The Kraus Project

by Karl Kraus

  41. I am happy to be confirming the truth of this line by translating Kraus rather than feuilletons from the Neue Freie Presse.

  42. “Kraus founded Die Fackel, his satirical not-quite weekly, in 1899. The first issue appeared, not by chance, on April Fools’ Day, and the magazine ran for 922 numbers. It was, again, in 1911 that Kraus stopped publishing contributions from other authors. Despite the difficulty of its sentences, Die Fackel had a fairly large circulation—about thirty thousand readers at its peak—and they included many important minds: Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg, Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, W. H. Auden, and Gershom Scholem, among others. Kraus’s topics ranged widely, covering everything from preposition usage to the employment of poison gas in the First World War, but the thematic nub of Die Fackel was always Kraus’s critique of the Viennese press. This, too, gives Kraus’s magazine a bloglike feel. He would often start with a press clipping that he would reproduce and dissect, which is the method of a lot of blogs today: cut, paste, and conquer. Die Fackel is available online at http://corpus1.aac.ac.at/fackel.” —PR

  43. “Kraus thought that people failed to appreciate what he himself saw as the essential paradox of his journalism, which, therefore, he kept on reformulating: ‘My readers believe that I write for the day because I write about the day, so I will have to wait until my works become old. Then they’ll be relevant.’ Kraus also told his readers that he wanted to locate ‘the chords of eternity’ in the ‘noises of the day.’” —PR

  44. Insel—literally “Island”—is the name of a venerable literary publisher.

  45. Again with the antisemitism.

  Reitter informatively adds: “‘Itzig,’ the term of opprobrium Kraus uses here, gained prominence through a character in Gustav Freytag’s novel Debit and Credit, the unscrupulous Ostjude (Eastern Jew) Feitel Itzig. But Itzig was also the name of an important figure in the German-Jewish Enlightenment, Daniel Itzig (1723–1799), whose son Elias had it changed to Hitzig, which sounded less Jewish. Heine, in his poem ‘Jehuda ben Halevy,’ while chiding Hitzig for altering the family nomenclature, has some fun with the phonetic proximity of ‘Itzig’ to ‘Hitzig.’ Thus, with ‘Itzig Witzig’ (Itzak Wisecrack), Kraus is smearing Jewish journalists with a term whose meaning had changed since Heine’s time, as well as slighting Heine’s style of wordplay.”

  46. In the original, it’s “ästhetisch auf Teetisch zu sagen.” Reitter comments: “‘Aesthetic’ in German sounds like ‘tea table.’ The pun, with its trivializing and ultimately meaningless irony, originated with Heine.”

  I’m indebted to Reitter for suggesting “cherry bomb” later in the sentence and for his help with numerous other problematic lines.

  47. J. D. Salinger might be an example of an American writer whose reputation has similarly benefited from being read in people’s youth. But consider here, too, the periodic arguments from Bob Dylan fans that Dylan deserves the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  48. “Du hast Diamanten und Perlen,” one of the more famous poems in Heine’s Book of Songs.

  49. “Hugo Salus (1866–1929) was a German-Jewish poet (and gynecologist) based in Prague. He had discerning admirers, e.g., Max Brod, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Arnold Schönberg. But Kraus wasn’t a fan; indeed, Kraus viewed Salus as an aesthete whose poetry exhibited the vices of the feuilleton. Its figures didn’t stand up to close scrutiny, and its ‘contemplative’ tone masked an underlying superficiality. Or so Kraus repeatedly tried to show.” —PR

  50. The Viennese amusement park with the giant Ferris wheel featured in The Third Man.

  51. “Friedrich von Flotow (1812–1883), that is, whose ‘The Last Rose’ (‘Die letzte Rose’) comes from his opera Martha (1847).” —PR

  52. To this line my friend Daniel Kehlmann, who is an actual Viennese and a deep student of Kraus, offers the comment: “Who the hell knows what Kraus is really saying here.”

