Authors: Karl Kraus
The deathbed poetry, parts of
Romancero
,
Lamentations
,
Lazarus
: here he no doubt had the best of all helpers in raising his form to the level of genuine figuration.
It took the experience of dying to make Heine a poet.
It was a dictate: sing, bird, or die.
Death is an even better helper than Paris; death in Paris, pain and homesickness, they do finally accomplish something authentic.
I hear the trot, the hooves beat near,
The dark rider comes to fetch me here—
He tears me away, from Mathilde I must part,
Oh, the thought will burst my heart!
This is a different poetry from the one whose success is proven in the account books.
For Heine’s influence derives from the
Book of Songs
, not the
Romancero
, and if you want to judge the accomplishments by the man, you have to open the former, not the latter.
Death concentrates, death clears away the trifling underworld-weariness
81
and lends pathos to the cynicism.
Heine’s witticisms, so often just the dissonance of an unlyrical perspective, produce a higher harmony here.
Compressed by its extinction, his wit finds more powerful fusions; and tasteless items such as “Get thee to a nunnery, dear child, or get thee a shave” become rarer.
82
The mot traditionally ascribed to him, “
Dieu me pardonnera, c’est son métier
,”
83
is perhaps, in its much-admired triteness, an invention of those who wanted Heine to remain true to his style to the end.
But it suits the whole not badly.
Both in belief and unbelief, Heine can’t rid himself of the imagery of commerce.
Love itself says to the god of songs that “it demands guarantees,” and the god asks how many kisses Love will advance him against his golden lyre.
And meanwhile Heine’s cynicism, this stale potpie of wit and woe, has become rather pleasing to the German palate, though the palate may not want to admit it.
Compared with Offenbach, in whose orchestra the thousand-year misery is ringed by a dance of eternal delight, this ridiculer of misery looks like a trained Asra next to a born Bluebeard—to the kind that kills when it loves.
84
… What does the lonely tear want?
85
What does a humor want which smiles through tears because both the strength to cry and the strength to laugh are lacking?
But the “brilliance of language” isn’t lacking, and it runs in the family.
And it’s uncanny how few people notice that it comes from chopped liver, and how many have spread it all over their household bread.
Their noses are stuffed, their eyes are blind, but their ears are wide open to every hit song.
86
And so, thanks to Heine, the feuilleton has evolved to the highest level of perfection.
There’s nothing to be done with an original, but copies can always be improved.
When the imitators of Heine began to fear that somebody would expose them, all they had to do was become forgers of Heine, and they could go into mass production under his name.
They take up a lot of space in the literature of Heine.
But the experts who succeeded in exposing the fraud aren’t expert enough to realize that to expose the thief is to have exposed the owner.
87
He himself broke into the house with a skeleton key, leaving the door open behind him.
He set a bad example for his successors.
He taught them the trick.
And the farther the trick spread, the more delicious it became.
Thus the pieties of journalism demand that every editorial masthead today include at least a bedbug from Heine’s “mattress grave.”
Every Sunday it creeps flatly through the columns and stinks the art out of our noses!
But to be tricked out of a real life in this way is entertaining to us.
In times that had time, art gave us one to resolve.
In times that have the
Times
, form and content are split apart for faster understanding.
Because we have no time, writers are obliged to say in many words what could have been succinctly put.
So Heine really is the forerunner of modern nervous systems, praised by artists who fail to notice that the philistines have tolerated him a lot better than he tolerated philistines.
For the philistines relent in their hatred of Heine when they take his poetry into account, while the artists take Heine’s hatred of philistines into account in order to rescue his personality.
And so, by means of a misunderstanding that never gets old, he vindicates the pretty coinage “cosmopolite,” in which the cosmos reconciled itself to politics.
Detlev von Liliencron had a merely provincial outlook.
But it seems to me that he was more cosmic in Schleswig-Holstein than Heine was in the cosmos.
In the end, the people who never came out of their province will go farther than the people who never came into one.
88
What attracted Nietzsche to Heine—he had delusions of smallness when, in
Ecce Homo
, he wrote that his and Heine’s names would go down together through the centuries—must have been that hatred of Germany which embraces every ally it can find.
But when you hold up the
lazzarone
as a cultural ideal alongside the German constable, there certainly seems to be nothing more German than such idealism, which takes a plagiarizing romanticism for something to be aspired to.
89
The intellectual problem of Heine, this refresher of German air, certainly should not be overlooked alongside the artistic problem of Heine: indeed, it runs alongside.
And yet here, once, some oxygen was let into the room of Germany, and after a momentary improvement it tainted the air.
That someone with nothing to say is better off saying it understandably: this perception was the relief for which Germany thanks its Heine after those difficult times when the people with something to say were all incomprehensible.
