by Karl Kraus
“The original motto of Die Fackel was ‘What we kill.’ In 1899, on the first page of the first issue, Kraus proclaimed that ‘nothing’ would move him from a ‘standpoint’ that was openly polemical and radically independent—as opposed to Vienna’s better newspapers, which feigned openness and impartiality but in fact adhered to liberal pieties and played to the material interests of their backers. Beholden to no one and to no party line, Kraus would be able to ‘carry out polemics from all perspectives,’ as he put it a little later. Yet even as he underscored his independence, he didn’t shy from tying it to an agenda that invited him to be taken for a progressive reformer. In the first issue of Die Fackel he announced his intention to expose the obfuscations of the established press so that it would be easier to ‘recognize the urgent social matters.’ Another early mission statement emphasized that Die Fackel would ‘give the oppressed a voice.’
“Kraus wasted no time in making good on his pledges. He hammered away at all sides in reporting on the dysfunction in Austria’s parliament, and in 1900 he took up the cause of the Galician coal miners who had gone on strike against ‘their exploiters.’ This helped win him a following among workers’ groups in Vienna. If there had been Viennese prostitutes’ groups, he might have had a following among them, too. The plight of prostitutes resonated with Kraus, and he addressed it repeatedly in covering what he saw as emblematic instances of disenfranchisement and injustice. In his essay ‘Medal of Honor’ (1909), he relates the story of a prostitute whose client didn’t tip her but instead gave her a decorative medal, which she proceeded to put on. Unfortunately for her, this was potentially against the law. It also ‘aroused,’ to use Kraus’s phrasing, the indignation of the brothel’s patrons, who turned her in. At her second trial—the first judge pronounced her innocent, but the prosecutor appealed the decision—the judge reinterpreted the status of the decorative cross, and the prostitute was fined twenty crowns for ‘unauthorized wearing of a military medal.’ As Kraus saw it, the case illustrated not just the extreme fatuousness and hypocrisy of the legal system’s attempts to preserve decency, but also the system’s perverse tendency to come down hardest on the very people it failed to protect. He ends the piece by declaring that the real ‘whore’ in the story is justice in Austria.
“Of course, Kraus took other kinds of stands, too. He heaped scorn on the supporters of Alfred Dreyfus. He belittled the women’s movement (and wrote unkind aphorisms about women: ‘at night, all cows are black, even the blond ones’). And in the years before the First World War, which he famously decried, Kraus sided with the old Austrian social order. After the war, he went through something of a socialist phase, but then, to Bertolt Brecht’s dismay, he gave his imprimatur to Engelbert Dollfuß, Austria’s right-wing chancellor from 1932 until 1934; Kraus believed that Dollfuß might effectively resist the reach of Nazi Germany and was thus the ‘lesser evil’ in Austrian politics. But Kraus’s political interventions, or really his peregrinations up and down the political spectrum, aren’t the main reason he’s so hard to place politically. He had two primary programs in trying to improve society, and while these programs were always interdependent, they had different political valences. Reactionary theory and revolutionary practice didn’t just coexist in Kraus’s work: they fed off each other.
