Authors: Karl Kraus
“Why is he looking at me like that?”—“She’s in the service of my future mistress, I’m in the service of her future master, I just toss that out, as various consequentialities could arise from it.”—“Time will tell.”
And if the aim is to demonstrate, in passages of Nestroyan dialogue, his accelerated method of psychology, where does a scene like this one between a cobbler and a servant stand:
“Congratulations on the secret jackpot, or whatever it was, but honestly, I was flabbergasted.”—“So was the innkeeper, no less!
He made an even stupider face than you.
I bet you I could be into him for ten francs now and he wouldn’t dare say anything … Yessiree, to ask for change from a ducat, it arouses respect.”—“Strange!
(
aside
) But suspicions, too … Our master has disappeared.
A ducat comes to light among the proletariat … Hm … You’re a cobbler?”—“So they say.”—“And I suppose you made good on a long shot?”—“Oh, you’re probably wondering how an honest cobbler came by a ducat?”—“Well, it is extraordinary … I mean, that is to say, interesting…”—“As a stranger, it’s actually none of your business … but, no, to me, anybody I meet in an inn is a kindred soul.
(
Shaking his hand)
You shall know everything.”—(
In inquisitive suspense
) “Well, so?”—“You see, the thing is, there’s an incident at the bottom of this … a fundamentally horrible incident that no man on earth may ever learn of, and consequently not you, either.”—“Yes, but…”—“So show yourself worthy of my trust and probe no further!”
Such values are lost and forgotten.
As everywhere in art, and above all in theater, scarcity of time has accustomed audiences to ponderousness.
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Only this would enable the intellect, weary from business, to procure those further pleasures that it has so long regarded as the task of dramatic high art to provide: getting acquainted with the latest advances in psychology, a psychology that is only psychrology,
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the science of coming to terms with mysteries in a rational way, bored amid excitement by instructors, dying amid beauty of boredom, from the French rule
de tri
to the Nordic integral equation.
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No theatergoer managing to go to bed without the necessary knotty problem.
And meanwhile naturalism, which not only met the psychological requirements but satisfied other demands for home use by calling things by their proper names, exhaustively, with nothing left out, while fate hung on the wall like a pendulum clock keeping perfect time.
All of this so thoroughly and at such length, until the vengeance of the fettered bourgeois imagination finally vented itself in the psychological operetta.
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In the most out-of-the-way corner of a Nestroyan farce there is more expert feeling for a scene and a better view into the stage-flies of higher worlds than in the repertoire of a German decade.
Hauptmann and Wedekind stand as poets, like the pre-Nestroyan Raimund, above considerations of theatrical utility.
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The influence of Anzengruber and his successors is detached at its own risk from the saving grace of dialect.
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Nestroy’s dialect is an artistic tool, not a crutch.
You can’t translate his language, but you could reduce the authors of folk plays to their scene value in Standard German.
Only a literary historian is capable of discerning an advance over Nestroy in this.
But the idea that this man, even if his exploitation for the meaner purposes of theatrical pleasure were to meet with ingratitude, can be so much as mentioned as an intellectual personality in the company of those very things that have Hand and Heart or Faith and Home
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onstage, would be a joke that humorlessness should not permit itself with impunity.
There are words on every page of Nestroy that burst open the tomb into which estrangement from art has thrown him, and that go for the throats of the gravediggers.
Full of datedness, an ongoing protest against the people who are up to date.
A Forty-Eighter’s
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word-barricades against the reign of banality; trains of thought whose action wordplay renders inoffensive to the seriousness of life, the better to outwit it.
A lowly genre, as far beneath a historian’s dignity as an earthquake.
But what if the joke sensed that it’s intolerable to dignity—that it so fooled dignity in advance that dignity is right to feel insulted.
Can you imagine that the professionals of the Ideal would let a phenomenon like Nestroy pass without leaving behind a visible expression of their terror?
The self-advertisements of Theodor Vischer, Laube, Kuh, and those other concerned dignitaries
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who came out for Nestroy’s hundredth birthday are as understandable as the judgmental politics of Hebbel, who rejects Nestroy after Nestroy’s wit has grabbed him by his tragic roots, extols Herr Saphir, from whom less painful attacks were to be expected, and also, of course, hates Jean Paul and loves Heine.
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Speidel’s courageous insights interrupt the parade of those who, by inclination or for decency’s sake, had to misread Nestroy.
What could be more natural than the resistance of the keepers of the sacred fire to a spirit who kindles it everywhere?
A spirit like this couldn’t help having every wind and every worthy of the times against him.
He ran into refinement above and banality below.
An author who in highly political times busies himself with human lowlinesses, a Carltheater actor whose reflections rule out attending the Concordia Ball.
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He orchestrated the horseplay of the sexes with perceptions and gestures that the warehouse managers of life had to cast, in revenge, as obscenities, and in social matters he never revealed loyalties, only personality.
Yes, he took up the profession of politics—the way a constable takes up a pickpocket.
And it wasn’t the absurdities within politics that attracted his attention, it was the absurdity of politics.
He was a thinker, and so he could think neither liberally nor anti-liberally.
