Reflections

by Walter Benjamin

  “I am,” Kraus has said, “perhaps the first instance of a writer who simultaneously writes and acts his writing,” and thus he shows his vanity its most legitimate place: in mime. His mimetic genius, imitating while it glosses, pulling faces in the midst of polemics, is festively unleashed in the readings of dramas whose authors do not for nothing occupy a peculiarly intermediate position: Shakespeare and Nestroy, dramatists and actors; Offenbach, composer and conductor. It is as if the demon in the man sought the tumultuous atmosphere of these dramas, shot through with all the lightning flashes of improvisation, because it alone offered him the thousand opportunities to break out, teasing, tormenting, threatening. In them his own voice tries out the abundance of personae inhabiting the performer—persona: that through which sound passes—and about his fingertips dart the gestures of the figures populating his voice. But in his polemics, too, mimesis plays a decisive role. He imitates his subjects in order to insert the crowbar of his hate into the finest joints of their posture. This quibbler, probing between syllables, digs out the grubs of humbug. The grubs of venality and garrulity, ignominy and bonhomie, childishness and covetousness, gluttony and dishonesty. Indeed, the exposure of inauthenticity—more difficult than that of wickedness—is here performed behavioristically. The quotations in Die Fackel are more than documentary proof: they are masks stripped off mimetically by the quoter. Admittedly, what emerges in just this connection is how closely the cruelty of the satirist is linked to the ambiguous modesty of the interpreter, which in his public readings is heightened beyond comprehension. To creep—so is termed, not without cause, the lowest kind of flattery; and Kraus creeps into those he impersonates, in order to annihilate them. Has courtesy here become the camouflage of hate, hate the camouflage of courtesy? However that may be, both have attained perfection, the Chinese pitch. “Torment,” of which there is so much talk in Kraus in such opaque allusions, here has its seat. His protests against letters, printed matter, documents are nothing but the defensive reaction of a man who is himself implicated. But what implicates him so deeply is more than the deeds and misdeeds; it is the language of his fellow men. His passion for imitating them is at the same time the expression of and the struggle against this implication, and also the cause and the result of that ever-watchful guilty conscience in which the demon has his habitat.

  The economy of his errors and weaknesses—a fantastic edifice, rather than the totality of his gifts—is so delicately and precisely organized that all outward confirmation only disrupts it. Well it may, if this man is to be certified as the “pattern of a harmoniously and perfectly formed human type,” if he is to appear—in a term as absurd stylistically as semantically—as a philanthropist, so that anyone listening to his “hardness” with “the ears of the soul” would find the reason for it in compassion. No! This incorruptible, piercing, resolute assurance does not spring from the noble poetic or humane disposition that his followers are so fond of attributing to him. How utterly banal, and at the same time how fundamentally wrong, is their derivation of his hatred from love, when it is obvious how much more elemental are the forces here at work: a humanity that is only an alternation of malice and sophistry, sophistry and malice, a nature that is the highest school of aversion to mankind and a pity that is alive only when mingled with vengeance. “Oh, had I only been left the choice / to carve the dog or the butcher, / I should have chosen.” Nothing is more perverse than to try to fashion him after the image of what he loves. Rightly, Kraus the “timeless world-disturber” has been confronted with the “eternal world-improver” on whom benign glances not infrequently fall.

  “When the age laid hands upon itself, he was the hands,” Brecht said. Few insights can stand beside this, and certainly not the comment of his friend Adolf Loos. “Kraus,” he declares, “stands on the frontier of a new age.” Alas, by no means. For he stands on the threshold of the Last Judgment. As in the most opulent examples of baroque altar painting, saints hard-pressed against the frame extend defensive hands toward the breathtakingly foreshortened extremities of the angels, the blessed, and the damned floating before them, so the whole of world history presses in on Kraus in the extremities of a single item of local news, a single phrase, a single advertisement. This is the inheritance that has come down to him from the sermon of Abraham a Sancta Clara. Thence the overwhelming immediacy, the ready wit of the wholly uncontemplative moment, and the inversion that allows his will only theoretical, his knowledge only practical expression. Kraus is no historic genius. He does not stand on the frontier of a new age. If he ever turns his back on creation, if he breaks off in lamentation, it is only to file a complaint at the Last Judgment.

