by Karl Kraus
28. “A popular advertising slogan used to sell home furnishings and decor. Kraus lampooned it more than once.” —PR
29. “Kraus may well be naming a title here, in which case he would have in mind Der österreichische Volkswirt [The Austrian Economist], a newspaper that was founded in 1908 and that focused on economics and politics—its contributors would include such heavyweights as Josef Schumpeter and Friedrich von Hayek. Kraus could be implying that even newspapers without literary pretentions are afflicted by feuilletonism. Or he could simply be referencing the heading of the business insert in many Austrian papers: the ‘Volkswirt.’” —PR
30. “Henry van de Velde (1863–1957), a Belgian artist and theorist, was treated by the members of the Wiener Werkstätte as a source of inspiration. Some of the Werkstätte’s champions found him inspiring, too. I’m thinking, in particular, of Kraus’s nemesis Hermann Bahr, who once called van de Velde ‘the greatest master of interior design working today.’ Loos, by contrast, proposed that prisons looking to institute harsh new forms of punishment should simply hire van de Velde to decorate their cells. This was something van de Velde would be happy to do, Loos intimated with some justification. In the 1890s, van de Velde repeatedly enjoined artists to enter into the world of crafts and design, and ‘impress beauty on every aspect of our lives.’” —PR
31. I.e., presumably, by buying a morning and an evening paper. It’s worth keeping in mind that Kraus isn’t speaking metaphorically of “thieves.” Newspapers such as the Neue Freie Presse really were engaged in stock-market manipulation, smear campaigns, real-estate speculation, advertisements masquerading as editorial content, and Hearst-like (Fox News–like!) political machinations, all of it under a gauze of Viennese aestheticism.
“The founder of Die Presse, an important Viennese daily, was once quoted as saying that his goal was to own a paper in which every single line was paid for—i.e., bought by someone with the means and will to manipulate the news.” —PR
32. Kraus is making fun of the prevailing style of prewar Viennese impressionistic journalism, heavy on adjectives and larded with “deep thoughts,” but his line “Everything suits everything always” will ring true to any contemporary America Online subscriber who has suffered through the recent tabloidization of AOL’s home page, with its revolving lazy Susan of news items and of advertisements masquerading as news items. What’s great about these items, in a horrible way (or horrible in a great way), is that their format is rigidly fixed, regardless of their content. Thus we might find, consecutively,
New Missing Girl Clues Point to Horror
Sierra LaMar, 15, was last seen a month ago leaving her Northern California home to attend high school. She never made it.
Discovery suggests “worst case” scenario
and
Eyebrow-Raising Way She Lures Men
Actress Jennifer Love Hewitt says that she keeps a kitchen item stashed in her purse—and apparently, it’s a proven love potion.
Strange thing she dabs all over her body
If Kraus were alive today, he might reprint these two items side by side in Die Fackel, perhaps with a one-line gloss suggesting that the final hot link of the first be exchanged with that of the second, since the prurience of the two items is identical.
You could object that Kraus, whose favorvite targets were middlebrow, wouldn’t have bothered to satirize a tabloidized website. But today’s middlebrow American papers, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, are the products of a mid-twentieth-century ideal of journalistic objectivity. The best examples of the earnest triviality and subjective grandstanding that characterized Vienna’s liberal press are now found on cable TV and the Internet. And many of AOL’s hyperlinks lead to respectable news services; the grotesqueries are in the headlines, reflecting the commercial Internet’s number one imperative, which is to generate clicks. Considering how many respectable writers and newspapers (including the Times) are big fans of the Internet these days, it seems fair to take a Krausian look at the asininities that the click-imperative engenders—to imagine the fun Kraus might have had with AOL’s self-deconstructing juxtaposition of
Do You Know When Suri Was Born?
Tom and Katie’s fashionable tot was born at a time of year that signals “new beginnings”—and she isn’t the only famous offspring who was.