“For Kraus—as for, say, Marx—liberal faith in progress was the worst sort of ideology. Technological progress was being driven by hubris and greed, and it was increasing civilization’s destructive capabilities, not just its productive ones, and Kraus was frightened by the enormous potential for abuse. An aphorism from around 1908 reads: ‘Progress celebrates the pyrrhic victory over nature.’ Another: ‘Progress will make wallets out of human skin.’ A key factor for Kraus was that technology and modernization were diminishing the space that the imagination needed to thrive. Once the popular imagination has atrophied, the likelihood that technology will be misused hardens into a certainty. Lamenting Austria’s relationship to Germany, in 1908, Kraus wrote, ‘Until the hypertrophy of our technological development, which our brains can’t handle, leads to a general catastrophe, it is the fate of people who eat meat and were born to mothers to be swallowed up by people who were born to machines and are nourished by them.’ When the general catastrophe then arrived, in the form of the First World War, Kraus believed that it was caused in large part by a failure of the Austrian imagination, which wasn’t strong to begin with, and which had been fatally enfeebled by the mass press, at a moment of unparalleled technological might. Not long after the war began, Kraus claimed that the very signature of our time is the threat our lack of imagination has come to pose: ‘in this time in which what people could no longer imagine is precisely what happens, and in which what they can no longer imagine has to happen, and if they could have imagined it, it wouldn’t have happened…’
“Part of Kraus’s response to this diagnosis might be characterized as romantic conservatism. Often with nostalgia for better days he hadn’t experienced himself, Kraus fought to keep open space for the imagination by campaigning against the modern things that got in its way: the feuilleton, with its addictive, and thus lucrative, offering of prepackaged emotional responses to the news; psychoanalysis, which, according to Kraus, ‘analyzes the dreams into which the disgust it elicits tries to escape’; etc. But another part of Kraus’s response was to promote Enlightenment in the Kantian sense—that is, to call for mental maturity: ‘I want the fruit of my labors to be that reading is done with sharper eyes.’ Kraus, to be sure, sometimes directed his readers to see his writing as the result of a kind of mystical submission to language: ‘I have only mastered the language of others. Language itself does whatever it wants to with me.’ Yet he stressed, as well, that an important purpose of his ‘revolutionary,’ extremely challenging style was to force readers to read more alertly, in the hope of revitalizing the Austrian mind. His audience ‘shouldn’t necessarily read different newspapers, they should read differently.’
“They should speak and write differently, too. Kraus exhorted his readers to think as hard as they could about their linguistic options. Doing so was, he believed, the best practice for ethical decision making. Because our deliberating over language usually takes place with neither the threat of punishment nor the prospect of gain hanging over it, it can teach us, in a uniquely unconstrained way, to hesitate, to have ‘scruples,’ and to be sensitive to nuance and thus to particularity. There was a time when these ideas resonated; more even than Kraus’s claims about journalism and the Great War, they’re what prompted critics to credit him with seeing, as one of them put it, ‘the connection between mistreated words and mistreated bodies.’
“It’s also been said that Kraus’s Enlightenment project was a bust. Elias Canetti, for example, argued that Kraus was too authoritarian a figure to encourage intellectual independence in other people, and that his style overwhelmed readers more than it stimulated their critical faculties. That Kraus had an Enlightenment project, which is one of Canetti’s points of departure, is harder to contest. And that Kraus never gave up on the project, regardless of its success or unsuccess, is impressive, especially given his low opinion of the people whom he was able to reach. He was only half joking when he quipped that the worst thing his audience members could say about him was: ‘I know Kraus personally.’” —PR
Kehlmann points out that Die Fackel’s original motto, “Was wir umbringen,” is a play on the hackneyed newspaper motto “Was wir bringen”—“What we bring.” So I might suggest a less literal translation: “We bring you the noose.”
15. “A reference to Nestroy’s farce about the revolution of 1848, The Lady and the Tailor (1849), which Friedjung had framed as an expression of Nestroy’s liberal convictions. Kraus would later back away from his attempt to distance this particular work, as well as Nestroy in general, from liberal politics. During the early 1920s, when Kraus was alarmed by the Fascist movements in Germany and Austria, he set about showing that the play ‘isn’t undem
ocratic.’” —PR
16. To return, in a roundabout way, to the connection between Kraus’s anger and his privilege, I should note that his political sympathies were substantially conservative when he wrote this essay. Hence his irritation at the spectacle of Heine, an outspoken if somewhat inconsistent liberal, being lionized by the latter-day liberal press, which Kraus believed overvalued Heine’s artistic achievements because his politics were correct. Where conservative American critics such as Dinesh D’Souza directly apply the crude label “PC” to work like Alice Walker’s, Kraus here more subtly, but in a similarly conservative spirit, mocks the word “enlightened.” (He does this in “Heine and the Consequences,” too: “And they want to be enlightened about everything, just not about Heine.”) Since almost everything Kraus says about Nestroy applies to himself as well, his insistence that Nestroy was neither liberal nor anti-liberal clearly connects with his own rather contortionist efforts to remain politically indefinable, at least in public.
