by Karl Kraus
9. “Here, too, Kraus is accentuating the negative to the point of stretching the truth. Yes, some early reviewers of ‘Heine and the Consequences’ expressed annoyance. But there were also favorable responses. Readers of Die Fackel would have known this because Kraus, who liked to catalogue and comment on reactions to his work, publicly kept track of how his Heine essay went over with the critics. In two separate discussions he complains of being misunderstood—no surprise there. Yet the impression that emerges isn’t that Kraus’s (uncomprehending) reviewers were for the most part hostile. To the contrary, the initial reception of ‘Heine and the Consequences’ seems to have been, on balance, admiring. Consider how Kraus begins the first of his two discussions. He writes, ‘Thoroughly in agreement with ‘Heine and the Consequences’ are the accounts in: the Zeit am Montag (Berlin, December 5); the Freisinnige Zeitung (Berlin, December 11); the Londoner General-Anzeiger (December 24); the Hamburger Nachrichten (December 25); and, further, Die Wage (Vienna, December 25).’ Kraus goes on to quote Franz Pfemfert, a well-known cultural critic, taking him to task in the magazine Der Demokrat. But Pfemfert didn’t so much question Kraus’s arguments as charge him with being irresponsible. According to Pfemfert, Adolf Bartels and Heine’s other antisemitic detractors would find plenty of new ammunition in ‘Heine and the Consequences.’ So what if Kraus had attempted to distance his position on Heine from Bartels’s? Did he really think that a screamer like Bartels would care about such disclaimers? Having brushed off Pfemfert’s accusation, Kraus proceeds to cite and mock a review that presents ‘Heine and the Consequences’ as a rare misstep by a great author. And that’s it for the disapproval. Kraus’s next move is to quote a passage from a letter by the esteemed, recently deceased critic Samuel Lublinski, in which Lublinski says about Kraus’s essay: it is ‘the most formidable attack’ on Heine ‘and also the most compelling one.’ In the final excerpt Kraus provides, his reviewer gushes, ‘I rank his Heine book above all previous books about Heine.’ Kraus’s second discussion, published just one month later, isn’t much different. The review on which it focuses ends with the lines: ‘Heine and the Consequences’ is ‘an achievement one cannot ignore. All in all, it comes across as a timely verdict.’
“For the next few decades, ‘Heine and the Consequences’ continued to elicit mixed responses. Perhaps most notable is the resonance it found among the Frankfurt School thinkers, who, like Kraus, were concerned about the commodification of literature. In 1931 Walter Benjamin called the essay the best thing ever written about Heine. And in 1956, on the hundredth anniversary of Heine’s death, Theodor Adorno described Kraus’s ‘judgment’ of Heine as ineradicable. Eventually, though, the debate about ‘Heine and the Consequences’ was taken over by critics who hadn’t come of age in Kraus’s world, and who as a group had a harder time getting past the antisemitic stereotypes in his text. When this happened, ‘Heine and the Consequences’ fell into disfavor. Hence the fact that Edward Timms mentions it only twice in his landmark Kraus study of 1986.” —PR
10. “Kraus is being self-ironic here, but he isn’t joking: in June of 1911 he wrote a letter to the Langen Verlag in which he speculates that his enemies were using their influence to undermine the marketing of ‘Heine and the Consequences.’” —PR
“Twelve years’ time” refers to how long Kraus had been publishing Die Fackel.