  Nothing is understood about this man until it has been perceived that, of necessity and without exception, everything—language and fact—falls for him within the sphere of justice. All his fire-eating, sword-swallowing philology in the newspapers pursues justice just as much as language. It is to misunderstand his theory of language to see it as other than a contribution to the linguistic rules of court, the word of someone else in his mouth as other than a corpus delicti, and his own as other than a judging word. Kraus knows no system. Each thought has its own cell. But each cell can in an instant, and apparently almost without cause, become a chamber, a legal chamber over which language presides. It has been said of Kraus that he has to “suppress the Jewishness in himself,” even that he “travels the road from Jewishness to freedom”; nothing better refutes this than the fact that, for him, too, justice and language remain founded in each other. To worship the image of divine justice in language—even in the German language—that is the genuinely Jewish somersault by which he tries to break the spell of the demon. For this is the last official act of this zealot: to place legal system itself under accusation. And not in a petit-bourgeois revolt against the enslavement of the “free individual” by “dead formulas.” Still less in the posture of those radicals who storm paragraphs without ever for a moment having taken thought of justice. Kraus accuses the law in its substance, not in its effect. His charge is the betrayal of justice by law. More exactly, of the word by the concept, which derives its existence from the word: the premeditated murder of imagination, which dies of the absence of a single letter and for which, in his “Elegy on the Death of a Sound,” he has sung the most moving lament. For over jurisdiction, right-saying, stands orthography, right-spelling, and woe to the former if the latter should be wanting. Here, too, therefore, he confronts the press; indeed, in this charmed circle he holds his fondest rendezvous with the lemures. He has seen through law as have few others. If he nevertheless invokes it, he does so precisely because his own demon is drawn so powerfully by the abyss it represents. By the abyss that, not without reason, he finds most gaping where mind and sexuality meet—in the trial for sexual offenses—and has sounded in these famous words: “A sexual trial is the deliberate development from an individual to a general immorality, against which dark background the proven guilt of the accused stands out luminously.”

  Mind and sexuality move in this sphere with a solidarity whose law is ambiguity. The possession of demonic sexuality is that of the ego that, surrounded by sweet feminine mirages “such as the bitter earth does not harbor,” enjoys itself. And no different is the loveless and self-gratifying trope of possessed mind: the joke. Neither reaches its object, the ego women no more than the joke words. Decomposition has taken the place of procreation, stridency that of secrecy. Now, however, they shimmer in the most winsome nuances: in the repartee lust comes into its own, and in onanism, the joke. Kraus portrayed himself as hopelessly subjugated to the demon; in the pandemonium of the age he reserved for himself the most melancholy place in the icy wilderness lit by reflected flames. There he stands on the “Last Day of Mankind”—the “grumbler” who has described the preceding days. “I have taken the tragedy, which is divided into the scenes of decaying humanity, on myself, so that it might be heard by the spirit who takes pity on the victims, even though he may have renounc
ed for all time his connection with a human ear. May he receive the keynote of this age, the echo of my bloodstained madness, through which I share the guilt for these noises. May he accept it as redemption!”

