Everything Kraus wrote is like that: a silence turned inside out, a silence that catches the storm of events in its black folds, billows, its livid lining turned outward. Notwithstanding their abundance, each of the instances of this silence seems to have broken upon it with the suddenness of a gust of wind. Immediately, a precise apparatus of control is brought into play: through a meshing of oral and written forms the polemical possibilities of every situation are totally exhausted. With what precautions this is surrounded can be seen from the barbed wire of editorial pronouncements that encircles each edition of Die Fackel, as from the razor-sharp definitions and provisos in the programs and lectures accompanying his readings from his own work. The trinity of silence, knowledge, and alertness constitutes the figure of Kraus the polemicist. His silence is a dam before which the reflecting basin of his knowledge is constantly deepened. His alertness permits no one to ask it questions, forever unwilling to conform to principles proffered to it. Its first principle is, rather, to dismantle the situation, to discover the true question the situation poses, and to present this in place of any other to his opponents. If in Johann Peter Hebel we find, developed to the utmost, the constructive, creative side of tact, in Kraus we see its most destructive and critical face. But for both, tact is moral alertness—Stössl calls it “conviction refined into dialectics”—and the expression of an unknown convention more important than the acknowledged one. Kraus lived in a world in which the most shameful act was still the faux pas; he distinguishes between degrees of the monstrous, and does so precisely because his criterion is never that of bourgeois respectability, which once above the threshold of trivial misdemeanor becomes so quickly short of breath that it can form no conception of villainy on a world-historical scale.
Kraus knew this criterion from the first, and moreover there is no other criterion for true tact. It is a theological criterion. For tact is not—as narrow minds imagine it—the gift of allotting to each, on consideration of all relationships, what is socially befitting. On the contrary, tact is the capacity to treat social relationships, though not departing from them, as natural, even as paradisiac relationships, and so not only to approach the king as if he had been born with the crown on his brow, but the lackey like an Adam in livery. Hebel possessed this noblesse in his priestly bearing, Kraus in armor. His concept of creation contains the theological inheritance of speculations that last possessed contemporary validity for the whole of Europe in the seventeenth century. At the theological core of this concept, however, a transformation has taken place that has caused it, quite without constraint, to coincide with the cosmopolitan credo of Austrian worldliness, which made creation into a church in which nothing remained to recall the rite except an occasional whiff of incense in the mists. Stifter gave this creed its most authentic stamp, and his echo is heard wherever Kraus concerns himself with animals, plants, children.
“The stirring of the air,” Stifter writes, “the rippling of water, the growing of corn, the tossing of the sea, the verdure of the earth, the shining of the sky, the twinkling of the stars I hold great: the thunderstorm approaching in splendor, the lightning flash that cleaves houses, the storm driving the surf, the mountains spewing fire, the earthquake laying waste to countries, I do not hold greater than the former phenomena; indeed, I believe them smaller, because they are only effects of far higher laws. . . . When man was in his infancy, his spiritual eye not yet touched by science, he was seized by what was close at hand and obtrusive, and was moved to fear and admiration; but when his mind was opened, when his gaze began to be directed at the connections between things, particular phenomena sank from sight and the law rose even higher, miracles ceased, and wonder increased. . . . Just as in nature the general laws act silently and incessantly, and conspicuous events are only single manifestations of these laws, so the moral law acts silently, animating the soul through the infinite intercourse of human beings, and the miracles of the moment when deeds are performed are only small signs of this general power.” Tacitly, in these famous sentences, the holy has given place to the modest yet questionable concept of law. But this nature of Stifter’s and his moral universe are transparent enough to escape any confusion with Kant, and to be still recognizable in their core as creation. This insolently secularized thunder and lightning, storms, surf, and earthquakes—cosmic man has won them back for creation by making them its world-historical answer to the criminal existence of men. Only the span between Creation and the Last Judgment here finds no redemptive fulfillment, let alone a historical resolution. For as the landscape of Austria fills unbroken the captivating expanse of Stifter’s prose, so for him, Kraus, the terrible years of his life are not history, but nature, a river condemned to meander through a landscape of hell. It is a landscape in which every day fifty thousand tree trunks are felled for sixty newspapers. Kraus imparted this information under the title “The End.” For that mankind is losing the fight against the creaturely world is to him just as certain as that technology, once deployed against creation, will not stop short of its master, either. His defeatism is of a supranational, that is, planetary kind, and history for him is merely the wilderness dividing his race from creation, whose last act is world conflagration. As a deserter to the camp of animal creation—so he measures out this wilderness. “And only the animal that is conquered by humanity is the hero of life”: never was Adalbert Stifter’s patriarchal credo given so lugubrious and heraldic a formulation.