11. “Kraus had good reason to think that people were trying to get between him and his audience. In December of 1910, for example, a ‘shuttering of the hall’ caused one of his lecture evenings to be canceled. What happened was that the owner of the hall suddenly backed out of his arrangement with Kraus without giving a meaningful explanation. Kraus surmised that the owner’s friends in the press had prevailed upon him to shut the performance down.” —PR
12. “In Vienna, Die Fackel was sold mostly on the magazine racks of tobacco shops. Kraus began putting out ‘double issues’ of Die Fackel in 1905. These weren’t quite twice as long as a single issue, but they cost twice as much, and they soon went from being something new and different to being the norm. What Kraus is making fun of here is the (gloating, gleeful) suspicion that the profit motive was behind this practice.” —PR
13. “There was, for example, minimal advertising in Die Fackel, whose production never depended on advertising revenues.” —PR
14. “Kraus published just one more book with the Langen Verlag, a collection of aphorisms that appeared in 1912. In the same year, he managed to establish his own imprint within Kurt Wolff’s publishing house—the Press of Karl Kraus’s Writings (Verlag der Schriften von Karl Kraus). He eventually went over to a freestanding operation with a much better name: Die Fackel Press (Verlag Die Fackel).” —PR
15. Indeed. To write a sentence like “Art backs away from him like a glacier from an alpine hotel guest,” to find the perfect metaphor and to set it in the most elegant possible sentence, and then to publish it in a magazine whose every issue you personally proofread with a gimlet eye, does amount to recompense. But maybe not a sufficient one, not a permanent one; because writing is the strangest social/antisocial art. When you finally become good enough at it to participate in the community of past writers to which you were drawn as a solitary reader, the pleasure is a weirdly social one; and yet the kind of person who is so keen to engage with that community that he or she submits to years of grueling apprenticeship is liable to be hungry for engagement with a community of the living, too. Kraus may say that he doesn’t care about reaching non-deaf ears. But all he’s doing is defending himself against further disappointment, not eradicating its cause. He still wants readers. All writers do.
Between Two Strains of Life: Final Word (1917)
1. “The funny thing here is that Kraus has gone from understating his readership (in the first Afterword) to overstating it—this third edition he’s talking about appeared six years earlier!” —PR
2. In other words: “I seem to be taking back what I said, but I’m not really taking it back, because I was even more right than you knew!” To read Kraus’s foregoing “Afterword,” you wouldn’t imagine it “insignificant” that “Heine and the Consequences” has sold well in the intervening six years. The imperiousness with which Kraus dismisses the fact that he’s found a lot of readers—after having insulted his audience and drawn all manner of conclusions from the failure of his pamphlet to find readers—is surely intended as a provocation. And yet this fact really is insignificant compared with the two major self-contradictions he’s addressing in this “Final Word.” In “Heine and the Consequences” he declared his allegiance with German culture and his rejection of Romance culture, and he inveighed against politics, particularly liberal politics; but now, as a result of the First World War, he’s publicly rejecting Germany and aligning himself with its enemies, and he’s coming to side with the Socialists in their opposition to the war. He’s got some ’splainin’ to do.
Kehlmann adds: “Kraus’s most alienating quality, for me at least, was his absolute refusal ever to admit that he’d changed his mind. There are lots of subjects on which he has completely different views before the war and after, or in the late 1920s. But he can never admit it. Instead he heaps mockery and scorn on anybody who talks about his changing opinions. The saddest case, for the Kraus admirer, was his attacks on the defenders of Dreyfus—and, worst of all, the downright insane fact that he remained unwilling, even decades later, to admit that Dreyfus was innocent and he’d been wrong.”
I agree that this does not speak well of Kraus. His never-apologizing moral certitude was one of the reasons I lost my taste for his work as I moved out of my morally certain twenties and into my morally confused thirties. And the fact that he had more money than many of his detractors, and used his inherited wealth to pursue expensive lawsuits against them, darkens the picture even further.
Reitter weighs in: “I’m of several minds about Kraus’s no-apologies policy. Moral certitude is so much a part of his voice that it’s hard even to ima
gine an apology-issuing Kraus—he’d be a fundamentally different writer. Or you could say that apologizing was inconsistent with Kraus’s brand. For all his wisecracking and wordplay, Kraus fashioned himself, to no small degree, as a modern-day wrathful prophet. Amid all the moral rot, he was the eloquent, fulminating, incorruptible seer who gave his works titles like ‘Apocalypse’ and Judgment Day. And what kind of wrathful prophet figure goes around retracting his statements and expressing remorse?
“Kraus’s policy was also a product of his off-the-charts competitiveness, and it no doubt functioned as a means of intimidation. All the literati in Kraus’s orbit had been put on notice. If they went after Kraus, they would be getting into it with someone who would never back off or back down or take back anything. Ever. Feuding with Kraus was like stepping into the ring with Tyson in his prime. There was glory to be won, but would you survive?