  53. For somebody who claims not to be musical, Kraus knows an awful lot about music. But his resistance to music while working is a point of identification with me. I’m always amazed when writers report listening to Beethoven or Arcade Fire while at work. How do they pay attention to two things at once?

  54. “Detlev von Liliencron (1844–1909), a late-blooming German writer of Nietzsche’s generation, appealed to Kraus for a number of reasons. Foremost among these was a feature of Liliencron’s style that other critics belittled: its rawness and apparent lack of refinement. In addition to printing some of Liliencron’s poems in Die Fackel, Kraus liked to do what he’s doing here, namely, play Liliencron’s earthiness off against the aestheticism of Heine’s heirs.

  “Gottfried August Bürger (1747–1794) was a Stürmer und Dränger, a poet of the ‘Storm and Stress’ movement. But unlike, say, the young Goethe, Bürger was known for producing non-recondite verses that ‘the people’ could appreciate, which is why Bürger’s work lends itself to being paired with Liliencron’s. ‘The Wild Hunter’ (‘Der wilde Jäger’) is the title of a poem by Bürger.” —PR

  55. “Simplicissimus was a German humor magazine that ran from 1896 to 1944 and was famous for its pictorial caricatures. (Not long after the Heine essay appeared, it printed a nasty sketch of Kraus, displeasing him in the extreme.) By juxtaposing images of a ‘philistine’ responding to Heine in very different ways, Simplicissimus had wittily evoked an oddity in Heine’s reception, one that resulted from the infectiousness of his work. Both in life and in death, Heine was at once loved and reviled: we can add to our list of tentative superlatives that Heine was the most popular and the most hated German author of the nineteenth century. But it wasn’t simply that Heine had many fans as well as many foes. Even some of his bigoted detractors couldn’t resist his poems and especially, as Kraus will emphasize, the musical settings that had made them so popular. Even some of the people who abominated Heine in theory enjoyed him in practice, and didn’t manage to hide or explain it.” —PR

  56. “Heine’s tactic of framing his poems as ‘songs,’ from his early Book of Songs to his autumnal Hebrew Melodies, proved to be a brilliant success, for there was hardly a composer in Germany who failed to take Heine up on the invitation to set his words to music. In 1829, the year after the Book of Songs appeared, Franz Schubert set six of the poems. By the 1950s, the number of settings ran to about three thousand, which is surely some kind of record.” —PR

  57. “Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten.” According to Daniel Kehlmann, this is the one Heine poem that every German knows. “The poem is so famous, such a part of the German collective consciousness, that even the Nazis couldn’t take it out of schoolbooks, anthologies, and calendars. Instead, they simply removed the name Heine from the books and wrote ‘Author unknown’ above the poem. This is infuriating, of course, but also funny in a certain way.”

  According to Paul Reitter, “Friedrich Silcher (1789–1860) was a German composer known mostly for his songs and, above all, for his popular setting of Heine’s ‘Lorelei.’”

  58. “Kraus is playing off another Heine poem made famous by its musical setting: ‘On Wings of Song’ (‘Auf Flügeln des Gesanges’). The key setting was Felix Mendelssohn’s.” —PR

  59. Here is the opening of Goethe’s famous poem:

  Über allen Gipfeln

  Ist Ruh,

  In allen Wipfeln

  Spürest du

  Kaum einen Hauch

  And again, in my amateur translation:

  On every peak

  Is silence.

  In the top of every tree

  You sense

  Barely a breath.

  Kraus was later prompted to call the poem a “national jewel,” after an atrocious patriotic pastiche of it appeared in a newspaper during the First World War:

  Under every sea—

  Is the U-boat.

  Of England’s fleet

  You note

  Barely a smoke.

  This kind of cleverness now
mainly resides on the front page of the New York Post.

  60. My translation of the artful fake in question (“Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam”):

  A pine tree stands lonely

  On a barren northern height.

  It sleeps; it’s covered by

  White blankets of snow and ice.

  It’s dreaming of a palm tree

  which, in a far-off Eastern place,

  is grieving, silent and lonely,

  Upon a burning rock face.

