Authors: Karl Kraus
67
.
A front-page article in the
Times
business section on August 9, 2012:
TIME WASTERS, POINTLESS BUT FUN
Times have changed since the best way to pass an idle 10 minutes was Nokia’s famous Snake, or whatever flavor of game was built into your old, dumb cellphone.
These basic games were simple entertainment and they were fun—to an extent.
But with smartphones, we have thousands of app-enabled ways to pass the time waiting in line at the post office or even when struck with insomnia …
Times have changed
: the watchword of the ideology of Progress.
Aren’t we lucky that our phones are so smart now!
The only thing that hasn’t changed is the tone of writers celebrating how things have changed.
68
.
“‘
Gschnas
’ is an Austrian term for a costume ball.” —PR
69
.
I love this line just as it is, but it’s also tempting to update it to begin, “Reality
TV shows are
…”
70
.
“A prestigious annual literary prize named after the Austrian writer Eduard Bauernfeld (1802–1890).
Kraus often took issue with the prize committee’s decision.” —PR
71
.
This is a very tough sentence, but I think what Kraus is talking about has a contemporary analogue in cable news: the phony coziness that tolerates the grotesque “expansion” of trivial news, traffics touristically in stories that ought to have no place in public discourse, and makes no tonal distinctions in its blending of serious and meaningless news items.
72
.
I remember being naive about sex when I was twenty-two, but not a prude, and so it’s a disagreeable surprise, when I’m looking through my old letters, to find a horrified and judgmental reference to my Canadian friend’s Italian porno magazines.
I sound just like my father, at least regarding the magazines (unlike him, I had no problem with “the fairies,” as he called them).
Indeed, come to think of it, although I was trying in Berlin to deracinate myself and become a person beyond my parents’ ken, I in fact was replicating my father’s personality almost point by point.
I, too, was solitary, depressive, conventional, prudish, workaholic, given to philosophizing, drawn to pretty women but unshakably loyal, and wary of pleasure lest the pursuit of it consume my whole life.
It’s true that I was afraid of my father’s judgments and frustrated by his inability to understand what I had to say about literature and art, frustrated by his reserve and silences; but I don’t think I ever once morally faulted him.
I knew that, unlike me, he’d grown up in a hardscrabble town and hadn’t had a liberal education.
The person I faulted was my mother.
It would be another twenty years before I appreciated the ways in which I’m like her, too.
In 1982 she seemed to me a bitch on wheels.
(That I had a problem with a morally stringent and boundary-trampling mom and had plunged into a rather insane relationship with a morally stringent and boundary-trampling woman was one of those obvious, important facts that I somehow couldn’t see.) By late February, when the semester ended in Berlin, my mother’s health had improved enough that I’d been forced to invent a new reason not to break the news of my engagement to her.
She was talking about coming to England with my father in April, and (as I explained to V) it would be best for me to meet them there and give them the news in person.
(Anything to buy a few more months.) But then, as I was about to leave Berlin for a month in Spain, I learned that the England trip was off.
Spain instantly ceased to be a sunny haven where I could relax and work on my novel and became the forbidding Inquisitional place where I would have to write an awful letter to my parents.
I stayed in a small village, in a small house belonging to my friend Ekström’s parents.
There was no telephone, and my only company was the village cats and two expat British ladies, one a drunk, the other a bigot, both of them very kind to me.
I smoked two packs of Ducados a day and consumed little else but coffee, chocolate, bread, and gin, and then wondered why I couldn’t sleep; in the sole picture I took of myself in the village, I look like a fifty-year-old psychiatric patient.
But somehow, one night, in the way you might finally dive into a freezing-cold lake, because you’re there to swim, I managed to write the necessary letter—making the usual carbon copy, of course, although it’s a document I can’t bear to read even thirty years later.
The lake wasn’t so catastrophically cold once I was in it.
My parents’ letters in reply came two weeks later, my father’s reasonable and accommodating, my mother’s a scream of pain and anger.
At some level I’d imagined their replies would annihilate me.
That I survived them amounted to a revelation: however gigantically my parents loomed in my imagination, they had no actual control over what I did with my life.
I still had a month on my two-month rail pass, and after returning to Berlin I went on to Amsterdam and then to Munich for a polite visit with a nerdy and bespectacled girl, a friend of good friends of mine at college, who was working as an au pair for a year.
I’d spoken with X once or twice at parties, and “Write to X” had been at the top of my to-do list all year, without my ever writing to her.
The first thing I discovered, in Munich, was that without her terrible glasses and her dowdy liberal-college overalls and hairstyle she was breathtakingly beautiful.
The next thing I discovered was that “Write to J” had been at the top of
her
to-do list in Munich, without her ever writing; the coincidence seemed highly Significant.
