Authors: Karl Kraus
6
.
From Jewry to Romanticism, is what Kraus appears to be suggesting with the final phrase.
The blue flower is the mysterious central symbol of the unfinished novel
Heinrich von Ofterdingen
, by the German Romantic poet Novalis.
(It’s also the title of Penelope Fitzgerald’s wonderful novel about Novalis.) Chopped liver is—chopped liver.
We’ll get into the question of Kraus’s antisemitism by and by.
He was Jewish himself.
7
.
Paul Reitter comments: “The German word rendered here variously as ‘material,’ ‘content,’ and ‘subject matter’ is ‘
Stoff
,’ which looks unassuming but poses the same translation challenge as that storied source of frustration, ‘
Geist
.’
For just as ‘
Geist
’ can signify not simply ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’ but also a combination of those two ideas, ‘
Stoff
’ brings together the notions ‘content’ and ‘material’ and ‘subject matter,’ and this means that, much of the time, none of the terms will feel quite adequate.”
8
.
“In the spring of 1831 Heine moved from Hamburg to Paris, where he would spend nearly half his life—he died at fifty-eight, in 1856.
Clearly, Heine loved the place.
He loved the food; he loved the women; he loved being in an environment that was less restrictive than the one he had left.
And in various ways, the city embraced Heine back: it was in Paris, not Prussia, that Heine became a celebrity.
As he once quipped to a friend, if a fish were asked how it felt to be a fish in water, it would surely answer, ‘like Heine in Paris!’
But if Heine and Paris had a kind of chemistry, his Francophilia also had its programmatic side.
Through his writings as a foreign correspondent for German newspapers, as well as through such works as
The Romantic School
and
On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany
(both of which first appeared in French translation), Heine tried to act as a cultural mediator.
What he was hoping for—and going for, too—was a synthesis of opposites: of the life-affirming ‘sensualism’ he associated with the French and the intellectually rigorous culture of German ‘spiritualism.’
Needless to say, ‘Heine and the Consequences’ mocks Heine’s project while retaining elements of its logic.” —PR
9
.
“A phrase from Horace (
Ars Poetica
), ‘
utile dulci
’ signifies ‘the practical along with the enjoyable’ or ‘usefulness along with pleasure.’” —PR
10
.
This was probably not a sentence that Kraus had to worry about Hermann Bahr understanding.
It’s a pure distillation of Kraus’s hatred of the liberal press, and the import of its paradoxes is easier to grasp once you’ve read the entire paragraph.
11
.
“The Wiener Werkstätte—literally ‘Viennese Workshop’—was an artists’ association set up around an actual workshop, which was highly color-coordinated: everything in the metal department was painted red, everything in the bookbinding studio gray, everything in the carpentry shop blue, etc.
Founded in 1903 by the architect Josef Hoffmann and the painter Kolo Moser, the association aimed to act on the ideals of the English workshop movement.
Hoffmann and Moser wanted to produce beautiful handicrafts that people could use in their daily lives.
Accordingly, the Wiener Werkstätte turned away from elaborate
Jugendstil
ornamentation and promoted instead an ethos of ‘objectivity.’
As Hoffmann put it, not so stirringly, at the end of the Werkstätte’s manifesto, ‘We stand with both feet in the real world and need commissions.’
These came in spades.
The Sanatorium Purkersdorf, constructed in 1904–5, established the WW as a new force in the world of Viennese design.
Critics marveled at how the building’s flat roof and concrete and iron structure departed from the prevailing Viennese styles, and the WW soon attracted new talents to its stable—including, for a time, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka.
The latter was one of Kraus’s few allies among Viennese artists; he made his mark by designing some of the WW’s signature postcards.
For Kraus, though, the WW’s program of creating art objects that were simultaneously use objects was irredeemably wrongheaded.
“I think, by the way, that a lot of Germans would accept Kraus’s opposition of uncool Germanic solidity vs.
cool Romance frivolity.
It’s a live value (and stereotype) in German culture, especially these days.
The debt crisis in southern Europe—along with Germany’s role as the voice of fiscal responsibility—has given the dualism a new immediacy.
Der Spiegel
(the
Time
magazine of Germany) recently declared that the “old biases” about Greeks and Italians “have returned.”
But even back when the expense of rehabbing and detoxifying the former GDR was the big economic complaint, the dualism was palpable.
During my student years in Heidelberg, in the early 1990s, it was all around me.
Simply to be an American was to invite people to define Germanness; and if their pronouncements didn’t turn on a point about beer consumption, or weren’t of the soul-searching, Holocaust-related kind, they almost always contained elements of Kraus’s opposition.
Fellow students wanted me to recognize that French theory hadn’t caught on in Germany because French theorists preferred showmanship to the rigor demanded by the German intellectual tradition.
My boss at the Footlocker where I worked wanted me to appreciate the ‘typical’ functionality of the unfashionable German athletic gear that our foreign customers hardly ever bought (this was before the rebirth of Puma and Adidas as hipster attire).
The dentist I went to proudly informed me: ‘German fillings aren’t pretty, but they hold up.
That’s how we do things here.’
“It’s in a similar spirit that Germans have called for more uncoolness.
Some of them did in 2006, for example, when the German national soccer team broke with its World Cup traditions by putting hip coaches on the sidelines and playing with plenty of finesse.
The team was fun to watch, and it did well and won applause in the German media.
