Authors: Karl Kraus
32
.
“Christened after a director whose name Nabokov would have loved, Karl Carl, the Carltheater was located in Leopoldstadt and served as a center of Nestroy activity.
Nestroy’s works were often performed there, frequently with him acting in them.
And from 1854 until 1860 he held the position of the director of the theater.” —PR
33
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“Alexander Girardi (1850–1918) was Vienna’s most famous operetta singer and comic actor at the turn of the century, known particularly for his roles in Ferdinand Raimund’s farces.
So in celebrating Girardi, Kraus wasn’t exactly swimming against the current of popular opinion.
Indeed, Girardi was a trendsetting celebrity in Vienna.
People would imitate how he dressed and talked, even how he walked.
But Kraus went much further in his assessment of Girardi than most critics.
As Kraus himself emphasized, he had little company in proclaiming that Vienna lost its ‘cultural heart’ when Girardi left for an engagement in Germany.
In the same context (the 1908 essay ‘Girardi’), Kraus began to develop the idea that Girardi’s ‘extraordinarily self-asserting’ way of using ‘scenic possibilities for creative portrayal’ didn’t lend itself to performing works of great literary value—hence Girardi’s lack of compatibility with Nestroy, whom Kraus sees as an author of satirical literature operating as a dramatist.
Girardi’s own gift for satire thrives precisely where the literary value of what he is performing is weak.
Kraus observes, about one of his performances, ‘if the script was superficial amusement, the accent employed was the deepest mocking of demagogic language,’ and goes on to say that Girardi ‘ignores the literature’ in the works he performs.
It’s the less self-asserting Oskar Sachs who is more ‘Nestroy-ready’ (‘
nestroyfähig
’) in the ‘Girardi’ essay, just as he is in ‘Nestroy and Posterity.’” —PR
34
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Kehlmann says: “This is a ridiculous insult.
Max Reinhardt was arguably the greatest stage director of the twentieth century; calling him ‘a layman of the stage’ is just pure ressentiment.”
Reitter explains: “Max Reinhardt (1873–1943) was a hugely influential director whom Kraus belittled for over thirty years.
As so often with Kraus’s feuds, things were different—that is, better—in the beginning.
Born near Vienna, Reinhardt met Kraus in 1892, when both participated in a student production of Schiller’s
The Robbers
.
Reinhardt excelled in the role of Spiegelberg while Kraus flopped as Franz Moor; this led him to give up his dreams of becoming an actor.
If he envied Reinhardt, he didn’t show it at the time.
Indeed, he wrote in support of Reinhardt for years, openly acknowledging his ‘gifts.’
But around 1905, when Reinhardt was achieving celebrity status, Kraus’s position changed.
A combination of old and new jealousies may have been at work; certainly Reinhardt thought so.
But there were also genuine differences of principle and practice.
Kraus’s drama
The Last Days of Mankind
may have a list of characters that runs to thirteen pages, and it may also call for war propaganda films to be used as a scenic backdrop, but Kraus for the most part was a theatrical minimalist.
In his own performances he often sat on a bare stage behind an unremarkable table on which there would be only papers and a glass of water.
Reinhardt, by contrast, was known for his big stagings and elaborate sets.
In 1911 he produced the Berlin premiere of Hofmannsthal’s
Everyman
in a circus arena.
Later that year, he turned the Exhibition Centre at Earls Court in London into a cathedral for his staging of Karl Vollmoeller’s
The Miracle
.
And in 1922 Reinhardt and Hofmannsthal mounted their drama
The Salzburg Great World Theater
in an actual cathedral—prompting Kraus, who had secretly converted to Catholicism in 1911, to proclaim that he was now leaving the church ‘out of antisemitism.’
“In an essay written before ‘Nestroy and Posterity,’ Kraus remarks that Reinhardt’s desire to have Girardi perform in a Nestroy cycle is an example of Reinhardt’s ‘snobbism.’
Reinhardt presumably knows that Girardi isn’t right for the role, but he wants a big name because he’s a snob, and that’s what snobs want.
‘Nestroy and Posterity’ upgrades the insult, in a way.
Now Reinhardt, as a ‘layman of the stage,’ doesn’t even seem to recognize how incompatible Girardi and Nestroy are.
Now it’s ignorance and incompetence that led him to propose a Nestroy cycle.”
35
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“One of Kraus’s more famous self-descriptions reads: ‘I am perhaps the first case of an author who simultaneously experiences his writing as an actor.’
Less well known is that the aphorism continues: ‘Would I therefore want to entrust another actor with my text?
Nestroy’s intellectuality is untheatrical.
The actor Nestroy was effective because he said what no listener would have understood so quickly that no listener could understand him.’
The actual point of the aphorism is to underscore the affinity between Kraus,
the
actorly writer, and Nestroy
the
writerly actor.
“What seems really astonishing now is that before an essay like ‘Heine and the Consequences’ was read, it was heard.
Kraus began giving public lectures in the spring of 1910, and ‘Heine and the Consequences,’ which wasn’t published until the end of that year, was among the first things he brought to the stage.
