To open a dialectical debate between the public and private zones that commingle demonically in prattle, to lead materialist humanity to victory, that is “the Purpose of the operetta” that Kraus discovered and in Offenbach* raised to its most expressive level. Just as prattle seals the enslavement of language with stupidity, so operetta transfigures stupidity through music. To fail to recognize the beauty of feminine stupidity was for Kraus always the blackest Philistinism. Before its radiance the chimeras of progress evaporate. And in Offenbach’s operetta the bourgeois trinity of true, beautiful, and good is brought together, freshly rehearsed and with musical accompaniment, in its star turn on the trapeze of stupidity. Nonsense is true, stupidity beautiful, weakness good. This is Offenbach’s secret: how in the deep nonsense of public discipline—whether it be of the upper ten thousand, a dance floor, or a military state—the deep sense of private licentiousness opens a dreamy eye. And what as language might have been judicial strictness, renunciation, discrimination, becomes cunning and evasion, obstruction and postponement, as music. Music as the preserver of the moral order? Music as the police of a world of pleasure? Yes, that is the splendor that falls on the old Paris ballrooms, on the Grande Chaumière, the Clôserie des Lilas in his performance of La Vie Parisienne. “And the inimitable duplicity of this music, which simultaneously puts a plus and a minus sign before everything it says, betraying idyll to parody, mockery to lyricism; the abundance of musical devices ready to perform all duties, uniting pain and pleasure—this gift is here developed to its purest pitch.” Anarchy as the only international constitution that is moral and worthy of man becomes the true music of these operettas. The voice of Kraus speaks, rather than sings, this inner music. It whistles bitingly about the peaks of dizzying stupidity, reverberates shatteringly from the abyss of the absurd, and in Frescata’s lines it hums, like the wind in the chimney, a requiem to the generation of our grandfathers. Offenbach’s work is touched by the pangs of death. It contracts, rids itself of everything superfluous, passes through the dangerous span of this existence and re-emerges saved, more real than before. For where this fickle voice is heard, the lightning flashes of the advertisements and the thunder of the Métro cleave the Paris of the omnibuses and the gas flames. And the work gives him all this in return. For at moments it is transformed into a curtain, and with the wild gestures of a fairground showman with which he accompanies the whole performance, Kraus tears aside this curtain and suddenly reveals the interior of his cabinet of horrors. There they stand: Schober, Bekessy, Kerr, and the other skits, no longer enemies but curiosities, heirlooms from the world of Offenbach or Nestroy, no, older, rarer still, lares of the troglodytes, household gods of stupidity from prehistoric times. Kraus, in his recitals, does not speak the words of Offenbach or Nestroy: they speak from him. And now and then a breathtaking, half-blank, half-glittering whoremonger’s glance falls on the crowd before him, inviting them to the unholy marriage with the masks in which they do not recognize themselves, and for the last time invokes his evil privilege of ambiguity.
It is only now that the satirist’s true face, or rather true mask, is revealed. It is the mask of Timon, the misanthrope. “Shakespeare had foreknowledge of everything”—yes. But above all of Kraus. Shakespeare portrays inhuman figures—and Timon as the most inhuman of them—and says: Nature would produce such a creature if she wished to create something befitting the world as your kind have fashioned it, something worthy of it. Such a creature is Timon; such is Kraus. Neither has, or wants, anything in common with men. “An animal feud is on, and so we renounce humanity”; from a remote village in the Swiss mountains Kraus throws down this challenge to mankind, and Timon wants only the sea to weep at his grave. Like Timon’s verse, Kraus’s poetry stands opposite the colon of the dramatis persona, of the role. A fool, a Caliban, a Timon—no more thoughtful, no more dignified or better—but, nevertheless, his own Shakespeare. All the figures thronging about him should be seen as originating in Shakespeare. Always he is the model, whether Kraus speaks with Weininger about man or with Altenberg about women, with Wedekind about the stage or with Loos about food, with Else Lasker-Schüler about the Jews or with Theodor Haecker about the Christians. The power of the demon ends in this realm. His demi- or subhuman traits are conquered by a truly inhuman being, a monster. Kraus hinted at this in the words “In me a capacity for psychology is united with the greater capacity to ignore the psychological.” It is the inhuman quality of the actor that he pre-empts in these words: the cannibal quality. For in each of his roles the actor assimilates bodily a human being, and in Shakespeare’s baroque tirades—when the cannibal is unmasked as the better man, the hero as an actor, when Timon plays the rich man, Hamlet the madman—it is as if his lips dripped blood. So Kraus, following Shakespeare’s example, wrote himself parts that let him taste blood. The endurance of his convictions is persistence in a role, in its stereotypes, its cues. His experiences are in their entirety nothing but this: cues. This is why he insists on them, demanding them of existence like an actor who never forgives a partner for denying him his cue.