Within a day, I’d banished all thought of V, and thirty-six hours later I was in bed with X and trying to decide, quickly, whether to call off my engagement, because X refused to consummate things unless I called it off.
She was a midwestern Latina, and her moderate craziness (which was a thing I found irresistible in women at that point in my life) was tempered by a decency and practicality that reminded me of home.
I was wildly attracted to her, and we’d been talking nonstop for three days, piecing together a complicated network of college friendships and liaisons whose superstitious upshot was that
we were meant to be
.
I wasn’t constituted to tell a lie to get the sex I wanted, but why I didn’t take the opportunity to shrug off the immense and not particularly joyful complication of me and V, a complication embodied in the half million words we’d typed to each other since the previous summer, is harder to understand.
I—or It—must have been bent on replicating my father’s life of work, of duty, of loyalty; of gratification delayed or even denied altogether.
Sex looks like nothing or like everything, depending on when you look at it, and it must have been looking to me like nothing in Munich, at the predawn hour when you’re finally exhausted by unsatisfied desire and only want to sleep a little.
Not until I was back in my clothes and standing on a train platform in Hannover, a few hours later, hurling pfennigs, did it look like everything again.
73
.
Or that Goethe had Asperger’s syndrome, which was one thesis of the long, earnest paper that a German psychologist recently e-mailed me out of the blue.
74
.
Now that our populace has stopped worrying about the several thousand Russian thermonuclear weapons still aimed at our cities and controlled by a populace that drinks vodka like water, it’s difficult to convey how primary and real and present the atomic danger seemed to many of us in 1982.
(Timothy Garton Ash, who was in Berlin around that time, expected nuclear war within ten years.) Every time a clap of thunder awoke me in the night, my first thought was that the apocalypse had come.
At any moment of any day, some person or machine in Nebraska or Siberia could make a mistake, I would be killed an hour later, and within a year or two no vertebrate animal on the planet would be alive.
And Berlin aggravated my fears, not only because it was a Cold War hot spot but because it still bore grim scars of past apocalypses and near apocalypses.
My host family lived near the site of the infamous Wannsee Conference; the wasteland where the Nazi central command bunker had been located was now AUTODROM, a closed track where student drivers could practice; and the West Berlin U-Bahn and the S-Bahn both had lines running underneath East Berlin, passing stations whose entrances had been bricked up twenty or thirty years earlier.
In the older S-Bahn trains you could open the windows and practically reach out and touch advertising posters that had been put up in the 1950s.
The very quaintness of these yellowed ads for cigarettes and chewing gum was ominous; I imagined our own contemporary billboards persisting in forever-deserted stations after all human life had been expunged.
When I remember how oppressed I was by fears and premonitions of thermonuclear war, and how unlikely it seemed that the world would last long enough for me to have a normal life span, it makes more sense to me that I stuck with V and our engagement.
Young people are said to have no conception of their mortality, but I had the opposite problem: I thought I’d be lucky to live another ten years.
And so I needed to accomplish a whole life
now
.
V and I needed to save the world (or at least the American novel)
now
.
If I was still alive at thirty-two, I’d be so happy not to be dead that I could deal with any bad consequences of having married young.
The apocalyptic and the megalomaniacal were so intertwined in me that they almost amounted to the same thing.
After my narrow escape from Munich, I was also
angry
, angry at the world for having denied me the pleasure of sex with X; and when I then came to the angry, apocalyptic, and arguably megalomaniacal Karl Kraus, I found the paternal example I’d been looking for.
I didn’t strictly have to take a course in the spring semester—the Fulbright people weren’t likely to ask for a refund if they learned that I’d blown off further schoolwork—but a seminar on
The Last Days of Mankind
was being offered at the Free University, and I was attracted by the title and by the word “apocalypse” in the course description.
The seminar was led by Herr Professor Hindemith, who was wry and soft-spoken, wore his hair long, and dressed like a student.
Unlike the Hofmannsthal seminar, Hindemith’s class was wildly overenrolled, because Kraus’s play was about war, and war was bad, and Kraus hadn’t liked it, and students in Berlin didn’t like it either, and what could be more agreeable than spending a semester talking about how bad war was?
At the class’s first meeting, every seat at the U of tables was filled.
Students in olive-drab jackets lined the walls and sat on the windowsills and crowded at the door, most of them puffing on hand-rolled cigarettes.
A student at the tables, a young woman with flaming cheeks, raised her hand to say that she was allergic to smoke and to ask Hindemith to ban smoking in the classroom.
“But our fellow student is surely in the minority,” an older male student immediately objected.
“Protect minority rights,” Hindemith countered with an ambiguous grin.
The young woman pressed her case, the pitch and volume of her voice rising as she detailed the health risks of first- and secondhand smoke and declared that it was
torture
for her to be in this classroom.
Finally, to quiet her, Hindemith suggested that the matter be put to a vote.
