The Kraus Project

by Karl Kraus

  AFTERWORD TO “HEINE AND THE CONSEQUENCES”

  The deepest confirmation of what was thought in this essay and accomplished by it is what happened to it: it found no readers. A printed thing that’s simultaneously a written thing finds none. Though it may have every outward merit in its favor—content that’s accessible and remains agreeable even under hostile scrutiny, a pleasing format, and even the lowest price1—the public isn’t fooled, it has the keenest nose against art, and even more surely than it knows its way to kitsch, it steers clear of value. Today only the novel, the work of language outside of language, which even in its most perfect form grants common sense some kind of hold and hope, can earn its author a living. Otherwise the people whose words to the reader abide with thought are in an endlessly difficult position compared with those who deceive him with words. He believes the latter immediately, the former only after a hundred years. And no earthly tear from eyes that see life buried by death will shorten the waiting period. Nothing helps. An age first has to rot past stinking to make the people who are what they can do as beloved as these people here, who can do what they are not. Except that this Today carries the particular curse of doubt: whether the head that survives the machine will also survive its consequences. Never before was the road from art to audience so long; but there has also never existed such an artificial hybrid,2 a thing that writes of its own accord and reads of its own accord, so that, indeed, they all can write and all can understand, and purely social accident determines who, among this horde of educated Huns who progress against the Spirit, emerges as writer and who as reader. The sole ability that they hold in honor as a trait inherited from nature: regurgitating what they’ve eaten seems welcome to them in the intellectual realm, as a trick through which it might be possible to unite two functions in one person, and it’s only because there are businesses more profitable than writing that so many of them have restrained themselves so far and satisfy themselves with eating what the others have regurgitated. Just as the same person is duplicated at a table of tavern regulars, a cellist, a lawyer, a philosopher, a horse trader, and a painter who are all of one mind and distinguishable to the waiter only by their trades: there’s no difference between author and reader. There’s only one person now, and that’s the feuilletonist. Art backs away from him like a glacier from an alpine hotel guest. There was a time, the guide boasts, when you could put your hands on it. If a reader today can put his hands on a work, the work must have a bad side. The publisher of this magazine is well aware that it owes its reputation mainly to a sensibility that doesn’t shrink from some excellent novelist merely because he’s also rumored to be an artist. He can confidently exploit the indulgence. The publisher of Die Fackel not infrequently has the feeling that he’s freeloading on it. It would be retracted irrevocably should his readers ever discover in what a state of insanity such witty happenstances came to be written, on what powers of self-annihilation such self-assurance lives, and how many hundredweight of suffering the lightest pen can carry. And how gloomy the thing that brightens the idler’s day.3 Their laughter, which doesn’t reach as far as my wit, would die in their mouths. If they could see that the petty material directly in front of them is just a shabby remnant of a thing they cannot touch, they would finally go away. Among those who flatter themselves that they’re my victims, I am not loved; but the people who look on with schadenfreude still give me far more credit than I deserve.4

  Given that Die Fackel finds itself in so many wrong hands: if something I’ve written proceeds to venture into other print, few people will reach for it. With a collection of satires or aphorisms, this would be nothing to complain about.5 Things of that sort are content to find the rare reader for whom textual alteration signifies new work. But the essay “Heine and the Consequences,” which came to the book publisher as a manuscript, has made it clear that there no longer are any readers besides these few.6 And it, of all texts, can’t help feeling pained by this discovery. For its wish is to create readers, and it can’t succeed at this unless it finds readers. It enacts the misery of German-language letters, and it isn’t content to make itself the demonstration of its own truth. And so it treads the path of remorse, which leads from the book back into the magazine; and would that even this exigency might please it, as proof of the perversity of the business of the Spirit in our times. Here, in familiar environs, it will at least make the attempt to speak to more deaf ears than are to be had in the greater German public.

  Because it’s not to be thought that they were simply deaf to the subject about which they were being addressed. They’re still happy to hear about Heine, even if they know not what it means.7 If the essay merely rejected the living value of his art, it would surely say nothing new to that contemporary sensibility that doesn’t even let itself be fooled by the collusions of the commentariat. It would surely sooner be brought around to begging for a Heine monument than to a reading of his books. And the hate that developed there, where not love but mere intellectual hypocrisy stands watch over the grave, would be greeted with some bitterness, to be sure, but not with any general interest. This text, meanwhile, as far removed from suspicion of being unfair to Heine as from pretension of being fair to him, is not a literary essay. It doesn’t exhaust the problem of Heine, but it does more than this.8 The most ridiculous reproach—that it holds Heine responsible as an individual culprit for his consequences—can’t touch it. The people who pretend to defend him are defending themselves and revealing the true direction of the attack. They should be held responsible for their existence, and the sputum that German intellectuals immediately coughed up is evidence that they feel themselves to be the responsible consequence. There were individuals severely enough punished by their own poetry or too gravely insulted by their own polemics to have needed to respond in detail. The few who were annoyed and the many who didn’t read have confirmed what was written.9 It wasn’t the danger of experiencing a desecration of Heine, but surely the fear of hearing the most hostile thing that can be said to this age of talents, that prevented the shout from having a stronger echo. It wasn’t an evaluation of Heinean poesy, but a critique of a form of life in which everything uncreative has once and for all found its place and its brilliantly wretched accommodation, that was essayed here. Not a denunciation of the invention of a pestilence, nor even of its importation, but a description of a spiritual condition on which ornaments fester. This offended the pride of the bacteria carriers. Here language is somehow released from everything it was obligated to outwit, and the power to acquire better content is celebrated. Here this very language declares itself a stranger to the calligraphic fraud that admires the beauty mongers from Paris to Palermo for the verve with which, in art and in the hotel bill, a five-note is made into a niner. This they didn’t understand, or recognized as dangerous enough that they didn’t want to hear it.

  But so as not to chastise lack of ability, which is an honest effect of the gifted zeitgeist, more severely than the malice that social possibilities of every age have mobilized against thought, it must be said that a particular suspicion has compelled the author to ask the publisher Albert Langen for the reprint rights to this document. The author’s well-known persecution mania, which has gone so far as to whisper to him that he hasn’t managed to make himself loved in twelve years’ time, led him to believe that the pamphlet was intentionally suppressed.10 He imagined that bugs flushed from Heine’s mattress-grave had sprung into action and settled in precisely on the road they know so well, the one that leads from thinking to commerce. Fear of the press can move mountains and shutter halls; a hint is perhaps not even needed to make a Viennese bookseller tepid in marketing a dangerous pamphlet that generates only paltry profit.11 Especially not one of the ones who are even now still sore with Die Fackel about a civil action that its first printer brought against it. Is it not, then, a most indicative Viennese circumstance that not only will the glances of the strolling city be spared the irritation of my books, but that copies of Die Fackel—one
line of which contains more literature than the collective show windows of every downtown bookstore, and on whose least comma more torment and love are expended than on a library of luxury editions by Insel—are compelled to offer themselves amid cigars, lottery tickets, and tabloids to cover the costs of a never-rewarded and never-appreciated labor, while an entire chorus of humor-loving vermin considers the thing lucrative and gloats over the idea of the “double issue.”12 A magazine that avoids like leprosy the most legitimate sponsorship,13 that in its desire to earn its own living makes life harder for itself, and that is book-born like hardly a book in contemporary Germany, has to do without the support of its own industry, which ought to have an obligation to it, and to get a taste, in Austrian exile, of the sort of ignominy that throws the person condemned for a political offense into jail with the pickpockets. The pack of liberals whose cosmic feeling is avarice, and whom you have to beg for the mercy of excusing you as crazy if you fail to make a profit: Does it have any idea how many pleasures it could buy with the money that my work of hate devours before it achieves the form with which a self-glorifier is never satisfied—because only then does it reveal to him the errors that the others don’t notice? But here, in his archive, he takes what he likes and collects what is liked nowhere else. Here nothing can disappoint him. A work that instead of twenty editions didn’t see a second one: here nothing more can happen to it. Its author, whose pleasure it is to reach into the spokes of his own wheel to shut down both himself and the machine when the tiniest point displeases him, will never again lend his assistance to an alien publishing concern.14 He will never again try to win a new audience. For him, Die Fackel is not a platform but a haven. Here the destiny of a work can move him only through the point of its completion, not through its dissemination. What’s being lived here may be resurrected in a book. But it’s recompense enough to be bound to one’s own wheel.15

  BETWEEN TWO STRAINS OF LIFE

  FINAL WORD [TO “HEINE AND THE CONSEQUENCES”]

  To report the insignificant fact that “Heine and the Consequences” is in its third edition in seven years, after having been circulated in Die Fackel as well, is not the motive for this supplement.1 The wish is to append something else, which likewise, in the guise of a correction, allows the correctness of a deeper observation to be recognized for the first time.2 Everything that’s said here, and in every chapter about the loss of life in contemporary life and the linguistic betrayal of German humanity, has a train of thought leading to the brink of this war, thanks to which my truths now also have the quality of self-evidence. An explanation is needed only at the point where, in my desperation to escape the machine, I said that I preferred an already fully dehumanized zone to that beauty-smitten thing that resisted the relentless march of progress with the leftover wreckage of humankind.3 This antithesis, now broken open by the war, was resolved in later aphorisms in favor of precisely the latter life-form, as the one with a yearning for life and for form, which, on account of just such a yearning, and of a self-preservative instinct as well, was obliged to undertake emergency defense against the tyranny of a valueless utility, according to which life is finished products and culture the trappings. The question “in which hell would the artist prefer to fry” gave way to the urgent verdict that humanity preferred not to fry in this hell, as a result of the corrective insight of the artist himself, who now no longer has the right and no longer the possibility of seeking to securely lock away his inner self, but only the duty of seeing which parties of mankind are struggling, like him, for the preservation of this kind of happiness and against the coercions of a philosophy of life that has squeezed all the motivations out of life, so as to save it solely for the profit motive. But the fact that those were the regions from whose character the disturbance came in peaceful times: to succumb to doubt about this would be wartime treason against the nature that is warding off the machine.4 It does it; and it does it, if need be, with the help of the machine itself, like the artist who isn’t above using the industrial methods of his times to preserve himself from them.5 Faced with the imperfection of life, he affirms the substitute for life; faced with half individuals, he affirms the patented system for avoiding personalities entirely. The person who helps himself to the machine is rewarded to the same extent that the people who help the machine are impoverished. Because the latter doesn’t liberate a person but makes him its slave, it brings him not to himself but under artillery fire. However, the kind of thinking that, unlike power, doesn’t need a “New Orientation”6 to reestablish its command knows that it was merely creating an emergency exit from the chaos of peace, and that what seemed contradictory about the division of values into “German-Romance” was merely the internal contradiction of modern life, which is today being resolved by way of events.7 The frame of reference that seemed unwilling to accept the “lazzarone as a cultural ideal alongside the German constable” thereby affirmed him more than the ones who were willing to accept the ideal—because it promised “picturesqueness”—and who are the real Germans. The phrase “beauty mongers from Paris to Palermo” may now apply to that horde of educated Huns who bear the blame for transforming the values of life into tourist attractions.8 The thinking here about language and human beings is more akin to the type who can laze around in the sun, wallowing in deeper aimlessness, than to the insufferable conqueror of a place in the sun, with whose way of thinking it was of course in keeping to ornamentally dishonor a more colorful existence and thereby beautify its own downfall. In that consecrated state of mind, which desires “basalt-free”9 orderliness and utility truly only for the higher purpose of tending to the castles and marvels of the soul without being disturbed, I had no choice but to prefer the company of commercial scum like that, because they provided the best instruments for securing respite from a noisy world in which, only because they were no longer human beings, they themselves could no longer disturb me. The others did, however, because they were half human.10 This used to be too little for me, and now it has ended up being so much. And this problem—in which, very similarly, the antithesis Berlin-Vienna is settled in favor of Vienna—is further illuminated by the collapse, which reveals that the entire contradiction was situated squarely in the sphere of life’s mechanization. That it’s not a matter simply of “German/Romance” but of “Germany/world” is shown by the colorful world’s insistence on its color.11 America, where things are better, joins forces with the world of antique forms to finish off a higgledy-piggledy that scrapes together functionality from here and beauty from there and keeps hoping to muddle through with its deadly conflation of valuables and values, the frightful application of old emblems to new realities. The Anglo-Saxon defends his ends and the Latin his form against a mishmash that turns means into an end and form into a pretext. Since art here is merely trappings; since, everywhere you look, this literal-mindedness, this orderliness, this miserable facility with instruments reveals the loss of humanity it has cost to win for the populace a life so emptied out; since there are no longer even the superficial values for which all depth of soul and all the sacred value of the German language were sacrificed in the collision of two strains of life; since the German really wasn’t an American at all, but merely an American with basalts—conditions here can no longer serve as a starting point for the imagination. Because they use Mind and God and gas12 to gather gold, the imagination turns away from a dehumanized people and toward a beauty-smitten one, which defends its wreckage against the inexorable fury of the times. In my flight from it, I was compelled to commit an injustice. I’ve never rejected the party of humane values, and now, when, oh, the standpoint has been reached where I’m able to side with it, I owe the world’s Spirit an apology for nothing but the guilt of having been born in times like these, and for the necessity of making my home in the escape from them.

  LET NO ONE ASK …

  Let no one ask what I’ve been doing since I spoke.

  I have nothing to say

  and won’t say why.


  And there’s stillness since the earth broke.

  No word was right;

  a man speaks only from his sleep at night.

  And dreams of a sun that joked.

  It passes; and later