by Karl Kraus
I didn’t strictly have to take a course in the spring semester—the Fulbright people weren’t likely to ask for a refund if they learned that I’d blown off further schoolwork—but a seminar on The Last Days of Mankind was being offered at the Free University, and I was attracted by the title and by the word “apocalypse” in the course description. The seminar was led by Herr Professor Hindemith, who was wry and soft-spoken, wore his hair long, and dressed like a student. Unlike the Hofmannsthal seminar, Hindemith’s class was wildly overenrolled, because Kraus’s play was about war, and war was bad, and Kraus hadn’t liked it, and students in Berlin didn’t like it either, and what could be more agreeable than spending a semester talking about how bad war was? At the class’s first meeting, every seat at the U of tables was filled. Students in olive-drab jackets lined the walls and sat on the windowsills and crowded at the door, most of them puffing on hand-rolled cigarettes. A student at the tables, a young woman with flaming cheeks, raised her hand to say that she was allergic to smoke and to ask Hindemith to ban smoking in the classroom.
“But our fellow student is surely in the minority,” an older male student immediately objected.
“Protect minority rights,” Hindemith countered with an ambiguous grin.
The young woman pressed her case, the pitch and volume of her voice rising as she detailed the health risks of first- and secondhand smoke and declared that it was torture for her to be in this classroom. Finally, to quiet her, Hindemith suggested that the matter be put to a vote. Though I believe he was a smoker himself, he voted for the ban, as did five or six others of us. The smoke really was unbelievably thick. But a forest of olive-drab-clad arms were raised against the ban, there was cheering and jeering and laughter, and the young woman fled the classroom, never to be seen again.
The Last Days of Mankind is extremely long (Kraus, in his foreword to it, suggests that ten evenings would be needed to produce it properly) but no longer than some novels. Hindemith, however, knew that this was still way too much reading to ask of Free University students of the day. Instead, we’d be spending the entire semester discussing only the two-hand scenes between the characters of the Grumbler and the Optimist, about 130 pages altogether. Hindemith did assign two Kraus essays as supplementary reading—“Heine and the Consequences” and “Nestroy and Posterity”—and because Kraus was so difficult, he suggested that we form small groups to study the essays outside of class.
My group consisted of two other people my own age—a nice, lost boy named Stefan, a tart-tongued and relatively conscientious girl named Ursula—and Axel, a classic, burly, beer-faced leftist ten years older than we were. At our first meeting I confessed that it took me half an hour to read one page of Kraus’s prose, and that I hadn’t quite finished reading the Heine essay. Ursula and Stefan were eager to sympathize—they didn’t do better than five pages an hour themselves. Axel sat shaking his head, lamely leafing through his pages, which he obviously hadn’t even looked at, and tentatively muttering random phrases of Marxist jargon, hoping to hear from us that maybe one of them applied to Kraus. Like a big bear, he was sort of adorably puzzled and grizzled to look at, but ferally selfish underneath. I loved Ursula for being unable not to laugh at him. (“He’s in his twentieth semester,” she remarked to me later, “and there’s not a trace of the first nineteen.”) She and Stefan were the first and last German students I became even halfway friends with in two years in Germany; I actually went out drinking with them once or twice before I returned to the States. And the study group was a success. Ursula and I managed to work out some of what Kraus meant by satire, with Stefan neither helping nor hindering us, his eyes always soulful.
Axel disappeared after our second meeting, but I continued to see him at the seminar, because absolutely nothing got done in the seminar; he felt more comfortable there. The sessions went like this: Hindemith began by calling our attention to a pregnant line in one of the Grumbler-Optimist dialogues; somebody raised a point of procedure; the point of procedure was furiously debated for twenty minutes; Hindemith redirected us to the text; somebody else asked a totally wrongheaded and irrelevant question (e.g., “Was Kraus in contact with Rosa Luxemburg?”); and the remainder of the class was spent discussing politics. Halfway through the semester, I stopped bothering to attend. I’d already signed up to present a paper on the last day of class, and I could work on the paper at home.