“If you did survive, Kraus might have his (busy) lawyer Oskar Samek try to force an apology out of you in court. Kraus himself didn’t have too much legal trouble, because he took care to play within the rules, meting out personal but permissible insults (like ‘Geist smeared on Brod is schmaltz,’ in a squabble with Max Brod, whose last name is pronounced just like the German word for ‘bread’) and defending his weaker positions as passionately as his best ones. Maybe, then, the saddest thing about Kraus’s refusal to retreat is the energy it cost him.”
3. This refers to the opening paragraphs of “Heine and the Consequences,” in which Kraus was plain about his preference for the “roaring of the German workday” to the beauty of life in Latin countries.
4. Our best guess about the word “nature” here is that it refers not to Nature but to Romance nature, Romance character—specifically, France and Italy. This helps make sense of the next sentence: France and Italy didn’t invent the war machine, but to defend themselves against the inventor of it (Germany) they’ve resorted to war machines of their own. This also picks up on the sentence above it, the one about Romance culture undertaking “emergency defense” against Germany’s mechanistic functionality.
5. Artists are still doing this. I know writers who use that computer software—I believe it’s called Freedom—that denies them access to the Internet during working hours. I use noise-canceling headphones when it’s loud at my office, and, for me, e-mail and digital voice mail are vital tools in restricting and managing the flood of communication that modern technology has unleashed.
6. “‘New Orientation’ (Neuorientierung) was a slogan used by the Austrian government after Franz Joseph died, in 1916: Austria would be going in a new direction, though where it was headed wasn’t clear.” —PR
7. I.e., by the First World War, then in progress. This is also the “collapse” to which Kraus refers in the very difficult sentence below.
8. If I may very freely paraphrase: “Yes, you have to inspect your hotel bill carefully in Italy, but I’ve always rather liked the country, and if I got carried away with saying nasty things about Paris it was only because Heine was a celebrity there; I’m not a Romance philologist, the language I love is German, and if you thought my essay was an attack on Romance culture you completely misunderstood it; my real target was a modern Germanic culture that is founded on utility and greed and literal-mindedness and is therefore all the more grotesque in its smittenness with Romance culture, as evidenced especially in the language of German feuilletons. Now that we’re seeing how much more horrific the German war machine is than its Latin counterparts, I’m asking you to believe that I showed more respect for the Romance cultural ideal by denouncing it than the Germans did by embracing it for their greedy, utilitarian purposes.”
Kraus was at least attempting here to walk back the nationalistic implications of the Heine essay, to disavow its applicability to a repugnant wartime cult of Germanic purity and superiority. In The Third Walpurgis Night, fifteen years later, he wouldn’t even mention that he himself, as a Jew, had once employed some of the antisemitic tropes with which the Nazis were justifying their violent program of purification. Maybe his longstanding indifference to history had come back to haunt him, or maybe, at some level too deep to be acknowledged, he was ashamed.
9. “The ‘consecrated’ referent here is Goethe’s ‘America’ poem, which begins: ‘Amerika, du hast es besser / Als unser Kontinent, das alte / Hast keine verfallene Schlösser / Und keine Basalte’ (‘America, you have it better / Than our continent, the old one / You have no decrepit castles / And no basalt’). Goethe regarded Europe’s basalt deposits as scars, the marks of violent volcanic episodes, and for him they were symbols of instability, both past and present. America, which Goethe became enthusiastic about as an old man, seemed to have it, well, ‘better.’ His poem goes on to suggest that unlike Europeans, Americans aren’t ‘inwardly disturbed’ by ‘futile conflict’ and ‘unproductive memories.’ With his talk of wanting ‘basalt-free orderliness,’ Kraus is invoking Goethe’s outlook to clarify his own prewar priorities and preferences: he wanted external orderliness and functionality not for their own sake, but for the same higher reason Goethe did: because they allow one ‘to tend to the castles and marvels of the soul.’” —PR
10. I.e., the French, the Italians.
11. A couple of very tough sentences here. What “colorful world” (a common colloquial phrase in German) is Kraus talking about? “My sense,” Reitter says, “is that the world is the world outside Germany, which is defending its diversity (or color) against the onslaught of the great gray German war machine. With ‘life’s mechanization’ (Lebensmechanik), Kraus is underscoring what he saw as the mechanical or machinelike nature of Germans, something he often did during the First World War.”