What she shares with Mariah Carey’s twins
with
Are You Too Obsessed with Celebs?
Sure, a juicy headline about pregnancy or divorce tends to spark the interests of many—but experts say it could be damaging.
Think you’re addicted? Click here
Where to begin with the glossing of this one? The tin-eared deployment of the word “tot”? The elegant one-line self-satirization of the commercial Internet? (Think you’re addicted? Click here!) The reverent invocation of “experts”? And obsessed is okay? Just don’t be “too” obsessed to function as a consumer? I suspect that Kraus, who believed that linguistic mistakes are never accidental—that bad morals and bad faith reveal themselves in bad usage—would have seized on the deliciously wrong word “interests,” which, being plural, can only mean “advantages” in this context. He might have supplied the missing word “corporate” before it, or suggested that “many” be replaced by “the privileged” or “the few.”
In the same spirit that inclined me to sympathize with the personified PC and hate the personified Mac, I remained loyal to AOL for thirteen years. But I finally read one too many items like:
Grandpa Found Guilty of Bizarre Abuse
An Indiana man forced his three grandsons on grueling hikes in the Grand Canyon, withheld water and choked and kicked them.
What he did with broccoli is vile
What is vile is for AOL to use the word “vile”: to invade my privacy by presuming that I would use the same word to describe what the grandfather did. And so I’ve quit AOL and signed on with hegemonic Gmail. Which at least, in messages to me like “It’s pretty quiet here. Time to expand your circles? Try one of these links,” is up-front about the fact that it’s invading my privacy. Up-front, too, about the norm by which it is deeming my circle of contacts insufficient.
Paul Reitter believes that AOL might indeed have interested Kraus. “This will sound a bit glib,” he says, “but for Kraus the one thing scarier than people reading the Neue Freie Presse may have been people not reading it. In 1904 he wrote that ‘next to the Jewish press, the antisemitic press has a lower degree of dangerousness, and thus doesn’t require such sharp monitoring, because of its greater degree of talentlessness.’ But the first real, illustrated, tabloidlike Viennese newspaper, the Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt, was also a recurring target in Die Fackel. Furthermore, when Vienna got an even more sensationalistic and, from our perspective, modern-seeming tabloid in 1923 (Die Stunde), Kraus paid a lot of attention to it, describing its new formula as ‘murder, sports, crossword puzzles.’ Its journalism was less duplicitous, but its greater rapacity and inanity were alarming. Kraus eventually went after that inanity and got into a feud with the paper’s publisher, Imre Békessy, who used vicious means against him, including retouched photographs on the front page of the paper. (Kraus in turn managed to dig up dirt on Békessy and drive him back to his native Hungary.) Kraus was always interested in how the news was disseminated, and the Internet would surely have commanded his attention, because that’s where the news is disseminated these days. And if Die Fackel can feel bloglike, the feuilleton resembles the blog even more closely. Indeed, with the intermingling of blogs and non-blog journalism in the most respected places (the online New Yorker, the online Times), we’re experiencing a reemergence of one of the problems that Kraus was fixated with: the ascendance of an impressionistic journalistic form that has institutional cachet but is of questionable quality as both reportage and self-expression.”
33. Reitter has kindly supplied a pair of examples of the sameness of the adjective-loving journalistic talents of Kraus�
��s time. The translations are mine:
General Fitschew is a stocky, medium-tall man whose face is round and full and whose skin has a rosiness to it and seems transparently delicate. Only a few white strands are mixed into his dark mustache, and his small eyes are lightning-quick in their animation, roving restlessly back and forth, as if trying to deny their own rootedness, as if wanting to look simultaneously both outward and inward.
One has to have seen this pale, fine-featured face with its dull gray eyes and its drooping, reddish-blond mustache, one has to have heard this tired and unspeakably mild man speaking, to arrive at an exact appreciation of his value. He sits there, impassive and indifferent, his face resigned, his entire figure sunk into itself, every feature suggesting the sufferer, the unfortunate—then suddenly he is gripped by a chance word—and now he stretches his head upward, life returns to the motionless organism, his hands go to work, his eyes flash, and out of his mouth spring short, wild sentences full of deep, lively wisdom.