The Last Days of Mankind is the strangest great play ever written. At first glance, it can be mistaken for postmodern, since the bulk of its 793 pages consists of quotation; it’s unabashedly a play about language. Kraus maintained that, with the exception of the Grumbler-Optimist scenes and the verse fantasias, every line spoken by its several hundred characters was something he had personally heard or read during the First World War, and many of the characters bear the names of real-life personalities: Hofmannsthal appears in it, unflatteringly, as does the jingoistic war correspondent Alice Schalek, who was sort of the Judith Miller of her day. But what makes the play modern, rather than postmodern, is the figure of the Grumbler, who in most respects is indistinguishable from Kraus himself. His friend the Optimist keeps coming to him with fresh phrases of propaganda and journalism, trying to persuade him that the war is a glorious thing and is going well, and the Grumbler aphoristically demolishes every one of them. He calls the Optimist his “cue bringer,” and indeed the Optimist is scarcely less subordinated to war-perverted language than Hofmannsthal and Schalek and the myriad other figures. Only the Grumbler comes across as fully human. His coordinating subjectivity is too central to be postmodern.
In my paper I tried to make sense of two strange moments late in the play. In the first, the Optimist asks the Grumbler what “heroic renown” might mean, and the Grumbler shows him a pair of clippings. One is a newspaper account of some veterans of a battle on the Eastern Front being paraded around a Viennese theater and applauded as a prelude to “a production of Eysler’s The Woman-Eater, with Fritz Werner and Betty Myra in their familiar starring roles.” The other clipping is a description of a product for peddlers to sell to families of soldiers killed in action, a grotesquely kitschy framed poster in which a photo of the dead man can be inserted, “so elegant and moving that it will be desired by rich and poor alike,” with a list of “prices for distributors.” The Optimist, aghast, says the clippings can’t be real. He begs the Grumbler to say that he’s invented them, and the Grumbler shakes his hand and says, “I thank you. They are by me.”
The other moment, related in theme, is the conclusion of the Grumbler’s final monologue, delivered from his writing desk, where he’s reading from a manuscript:
If the voice of this age had been preserved in a phonograph recording, the inner lies would have suffered for the outward fidelity, and the ear wouldn’t have distinguished the one from the other. In this way, time renders the essence unrecognizable and would grant amnesty to the greatest crime ever committed under the sun, under the stars. I’ve rescued the essence, and my ear has discovered the sound of deeds and my eye the gesture of speeches, and my voice, simply by repeating, has quoted in such a way that the fundamental tone remained recorded for all time.
And let me speak to the yet unknowing world
How these things came about: so shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters;
Of deaths put on by cunning and forc’d cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall’n on the inventors’ heads; all this can I
Truly deliver.
And if the times could no longer hear, a Being above them would still hear! I’ve done nothing more than abbreviate this deadly quantity which, in its unmeasurability, is counting on the imbalance between times and Times. All of its blood really was just ink—now the writing will be done in blood! This is the world war. This is my manifesto. I have considered everything carefully. I have taken upon myself the tragedy that disi
ntegrates into scenes of disintegrating mankind, so that the Spirit that takes pity on sacrifice may hear, even if it has renounced for all future its connection with human hearing. May it receive the fundamental tone of these times, the echo of my bloody insanity, through which I share in the guilt for these noises. May it let this stand as a redemption!
This is the last we see of the Grumbler, and he’s clearly quite out of his mind. Throughout the play, he’s been the only character to imagine the horror of mechanized death in the trenches, the only character to see through the lies and propaganda. This would be less notable if there were only ten characters, but there are hundreds; the numerical imbalance casts the Grumbler as a profoundly solitary prophet. Nothing can save Austrian humanity, but he will be the one person to record its downfall for whoever and whatever comes after. With “I have considered everything carefully,” he is quoting from the Austrian emperor’s proclamation of war, laying claim to a kind of imperial power. His megalomania in this final scene is reminiscent of King Lear in his scenes on the heath; also of my own psychotic moment in the fall. It didn’t occur to me when I was writing my paper, but I must have been drawn to the scene because I’d experienced something like it: alone at my writing desk, racked by guilt, awaiting apocalypse, reading my own words, convinced that I could see what no one else could see, and getting so lost in figuration that reality dissolved. Blood as ink, ink as blood: figuration has driven the Grumbler crazy, too, making the outside world indistinguishable from the inside of his head. His thoughts aren’t the echo of his times, his times are the echo of his thoughts! Which is why, in the earlier scene, he thanks the Optimist and accepts credit as the author of monstrosities he didn’t write, merely quoted.