And this undeniable piece of social progress has been attributed to art, since Germans are unshakable in their opinion that language is the means of expression common to both writers and speakers.
With all due respect to Heine’s enlightening achievement, he wasn’t so great a satirist as to be deemed unworthy of a monument.
90
In fact, he was such a small satirist that the stupidity of his times has descended on posterity.
Granted, this posterity builds itself the monument that it refuses to give him.
But truly it also builds itself the one it wants for him.
And if it doesn’t follow through with its monument, it at least leaves its calling card on Heine’s grave and reassures itself of its piety in the newspaper.
As long as the secret balloting about his immortality continues, his immortality will continue, and when a nation of fraternity brothers has a problem, it won’t be making an end of it so soon.
But the cultural subcommittee is manned by the Karpeleses and the Bartelses, and whichever way the decision finally falls, it won’t prove anything for the Mind.
91
The squalid all-in-due-courseness of this debate, the perennial timeliness of antiquated perspectives, is the perfect emblem for a literary phenomenon in which nothing is eternal but the personality type, which runs through time from nowhere.
This type, who amazes his contemporaries by having more talent on their level than they do, has inflicted grievous damage on the art of language, which everyone who speaks believes he can understand.
92
We no longer recognize the personalities, and the personalities envy the technicians.
93
If Nietzsche admires Heine’s technique, then he is given the lie by every sentence he himself ever wrote.
Except one: “You have attained mastery when you neither err nor hesitate in the execution.”
94
The converse of this shallow insight is the artist’s business.
His achievement is scruples.
He seizes, but, after seizing, he hesitates.
Heine was a go-getter of the language; never did he cast his eyes down before her.
Here is how his credo reads: “The axiom that we may know the character of an author from his style is not unconditionally correct; it is applicable merely to that mass of authors who depend upon momentary inspirations to guide their pens, and who obey the word more than they command it.
With artistes, this axiom is inadmissible, for these are masters of the word, they manipulate it to whatever end they please, coin it according to their whim, write objectively, and their character does not betray itself in their style.”
And that’s what he was: a talent, because no character; except he confused the artistes with the journalists.
95
As for the mass of authors who obey the word, they are unfortunately very few.
These are the artists.
Talent is what the others have: for it is a character defect.
Here Heine utters his unconditional truth; he needs it against Börne.
But since he writes objectively and, as a master of the word, manipulates it to whatever end he pleases, the opposite suits hims against Platen.
In Platen, “unlike the true poet, the language has never become master”; he has, “rather, become a master in the language, or, rather, on the language, like a virtuoso on an instrument.”
Heine is objective.
Against Börne: “The deeds of an author consist in words.”
Against Platen: he calls his achievement “in words, a splendid deed”—“so entirely unfamiliar with the essence of poesy that he doesn’t even know that the word is a deed only for a rhetorician, whereas for a true poet the word is an event.”
Which was it for Heine?
Neither deed nor event but intention or accident.
Heine was a Moses who tapped his staff on the rocks of the German language.
But speed isn’t sorcery, the water didn’t flow from the rock, he simply brought it up with his other hand; and it was eau de cologne.
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Heine turned the miracle of linguistic creation into a magic act.
He achieved as much as can be achieved with language; greater still is what can be created
out
of language.
He could write a hundred pages, but he couldn’t shape the language of the hundred pages that weren’t written.
When Iphigenie
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begs for a kind parting word and the king says to her, “Farewell!”
it’s as though leave were being taken for the first time in the world, and a “Farewell!”
like this outweighs the
Book of Songs
and a hundred pages of Heine’s prose.
The mystery of the birth of the old word was foreign to him.
98
The language was at his command.
Yet never did she reduce him to silent ecstasy.
Never did her favor force him to his knees.
Never did he follow paths invisible to the profane reader’s eye, approaching the place where love first begins.
Oh, the marrow-burning rapture of experiences in language!
The danger of the word is the delight of thought.
What turned the corner there?
Not even seen and already loved!
I plunge into this adventure.
N
ESTROY
1
AND
P
OSTERITY
ON THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS DEATH
We cannot celebrate his memory the way a posterity ought to, by acknowledging a debt we’re called upon to honor, and so we want to celebrate his memory by confessing to a bankruptcy that dishonors us, we inhabitants of a time that has lost the capacity to
be
a posterity … How could the eternal Builder fail to learn from the experiences of this century?
For as long as there have been geniuses, they’ve been placed into a time like temporary tenants, while the plaster was still drying; then they moved out and left things cozier for humanity.
For as long as there have been engineers, however, the house has been getting less habitable.
God have mercy on the development!
Better that He not allow artists to be born than with the consolation that this future of ours will be better for their having lived before us.