This kind of writing is uniquely awful, but is it really that different from what you can find in the Times today? Consider the lede of a front-page Arts and Leisure piece from May 13, 2012:
If anyone has a right to feel on top of the world, it’s Howard Stern—especially inside his elegant, cumulus-high apartment on the West Side of Manhattan, dominated by a solariumlike living room with views on one side extending far up the Hudson and the other encompassing the entire bucolic breadth of Central Park.
Here, too, the tell is in the adjectives.
34. This is one of my favorite lines. It applies beautifully to today’s cable-TV news anchors, who bring the identical tone of urgent wonderment to whatever story they happen to be following, whether it’s a tornado in Texas, a new weight-loss drug, another actress having another baby, or an assassination in the Middle East. The tone can be found on AOL, too, with an additional garbled note of condescension:
Old People Are Miserable
OK so that’s not really true. In fact, it’s a major misconception about getting older—and that’s not the only thing we’re getting wrong.
What you don’t know about aging
Here again, with the confusion of “you” and “we,” I feel my privacy being invaded.
35. “Leopoldstadt was the Lower East Side of fin de siècle Vienna. It was the location of Vienna’s ‘Jewish section’ and thus had an air of the exotic. Playing on this, as well as on the similarity between its name and ‘Leopoldville,’ the city in the Congo that H. M. Stanley (of Stanley and Livingston fame) founded in 1881, Kraus is associating Leopoldstadt with Stanley’s report about searching for and finding Livingston in what is now Tanzania: the report was published in German under the title Im dunkelsten Afrika (In Darkest Africa, 1890).” —PR
36. “In his acclaimed study Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, Carl Schorske observes that ‘in the feuilleton writer’s style, the adjectives engulfed the nouns, the personal tint virtually obliterated the object of discourse.’ On the causes and true nature of this style, however, Kraus and Schorske differ. Schorske’s theory is that the culture of Vienna in 1900 was, in a way, a function of politics. Or, rather, of political failure. Disaffected by the collapse of the liberal governments their fathers had labored to build up, quite a few energetic Viennese ‘sons’ turned inward to psychological discovery and radical self-reflection. While this trend produced a variety of cultural innovations, it also led, Schorske contends, to some not-so-salutary developments. And the adjective-happy, very ‘subjective’ response of the critic or reporter that we find in the feuilleton is one of them.” —PR
At the risk of overstating the parallels with our own time, I might point out that despair about national politics has likewise led a lot of American sons (and daughters) to retreat into subjectivity, which is the essence of the blog.