It is in the name of animal creation that Kraus again and again bends toward the animal and toward “the heart of all hearts, that of the dog,” for him creation’s true mirror of virtue, in which fidelity, purity, gratitude smile from times lost and remote. How la-mentable that people usurp its place! These are his followers. More numerously and eagerly than about their master they throng with unlovely sniffings about the mortally wounded opponent. Certainly the dog is not for nothing the emblematic beast of this author: the dog, the ideal example of the follower, who is nothing except devoted creaturely life. And the more personal and unfounded this devotion, the better. Kraus is right to put it to the hardest test. But if anything makes plain what is infinitely questionable in these creatures, it is that they are recruited solely from those whom Kraus himself first called intellectually to life, whom he conceived and convinced in one and the same act. His word can be decisive only for those whom it did not beget.
It is entirely logical when the impoverished, reduced human being of our days, the contemporary, can only seek sanctuary in the temple of living things in that most withered form, as a private individual. How much renunciation and how much irony lie in the curious struggle for the “nerves,” the last root fibers of the Viennese to which Kraus could still find Mother Earth adhering. “Kraus,” writes Robert Scheu, “had discovered a great subject that had never before set in motion the pen of a publicist: the rights of the nerves. He found that they were just as worthy an object of impassioned defense as were property, house and home, party, and constitution. He became the advocate of the nerves and took up the fight against the petty, everyday imitations, but the subject grew under his hands, became the problem of private life. To defend this against police, press, morality, and concepts, finally against neighbors in every form, constantly to find new enemies, became his profession.” Here, if anywhere, is manifest the strange interplay between reactionary theory and revolutionary practice that is met everywhere in Kraus. Indeed, to secure private life against morality and concepts in a society that perpetrates the political radioscopy of sexuality and family, of economic and physical existence, in a society that is in the process of building houses with glass walls, and patios extending far into the drawing rooms that are no longer drawing rooms—such a watchword would be the most reactionary of all were not the private life that Kraus had made it his business to defend precisely that which, unlike the bourgeois form, is in strict accordance with this social upheaval; in other words, the private life that is dismantling itself, openly shaping itself, that of the poo
r, from whose ranks came Peter Altenberg, the agitator, and Adolf Loos. In this fight—and only in it—his followers also have their use, since it is they who most sublimely ignore the anonymity with which the satirist has tried to surround his private existence, and nothing holds them in check except Kraus’s decision to step in person before his threshold and pay homage to the ruins in which he is a “private individual.”
As decisively as he makes his own existence a public issue when the fight demands it, he has always just as ruthlessly opposed the distinction between personal and objective criticism with the aid of which polemics are discredited, and which is a chief instrument of corruption in our literary and political affairs. That Kraus attacks people less for what they are than for what they do, more for what they say than for what they write, and least of all for their books, is the precondition of his polemical authority, which is able to lift the intellectual universe of an author—all the more surely the more worthless it is, in confidence of a truly prestabilized, reconciling harmony—whole and intact from a single fragment of sentence, a single word, a single intonation. But the coincidence of personal and objective elements not only in his opponents but above all in himself is best demonstrated by the fact that he never puts forward an opinion. For opinion is false objectivity that can be separated from the person and incorporated in the circulation of commodities. Kraus never offered an argument that had not engaged his whole person. Thus he embodies the secret of authority: never to disappoint. Authority has no other end than this: it dies or it disappoints. It is not in the least undermined by what others must avoid: its own despotism, injustice, inconsistency. On the contrary, it would be disappointing to observe how it arrived at its pronouncements—by fairness, for example, or even self-consistency. “For the man,” Kraus once said, “being right is not an erotic matter, and he gladly prefers others’ being right to his being wrong.” To prove his manhood in this way is denied to Kraus; his existence demands that at most the self-righteousness of others is opposed to his wrongness, and how right he then is to cling to this. “Many will be right one day. But it will be a rightness resulting from my wrongness today.” That is the language of true authority. Insight into its operations can discover only one thing: that it is binding, mercilessly binding toward itself in the same degree as toward others; that it does not tire of trembling before itself, though never before others; that it never does enough to satisfy itself, to fulfill its responsibility toward itself, and that this sense of responsibility never allows him to accept arguments derived from his private constitution or even from the limits of human capacity, but always only from the matter at hand, however unjust, from a private point of view, it may be.