We can only wonder how many of Kraus’s allusions and echoes his most educated listeners were able to pick up on as the words flew by.” —PR
36
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“By 1912 Kraus had been championing Wedekind and his works for nearly a decade.
He had even produced—and participated in—a private staging of
Pandora’s Box
in 1905, when public performances of it were banned.
Kraus played the role of Kungu Poti, Imperial Prince of Uahubee; Wedekind assigned himself the part of Jack the Ripper.
This kind of self-casting wasn’t unusual for him, and it linked him, as Kraus points out, to the writer-actor Nestroy.
Kraus particularly lauded Wedekind’s handling of his great theme, which he construed as a version of one of his own themes: gender conflicts reveal both the misogyny and the larger ethical bankruptcy of bourgeois society.
Kraus insisted on Lulu’s status as a victim, ‘a destroyer because she is destroyed from all sides.’
The ‘world of the poet Frank Wedekind,’ he wrote in 1905, is one ‘in which woman isn’t cursed with taking the cross of ethical responsibility from man, should she ripen to aesthetic perfection.
His deep knowledge, which understands the gap between blooming lips and bourgeois attitudes, is perhaps the only knowledge today worthy of a dramatist.’” —PR
37
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Kehlmann cuts through some of the fog here: “Kraus is talking about the fact that Wedekind also worked as an actor, playing his own roles, writing roles for himself, and therefore adding an element of personal confession, which is a slightly untheatrical effect but very effective on a different level.”
38
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“Sigmund Wilheim (1849–1911) was one of the few theater critics in Austria whom Kraus respected.
Kraus compared Wilheim’s style to that of Ludwig Speidel, the only feuilletonist he admired, and he wrote, in his obituary for Wilheim, ‘he truly understood theater, and he was the first in Vienna to comprehend something of Wedekind.’” —PR
39
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“From
Pandora’s Box
(1904).” —PR
40
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Wedekind’s play of 1894.
41
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“From Nestroy’s farce
The Insignificant Man
(
Der Unbedeutende
, 1846).” —PR
I’m reluctant to add to the already astronomical footnote tally by separately noting the sources of all the Nestroy lines that Kraus will be quoting, but Paul Reitter has done such excellent work in tracking them down that I will list the rest of them here, in order of appearance.
1.) From Nestroy’s farce
My Friend
(
Mein Freund
, 1851).
2.) From Nestroy’s farce
The Talisman
(
Der Talisman
, 1840).
3.) From Nestroy’s farce
The Evil Spirit Lumpazivagabundus
(
Der böse Geist Lumpazivagabundus
, 1833).
4.) From Nestroy’s farce
A Man Full of Nothing
(
Der Zerrissene
, 1844).
5.) Also from
A Man Full of Nothing.
6.) From Nestroy’s farce
The Two Night Wanderers
(
Die beiden Nachtwandler
, 1836).
7.) From Nestroy’s farce
Earlier Conditions
(
Frühere Verhältnisse
, 1862).
8.) From
The Two Night Wanderers
.
9.) From Nestroy’s farce
Earlier Conditions
.
10.) From
My Friend
.
11.) From
The Two Night Wanderers
.
12.) From Nestroy’s farce
Terrible Fear
(
Höllenangst
, 1849).
13.) From
Lumpazivagabundus
.
42
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“Kraus was nothing if not polemical, yet he tended not to apply the term ‘polemical’ to himself or to writers whom he admired.
In fact, he often used it to describe attacks against him, with ‘polemical’ implying, as it still does, a lack of fairness.
But Kraus’s definition of the category ‘polemic’ is rather neutral.
In an essay that appeared a few months after ‘Nestroy and Posterity,’ Kraus distinguishes polemic from satire, explaining that the former ‘operates within the format of the bad object’ and that its specific function is to ‘expose the disparity between high standing and insignificance.’
The point of polemic is, evidently, to take down what’s overrated.” —PR
43
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“A very personal line,” says Kehlmann.
“Kraus was constantly reproached for being ‘only corrosive,’ and this is his response to that.”
I would add that this entire essay—a loving celebration of Nestroy’s brilliance—is a response to that.
44
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The latter part of this sentence fragment is obstinately opaque.
But it may help to compare the “counterfeit irony” of Heine—who doesn’t actually credit the emotion of the girl who’s moved by a sunset, and who undercuts it with a snarky, conventional-minded reference to the earth’s rotation—with the functioning of high emotion in a genuinely satirical work like Joseph Heller’s
Catch-22
.
The pathos of the mortally wounded Snowden’s refrain in that novel (“I’m cold”) stands in meaningful aesthetic relation to Heller’s acidic satire of the logic preventing Snowden from escaping endless bombing missions.
45
.
Sadly, more untranslatable wordplay here: in the original, “disputatious catalogue” is a play on “catalogue raisonné,” which works in German because
Raisonneur
means “disputer” or “person who wrangles.”
46
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“Nestroy’s contemporaries Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Heinrich Laube, and Emil Kuh, all of them authors of consequence, charged Nestroy with ‘cheapening our ideals through his toxic nastiness.’
This sounds a lot like a well-worn criticism of Kraus, and it may be what Kraus is alluding to with the sarcastic line ‘noble impulses.’” —PR