This world!
Let it just try to feel like a posterity, and, at the insinuation that it owes its progress to a detour of the Mind, it will give out a laugh that seems to say: More Dentists Prefer Pepsodent.
A laugh based on an idea of Roosevelt’s and orchestrated by Bernhard
2
Shaw.
It’s the laugh that’s done with everything and can do whatever.
For the technicians have burned the bridges, and the future is: whatever follows automatically.
3
This velocity doesn’t realize that its achievement is important only in escaping itself.
Present in body, repellent in spirit, perfect just the way they are, these times of ours are hoping to be overtaken by the times ahead, and hoping that the children, spawned by the union of sport and machine and nourished by newspaper, will be able to laugh even better then.
There’s no scaring them; if a spirit comes along, the word is: we’ve already got everything we need.
Science is set up to guarantee their hermetic isolation from anything from the beyond.
Let art chase away their worries about which planet happens to be benefiting from the thoughts of the world anterior to them.
4
This thing that calls itself a world because it can tour itself in fifty days is finished as soon as it can do the math.
5
To look the question “What then?”
resolutely in the eye, it still has the confidence to reckon with whatever doesn’t add up.
It’s grateful to the authors who relieve it of the problem, whether by diversion or by dispute.
But it has to curse the one—living or dead—whom it encounters as admonisher or spoilsport between business and success.
And when cursing no longer suffices—because cursing implies reverence—it’s enough to forget.
And the brain has barely an inkling that the day of the great drought has dawned.
Then the last organ falls silent, but the last machine goes on humming until even it stands still, because its operator has forgotten the Word.
6
For the intellect didn’t understand that, in the absence of spirit, it could grow well enough within its own generation but would lose the ability to reproduce itself.
7
If two times two really is four, the way they say it is, it’s owing to the fact that Goethe wrote the poem “Stillness and Sea.”
But now people know the product of two times two so exactly that in a hundred years they won’t be able to figure it out.
Something that never before existed must have entered the world.
An infernal machine of humanity.
8
An invention for shattering the Koh-i-noor to make its light accessible to everyone who doesn’t have it.
9
For fifty years now it’s been running, the machine into which the Mind is put in the front to emerge at the rear as print, diluting, distributing, destroying.
The giver loses, the recipients are impoverished, and the middlemen make a living.
A hybrid thing has settled in to subvert the values of life by turning them against each other.
In the pestilential miasma of the intellect, art and mankind make their peace … A spirit who’s been dead for fifty years today, and who still isn’t alive, is the first victim of this festival of joy, about which reports by the column have appeared ever since.
How it happened that a spirit like this was buried:
10
it could only be the enormous content of his satirical thinking, and I believe he continues to create.
He, Johann Nestroy, cannot tolerate that everything he found intolerable remained in place.
Posterity repeats his text and doesn’t recognize him; it doesn’t laugh with him, it laughs against him, it refutes and confirms his satire through the undying nature of the subject matter.
11
Unlike Heine, whose wit agrees with the world, who touched it where it wanted to be tickled, and whom it could always handle—the world won’t vanquish Nestroy the way it did Heine.
It will do it the way the coward overcomes the strong man, by running away from him and getting a literary historian to spit on him.
People will be ungrateful to Heine, they’ll enforce the laws of fashion against him, they won’t wear him anymore.
But they’ll always say that he had wide horizons, that he was an emancipator, that he rubbed shoulders with statesmen and still had the presence of mind to write a love poem now and then.
Not so Nestroy.
No Kaddish will be said.
12
No Friedjung
13
will succeed in demonstrating that
he
had a political outlook, let alone the kind of outlook that turns a political outlook into an outlook in the first place.
What mattered to him?
So much, and therefore nothing of liberalism.
14
While the cobblers outside were fighting for the most ideal of wares, he was having his tailors sing lampoons.
15
He limited his partitioning of the world to small businessmen and landlords, to the up-and-coming and the down-and-out, to pensioners and unemployed porters.
But that it was the world, not the editorial page, that he partitioned like this; that his wit was forever taking the road from social standing to humanity: conventional wisdom leafs past a chapter as incomprehensible as that.
16
Flashes on a narrow horizon—the heavens opening over a grocery store—are not enlightening.
Nestroy’s thinking proceeded from social status into the world, Heine’s from the world into the state.
And that is more.
17
Nestroy remains a joker because his jokes, which shot from the workbench to the stars, came from the workbench and we know nothing of the stars.
An earthly politician says more to us than a cosmic buffoon.
And since what matters to
us
is increasing our stores of conventional wisdom, we don’t mind if some earthly buffoons occasionally make Nestroy into a politician and force him to speak the kind of liberal precinct-opinion without which we can no longer conceive of a dead satirist.