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And the suspicion of anti-liberal convictions may well be more likely to arise where thought transcends the region in which spiritual salvation depends on this kind of evaluation, and where thought turns into joke because it had to get past it.
How bewilderingly unprincipled art is: the satirist revealed it in his ability to set off words that exploded the seeming tendency of his plots, leaving the historian uncertain about what to take more seriously, the praised revolution or the ridiculed yokel, the mockery of someone’s fear of the Devil or a fanatical confession of faith.
But even the historian can sense that the satirist opposed the affliction of humanity by intellectual sham values, and has no better defense than to explain that Nestroy was afraid of the police.
Liberals are forever calling in the police to accuse artists of cowardice.
So little does the artist take sides, however, that he sides with the lie of tradition against the truth of the swindle.
Nestroy knows where the danger is.
He recognizes that knowing means believing nothing.
He can already hear the ravens of freedom, which are black with printer’s ink.
The imposing sounds of education have already come clattering into his prayers.
How open his ears are to the argot whereby jurisprudence browbeats justice!
How well he teases out the terminological pretensions with which empty disciplines fill themselves for a knowledge-trusting human race.
And instead of blaming religion for priests, he prefers to blame the Enlightenment for journalists and Progress for the scientific paper pushers.
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Just listen to the gibberish spouted by the comet-cobbler in
Lumpazivagabundus
.
After a matchless glance with which he sizes up a skeptical carpentress:
“She don’t believe in the comet, she’s in for an eye-opener…”
he continues:
“I’ve had the thing figured out for quite a while now.
The astral fire of the solar ring in the golden number of Urion has left the constellation of the planetary system in the universe of parallaxes and landed, by means of fixed-star quadrants, in the ellipse of the ecliptic; in consequence, according to the diagonals of approximation of the perpendicular rings, the next comet will have to smash into the earth.
My calculations are as clear as shoe polish…”
And sound as plausible as if Nestroy had studied the problem of the “
Grubenhund”
at its journalistic source.
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The sentence, just as it is, eighty years later, when the astronomers again personally came hither in a comet’s stead, could have been printed in the
Neue Freie Presse
.
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I also reserve the right to send it in sometime.
But even beyond this kind of applicability in urgent cases, Nestroy won’t become obsolete.
For he took such accurate note of human nature’s weakness that posterity could feel observed by him, too, if it hadn’t grown a thick skin in the meantime.
No wisdom can get through to it, but it has itself tattooed with enlightenment.
And thus it considers itself more beautiful than the
Vormärz
.
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But since enlightenment comes off with soap, lies have to help out.
This present day of ours never ventures out without a protective guard of historians to club down memory for it.
What it most wants to hear is that the
Vormärz
compares to it like a candle hawker to an electricity company.
Scientific truth would be better served, however, if the present day were told that the
Vormärz
is the light and the present day enlightenment.
Among the dogmas of its presuppositionlessness is the belief that art indeed used to be gay but life is serious now.
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And our times manage to be vain about even this.
For, supposedly, in the theatrical season that constitutes the first half of the nineteenth century, people were interested solely in the affair of Demoiselle Palpiti
vulgo
Tichatschek, whereas now they’re generally enthusiastic about the affair of Professor Wahrmund and only occasionally about the Treumann affair.
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If this is how things stand, long live the
Vormärz
!
In the age of absolutism, passion for theater was an outgrowth of the artistic feeling aroused by political suppression.
In times of universal suffrage, theater gossip is the residue of a culture impoverished by political freedom.
Comparing our notorious intellectual life to that of the
Vormärz
is such an unparalleled affront to the
Vormärz
that only the moral degeneracy left behind by fifty thousand performances of
The Merry Widow
can excuse the excess.
The grand press alone has the right to look down with contempt on the little coffeehouse that used to spread, by laughably inadequate means, the gossip that people in those days couldn’t live without because politics were forbidden, while today people can’t live without it because politics are allowed.
One decade of phraseological enslavement has supplied people’s imaginations with more stage-prop rubbish than a century of absolutist tyranny, with the important difference that intellectual productivity was furthered by prohibitions to the same degree that it’s now being crippled by the editorial page.
But one shouldn’t imagine that people let themselves be marched off from the theater into politics so directly.
The path of permissible play leads through pinochle.
This the liberal educators must concede.
How the rhetoric of Progress slips up and speaks the truth can be seen in the delicious comment of a moral historian from the eighties who rejects the roast-chicken era and serves up the fresh-baked seriousness of life as follows:
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Times have changed since the days of Bäuerle, Meisl and Gleich, and although the old guard of unalloyed Viennese, the respectable families, may still scratch the theatrical itch that they inherited from “Grammerstädter, Biz, Hartriegel and Schwenninger” to the extent that they are wont never to miss a premiere at the Royal Temple of the Muses or a revival of
Beiden Grasel
at the Josefstadt, the main force of their compatriots has long since been diverted from the road to the theater by the most various of enticements, and devotes its free time to a game of Tapper, a meal at the local vineyard, or a production by a folksinging company that’s currently
en vogue
—times and people have changed.
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