12. I.e., poison gas, in the trenches. The word “gold,” which follows, is “money” (Geld) in the equally alliterative original.
Let No One Ask … (1934)
1. I’m grateful to the gifted translators Damion Searls and Jonathan Galassi for their help in rendering this poem, and to Daniel Kehlmann for this short essay about it:
“‘Let no one ask…’ is a poem about appropriateness, the right word for the right occasion. For decades, Kraus had hounded stupid journalists, incorrect usage, bad usage, and everything else wrong with a late-feudal-bourgeois society stultified by the media. But now, suddenly, he was confronted with a phenomenon of an entirely different order, a thing more evil and horrifying than perhaps any the world had ever seen. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, Kraus recognized this circumstance immediately. He saw what was new about National Socialism, he understood what Hitler was trying to do, and he was under no illusions that this all could end in anything but an epochal catastrophe.
“And so at first he wrote—nothing. There was no reaction from Karl Kraus to Hitler’s seizure of power; month after month went by, and Die Fackel failed to appear. Kraus’s admirers expected that he would eloquently attack Hitler, criticize him, condemn him, mock him, but instead: not a word. From today’s standpoint, it seems easy to understand this silence as precisely the commentary whose failure to appear so appalled Kraus’s readers. And yet it was simply not appropriate to take the same words and the same raging tone in which the Neue Freie Presse, Franz Lehár, and Max Reinhardt had been attacked and apply them to Goebbels, Göring, and Hitler, as if there were ultimately no difference between them. So Kraus remained silent, unshakably so, even as many of his followers turned away from him.
“All the while, as we now know, he was writing a lengthy book from which he would much later, in July 1934, print excerpts under the title ‘Why Die Fackel Isn’t Coming Out,’ and which appeared in its entirety, as The Third Walpurgis Night, only posthumously (which also, by the way, ought to forever put to rest the idea that ‘nobody could have known’ from the outset how dangerous the Nazis were). But finally, in 1933, the year of the putsch—in late October, to be precise, nine months after Hitler became chancellor—one solitary issue of Die Fackel came out. It was four pages long, and it contained Kraus�
��s obituary of his architect friend Adolf Loos (the great rationalist and enemy of baroque ornament), an advertisement for Kraus’s own translation of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and the poem ‘Let no one ask…’
“The poem is about the powerlessness of words in the face of a development so dark as to have gone beyond the reach of satire. Kraus was never one of the great German lyric poets, except in this one moment. ‘Let no one ask…’ is far and away his best poem, a masterpiece of brevity and despair, its pathos immanent in its very laconicism. In a way, it remains Kraus’s most important statement about National Socialism, artistically superior even to The Third Walpurgis Night, because it is so short. And we shouldn’t forget that this isn’t a matter of political theory: Kraus fully expected that Austria wouldn’t hold out for long (for this very reason, he supported the clerical-reactionary regime of the Austrian dictator Engelbert Dollfuß, whom he saw as the only politician fighting full-force against this danger), he had no illusions about the cruelty of the Nazis, he had to assume that as soon as they came to power in Austria they would either drive him into exile or kill him—which, if he hadn’t been lucky enough to die of natural causes shortly before then, is exactly what would have happened. (Try to imagine how Kraus would have fared in exile, and it can’t be done, even as theater of the absurd, it’s just unthinkable.) ‘Let no one ask…,’ which was admired by Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, among others, is perhaps not the best but certainly one of the most important short poems of the twentieth century, a chilly masterpiece that gives voice to its own muteness. ‘The Word went under when that world awoke’: if it’s even possible for silence to be rendered in words, Kraus succeeds in doing it here.”