The Offenbach readings, the recital of couplets from Nestroy, are bereft of all musical means. The word never gives way to the instrument; but by extending its boundaries further and further it finally enfeebles itself, dissolving into a merely animal voice: a humming that is to the word what his smile is to the joke is the holy of holies of this performer’s art. In this smile, this humming in which, as in a crater lake amid the most monstrous crags and cinders, the world is peacefully and contentedly mirrored, irrupts the deep complicity with his listeners and models that Kraus has never allowed to enter his words. His service to the world permits no compromise. But as soon as he turns his back on it, he is ready for a good many. Then is felt the tormenting, inexhaustible charm of these recitals: that of seeing the distinction between like and unlike minds annulled, and the homogeneous mass of false friends created, that sets the tone of these performances. Kraus confronts a world of enemies, seeks to coerce them to love and yet coerces them to nothing but hypocrisy. His defenselessness before the latter has a precise connection to the subversive dilettantism that is particularly predominant in the Offenbach performances. Here Kraus confines music to limits narrower than were ever dreamed of in the manifestoes of the George school. This cannot, of course, obscure the antithesis between the linguistic gestures of both men. Rather, an exact correlation exists between the factors that give Kraus access to the two poles of linguistic expression—the enfeebled pole of humming and the armed pole of pathos—and those which forbid his sanctification of the word to take on the forms of the Georgean cult of language. To the cosmic rising and falling that for George “deifies the body and embodies the divine,” language is only the Jacob’s ladder with its ten thousand word-rungs. Kraus’s language, by contrast, has done away with all hieratic moments. It is the medium neither of clairvoyance nor of domination. It is the theater of a sanctification of the name—with this Jewish certainty it sets itself against the theurgy of the “word-body.” Very late, with a decisiveness that must have matured in years of silence, Kraus entered the lists against the great partner whose work had arisen at the same time as his own, beneath the threshold of the century. George’s first published book and the first volume of Die Fackel are dated 1899. And only retrospectively, “After Thirty Years,” in 1929, did Kraus issue the challenge. There, as the zealot, he confronts George, the object of worship,
who in the temple dwells from which
he never had to drive the traders and the lenders,
nor yet the pharisees and scribes
who, therefore, camped about the place, describe it.
Profanum vulgus praises this renouncer
who never told it what it ought to hate.
And he who found the goal before the way
did not come from the source.
“You came from the source—the source is the goal” is received by the “Dying Man” as God’s comfort and promise. To t
his Kraus alludes here, as does Viertel when, in the same way as Kraus, he calls the world a “wrong, deviating, circuitous way back to paradise.” “And so,” he continues in this most important passage of his essay on Kraus, “I attempt to interpret the development of this remarkable talent: intellectuality as a deviation . . . leading back to immediacy; publicity—a false trail back to language; satire—a detour to poetry.” This “source”—the phenomenon’s seal of authenticity—is the subject of a discovery that has a curious element of rediscovery. The theater of this philosophical recognition scene in Kraus’s work is poetry, and its language rhyme: “A word that never lies at source” and that, just as blessedness has its source at the end of time, has its at the end of the line. Rhyme—two putti bearing the demon to its grave. It died at its source because it came into the world as a hybrid of mind and sexuality. Its sword and shield—concept and guilt—have fallen from its hands to become emblems beneath the feet of the angel that killed it. This is a poetic, martial angel with a foil in his hand, as only Baudelaire knew him: “practicing alone fantastic swordsmanship,”
Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de la rime,
Trébuchant sur les mots comme sur les pavés,
Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps rêvés.