In my paper, I applied “Nestroy and Posterity” to the figure of the Grumbler. I called particular attention to the satirist’s relationship with an age that has lost all connection to the Spirit: “He is its product and its hopeless antithesis.” Kraus had certainly been nearly alone in his early opposition to the war; Hauptmann, Rilke, Mann, and Musil all wrote in patriotic support of it, and, as Edward Timms notes in his big Kraus study, “Every socialist party in Europe voted unanimously with its own government in favour of war, with the exception of two Serbian socialists and the Bolshevik caucus in the Russian Duma.” But Hermann Hesse, too, was against the war from the beginning. As it proceeded, Kraus found a growing number of sympathizers in Vienna, including some within the government who provided him with documents that he worked into his play, and by 1917 the Austrian Socialists were calling for an armistice. Kraus may have felt alone, but he had to know that he was not alone. And so I argued that the Grumbler, in his total isolation and its attendant megalomania, should be seen as another of Kraus’s satiric exaggerations. What would the product and hopeless antithesis of an insane war look like? It would look like the Grumbler. The abstracted, ideal satirist.
I remember reading in a liner note that after Stravinsky finished writing Petruchka he was laid low for weeks with “acute intracostal neuralgia due to nicotine poisoning.” Although my Kraus paper was as rough and ploddingly written as Petruchka is perfect, I combusted what even for me was an enormous number of cigarettes while writing it. I was trying to be the one person in the seminar to actually read and understand the text, I was wrestling on my own with one of the most difficult German-language authors, and I was doing it while V brooded on a sofa and my Canadian friend waltzed in and out, humming opera. By the time I took the U-Bahn out to the last class of the semester, I had a bad cold and a Dickensian cough. With burning eyes, and in stumbling German, I read my paper aloud and let Professor Hindemith bat aside the one question with which a leftist interrupted me: “You use the word ‘positivistic’—are you defending Karl Popper?” When I was finished, I had my proudest moment in two years in Germany—one of the proudest in my life, in fact. Hindemith smiled at me, looked around the smoke-filled room, and said, “Here’s a lesson for us all. It took an American to explain what we’ve spent a whole semester trying to understand.” Then we discussed Karl Popper.
Afterword to “Heine and the Consequences” (1911)
1. “‘Heine and the Consequences’ first appeared, in 1910, as a small stand-alone publication, a pamphlet for which Kraus obviously had high hopes. Priced at eighty pfennigs in Germany, it didn’t cost much more than an equally long issue of Die Fackel. The following year, Kraus reprinted the essay in Die Fackel, with this afterword as a foreword. Foreword became afterword a decade later, when Kraus reprinted the essay once again, in his collection The Destruction of the World Through Black Magic (1922).”—PR
2. I.e., the newspaper, specifically the feuilleton. The riff that follows—on the interchangeability of reader and writer, the self-sufficing loop of eating and regurgitation—further points to the kinship between feuilletons then and the blogosphere now.
3. Indeed, nobody is funnier than depressives. Not only that, but the more depressive they are, the funnier they are—up to a point. My friend who committed suicide was the funniest friend I ever had.
4. This paragraph particularly interests me because it’s shadowed by Kraus’s envy of fiction—which, after my immersion in his work, I began in earnest to try to write.
As a wedding present, three months after I returned from Berlin, my college German professor George Avery gave me a hardcover edition of Kraus’s The Third Walpurgis Night. George, who had opened my eyes to the connection between literature and the living of life, was becoming something of a second father to me, a father who read novels and cared about them deeply; an alternate father who, in his Greek-American way, embraced every pleasure and preferred beauty to engineering. I’d been a good student of his, and it must have been a wish to become his best ex-student ever—to prove myself worthy, to demonstrate my love—that led me, in the months following my wedding, to try to translate the two difficult Kraus essays I’d brought home from Berlin.
I did the work late in the afternoon, after six or seven hours of writing short stories, in the bedroom of the little Somerville, Massachusetts, apartment that V and I were renting for $300 a month, while our elderly landlords, Mr. and Mrs. Frongillo, shouted at each other upstairs and watched television at high volumes. I was so bent on proving to my parents that I could succeed as a writer, and on proving to George that I still cared about the writers he loved, that I could work seventy hours a week for months at a stretch.
When I’d finished drafts of the two translations, I sent them to George. He returned them a few weeks later, with marginal notations in his microscopic handwriting, and with a letter in which he applauded my effort but said that he could also see how “devilishly difficult” it was to translate Kraus. Taking his hint, I looked at the drafts with a fresh eye and was discouraged to find them stilted and nearly unreadable. Almost every sentence needed further work, and I was so worn out by the work I’d already done that I buried the pages in a file folder.