  “I share the guilt. . . .” Because this has the ring of the manifestoes of an intelligentsia seeking to call to mind the memory of an epoch that seemed to be turning away from it, there is something to be said about this guilt feeling in which private and historical consciousness so vividly meet. This guilt will always lead to Expressionism, from which his mature work was nourished by roots that cracked open their soil. The slogans are well known—with what scorn did not Kraus himself register them: “geballt,” “gestuft,” “gesteilt” [clenched, stepped, steeped], stage sets, sentences, paintings were composed. Unmistakable—and the Expressionists themselves proclaim it—is the influence of early medieval miniatures on the world of their imagination. But anyone who examines their figures—for example, in the Vienna Genesis—is struck by something very mysterious, not only in their wide-open eyes, not only in the unfathomable folds of their garments, but also in their whole expression. As if falling sickness had overtaken them thus, in their running that is always precipitous, they lean toward one another. “Inclination” may be seen, before all else, as the deep human affect tremulously pervading the world of these miniatures, as it does the manifestoes of that generation of poets. But only one, as it were inwardly curved, aspect is revealed by the front of these figures. The same phenomenon appears quite different to someone who looks at their backs. These backs are piled—in the saints of the adorations, in the servants of the Gethsemane scene, in the witnesses of the entrance into Jerusalem—into terraces of human necks, of human shoulders that, really clenched in steep steps, lead less toward heaven than downward, to and even under the earth. It is impossible to find for their emotional impact an expression that ignores the fact that they could be climbed like heaped rocks or rough-hewn steps. Whatever powers may have fought out their spiritual battles on these shoulders, one of them, from our experience of the condition of the defeated masses immediately after the end of the war, we are able to call by its name. What finally remained of Expressionism, in which an originally human impulse was converted almost without residue into a fashion, was the experience and the name of that nameless power toward which the backs of people bent: guilt. “That an obedient mass is led into danger not by an unknown will but by an unknown guilt, makes them pitiable,” Kraus wrote as early as 1912. As a “grumbler” he participates in their lot in order to denounce them, and denounces them in order to participate. To meet them through sacrifice he one day threw himself into the arms of the Catholic Church.

  In those biting minuets that Kraus whistled to the chassé-croisé of Justitia and Venus, the leitmotif—that the Philistine knows nothing of love—is articulated with a sharpness and persistence that have a counterpart only in the corresponding attitude of décadence, in the proclamation of art for art’s sake. For it was precisely art for art’s sake, which for the decadent movement applies to love as well, that linked expertise as closely as possible to craftsmanship, to technique, and allowed poetry to shine at its brightest only against the foil of hack writing, as it made love stand out against perversion. “Penury can turn every man into a journalist, but not every woman into a prostitute.” In this formulation Kraus betrayed the false bottom of his polemic against journalism. It is much less the philanthropist, the enlightened friend of man and nature, who unleashed this implacable struggle, than the literary expert, artiste, indeed the dandy who has his forebear in Baudelaire. Only Baudelaire hated as Kraus did the satiety of healthy common sense, and the compromise that intellectuals made with it in order to find shelter in journalism. Journalism is betrayal of the literary life, of mind, of the demon. Idle chatter is its true substance, and every feuilleton poses anew the insoluble question of the relationship between the forces of stupidity and malice, whose expression is gossip. It is, fundamentally, the complete agreement of two forms of existence—life under the aegis of mere mind or of mere sexuality—in which is founded that solidarity of the man of letters with the whore to which Baudelaire’s existence is once again the most inviolable testimony. So Kraus can call by their name the laws of his own craft, entwined with those of sexuality, as he did in the Wall of China. The man “has wrestled a thousand times with the other, who perhaps does not live, but whose victory over him is certain. Not because he has superior qualities but because he is the other, the late-comer, who brings the woman the joy of variety and will triumph as the last in the sequence. But they rub it from her brow like a bad dream, and want to be the first.” Now if language—this we read between the lines—is a woman, how far is the author removed, by an unerring instinct, from those who hasten to be the first with her, how multifariously he forms his thought, which incites her with intuition, rather than slake her with knowledge, how he lets hatred, contempt, malice ensnare one another, how he slows his step and seeks the detour of followership, in order finally to end her joy in variety with the last thrust that Jack holds in readiness for Lulu.

  The life of letters is existence under the aegis of mere mind, as prostitution is existence under the aegis of mere sexuality. The demon, however, who leads the whore to the street exiles the man of letters to the courtroom. This is therefore for Kraus the forum that it has always been for the great journalist—for a Carrel, a Paul-Louis Courier, a Lassalle. Evasion of the genuine and demonic function of mere mind, to be a disturber of the peace; abstention from attacking the whore from behind—Kraus sees this double omission as defining the journalist. Robert Scheu rightly perceived that for Kraus prostitution was a natural form, not a social deformation, of female sexuality. Yet it is only the entanglement of sexual with commercial intercourse that constitutes the character of prostitution. It is a natural phenomenon as much in terms of its natural economic aspect, as a manifestation of commodity exchange, as in terms of its natural sexuality. “Contempt for prostitution? / Harlots worse than thieves? / Learn this: not only is love paid, / but payment, too, wins love!” This ambiguity—this double nature as twofold naturalness—makes prostitution demonic. But Kraus “enlists with the power of nature.” That the sociological area never becomes transparent to him—no more in his attack on the press than in his defense of prostitution—is connected to this attachment to nature. That to him the fit state of man appears not as the destiny and fulfillment of nature liberated through revolutionary change, but as an element of nature per se, of an archaic nature without history, in its pristine, primeval state, throws uncertain, disquieting reflections even on his idea of freedom and of humanity. It is not removed from the realm of guilt that he has traversed from pole to pole: from mind to sexuality.

  In face of this reality, however, to which Kraus exposed himself more harrowingly than any other, the “pure mind” that his followers worship in the master’s activity is revealed as a worthless chimera. For this reason, none of the motives for his development is more important than the continuous curbing and checking of mind. By Night, he entitles the logbook of this control. For night is the mechanism by which mere mind is converted into mere sexuality, mere sexuality into mere mind, and where these two abstractions hostile to life find rest in recognizing each other. “I work day and night. So I have a lot of free time. To ask a picture in the room how it likes work, to ask the clock whether it is tired and the night how it has slept.” These questions are sacrificial gifts that he throws to the demon while working. His night, however, is not maternal, or a moonlit, romantic night: it is the hour between sleeping and waking, the night watch, the centerpiece of his threefold solitude: that of the coffeehouse where he is alone with his enemy, of the nocturnal room where he is alone with his demon, of the lecture hall where he is alone with his work.

  3. Monster

  Already the snow falls.

  —Words in Verse III

  Satire is the only legitimate form of regional art. This, however, was not what people meant by callin
g Kraus a Viennese satirist. Rather, they were attempting to shunt him for as long as possible into this siding where his work could be assimilated in the great store of literary consumer goods. The presentation of Kraus as a satirist can thus yield the deepest insight both into what he is and into his most melancholy caricature. For this reason, he was at pains from the first to distinguish the genuine satirist from the scribblers who make a trade of mockery and in their invectives have little more in mind than giving the public something to laugh about. In contrast, the great type of the satirist never had firmer ground under his feet than amid a generation about to board tanks and put on gas masks, a mankind that has run out of tears but not of laughter. In him civilization prepares to survive, if it must, and communicates with him in the true mystery of satire, which consists in the devouring of the adversary. The satirist is the figure in whom the cannibal was received into civilization. His recollection of his origin is not without filial piety, so that the proposal to eat people has become an essential constituent of his inspiration, from Swift’s pertinent project concerning the use of the children of the less wealthy classes, to Léon Bloy’s suggestion that landlords of insolvent lodgers be conceded a right to the sale of their flesh. In such directives the great satirists have taken the measure of the humanity of their fellow men. “Humanity, culture, and freedom are precious things that cannot be bought dearly enough with blood, understanding, and human dignity”—thus Kraus concludes the dispute between the cannibal and human rights. It should be compared to Marx’s treatment of the “Jewish question,” in order to judge how totally this playful reaction of 1909—the reaction against the classical ideal of humanity—was likely to become a confession of materialist humanism at the first opportunity. Admittedly, one would need to understand Die Fackel from the first number on literally word for word to predict that this aesthetically oriented journalism, without sacrificing or gaining a single motif, was destined to become the political prose of 1930. For that it had to thank its partner, the press, which disposed of humanity in the way to which Kraus alludes in these words: “Human rights are the fragile toy that grownups like to trample on and so will not give up.” Thus drawing the frontier between the private and public spheres, which in 1789 was supposed to inaugurate freedom, became a mockery. “Through the newspaper,” says Kierkegaard, “the distinction between public and private affairs is abolished in private-public prattle. . . .”