(Scenting rhyme’s hazards in every corner,
Stumbling on words as on uneven pavements,
Jostling now and then long-dreamed-of lines.)
Also a licentious angel, to be sure, “here chasing a metaphor that has just turned the corner, there coupling words like a procurer, perverting phrases, infatuated with similarities, blissfully abusing chiastic embraces, always on the lookout for adventure, impatient and hesitant to consummate in joy and torment.” So finally the hedonistic moment of the work finds its purest expression in this melancholy and fantastic relationship to existence in which Kraus, in the Viennese tradition of Raimund and Girardi, arrives at a conception of happiness that is as resigned as it is sensual. This must be borne in mind if one is to understand the urgency with which he opposed the dancing pose affected by Nietzsche—not to mention the wrath with which the monster was bound to greet the Superman.
The child recognizes by rhyme that it has reached the summit of language, from which it can hear at their source the rushing of all springs. Up there creaturely existence is at home; after so much dumbness in the animal and so much lying in the whore, it has found its tongue in the child. “A good brain must be capable of imagining each fiber of childhood with all its phenomena so intensely that temperature is raised”—in statements such as this Kraus aims further than it appears. He himself, at any rate, satisfied this requirement to the extent that he never envisaged the child as the object of education but, in an image from his own youth, as the antagonist of education who is educated by this antagonism, not by the educator. “Not the cane was to be abolished, but the teacher who uses it badly.” Kraus wants to be nothing except the teacher who uses it better. The limit of his philanthropy, his pity, is marked by the cane, which he first felt in the same class at school to which he owes his best poems.
“I am only one of the late followers”—Kraus is a late follower of the school anthologies. “The German Boy’s Table Grace,” “Siegfried’s Sword,” “The Grave in the Busento,” “Kaiser Karl Inspects a School”—these were his models, poetically re-created by the attentive pupil who learned them. So the “Steeds of Gravelotte” became the poem “To Eternal Peace,” and even the most incandescent of his hate poems were ignited by Hölty’s “Forest Fire,” the glow of which pervaded the anthologies of our school days. And if on the last day not only the graves but the school anthologies open, to the tune of “How the trumpets blow, Hussars away,” the true Pegasus of the little folk will burst from them and, a shriveled mummy, a puppet of cloth or yellowish ivory, hanging dead and dried up over the shoulders of his horse, this unparalleled fashioner of verses will go careening off; but the two-edged saber in his hand, polished as his rhymes and incisive as on the First Day, will belabor the green woods, and blooms of style bestrew the ground.
Language has never been more perfectly distinguished from mind, never more intimately bound to Eros, than by Kraus in the observation “The more closely you look at a word the more distantly it looks back.” This is a Platonic love of language. The only closeness from which the word cannot escape, however, is rhyme. So the primal erotic relationship between closeness and distance is given voice in his language: as rhyme and name. As rhyme, language rises up from the creaturely world; as name, it draws all creation up to it. In “The Forsaken” the most ardent interpenetration of language and Eros, as Kraus experienced them, expresses itself with an innocent grandeur that recalls the perfect Greek epigrams and vase pictures. “The Forsaken” are forsaken by each other. But—this is their great solace—also with each other. On the threshold between dying and rebirth they pause. With head turned back, joy “in unheard-of fashion” takes her eternal leave; turned from her the soul “in unwonted fashion” silently sets foot in an alien world. Thus forsaken with each other are joy and soul, but also language and Eros, also rhyme and name. To “The Forsaken” the fifth volume of Words in Verse is dedicated. Only the dedication now reaches them, which is nothing other than avowal of Platonic love, which does not satisfy its desire in what it loves, but possesses and holds it in name. This self-obsessed man knows no other self-renunciation than giving thanks. His love is not possession, but gratitude. Thanking and dedicating—for to thank is to put feelings under a name. How the beloved grows distant and lustrous, how her minuteness and her glow withdraw into name, that is the only experience of love known to Words in Verse. And, therefore, “To live without women, how easy—to have lived without women, how hard.”
From within the linguistic compass of the man, and only from within it, can we discern Kraus’s basic polemical procedure: quotation. To quote a word is to call it by its name. So Kraus’s achievement exhausts itself at its highest level by making even the newspaper quotable. He transports it to his own sphere, and the empty phrase is suddenly forced to recognize that even in the deepest dregs of the journals it is not safe from the voice that swoops on the wings of the word to drag it from its darkness. How wonderful, if this voice approaches not to punish but to save, as it does on the Shakespearean wings of the lines in which, before Arras, someone sends word home of how in the early morning, on the last blasted tree before the fortifications, a lark began to sing. A single line, and not even one of his, is enough to enable Kraus to descend, as savior, into this inferno, a single italicization: “It was a nightingale and not a lark which sat there on the pomegranate tree and sang.”* In the quotation that both saves and chastises, language proves the matrix of justice. It summons the word by its name, wrenches it destructively from its context, but precisely thereby calls it back to its origin. It appears, now with rhyme and reason, sonorously, congruously in the structure of a new text. As rhyme it gathers the similar into its aura; as name it stands alone and expressionless. In quotation the two realms—of origin and destruction—justify themselves before language. And conversely, only where they interpenetrate—in quotation—is language consummated. In it is mirrored the angelic tongue in which all words, startled from the idyllic context of meaning, have become mottoes in the book of Creation.
From its two poles—classical and materialist humanism—the whole world of this man’s culture is embraced by quotation. Schiller, admittedly unnamed, stands beside Shakespeare: “There is also a moral nobility. Mean natures pay / With that which they do, noble with that which they are”—this classical distich characterizes, in the convergence of manorial noblesse and cosmopolitan rectitude, the Utopian vanishing point where Weimar humanism was at home, and which was finally fixed by Stifter. It is decisive for Kraus that he locates origin at exactly this vanishing point. It is his program to reverse the development of bourgeois-capitalist affairs to a condition that was never theirs. But he is nonetheless the last bourgeois to claim his ju
stification from Being, and Expressionism was portentous for him because in it this attitude had for the first time to prove its worth in face of a revolutionary situation. It was precisely the attempt to do justice to this situation not by actions but by Being that led Expressionism to its clenched ensteepments. So it became the last historical refuge of personality. The guilt that bowed it and the purity it proclaimed—both are part of the phantom of the unpolitical or “natural” man who emerges at the end of that regression and was unmasked by Marx. “Man as member of bourgeois society,” writes Marx, “the unpolitical man, necessarily appears as the natural man. . . . Political revolution dissolves bourgeois life into its component parts without revolutionizing or criticizing these components themselves. It stands to bourgeois society, to the world of needs, work, private interests, private right, in the same relation as to the foundation of its existence . . . and therefore to its natural basis. . . . The real man is acknowledged only in the form of the egoistical individual, the true man only in the form of the abstract citoyen. . . . Only when the really individual man takes back into himself the abstract citizen and, as an individual man, has become in his empirical life, in his individual work, in his individual circumstances a species-being . . . and therefore no longer separates social power from himself in the form of political power, only then is human emancipation complete.” The materialist humanism which Marx here opposes to its classical counterpart manifests itself for Kraus in the child, and the developing human being raises his face against the idols of ideal man—the romantic child of nature as much as the dutiful citizen. For the sake of such development Kraus revised the school anthology, investigated German education, and found it tossing helplessly on the waves of journalistic caprice. Hence the “Lyric of the Germans”: “He who can is their man and not he who must, / they strayed from being to seeming. / Their lyrical case was not Claudius / but Heine.” The fact, however, that the developing man actually takes form not within the natural sphere but in that of mankind, in the struggle for liberation, and that he is recognized by the posture that the fight with exploitation and poverty stamp upon him, that there is no idealistic but only a materialistic deliverance from myth, and that at the origin of creation stands not purity but purification—all this did not leave its trace on Kraus’s materialist humanism until very late. Only in despair did he discover in quotation the power not to preserve but to purify, to tear from context, to destroy; the only power in which hope still resides that something might survive this age—because it was wrenched from it.
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