The characteristic of such unlimited authority has for all time been the union of legislative and executive power. But it was never a more intimate union than in the theory of language. This is therefore the most decisive expression of Kraus’s authority. Incognito like Haroun-al-Raschid, he passes by night among the sentence constructions of the journals, and, from behind the petrified façades of phrases, he peers into the interior, discovers in the orgies of “black magic” the violation, the martyrdom of words: “Is the press a messenger? No: the event. Is it speech? No: life. It not only claims that the true events are its news of events, but it also brings about a sinister identification that constantly creates the illusion that deeds are reported before they are carried out, and frequently also the possibility of a situation, which in any case exists, that while war correspondents are not allowed to witness events, soldiers become reporters. I therefore welcome the charge that all my life I have overestimated the press. It is not a servant—how could a servant demand and receive so much—it is the event. Once again the instrument has run away with us. We have placed the person who is supposed to report outbreaks of fire, and who ought doubtless to play the most subordinate role in the state, in power over the world, over fire and over the house, over fact and over our fantasy.” Authority and word against corruption and magic—these are the catchwords distributed in this struggle. It is not idle to prognosticate its outcome. No one, Kraus least of all, can leave the Utopia of an “objective” newspaper, the chimera of an “impartial transmission of news,” to its own devices. The newspaper is an instrument of power. It can derive its value only from the character of the power it serves; not only in what it represents, but also in what it does, it is the expression of this power. If, however, high capitalism defiles not only the ends but also the means of journalism, then a new blossoming of paradisiac, cosmic humanity can no more be expected of a power that defeats it than a second blooming of the language of Goethe or Claudius. From that now prevailing it will distinguish itself first of all by putting out of circulation ideals that debase the former. This is enough to give a measure of how little Kraus would have to win or lose in such a struggle, of how unerringly Die Fackel would illuminate it. To the ever-repeated sensations with which the daily press serves its public he opposes the eternally fresh “news” of the history of creation: the eternally renewed, the uninterrupted lament.
2. Demon
Have I slept? I am just falling asleep.
—Words in Verse IV
It is deeply rooted in Kraus’s nature, and it is the stigma of every debate concerning him, that all apologetic arguments miss their mark. The great work of Leopold Liegler springs from an apologetic posture. To certify Kraus as an “ethical personality” is his first objective. That cannot be done. The dark background from which his image detaches itself is not formed by his contemporaries, but is the primeval world or the world of the demon. The light of the first day falls on him—thus he emerges from this darkness. But not in all parts; others remain that are more deeply immersed in it than one suspects. An eye that cannot adjust to this darkness will never perceive the outline of this figure. On it will be wasted all the gestures that Kraus tirelessly makes in his unconquerable need to be perceived. For, as in the fairy tale, the demon in Kraus has made vanity the expression of his being. The demon’s solitude, too, is felt by him who gesticulates wildly on the hidden hill: “Thank God nobody knows my name is Rumpelstiltskin.” Just as this dancing demon is never still, in Kraus eccentric reflection is in continuous uproar. “The patient of his gifts,” Viertel called him. In fact, his capacities are maladies, and over and above the real ones, his vanity makes him a hypochondriac.
If he does not see his reflection in himself, he sees it in the adversary at his feet. His polemics have been from the first the most intimate intermingling of a technique of unmasking that works with the most advanced means, and a self-expressive art operating with the most archaic. In this zone, too, however, ambiguity, the demon, is manifest: self-expression and unmasking merge in it as self-unmasking. Kraus has said, “Anti-Semitism is the mentality . . . that means seriously a tenth part of the jibes that the stock-exchange wit holds ready for his own blood”; he thereby indicates the nature of the relationship of his own opponents to himself. There is no reproach to him, no vilification of his person, that could not find its most legitimate formulation in his own writings, in those passages where self-reflection is raised to self-admiration. He will pay any price to get himself talked about, and is always justified by the success of these speculations. If style is the power to move freely in the length and breadth of linguistic thinking without falling into banality, it is attained chiefly by the cardiac strength of great thoughts, which drives the blood of language through the capillaries of syntax into the remotest limbs. While such thoughts are quite unmistakable in Kraus, the powerful heart of his style is nevertheless the image he bears of himself in his own breast and exposes in the most merciless manner. Yes, he is vain. As such he has been described by Karin Michaelis, crossing a room with swift, restless bounds to reach the lecture podium. And if he then offers a sacrifice to his vanity, he would not be the demon that he is were it not finally himself, his life and his suffering, that he exposes with all its wounds, all its nakedness. In this way his style comes into b
eing, and with it the typical reader of Die Fackel, for whom in a subordinate clause, in a particle, indeed in a comma, fibers and nerves quiver; from the obscurest and driest fact a piece of his mutilated flesh hangs. Idiosnycrasy as the highest critical organ—that is the hidden logic of this self-reflection and the hellish state known only to a writer for whom every act of gratification becomes at the same time a station of his martyrdom, a state that was experienced, apart from Kraus, by no one as deeply as by Kierkegaard.
Reflections Page 29