Authors: Karl Kraus
Later on, life became even more serious, there came the issues, the
Gschnas
parties,
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the geological discoveries, the American tour of the men’s glee club, and it will be important for even later times to learn: it was not in the
Vormärz
that the following announcement appeared in Viennese newspapers:
Yesterday’s competition at the “Dumb Fellow” saw the first prize go to Fräulein Luise Kemtner, sister of the well-known Hernals innkeeper Koncel, for the smallest foot (19½), and to Herr Moritz Mayer for the largest bald spot.
Prizes will be awarded today for the narrowest lady’s waist and the biggest nose.
This is what Vienna looks like in 1912.
Reality is a meaningless exaggeration of all the details that satire left behind fifty years ago.
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But the nose is even bigger, the fellow is even dumber where he believes that he’s progressed, and the contest for the largest bald spot is the image of a justice that recognizes true merit and bestows the Bauernfeld Prize.
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One glance into the new world as it’s manifested in one issue of the local roundup, one breath of this godless air of omniscience and omnipresence, will force the reproachful question: What does Nestroy have against his contemporaries?
Truly, he’s ahead of himself.
As if anticipating, he attacks his small environs with an asperity worthy of a later cause.
He’s already coming into his satirical inheritance.
Dawn is already breaking, here and there, on his gentle scenes, and he scents putrefaction in the morning air.
He sees all those things coming up that won’t come up in order to be present, but will be present in order to climb.
With what fervor he would have jumped on them if he’d found them fifty years later!
The coziness that tolerates this kind of expansion, accommodates this kind of tourist trade, reveals its inner fraudulence in this kind of blending: what a caricature he would have made of the helpless malice of this innocent, cross-eyed face!
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The farce of counterfeit authenticity cozying up to grand trends, rather than falling in line with them, has followed him like an epilogue; the all-blanketing haze of issues, which the times impose on themselves to while away eternity, smokes above his grave.
He turned his mankind out of its little garden of paradise, but he doesn’t know yet how it will behave itself outside.
He turns back in the face of a posterity that disavows the values of the Spirit, he doesn’t live to see the respectless intelligence that knows that technology is more important than beauty and doesn’t know that technology is at most a way to beauty, and that there can be no thanks at the destination, and that the ends are the means of forgetting the means.
He can’t yet see that a time will come where girls take it like a man and their banished sexuality seeks refuge in men to revenge itself on nature.
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Where talent wages a smear campaign against character, and education forgets its good upbringing.
Where standards are universally raised and no one meets them.
Where everyone has individuality and everyone the same, and hysteria is the glue that holds together the social order.
But of all the issues that came after him—issues indispensable to mankind since it lost its legends—he did live to see politics.
He was there when the noise got so loud that it raised the dead, which is always a signal that it’s time for the Spirit to go home to bed.
This then produces a posterity that can’t be toured in even fifty years.
The satirist could seize the great opportunity, but it no longer grasps him.
What lives on is misunderstanding.
Thanks to its artistic insensibility, Nestroy’s posterity does the same thing as his contemporaries, who were in material agreement with him: the latter took him for a topical jokester, while his posterity says he’s obsolete.
He hits posterity and so it doesn’t recognize him.
Satire lives between errors, between the one that’s too close to it and the one that it’s too far from.
Art is what outlasts its subject matter.
But the test of art becomes the test of times as well, and if past times in their succession always managed to experience art in their remoteness from its subject matter, these times of ours experience remoteness from art and hold the subject matter in their hands.
For them, anything that isn’t telegraphed is over with.
Their reporters replace their imagination.
Because times that can’t hear language can judge only information value.
They can still laugh at jokes, if they were personally party to the occasion.
How are they, whose memory extends no further than their digestion, supposed to make the leap into anything that isn’t explained to them directly?
Applying the mind to things that people no longer remember upsets their digestion.
They grasp only with their hands.
And machines make even hands unnecessary.
The organs of these times oppose the calling of all art, which is to enter into the understanding of those who live afterward.
There no longer are any people who live afterward, there are only people who live, who express enormous satisfaction that they do, that they live in a present that sees to its own news and conceals nothing from the future.
Joyful as the morning paper, they crow upon the civilized dunghill that it’s no longer the concern of art to shape into a world.
They have their own talent.
If you’re a villain you don’t need honor, if you’re a coward you don’t need to be afraid, and if you have money you don’t need to have respect.
Nothing is allowed to survive, immortality is what’s outlived itself.
Things stick where they lie.
Freaks with deformities balance out good fortune, because they can claim that heroes were hermaphrodites.
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Herr Bernhard Shaw guarantees the superfluity of all that might prove useful between being awake and sleeping.