In private, Kraus was a privileged rentier with a strong stake in the status quo. Indeed, part of what intoxicated him about Sidonie Nádherný, when he met her in 1913, was that she belonged to the landed aristocracy: he fell in love not only with her but with her family’s country estate. His long-running satiric preoccupation with financial malfeasance—first with the petty corruptions of Vienna’s prewar liberal press, later with the rampant profiteering, by Jewish businessmen especially, in the First World War—can be seen as a way of elevating himself above the money-minded liberal bourgeoisie. It was only at the end of the war that Kraus became fully disillusioned with the monarchy and came out for the Socialists, and even this conversion was shaky and short-lived.
The works of Kraus’s two playwright heroes, Shakespeare and Nestroy, are rooted in worlds of fixed social standing. The wonderful contrast between the diction of Dogberry and the diction of Beatrice, and between Nestroy’s servants and Nestroy’s masters, depends on firm distinctions between social classes. Satire, too, thrives on contrasts, and so the prospect of liberal democracy, in which everyone is identically entitled and eventually comes to speak identically, threatened Kraus’s very foundations as an artist. This specter of uniformity—modernity’s effacement of difference—would later haunt thinkers as various as the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, with his notion of “cultural entropy,” and the postmodern novelist William Gaddis, with his lament for a lost era of Status in which high art was high and low was low. The uncomfortable dissonances of their positions (Lévi-Strauss’s “Please don’t change until we’ve thoroughly studied you” and Gaddis’s “Please hold still while I kick you”) are versions of the more general discomfort with which creative people view the levelings of modernity. To write well about slum dwellers, or about Andaman islanders, you need to have sympathy with them—precisely the kind of liberal sympathy that also makes you want better schools for the slums or Western-style amenities for the Andaman Islands. Good narrative art thus tends toward liberalism. But good artists also crave contrast. Unless you want to tell the same story of global monoculture’s triumph over differences, again and again, you want slum dialogue to keep sounding distinctively like the slums, and you don’t want Andaman islanders to start using the same iPhones and wearing the same sensible sneakers as Americans; you want them to keep doing intensely, interestingly Andaman islander things. This makes you a conservative. Or, actually, worse than a conservative, because you, as an artist, want to be able to move liberally and sympathetically among various classes and cultures—just like Shakespeare did—while secretly hoping that everyone who’s not an artist will stay fixed in place. This is the monstrous sort of privilege that can be claimed only by a person like Cordelia, who feels entitled to speak unwelcome truths and still be loved. It’s part of the dubious moral character that artists are famed for. And it helps makes sense of how furiously Kraus rejected political categories. He wasn’t just resisting the linguistically debased sloganeering of politics. He was insisting on the artist’s uniquely privileged place in society. He argued for maintaining differences because he knew that his kind of art—maybe all good art—depends on it.
Clive James, in a perceptive piece in the Australian Literary Review, contends that after the First World War Kraus began to lose his way as a satirist. James notes that Kraus’s humor and his anger with the liberal bourgeoisie, especially the Jewish bourgeoisie, remained viable only as long as the genteel old order survived: Kraus could safely indulge in a little antisemitism because the antisemites were still arguing within the rule of law, and because he could do antisemitism more deftly and wickedly than the antisemites themselves. Even the titanic horror of the First World War was susceptible to his methods, because people of all ethnicities were collectively suffering; because what Kraus calls Verstand (intellect, reason), in the form of war theory, was responsible for it; and because, as Reitter points out, his satirical targets didn’t change all that much. (Reitter notes that “what Kraus had decried before the war was also operating during the war: the benightedness and incompetence of aristocratic leaders, the posturing and complicity of the bourgeois literati, the gleeful cruelty of the troglodyte elements in Austrian society, and, of course, the rapacity and warping effects of the press.”) But then along came the irrational Nazis and demolished the old Viennese order that Kraus had raged against and thrived in.