But Kraus had changed me. When I gave up on short stories and returned to my novel, I was mindful of his moral fervor, his satirical rage, his hatred of the media, his preoccupation with apocalypse, and his boldness as a sentence writer. I wanted to expose America’s contradictions the way he’d exposed Austria’s, and I wanted to do it via the novel, the popular genre that he’d disdained but I did not. I still hoped to finish my Kraus project, too, after my novel had made me famous and a millionaire. To honor these hopes, I collected clippings from the Sunday Times and the daily Boston Globe, which V and I subscribed to. For some reason—perhaps to reassure myself that other people, too, were getting married—I read the nuptials pages of the Times religiously, clipping headlines like
CYNTHIA PIGOTT MARRIED TO LOUIS BACON
and, my favorite,
MISS LEBOURGEOIS TO MARRY WRITER
I read the Globe with an especially cold Krausian eye, and it obligingly enraged me with its triviality and its shoddy proofreading and its dopily punning weather headlines. I was so disturbed by the rootless, meanin
gless “wit” of HEAD-ON SPLASH, which I imagined would not amuse the family of someone killed in a car crash, and of AUTUMNIC BALM, which offended my sense of the seriousness of the nuclear peril, that I finally wrote a slashingly Krausian letter to the editor. The Globe actually printed the letter, but it managed, with characteristic carelessness, to mangle my punch line as “Automatic Balm,” thereby rendering my point incomprehensible. Although Kraus was no Freudian, he had a Freud-like belief in the significance of journalistic parapraxis—he saw an unconscious compulsion to truth-telling in mistakes like “King Lehar” for “King Lear” (Franz Lehár being an operetta composer whom Kraus couldn’t stand)—and I, who was both Krausian and Freudian, believed it was no accident that some typesetter at the Globe had “inadvertently” protected the paper from recognizing its own linguistic culpability. I was so enraged that I later devoted many pages of my second novel to making fun of what a shitty paper the Globe was. (In a tacit abandonment of my Kraus project, following the failure of my first novel to make me rich or famous, I also deployed the best clippings I’d saved from the Times in a chapter of the second novel, as examples of the rhetoric of Progress.) My rage back then—directed not just at the media but at Boston, Boston drivers, the people at the lab where I worked, the computer at the lab, my family, V’s family, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, literary theorists, the minimalist fiction writers then in vogue, and men who divorced their wives—is foreign to me now. It must have had to do with the profound isolation of my married life with V (those were the only substantially friendless years of my life) and with the ruthlessness with which, in my ambition and poverty, I was denying myself pleasure.
There was probably also, as I’ve argued, an element of the privileged person’s anger at the world for disappointing him. If I turned out not to have enough of this anger to make me a junior Kraus, it was because of the genre I’d chosen. Kraus twice, in his “Afterword,” makes envious reference to the novelist, first as the one kind of linguistic artist who can actually earn a living, and then, more snidely, as the kind of writer whose audience isn’t frightened away if “he’s rumored to be an artist.” When a hard-core satirist like Kraus manages to achieve some popularity, it can only mean that his audience doesn’t understand him. But when novelists start taking this position, you get the dead end of mid-century American art fiction; you get late Gaddis. (I’ll pass over in silence the attitudes of art-fiction writers in much of contemporary Europe.) But it’s actually a reasonable and defensible position for an aphorist and densely allusive satirical glosser like Kraus. The lack of an audience whom he could respect was a foregone conclusion, and so he never had to stop being angry: he could be the Great Hater at his writing desk, be his society’s hopeless antithesis, and then he could put down his pen and have a cozy personal life with whatever friends he hadn’t made into enemies with his writing. It was an arrangement that worked throughout his life. Whereas, when a novelist finds an audience, even a small one, he or she is in a different relation to it, for the reason Kraus suggests: the relation is based on recognition, not misunderstanding. With a relation like that, with an audience like that, it becomes simply dishonest to remain so angry. And the mental work that fiction fundamentally requires, which is to imagine what it’s like to be somebody you are not, further undermines anger in the long run. The more I wrote novels, the less I trusted my own righteousness, and the more prone I was to sympathizing with people like the typesetters at the Globe. Maybe it was a sneering jerk who’d written “Automatic,” but maybe it was some soul who’d simply been asked to do too much too quickly. Plus, as the Internet rose to power, disseminating information that could be trusted as little as it cost to read it, I became so grateful to papers like the Times and the Globe for still existing, and for continuing to pay halfway responsible reporters to report, that I lost all interest in tearing them down.