To the irony of his and all shallow minds no depth is unfathomable, to the haughtiness of his and all flat minds no heights are unattainable.
There’s earthly laughter everywhere.
Satire, however, has the answer to such laughter.
For it’s the art that, more than any other art, outlives itself, and this means the dead times, too.
The harder the material, the greater the attack.
The more desperate the struggle, the stronger the art.
The satiric artist stands at the end of a development that renounces art.
He is its product and its hopeless antithesis.
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He organizes the Spirit’s flight from mankind, he is the rear guard.
After him, the deluge.
In the fifty years since Nestroy’s death, his spirit has experienced things that encourage it to go on living.
It stands wedged in between the paunches of every profession, delivers monologues, and laughs metaphysically.
A
FTERWORD TO
“H
EINE AND THE
C
ONSEQUENCES
”
The deepest confirmation of what was thought in this essay and accomplished by it is what happened to it: it found no readers.
A printed thing that’s simultaneously a written thing finds none.
Though it may have every outward merit in its favor—content that’s accessible and remains agreeable even under hostile scrutiny, a pleasing format, and even the lowest price
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—the public isn’t fooled, it has the keenest nose against art, and even more surely than it knows its way to kitsch, it steers clear of value.
Today only the novel, the work of language outside of language, which even in its most perfect form grants common sense some kind of hold and hope, can earn its author a living.
Otherwise the people whose words to the reader abide with thought are in an endlessly difficult position compared with those who deceive him with words.
He believes the latter immediately, the former only after a hundred years.
And no earthly tear from eyes that see life buried by death will shorten the waiting period.
Nothing helps.
An age first has to rot past stinking to make the people who are what they can do as beloved as these people here, who can do what they are not.
Except that this Today carries the particular curse of doubt: whether the head that survives the machine will also survive its consequences.
Never before was the road from art to audience so long; but there has also never existed such an artificial hybrid,
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a thing that writes of its own accord and reads of its own accord, so that, indeed, they all can write and all can understand, and purely social accident determines who, among this horde of educated Huns who progress against the Spirit, emerges as writer and who as reader.
The sole ability that they hold in honor as a trait inherited from nature: regurgitating what they’ve eaten seems welcome to them in the intellectual realm, as a trick through which it might be possible to unite two functions in one person, and it’s only because there are businesses more profitable than writing that so many of them have restrained themselves so far and satisfy themselves with eating what the others have regurgitated.
Just as the same person is duplicated at a table of tavern regulars, a cellist, a lawyer, a philosopher, a horse trader, and a painter who are all of one mind and distinguishable to the waiter only by their trades: there’s no difference between author and reader.
There’s only one person now, and that’s the feuilletonist.
Art backs away from him like a glacier from an alpine hotel guest.
There was a time, the guide boasts, when you could put your hands on it.
If a reader today can put his hands on a work, the work must have a bad side.
The publisher of this magazine is well aware that it owes its reputation mainly to a sensibility that doesn’t shrink from some excellent novelist merely because he’s also rumored to be an artist.
He can confidently exploit the indulgence.
The publisher of
Die Fackel
not infrequently has the feeling that he’s freeloading on it.
It would be retracted irrevocably should his readers ever discover in what a state of insanity such witty happenstances came to be written, on what powers of self-annihilation such self-assurance lives, and how many hundredweight of suffering the lightest pen can carry.
And how gloomy the thing that brightens the idler’s day.
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Their laughter, which doesn’t reach as far as my wit, would die in their mouths.
If they could see that the petty material directly in front of them is just a shabby remnant of a thing they cannot touch, they would finally go away.
Among those who flatter themselves that they’re my victims, I am not loved; but the people who look on with schadenfreude still give me far more credit than I deserve.
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Given that
Die Fackel
finds itself in so many wrong hands: if something I’ve written proceeds to venture into other print, few people will reach for it.
With a collection of satires or aphorisms, this would be nothing to complain about.
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Things of that sort are content to find the rare reader for whom textual alteration signifies new work.
But the essay “Heine and the Consequences,” which came to the book publisher as a manuscript, has made it clear that there no longer are any readers besides these few.
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And it, of all texts, can’t help feeling pained by this discovery.
For its wish is to create readers, and it can’t succeed at this unless it finds readers.
It enacts the misery of German-language letters, and it isn’t content to make itself the demonstration of its own truth.
And so it treads the path of remorse, which leads from the book back into the magazine; and would that even this exigency might please it, as proof of the perversity of the business of the Spirit in our times.
Here, in familiar environs, it will at least make the attempt to speak to more deaf ears than are to be had in the greater German public.
Because it’s not to be thought that they were simply deaf to the subject about which they were being addressed.
