krausian paradox of the phrase “of humanity.”
Kraus in this passage is evoking the Sorcerer’s Apprentice—the unintended unleashing of supernaturally destructive consequences.
Although he’s talking about the modern newspaper, his critique applies, if anything, even better to contemporary techno-consumerism.
For Kraus, the infernal thing about newspapers was their fraudulent coupling of Enlightenment ideals with a relentless and ingenious pursuit of profit and power.
With techno-consumerism, a humanist rhetoric of “empowerment” and “creativity” and “freedom” and “connection” and “democracy” abets the frank monopolism of the techno-titans; the new infernal machine seems increasingly to obey nothing but its own developmental logic, and it’s far more enslavingly addictive, and far more pandering to people’s worst impulses, than newspapers ever were.
Indeed, what Kraus will later say of Nestroy could now be said of Kraus himself: “He attacks his small environs with an asperity worthy of a later cause.”
The profits and reach of Moriz Benedikt, the publisher of the
Neue Freie Presse
, were pitifully small by the standards of today’s tech and media giants.
The sea of trivial or false or empty data is thousands of times larger now.
Kraus was merely prognosticating when he envisioned a day when people had forgotten how to add and subtract; now it’s hard to get through a meal with friends without somebody reaching for an iPhone to retrieve the kind of fact it used to be the brain’s responsibility to remember.
The techno-boosters, of course, see nothing wrong here.
They point out that human beings have always outsourced memory—to bards, historians, spouses, books.
But I’m enough of a child of the sixties to see a difference between letting your spouse remember your nieces’ birthdays and handing over basic memory function to a global corporate system of control.
9
.
The Koh-i-noor, at 106 metric carats, was once the largest known diamond.
It now resides in the crown of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II.
10
.
Reitter notes: “When Kraus published ‘Nestroy and Posterity,’ in May of 1912, Nestroy was generally considered, for all his popularity, to be no more than an author skilled at vernacular farces—a fun and sometimes vulgar form of entertainment that didn’t ultimately have much depth.
Only Kraus and a few others thought he was a great artist.”
Kehlmann continues: “Kraus’s persistent championing of Nestroy had consequences: Nestroy today is acknowledged to be perhaps the greatest comic genius in Austrian literature.
His plays are produced and he’s read in school; he’s a classic whose literary status is no longer in dispute—at least in Austria.
In Germany, people maybe know just the name.
His plays are neither read nor produced.
And this has nothing to do with their being hard to follow: the right way to produce him, as Kraus himself will point out, is not in Austrian dialect but in clear High German with a slight Austrian intonation.
The problem is that the Prussian canon has, in general, very little room for Austrian writers and, in particular, no interest in humor.
This is a subject too complex to be treated properly even in footnotes as deviant as ours.
But Goethe and Schiller were explicitly opposed to humor in literature, there was never a Voltaire in German letters, and even a comic genius like Nestroy or a master of witty polemic like Kraus finds very little traction with readers and theatergoers in Germany.
Germans and humor: the old, great, sad problem…!”
“Kraus himself had quite a bit to say about this problem,” Reitter adds.
“He was predictably hard on what he once called ‘the overwhelming humorlessness of German literature.’
And where it did attempt to be funny, according to him, it tended to be filthy in the most puerile way: ‘No experience is more important to German humorists than the process of digestion.’”
11
.
By “subject matter,” Kraus appears to mean “the object or content of satire” (we’re up against the tricky word “
Stoff”
again), but I don’t think he gives us enough information here to understand the final phrase.
I’d understand it better if he’d written “perennial fascination” instead of “undying nature,” but unfortunately he didn’t.
Kehlmann’s comment may nevertheless be illuminating: “‘
Stoff
’ is a key word for Kraus.
In his opinion, we shouldn’t be laughing at the content of satire, because the only thing that matters is our aesthetic enjoyment of how the content is arranged—the form, in other words.”
12
.
Pretty clearly a reference to Heine’s transformative importance to later generations of German-Jewish writers, and to the maintenance of his reputation by newspapers controlled and substantially written by German Jews.
“They take care of their own,” is perhaps the unsavory implication here, “and Nestroy, being Gentile, doesn’t have that advantage.”
Reitter adds: “At least some of Kraus’s readers would have known that ‘no Kaddish will be said’ is a Heine quotation.
The source is Heine’s poem ‘Memorial Service’ (‘Gedächtnisfeier’).”
13
.
“Heinrich Friedjung (1851–1920) was an assimilated Jewish historian and journalist who wrote for the
Neue Freie Presse
and shared its dual commitments to liberalism and a German patriotism that could go over into a saber-rattling nationalism.