That Kraus had “nothing to say” about Hitler is a fact so widely accepted that it once cleared The New Yorker’s fact-checkers and appeared in its pages. It’s true that he did once write “I can’t think of anything to say about Hitler.” But this was the first line of a book-length document about Hitler and the Nazis. Published posthumously as The Third Walpurgis Night, it bravely and clear-sightedly takes their measure, and Daniel Kehlmann considers it Kraus’s finest work. To me, though, it has the feel of a despairing exercise. The problem, as James points out, is that the Nazis were not lying (ten years before the Final Solution, they were already saying plainly what they intended to do to the Jews) or were so obviously lying as not to require satirical exposure, and that they were generally too dangerous to be laughed at. And so Kraus’s last book isn’t funny the way so much of his earlier work was, and its takeaway—that the Nazis were evil and insane—doesn’t retain the biting relevance of his ideas about literature or of his critique of modern media.
James doesn’t claim that Kraus’s artistic dilemma vis-à-vis the Nazis was unique. Indeed, he seems to suggest that no form of writing can be effective in the face of irrational and genocidal violence—that only the counter-application of rational violence will avail. (His piece was published during the Iraq War.) What this says to me about art is that it’s the child of a well-ordered house. Kraus was the kind of privileged child who was angriest, and therefore funniest, en famille. When something alien or irrational comes along and smashes the house’s windows, the game ceases to be fun.
To which Reitter illuminatingly adds:
“One of the disorienting things about reading Kraus today is that he often sounds simultaneously un-PC and PC. In a PC way, he bashes the liberal culture of the press for its leveling of difference, but he does this in a way that’s calculated to sound wildly un-PC (which of course has the effect of introducing more difference into the discussion). His critique in ‘Heine and the Consequences’ is a great example: the problem with feuilletonists is at once their mindless worship of a canon (Heine) and their difference-leveling false subjectivity. The feuilletonists all ‘taste alike.’ The early Fackel is full of such lines: ‘the newspaper speaks like the world, because the world speaks like the newspaper,’ ‘the tone is always the same.’ Thus Kraus’s PC-seeming predilection for minor and marginalized forms (vaudeville, Jewish-dialect theater, Nestroy, etc.) is very much in keeping with his hatred of the liberal culture of the time, which he saw as an assimilation-driven, impossibly snobbish agent of conformity, with a narrow and culturally chauvinist notion/fetish of Bildung. It’s also worth noting that Kraus’s early (a
nd perspicacious) critique of Zionism was that it was often assimilationism masquerading as a movement devoted to sustaining difference. Zionism was the Jews’ ‘imitation nationalism,’ to cite a phrase that Kraus likely inspired. This can be a pretty PC argument these days, and KK made it in 1898!
“And here’s a sad irony: Kraus’s fight against the cliché has lent itself to being characterized in clichéd terms. Even Clive James does some of that, for all the perceptiveness of his piece. To read James on Die Fackel, you’d think that Kraus ‘tirelessly’ went after every platitude and sloppy formulation that bothered his ears. Thus, ‘Nothing got past him.’ Or at least, ‘Anyone who let slip a loose phrase lived to rue it if Kraus caught him.’ What these well-worn overstatements obscure is that Kraus was interested in the emblematic infelicities, the ones that he could reveal to be both a symptom and a cause of social ills. At its best, Kraus’s cultural criticism presents us with a feedback loop wherein bad circumstances and motives lead to bad prose that makes the world vastly worse. The press may have begun to gain the upper hand, the virtual reality of the media may have begun to determine the external reality that it’s supposed to cover—‘shadows now throw bodies,’ in Kraus’s formulation—but Kraus didn’t imagine that the language of the press developed independently of its material conditions. Often, in fact, the importance of language misuse is that it allows us to recognize a dangerous underlying corruption: ‘that one is a murderer doesn’t necessarily tell us something about his style; but his style can tell us that he’s a murderer.’ Because James misses this point, it’s easy for him to accuse Kraus of being more one-sided about historical causality than he was. According to James, Kraus, the language-obsessed satirist, failed to appreciate sufficiently that ‘the world is made up of more than language.’ Similarly, James reproaches Kraus for coming ‘close to suggesting that the war had been caused by bad journalism,’ then adds, with an implied sigh of impatience, ‘if only it had been that simple.’ James also conjectures that Kraus ‘might have found instruction in the despotic past, had he been more historically minded.’