But for a lot of German soccer fans it just didn’t seem German enough.
Of course, many Germans worship coolness, and many Germans, such as Walter Benjamin and Joachim Löw (the current German national soccer coach), look cool even to the non-German world.
As we all know, moreover, Germans make cool things.
A genealogy of successfully stylized appliances might even trace the Mac’s heritage to a German culture of design—or rather, to the very fin de siècle culture of design whose advent Kraus is bemoaning in ‘Heine and the Consequences.’
For the fusing of art objects and use objects in Germany and Austria didn’t simply lead to ornamented use objects; it also resulted in sleek, practical, proto-Jobsian coffeemakers and candleholders (go from a Wiener Werkstätte exhibition to an Apple store, and you’ll see what I mean).
Nevertheless, German history poses a challenge for Germans who want to be cool.
The lingering sense that uncoolness is a national characteristic, and that other people (African Americans, Italians, etc.) are the naturally cool ones, makes for a self-defeating, self-reinforcing desperation in the pursuit of coolness.
Trying too hard to be cool is, after all, very uncool.” —PR
12
.
“The feuilleton is, as its name suggests, of French provenance.
Or, more precisely, the French journalist Julien Louis Geoffroy is the father of the form.
On January 18, 1800, Geoffroy, an editor at the Paris-based newspaper the
Journal des Débats
, started using the space left over on the paper’s advertising insert for his own cultural commentary: ‘feuilleton’ literally means ‘small sheet.’
The name stuck, and it continued to stick even after newspapers had begun to make the feuilleton part of their main body.
Today, most major German-language newspapers still offer a feuilleton section, where, as was the case in Kraus’s time, one finds reviews, essays on culture, short fiction, and travel reports, among other things.” —PR
13
.
“In 1848 Heine suffered a physical breakdown from which he never recovered.
He spent the last eight years of his life in bed—his ‘mattress grave,’ as he called it.
Although no medical evidence has ever indicated as much, Heine’s condition was once thought to have resulted from syphilis.
With the word
Franzosenkrankheit
, a popular term for syphilis, Kraus is alluding to—basically invoking—that idea.” —PR
A good analogue here might be the “disease” of French theory that became epidemic in American English departments after 1980 and engendered several decades of jargon-choked academic criticism.
Good French literary theory did for mediocre American scholars exactly what Kraus claims that Heine’s breezy, neologism-coining, Frenchified German did for the latter-day journalistic hacks of Vienna: it allowed you to feel and sound smart and au courant without actually having to think for yourself.
You simply turned the crank, and out came the conclusion that Western culture is imperialistic and barren.
French theory was, as Kraus would have said, the most agreeable of excuses for avoiding literature itself.
Mastering the theoretical jargon required some up-front effort, but applying it to defenseless literary texts was
easy
; and
easy
, with its connotation of sexual looseness, is what Kraus here is accusing the French language of being.
This is not to slight the insights of Saussure, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, or Bourdieu, which can be powerful tools of cultural analysis, nor to deny that when I packed my suitcases for Berlin, in the fall of 1981, the books I took along were, with the exception of
Gravity’s Rainbow
, all theory.
I had a dense volume of Lacan and another of Derrida, along with various Marxists and French-influenced American theorists.
The world needed criticizing, and literary theory was one of the ways I intended to do it.
My fiancée and I, separated by the Atlantic Ocean, proceeded to devote many pages of our early letters to practicing our theoryspeak.
These pages were fun to write and all but impossible to read.
What people used to say of Chinese takeout—that you were hungry again an hour after eating it—soon came to be true, for me, of literary theory.
Of the dozen books I schlepped over to Berlin,
Gravity’s Rainbow
was the only one I finished.
By the time my fiancée was planning her midwinter visit, I was giving her a long list of novels to bring along for me.
14
.
Flattery, trinkets, pliant, rabble: in German these are consecutive dictionary entries, and the German reader experiences a spasm of pleasure in the aptness of the sequence as Kraus here applies it.
Kraus loved linguistic accidents like this and was wont to ascribe deep significance to them.
When I was twenty-two, I did, too.
Nowadays they seem to me a little cheap.
15
.
Many of Kraus’s generalizations about women sound unattractive today.
In the years before the First World War, he consistently portrayed men as the intellectual achievers, women as the repositories of the human capacity for sensual pleasure.
About all that can be said in defense of this view is that Kraus’s style depended on extreme, pithy contrasts—“A woman’s sexual pleasure compares to a man’s like an epic to an epigram” is one his famous aphorisms—and that he meant it nicely.
Kraus liked and admired women, and his circle of friends included female intellectual achievers, the poet Else Lasker-Schüler among them, but for a long time his amorous experience was mainly with actresses.
His tone changed after he fell in love with the aristocrat Sidonie Nádherný, in 1913.
16
.
The German deeds and monuments Kraus has in mind are cultural—Goethe, Kant, Schopenhauer, Beethoven—and in 1910 it was fair to say that the Germans had outdone the French in lyric poetry, philosophy, and classical music.
If Kraus slights France’s superior novelistic achievement, ignoring Balzac and Stendhal and Flaubert (not to mention Proust, who was embarking on his grand project around this time), it’s because he didn’t care about novels.
Literature for Kraus was poetry and drama and epigram, not epic.
His favorite writers were Shakespeare and Goethe.