He had, in short, all the makings of a Kraus target.
But it was through a sensational act of gullibility that Friedjung got Kraus’s full attention.
In 1909, it looked as if the Serbian response to Austria’s annexation of Bosnia might give the Austrian-Hungarian government the opportunity to invade Serbia.
Thus the government found itself in need of a moral justification for the war it wanted.
The Austrian foreign minister turned to none other than Friedjung, handing him forged documents that he proceeded to run with.
Writing in the
Neue Freie Presse
, Friedjung tried to make the case that the Austro-Hungarian regional administration in Bosnia had entered into a conspiracy with the anti-Habsburg government in Belgrade.
Soon, however, the Serbs backed down.
The threat of war abated, whereupon the regional administration that Friedjung had accused of treason brought a libel suit against him—and won.
For Kraus, the really damning thing was a point that Friedjung had managed to prove
in his defense
: he hadn’t known that the documents on which he’d based his claims were forgeries.
Kraus’s essay on the affair (‘The Trial of Friedjung,’ 1909) contains some memorable remarks about the forces driving Austrian history—‘its events are a function of the conflict between stupidity and randomness’—but his focus is on the related issue of the state of reading in Austria.
‘Austria in
orbe ultima
: in a world that’s been deceived, Austria has kept its credulity longer than anyone else.
It is journalism’s most willing victim, for it not only believes what it sees in print, it believes the opposite when it sees that in print, too.’
The reason Friedjung merits only one mention in ‘Nestroy and Posterity’ is that Kraus had just written an essay dealing exclusively with Friedjung’s (1908) attempt to interpret Nestroy as a ‘mockingbird’ with a liberal outlook.
Unsurprisingly, Kraus wasn’t about to let stand the ultimate bad reader’s reading of Nestroy, but here, according to Kraus, Friedjung may actually have been aware of the tendentiousness of his interpretation.
Finding some dark solace in that, Kraus writes, ‘Only this time it isn’t quite believable that Herr Friedjung is acting out of honest belief.’” —PR
14
.
“So, was Kraus, whose experimental style influenced Brecht and Schönberg, a reactionary modernist?
Walter Benjamin once suggested as much.
His essay ‘Karl Kraus’ (1931) describes its subject’s work as a mix of ‘reactionary theory and revolutionary practice.’
But as Benjamin himself knew, this formulation was misleading.
“The original motto of
Die Fackel
was ‘What we kill.’
In 1899, on the first page of the first issue, Kraus proclaimed that ‘nothing’ would move him from a ‘standpoint’ that was openly polemical and radically independent—as opposed to Vienna’s better newspapers, which feigned openness and impartiality but in fact adhered to liberal pieties and played to the material interests of their backers.
Beholden to no one and to no party line, Kraus would be able to ‘carry out polemics from all perspectives,’ as he put it a little later.
Yet even as he underscored his independence, he didn’t shy from tying it to an agenda that invited him to be taken for a progressive reformer.
In the first issue of
Die Fackel
he announced his intention to expose the obfuscations of the established press so that it would be easier to ‘recognize the urgent social matters.’
Another early mission statement emphasized that
Die Fackel
would ‘give the oppressed a voice.’
“Kraus wasted no time in making good on his pledges.
He hammered away at all sides in reporting on the dysfunction in Austria’s parliament, and in 1900 he took up the cause of the Galician coal miners who had gone on strike against ‘their exploiters.’
This helped win him a following among workers’ groups in Vienna.
If there had been Viennese prostitutes’ groups, he might have had a following among them, too.
The plight of prostitutes resonated with Kraus, and he addressed it repeatedly in covering what he saw as emblematic instances of disenfranchisement and injustice.
In his essay ‘Medal of Honor’ (1909), he relates the story of a prostitute whose client didn’t tip her but instead gave her a decorative medal, which she proceeded to put on.
Unfortunately for her, this was potentially against the law.
It also ‘aroused,’ to use Kraus’s phrasing, the indignation of the brothel’s patrons, who turned her in.
At her second trial—the first judge pronounced her innocent, but the prosecutor appealed the decision—the judge reinterpreted the status of the decorative cross, and the prostitute was fined twenty crowns for ‘unauthorized wearing of a military medal.’
As Kraus saw it, the case illustrated not just the extreme fatuousness and hypocrisy of the legal system’s attempts to preserve decency, but also the system’s perverse tendency to come down hardest on the very people it failed to protect.
He ends the piece by declaring that the real ‘whore’ in the story is justice in Austria.
“Of course, Kraus took other kinds of stands, too.
He heaped scorn on the supporters of Alfred Dreyfus.
He belittled the women’s movement (and wrote unkind aphorisms about women: ‘at night, all cows are black, even the blond ones’).