They’re still happy to hear about Heine, even if they know not what it means.
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If the essay merely rejected the living value of his art, it would surely say nothing new to that contemporary sensibility that doesn’t even let itself be fooled by the collusions of the commentariat.
It would surely sooner be brought around to begging for a Heine monument than to a reading of his books.
And the hate that developed there, where not love but mere intellectual hypocrisy stands watch over the grave, would be greeted with some bitterness, to be sure, but not with any general interest.
This text, meanwhile, as far removed from suspicion of being unfair to Heine as from pretension of being fair to him, is not a literary essay.
It doesn’t exhaust the problem of Heine, but it does more than this.
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The most ridiculous reproach—that it holds Heine responsible as an individual culprit for his consequences—can’t touch it.
The people who pretend to defend him are defending themselves and revealing the true direction of the attack.
They should be held responsible for their existence, and the sputum that German intellectuals immediately coughed up is evidence that they feel themselves to be the responsible consequence.
There were individuals severely enough punished by their own poetry or too gravely insulted by their own polemics to have needed to respond in detail.
The few who were annoyed and the many who didn’t read have confirmed what was written.
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It wasn’t the danger of experiencing a desecration of Heine, but surely the fear of hearing the most hostile thing that can be said to this age of talents, that prevented the shout from having a stronger echo.
It wasn’t an evaluation of Heinean poesy, but a critique of a form of life in which everything uncreative has once and for all found its place and its brilliantly wretched accommodation, that was essayed here.
Not a denunciation of the invention of a pestilence, nor even of its importation, but a description of a spiritual condition on which ornaments fester.
This offended the pride of the bacteria carriers.
Here language is somehow released from everything it was obligated to outwit, and the power to acquire better content is celebrated.
Here this very language declares itself a stranger to the calligraphic fraud that admires the beauty mongers from Paris to Palermo for the verve with which, in art and in the hotel bill, a five-note is made into a niner.
This they didn’t understand, or recognized as dangerous enough that they didn’t want to hear it.
But so as not to chastise lack of ability, which is an honest effect of the gifted zeitgeist, more severely than the malice that social possibilities of every age have mobilized against thought, it must be said that a particular suspicion has compelled the author to ask the publisher Albert Langen for the reprint rights to this document.
The author’s well-known persecution mania, which has gone so far as to whisper to him that he hasn’t managed to make himself loved in twelve years’ time, led him to believe that the pamphlet was intentionally suppressed.
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He imagined that bugs flushed from Heine’s mattress-grave had sprung into action and settled in precisely on the road they know so well, the one that leads from thinking to commerce.
Fear of the press can move mountains and shutter halls; a hint is perhaps not even needed to make a Viennese bookseller tepid in marketing a dangerous pamphlet that generates only paltry profit.
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Especially not one of the ones who are even now still sore with
Die Fackel
about a civil action that its first printer brought against it.
Is it not, then, a most indicative Viennese circumstance that not only will the glances of the strolling city be spared the irritation of my books, but that copies of
Die Fackel
—one line of which contains more literature than the collective show windows of every downtown bookstore, and on whose least comma more torment and love are expended than on a library of luxury editions by Insel—are compelled to offer themselves amid cigars, lottery tickets, and tabloids to cover the costs of a never-rewarded and never-appreciated labor, while an entire chorus of humor-loving vermin considers the thing lucrative and gloats over the idea of the “double issue.”
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A magazine that avoids like leprosy the most legitimate sponsorship,
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that in its desire to earn its own living makes life harder for itself, and that is book-born like hardly a book in contemporary Germany, has to do without the support of its own industry, which ought to have an obligation to it, and to get a taste, in Austrian exile, of the sort of ignominy that throws the person condemned for a political offense into jail with the pickpockets.
The pack of liberals whose cosmic feeling is avarice, and whom you have to beg for the mercy of excusing you as crazy if you fail to make a profit: Does it have any idea how many pleasures it could buy with the money that my work of hate devours before it achieves the form with which a self-glorifier is never satisfied—because only then does it reveal to him the errors that the others don’t notice?
But here, in his archive, he takes what he likes and collects what is liked nowhere else.
Here nothing can disappoint him.
A work that instead of twenty editions didn’t see a second one: here nothing more can happen to it.
Its author, whose pleasure it is to reach into the spokes of his own wheel to shut down both himself and the machine when the tiniest point displeases him, will never again lend his assistance to an alien publishing concern.
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He will never again try to win a new audience.
For him,
Die Fackel
is not a platform but a haven.
Here the destiny of a work can move him only through the point of its completion, not through its dissemination.
What’s being lived here may be resurrected in a book.
But it’s recompense enough to be bound to one’s own wheel.
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