Though I believe he was a smoker himself, he voted for the ban, as did five or six others of us.
The smoke really was unbelievably thick.
But a forest of olive-drab-clad arms were raised against the ban, there was cheering and jeering and laughter, and the young woman fled the classroom, never to be seen again.
The Last Days of Mankind
is extremely long (Kraus, in his foreword to it, suggests that ten evenings would be needed to produce it properly) but no longer than some novels.
Hindemith, however, knew that this was still way too much reading to ask of Free University students of the day.
Instead, we’d be spending the entire semester discussing only the two-hand scenes between the characters of the Grumbler and the Optimist, about 130 pages altogether.
Hindemith did assign two Kraus essays as supplementary reading—“Heine and the Consequences” and “Nestroy and Posterity”—and because Kraus was so difficult, he suggested that we form small groups to study the essays outside of class.
My group consisted of two other people my own age—a nice, lost boy named Stefan, a tart-tongued and relatively conscientious girl named Ursula—and Axel, a classic, burly, beer-faced leftist ten years older than we were.
At our first meeting I confessed that it took me half an hour to read one page of Kraus’s prose, and that I hadn’t quite finished reading the Heine essay.
Ursula and Stefan were eager to sympathize—they didn’t do better than five pages an hour themselves.
Axel sat shaking his head, lamely leafing through his pages, which he obviously hadn’t even looked at, and tentatively muttering random phrases of Marxist jargon, hoping to hear from us that maybe one of them applied to Kraus.
Like a big bear, he was sort of adorably puzzled and grizzled to look at, but ferally selfish underneath.
I loved Ursula for being unable not to laugh at him.
(“He’s in his twentieth semester,” she remarked to me later, “and there’s not a trace of the first nineteen.”) She and Stefan were the first and last German students I became even halfway friends with in two years in Germany; I actually went out drinking with them once or twice before I returned to the States.
And the study group was a success.
Ursula and I managed to work out some of what Kraus meant by satire, with Stefan neither helping nor hindering us, his eyes always soulful.
Axel disappeared after our second meeting, but I continued to see him at the seminar, because absolutely nothing got done in the seminar; he felt more comfortable there.
The sessions went like this: Hindemith began by calling our attention to a pregnant line in one of the Grumbler-Optimist dialogues; somebody raised a point of procedure; the point of procedure was furiously debated for twenty minutes; Hindemith redirected us to the text; somebody else asked a totally wrongheaded and irrelevant question (e.g., “Was Kraus in contact with Rosa Luxemburg?”); and the remainder of the class was spent discussing politics.
Halfway through the semester, I stopped bothering to attend.
I’d already signed up to present a paper on the last day of class, and I could work on the paper at home.
The Last Days of Mankind
is the strangest great play ever written.
At first glance, it can be mistaken for postmodern, since the bulk of its 793 pages consists of
quotation
; it’s unabashedly a play about language.
Kraus maintained that, with the exception of the Grumbler-Optimist scenes and the verse fantasias, every line spoken by its several hundred characters was something he had personally heard or read during the First World War, and many of the characters bear the names of real-life personalities: Hofmannsthal appears in it, unflatteringly, as does the jingoistic war correspondent Alice Schalek, who was sort of the Judith Miller of her day.
But what makes the play modern, rather than postmodern, is the figure of the Grumbler, who in most respects is indistinguishable from Kraus himself.
His friend the Optimist keeps coming to him with fresh phrases of propaganda and journalism, trying to persuade him that the war is a glorious thing and is going well, and the Grumbler aphoristically demolishes every one of them.
He calls the Optimist his “cue bringer,” and indeed the Optimist is scarcely less subordinated to war-perverted language than Hofmannsthal and Schalek and the myriad other figures.
Only the Grumbler comes across as fully human.
His coordinating subjectivity is too central to be postmodern.
In my paper I tried to make sense of two strange moments late in the play.
In the first, the Optimist asks the Grumbler what “heroic renown” might mean, and the Grumbler shows him a pair of clippings.
One is a newspaper account of some veterans of a battle on the Eastern Front being paraded around a Viennese theater and applauded as a prelude to “a production of Eysler’s
The Woman-Eater
, with Fritz Werner and Betty Myra in their familiar starring roles.”
The other clipping is a description of a product for peddlers to sell to families of soldiers killed in action, a grotesquely kitschy framed poster in which a photo of the dead man can be inserted, “so elegant and moving that it will be desired by rich and poor alike,” with a list of “prices for distributors.”
The Optimist, aghast, says the clippings can’t be real.
He begs the Grumbler to say that he’s invented them, and the Grumbler
shakes his hand
and says, “I thank you.
They are by me.”
The other moment, related in theme, is the conclusion of the Grumbler’s final monologue, delivered from his writing desk, where he’s reading from a manuscript: