by Karl Kraus
“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.
17. “Heine began producing literary travel reportage—that is, feuilletonistic writing—about a decade before he relocated to Paris: his Letters from Berlin appeared in 1822. Kraus and his earliest readers would have been aware of this fact—almost everyone who read Kraus had read Heine—and it would have prompted at least some of Kraus’s readers to wonder about the status of his genealogy. Is Kraus really trying to tell the story of how the feuilleton got to Germany? Or is he doing something else?” —PR
Taking the bait of Prof. Reitter’s two pedagogically flavored questions, I’ll venture to say that Kraus is doing something else. The seeming weakness of the essay—a weakness advertised in its very title—is Kraus’s failure to “prove” that Heine is the cause of bad journalistic writing in Kraus’s Vienna. I think Reitter is right to suggest that at least some of Kraus’s readers recognized the title as an absurd claim, deliberately exaggerated for comic effect. What Kraus seems really to be doing is combining his agon with Heine with his critique of his journalistic competitors and manufacturing a make-believe genealogy: because there’s a kinship between the bad writing of Heine and that of his feuilletonistic successors, let’s make believe that there’s a direct inheritance. I’m put in mind of a rock-and-roll lyric by my beloved Mekons: “Call it intuition, call it luck / But we’re right in all that we distrust.” A satirist has to believe this in order to write with any force. Kraus distrusts Heine, he distrusts the feuilletonists, and his trust in his gut sweeps aside the need for fact-based literary-historical argument.
Reitter adds: “Kraus’s genealogy is also designed to provoke. It bears an egregious resemblance to a highly influential antisemitic narrative spread by Richard Wagner, among many others: Jewish journalists ruin German Kultur by importing into it decadent, fraudulent foreign models.”
18. “Kraus is playing with a proverb that was better known in his day, ‘hic Rhodus, hic salta’—here is Rhodes, here you should leap. This comes from an Aesop’s fable and has to do with an athlete who purports to have executed a mighty jump on Rhodes. But
since Heine himself had played with the same proverb in his poem “Plateniden,” Kraus is also playing on a quotation, which he’ll cite more directly later in the essay. The poem’s title is a mocking reference to Count von Platen, whose feud with Heine Kraus (and these footnotes) will also take up later.” —PR
19. “A lightly reworked line from one of Heine’s ballads, ‘The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar’ (‘Die Wallfahrt nach Kevlaar’). The original reads ‘many a person who otherwise didn’t have a single healthy finger can now play the viola.’” —PR
20. This sentence is very funny in German. I can’t translate it any better, and so I have to resort, dismally, to trying to explain the humor. Kraus is again going after easiness—here, the ease with which foreign travel lends spice to writing. The joke is, approximately, that the jungle is fascinating to us non–jungle dwellers, and that we mistake this fascination for talent on the writer’s part. Thus: people are very talented in the jungle. Kraus ridicules this phenomenon by way of contrasting himself with Heine, whose best-known prose was his travel writing and his dispatches from Paris. Although Kraus vacationed abroad and spent parts of the First World War in Switzerland, his life’s work was focused exclusively on Vienna, and it obviously galled him to hear foreign-traveling writers praised for their “talent.” It galled him so much that he turned against the word “talent” itself; later in the essay he’ll use it directly against Heine, connecting it with an absence of “character” (as Heine’s rival Ludwig Börne famously had). But here I think his venom is directed more at admirers of jungle writing than at its producers. The former are perpetrating bad literary values, the latter merely making the most of such talent as they have. There is, after all, a long tradition of writers venturing overseas for material. The funniest fictional example may be the young man Otto, who, in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, goes to Central America in quest of the character he natively lacks, but the inverse relationship between travel and character is found in real life, too. I’m thinking of Hemingway, whose style was as strong as his range of theme was narrow (would he actually have had anything to say if he’d been forced to stay at home?), and of Faulkner, a writer of real character whose best work began after he gave up his soldier dreams and his New Orleans flaneurship and returned to Mississippi. You can’t really fault Hemingway for being aware of his own limitations, but you can (and Kraus would) fault the culture for making him the face of twentieth-century American literature.
Hemingway’s star seems to have faded a little, so a takedown of him now wouldn’t be as incendiary as Kraus’s takedown of Heine, but he’s an interestingly parallel case, not only in the general outlines (both he and Heine were expats in Paris, obsessed with their literary reputations, and famously nasty to writers they perceived as rivals) but in their literary methods. Kraus’s critique of Heine’s writing—that it was fundamentally hack journalism, dressed up in an innovative and easily copied style—could apply to a lot of Hemingway’s work as well.
21. “Many of the Austrian feuilletonists whom Kraus detested spent part of their career in Paris. For example, Theodor Herzl did a stint as the Paris correspondent for Vienna’s paper of record (the Neue Freie Presse). And the hated Hermann Bahr had two formative years of work in Paris.
“The more direct reference is to a comedy by the Viennese author Ferdinand Raimund (The Alp King and the Misanthrope, 1828), in which there’s a servant named Habakuk who likes to mention that he spent two years in Paris, because, as he puts it, doing so gets him ‘a lot more respect.’
“The German version of ‘Heine and the Consequences’ in Schriften zur Literatur (1986), annotated by Christian Wagenknecht, helped me identify this and many other references. Wagenknecht’s annotations to ‘Nestroy and Posterity,’ in the same volume, proved to be as vital a resource. Wagenknecht has done a lot for Kraus readers, and it’s a pleasure to acknowledge my debt to his work.” —PR
22. “Johann Nestroy (1801–1862) was one of the few Austrian authors Kraus admired. Kraus explains just how Nestroy speaks to him in the essay ‘Nestroy and Posterity’ (1912), whose title marks it as the companion piece to ‘Heine and the Consequences.’ Kraus applauds Nestroy for sending up some of the very populist ideals that Heine advanced; and Kraus salutes, as well, the ‘verbal barricades’ Nestroy put in the way of the process that Heine supposedly did so much to promote: the trivialization of culture. Above all, Kraus underscores the value of Nestroy’s satirical techniques. Where Heine ‘loosened the corsets of the German language,’ Nestroy realized its deepest linguistic possibilities. Kraus’s compliment to Nestroy is that his is the first German satire in which ‘language forms thoughts about things.’ So, for Kraus, where Heine had consequences, his less famous and less celebrated contemporary Nestroy has relevance.” —PR
My translation of “Nestroy and Posterity”
23. “‘The going is good up to Stockerau, but from there on the journey is long.’ Nestroy is supposed to have said this about traveling from Vienna to America, and a version of the saying occurs in his play Der alte Mann mit der jungen Frau (The Old Man with the Young Woman, 1849). Later users of the epigram swapped out Stockerau and America for other place names, including the ones featured in Kraus’s reworking of it: St. Pölten—like Stockerau, an old town, just north of Vienna—and Paris. Kraus’s meaning appears to be that with the flair they’ve acquired in Paris, Austrian journalists can effortlessly dazzle readers in the provinces; however, once those journalists get close to Vienna, where feuilletonism is already rampant, the road to success becomes harder.” —PR
24. “With ‘local swindlers’ (Heimatsschwindler), Kraus is alluding to the regional writers (Heimatdichter) whose critical success he viewed as the culmination of acts of fraud. Much to his chagrin, one of them, Karl Schönherr, had just been decorated with the prestigious Bauernfeld Prize. Kraus’s suggestion, in any case, is that instead of trying to make it as feuilletonists in Vienna, some of the returning authors cash in along the way, becoming regional writers who manage to couple their Parisian confections with provincial flavors. The neologism Heimatsschwindler carries an echo of coupling driven by venality, because it’s also a play on the term Heiratsschwindler, or ‘marriage swindler.’ And since duplicitous marriage figures in Nestroy’s farce Liebesgeschichten und Heiratssachen (Love Stories and Marriage Matters, 1843), Heimatsschwindler serves as well to thicken the web of references to Nestroy’s work in this passage.” —PR
25. Who has time to read literature when there are so many blogs to keep up with, so many food fights to follow on Twitter?
26. “Kraus was hardly alone with his contempt for the feuilleton. Here, in fact, he’s creating a mash-up of two distinctive, if not always dissimilar, patterns of opposition to the form. One we might call a high modernist critique. For such figures as Robert Musil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and, above all, Kraus, the key problem with the feuilleton is that it objectifies what should be most subjective. With its air of intimacy, its emphasis on evoking the mood of its author, and its abundance of clever observations, the classic fin de siècle feuilleton seems like nothing other than a highly subjective response to the world. But read feuilletons closely, and you’ll see that they are the opposite of personal. Feuilletons are mass-produced, fast-moving, seriously addictive commodities that are overrunning the space in which actual literature is read, and undermining the ability of newspaper readers to develop their own imaginative responses to the news—or to anything else, for that matter. Thus, more or less, this thinking went. At the same time, the feuilleton was a favorite target among antisemitic propagandists, who tended to portray it as a debauched and debauching un-German genre that Jews—especially Heine—had managed to bring into German culture. Take the essay ‘The Sovereign Feuilleton,’ which was first published around 1890 and whose author, Heinrich von Treitschke, was an important figure in the early days of Germany’s antisemitic movement. Having elsewhere claimed that Heine ‘shows Germans just what se
parates them from the Jews,’ Treitschke sketches Heine imbibing the feuilletonistic spirit by sucking down ‘the foam of the French passion drink’ in a state of high ‘arousal.’ Treitschke then accuses Heine and the feuilleton of dislodging the core value of German letters: the prizing of content over form. Hence Theodor Lessing’s remark, in a feuilleton of 1929, that ‘the word feuilletonist’ is ‘the nastiest insult in the German language.’ Hence, too, the attempts by certain scholars to read ‘Heine and the Consequences’ as a ‘symptom’ of ‘Jewish self-hatred’ on Kraus’s part.” —PR
27. “Adolf Loos (1870–1933) was many things—for example, a polemicist, a music critic, and the cofounder of the short-lived culture magazine The Other. But he achieved much more success—and notoriety—in his actual métier: architecture. Finished in 1910, his starkly unornamented ‘Haus am Michaelerplatz,’ which stands opposite the Hofburg, repelled some members of the royal family so much that they avoided the doors that opened onto it. Loos was also known for being one of Kraus’s closest friends and for leading a complicated personal life: he contracted syphilis as a young man, married a series of much-younger women, wound up at the center of a pederasty scandal, and died a pauper. What Loos wasn’t was ‘American.’ However, he did spend a few formative years in the United States during the 1890s, and for the rest of his life he was quick to convey his enthusiasm for American culture, and especially for Anglo-American fashion trends. This is why Kraus describes Loos as he does. It’s hard to imagine, though, that Kraus means to frame Loos’s aesthetic outlook as somehow being American. Kraus himself felt quite differently about the United States, and yet, as he stresses, he shared Loos’s stance on the conflating of art objects and use objects. As Kraus puts it in an aphorism, ‘Adolf Loos and I—he literally and I verbally—have done nothing other than demonstrate that there’s a difference between an urn and a chamber pot, and that culture gets the space it needs to live from this difference.’” —PR