The
phraseurs
and
riseurs
are then happy to admit that he was a mockingbird and a cutup.
And nevertheless, he was only cutting them down and blowing off their Calabrian hats.
18
And nevertheless, to those who condescend to art and grant it free play between the horizons—that is, from the individual nullity to the social quantity—let it be said with considerable certainty: If art is not what they conceive and condone but instead is the stretch from something seen to something thought—the shortest link from the gutter to the Milky Way—then there has never been a runner under the German sky like Nestroy.
Never, it goes without saying, among those who brought the news, with laughing faces, that life is arranged in an ugly way.
19
We won’t deny credence to his message because it was a lampoon.
Not even because, in his rush, he also sang something for the listener; because, in his contempt for the needs of the audience, he satisfied them, so that his thoughts could soar unhindered.
Or because he swaddled his dynamite in cotton and blew up his world only after reinforcing its conviction that it was the best of all possible worlds, and because he laid on the soft soap of congeniality before he started slitting throats, and otherwise didn’t wish to inconvenience anyone.
Nor, not being interested in honoring truth before spirit,
20
will we think less of him because he often, with the carelessness of an original who has more important things on his mind, borrowed punch lines from stagehands.
The reproof that was leveled against Nestroy is sillier than any plotline he lifted from a French flunky, sillier than the printed look of any of those potpourris that he used to toss to the people, who, then as now, won’t give humor a free pass unless they’re also given their hardy-har-har, and who, in those days, weren’t convinced they’d got their money’s worth unless they went home with a cheer for the assembled wedding guests.
21
He chose the routine, which had been born as a routine, in order to conceal his substance, which could never be a routine.
That even the low theatrical effects here somehow contributed to the deeper meaning, by separating the audience from it—and that, again, there’s deeper meaning even in the fanfare with which the orchestra sends off philosophy—escapes the literary historians, who may well be capable of helping Nestroy to a political conviction, but not to the text that encompasses the immortal part of him.
22
He himself hadn’t bargained for this.
He wrote on the fly, but he didn’t know the flight would extend beyond the repertoire.
Although every Nestroyan line attests that he was capable of it, he didn’t have to withdraw into artistic self-discipline in the face of those who considered him nothing more than a humorist, and the milder jarring of his times denied his response the consciousness of its finality—that blessed incentive to seal revenge on the material in his enjoyment of form.
23
If he’d been born later, if he’d been born into these times of journalistic language fraud, he would have conscientiously repaid everything he owed to language.
Times that retard the intellectual tempo of the masses incite their satirical counterpart.
These times would have left him no time for as casual a prosecution of a bloody feud as the stage permits and insists on, and no orchestra would have been harmonious enough to resolve the dissonance between his nature and the world that grew up after it.
His essence was the joke that runs counter to the stage effect, the flat onceness that has to be satisfied with finding a mate for the joke’s material and which, in its rhythmic salvo, hits the target before the thought.
24
On the stage, where politeness toward the audience parades around in the negligee of language, Nestroy’s wit could only be coined in the currency of rhetoric, which, far removed from the actor’s tools of characterization, was something again only he could pull off.
25
Fragmented times would have driven his essence to concentrate itself in aphorism and glosses, and the world’s more varied screechings would have introduced new cadences to his dialectic in its penetration to the core of the apparatus.
26
In his satire, one particular rhythm above all suffices as a winding post for the threads of an observation that is truly of the spirit.
But sometimes a Nestroyan climax will look as if the terminologies of class feeling, perorating in succession, had arranged themselves as the steps of a Jacob’s ladder.
These lively exponents of their professional point of view are always standing with one foot in their trade and the other in philosophy, and if their face is always changing, it’s really just a mask, because they have Nestroy’s one and only tongue, which has unleashed this sage torrent of words.
Whatever else they may be, they are, above all, thinkers and speakers and are always in danger, on the public stage, of shortchanging their thought to save their breath.
This utterly language-infatuated humor, in which word and sense capture each other, embrace, and hold each other entwined to the point of inseparability, indeed to the point of indistinguishability, stands removed from anything that a stage scene can communicate and therefore falls into the prompter’s box, in a way comparable only to Shakespeare, from whom you likewise have to remove Shakespeare before you can produce a theatrical effect—unless the mission of a stage character who begins to drone and rave without regard to anything going on behind him would be assured of applause by the oddness of such behavior.
Odder yet, that the verbal and oral wit that he carries into his dialogue doesn’t impede his powers of characterization, of which there’s enough left over to outfit an entire dramatis personae and, even as it’s causing us to think, to fill the theater with concrete mood, gesture, suspense, and action.
He borrows foreign subject matter.