And in the years before the First World War, which he famously decried, Kraus sided with the old Austrian social order.
After the war, he went through something of a socialist phase, but then, to Bertolt Brecht’s dismay, he gave his imprimatur to Engelbert Dollfuß, Austria’s right-wing chancellor from 1932 until 1934; Kraus believed that Dollfuß might effectively resist the reach of Nazi Germany and was thus the ‘lesser evil’ in Austrian politics.
But Kraus’s political interventions, or really his peregrinations up and down the political spectrum, aren’t the main reason he’s so hard to place politically.
He had two primary programs in trying to improve society, and while these programs were always interdependent, they had different political valences.
Reactionary theory and revolutionary practice didn’t just coexist in Kraus’s work: they fed off each other.
“For Kraus—as for, say, Marx—liberal faith in progress was the worst sort of ideology.
Technological progress was being driven by hubris and greed, and it was increasing civilization’s destructive capabilities, not just its productive ones, and Kraus was frightened by the enormous potential for abuse.
An aphorism from around 1908 reads: ‘Progress celebrates the pyrrhic victory over nature.’
Another: ‘Progress will make wallets out of human skin.’
A key factor for Kraus was that technology and modernization were diminishing the space that the imagination needed to thrive.
Once the popular imagination has atrophied, the likelihood that technology will be misused hardens into a certainty.
Lamenting Austria’s relationship to Germany, in 1908, Kraus wrote, ‘Until the hypertrophy of our technological development, which our brains can’t handle, leads to a general catastrophe, it is the fate of people who eat meat and were born to mothers to be swallowed up by people who were born to machines and are nourished by them.’
When the general catastrophe then arrived, in the form of the First World War, Kraus believed that it was caused in large part by a failure of the Austrian imagination, which wasn’t strong to begin with, and which had been fatally enfeebled by the mass press, at a moment of unparalleled technological might.
Not long after the war began, Kraus claimed that the very signature of our time is the threat our lack of imagination has come to pose: ‘in this time in which what people could no longer imagine is precisely what happens, and in which what they can no longer imagine has to happen, and if they could have imagined it, it wouldn’t have happened…’
“Part of Kraus’s response to this diagnosis might be characterized as romantic conservatism.
Often with nostalgia for better days he hadn’t experienced himself, Kraus fought to keep open space for the imagination by campaigning against the modern things that got in its way: the feuilleton, with its addictive, and thus lucrative, offering of prepackaged emotional responses to the news; psychoanalysis, which, according to Kraus, ‘analyzes the dreams into which the disgust it elicits tries to escape’; etc.
But another part of Kraus’s response was to promote Enlightenment in the Kantian sense—that is, to call for mental maturity: ‘I want the fruit of my labors to be that reading is done with sharper eyes.’
Kraus, to be sure, sometimes directed his readers to see his writing as the result of a kind of mystical submission to language: ‘I have only mastered the language of others.
Language itself does whatever it wants to with me.’
Yet he stressed, as well, that an important purpose of his ‘revolutionary,’ extremely challenging style was to force readers to read more alertly, in the hope of revitalizing the Austrian mind.
His audience ‘shouldn’t necessarily read different newspapers, they should read differently.’
“They should speak and write differently, too.
Kraus exhorted his readers to think as hard as they could about their linguistic options.
Doing so was, he believed, the best practice for ethical decision making.
Because our deliberating over language usually takes place with neither the threat of punishment nor the prospect of gain hanging over it, it can teach us, in a uniquely unconstrained way, to hesitate, to have ‘scruples,’ and to be sensitive to nuance and thus to particularity.
There was a time when these ideas resonated; more even than Kraus’s claims about journalism and the Great War, they’re what prompted critics to credit him with seeing, as one of them put it, ‘the connection between mistreated words and mistreated bodies.’
“It’s also been said that Kraus’s Enlightenment project was a bust.
Elias Canetti, for example, argued that Kraus was too authoritarian a figure to encourage intellectual independence in other people, and that his style overwhelmed readers more than it stimulated their critical faculties.
That Kraus had an Enlightenment project, which is one of Canetti’s points of departure, is harder to contest.
And that Kraus never gave up on the project, regardless of its success or unsuccess, is impressive, especially given his low opinion of the people whom he was able to reach.
He was only half joking when he quipped that the worst thing his audience members could say about him was: ‘I know Kraus personally.’” —PR
Kehlmann points out that
Die Fackel
’s original motto, “
Was wir umbringen
,” is a play on the hackneyed newspaper motto “
Was wir bringen
”—“What we bring.”
So I might suggest a less literal translation: “We bring you the noose.”