37. “In the mid-1890s Bahr (1863–1934) established himself as a leader within Vienna’s emerging culture of modernism, thanks in large part to his theoretical essays. It was Bahr who gave the German term ‘Moderne,’ which had simply meant ‘modernity,’ the added connotation of ‘modernism.’ But Bahr also achieved a leadership role by working the coffeehouse scene. Older than most of the writers associated with the ‘Young Vienna’ movement, and outfitted with flowing locks, a big beard, and great connections, Bahr fashioned himself as the avuncular guru of those writers, whom he encouraged to gather around his table at the Café Griensteidl. So when Kraus decided to distance himself from the Griensteidl authors—on the grounds that they were morbidly, and faddishly, obsessed with the condition of their nerves—he made Bahr his point of attack. This was in 1896; and thus began a feud that would stretch into the 1930s. Its duration is easy enough to understand. For one thing, Bahr successfully brought a defamation suit against Kraus in 1900, and Kraus wasn’t the kind of person who could get over such a defeat. For another, Bahr continued to align himself with all the wrong causes, as Kraus saw it, e.g., expressionism. And Bahr’s cultural reportage strikes just the feuilletonistic tone that Kraus found so formulaic and so insufferable.” —PR
38. “Here is another puzzling aspect of Kraus’s genealogy of the feuilleton. When Heine died, he was one of Europe’s most widely read authors. According to some accounts, in fact, Heine is the very first writer who could amply support himself through book sales. Yet in Kraus’s essay, the predominance of Heine’s journalistic ‘model’ is a fin de siècle problem, a problem that seems to both contribute to and arise from the cultural moment of the Wiener Werkstätte. In lionizing Ludwig Speidel, Kraus doesn’t make the chronological picture any clearer. If Speidel, a Viennese feuilletonist born in 1830, was an exceptional case, what about the rule from which Speidel deviated? How far did Speidel’s colleagues get in institutionalizing Heine’s style? Complaining about the generation of feuilletonists between Heine and Hermann Bahr, Nietzsche spoke of the ‘repulsive stamp of our aesthetic journalism.’ But in ‘Heine and the Consequences’ Kraus has nothing more to say about them.” —PR
Point taken. But, again, Kraus isn’t even pretending to write a conventional history. I confess I haven’t read Speidel, but I like to imagine that his writing was striking for the same kind of freshness, humor, and authenticity that Russell Baker’s old columns in the Times had.
To which, Reitter again: “An apt comparison, though Baker is a lot funnier than Speidel. To come back to Kraus, I agree and would like to take the claim one step further: Kraus couldn’t have written a conventional history even if he’d wanted to. His mind just didn’t work that way. Furthermore, there were principles behind this avoidance. In one aphorism, Kraus uses the same brush to tar both conventional history writing and conventional journalism: ‘Historians are often just backward-turned journalists.’ In another, he makes historians out to be even less appealing: ‘Journalism has sullied the world with talent; historicism has done the same thing without it.’ It’s striking, nevertheless, how little interested Kraus is in how the feuilleton actually entrenched itself in the decades after Heine’s death. Since Kraus sees this development as hugely important, you’d think that, somewhere in his essay, he’d say something that would make the biggest gaps in his story a little smaller. But he doesn’t.”
39. “Schmock is the name of a disreputable Jewish journalist in Gustav Freytag’s drama of 1854, The Journalists. Freytag himself, by contrast, commanded a lot of respect. He even functioned as a sort of arbiter of good sense in late-nineteenth-century Germany, among both Germans and German Jews. Indeed, Freytag’s novel Credit and Debit (1855), which features another scurrilous Jewish figure (Feitel Itzig), was often given as a bar mitzvah gift, presumably because the givers thought the book had didactic value for young German Jews. The term ‘Schmock,’ in any case, could be used the way we use ‘Lothario’—i.e., to indicate that someone has the same qualities as the literary character. This is what Kraus is doing with it in ‘Heine and the Consequences.’ He’s insulting the journalist Hugo Wittmann and, above all, Moriz Benedikt, the all-powerfu
l editor of the Neue Freie Presse, whose obituary for Speidel was appended to the essay by Wittmann that introduces Speidel’s collected works, which were published in 1910. A little later, Kraus saw fit to stress that being a ‘Schmock’ generally meant having a Jewish background. ‘Nothing is more convoluted,’ he wrote, ‘than a non-Jewish Schmock.’” —PR
40. “Speidel was indeed too modest to issue a collection of his works, while other journalists eagerly published their own collections. And not long before the edition of Speidel’s works finally appeared, the journalist Ludwig Hevesi wrote a book-length ‘biographical appreciation’ of Speidel. Hevesi, who sometimes wrote under the odd pseudonym Onkel Tom (Uncle Tom), was known for coining the phrase inscribed over the entrance to Josef Olbrich’s Secession building: ‘To each age its own art, to art its freedom.’ Kraus mocked the slogan, along with the movement that adopted it, and he thought poorly of Hevesi. Which is another reason why Kraus felt that Speidel needed to be rescued from his commemorators.” —PR