  61. “In the beginning was Eros: Kraus formed an attachment to Offenbach (1819–1880) in 1900, when he saw the beautiful actress Annie Kalmar performing in Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann (one of the few “serious” operas he wrote). The association of Offenbach’s music with Kalmar, whom Kraus came to adore, gave it a special personal resonance for him. By 1909, he had also started to theorize about Offenbach’s aesthetic virtues. This was the time when Kraus really began taking aim at both the Viennese feuilleton and the established cultural institutions that had facilitated its rise. Not coincidentally, it was also the time when Kraus started to celebrate noncanonical forms and figures—vaudeville, a theater troupe that spoke Jewish dialect, Else Lasker-Schüler, Offenbach—for having more to offer than their prestigious counterparts, which lacked fantasy and were, in his opinion, dangerously out of touch with reality. In a 1909 essay on Offenbach, for example, Kraus points up the contrast between the emptiness of official theater culture and the ‘thought-provoking nonsense’ of Offenbach’s operettas. The latter have the potential to be a true ‘Gesamtkunstwerk,’ Kraus claims, for they capture the absurdity characteristic of modern life. In the 1920s Kraus adapted and translated Meilhac and Halévy’s libretti, and he began to give ‘speech-song’ readings of Offenbach—a lot of them. During the last decade of his life he devoted more than a third of his stage performances to Offenbach (123 of 346).” —PR

  62. “‘Vitzliputzli,’ a long and biting poem by Heine, is about the conquistadores’ guileful victory over the Aztecs and the revenge plans of the Aztec god who wants to torment Europe.” —PR

  63. Boy, does Kraus nail what’s wrong with Heine’s sunset poem. And yet, when I was twenty, I found this poem hilarious. I welcomed its puncturing of the earnestness of the other German literature I’d been reading. I thought, wow, this guy is one of us. Heine has remained popular with Germans because they feel the same way I did: he’s a relief from the heaviness of so much of German culture. For Germans, experiencing Heinean irony is like escaping to a Latin country where life is freer and lighter; they read him the way they flock to the Mediterranean for their vacations.

  The German term “Romantic irony” is synonymous with Heine (even if Heine saw himself as a post-Romantic author and the Romantics promoted their own brand of irony). I first encountered it in 1979, in Munich, where I was enrolled in a junior-year-abroad program run by Wayne State University. Imagining that American students might be homesick on a major holiday, the program’s director, Frau Doktor Riegler, annually organized a formal Thanksgiving dinner to which professors and other dignitaries were invited, and for some reason Frau Doktor Riegler singled me out to give a speech at the dinner. I wrote the kind of faux-philosophical confection I’d perfected as a style reporter for my college newspaper, and Frau Doktor Riegler vetted it and approved it. When I delivered the speech, though, I inflected its serious passages with an irony borrowed from the Talking Heads—in the years before I discovered Kraus, David Byrne was my number one hero—and I got a lot of laughs and made some progress toward impressing the Bryn Mawr girl I was bent on impressing. Afterward, Frau Doktor Riegler chided me for having deceived her about the nature of my speech. “What you did,” she said, “is called Romantic irony, Herr Franzen. Very clever of you.” Kraus would say that I was imitating Heine before I’d even read him. I was doing what smart-ass adolescents do, undermining substance with irony because they don’t have substance yet themselves, or because they’re afraid of the substance that they do have, afraid of the intensity of their own emotion at the sight of a sunset, or afraid (as in my case, on Thanksgiving) of how powerfully they love their childhood home. Heine’s poem about the girl and the sunset is smart-ass. It shouldn’t wear well as you get older, and Kraus was incensed that grown-up Germans, who’d taken up Heine in their own smart-ass days, continued to place him alongside Goethe, a poet of real substance who respected sunsets.

  64. Balm and Moonlight in the original are “Veilchenduft” and “Mondschein,” which, as Reitter notes, would have been recognizable as German-Jewish surnames, or as parodies of them.

  65. “According to an old superstition, sprinkling salt on the tail of a bird would cause it to become crazy—and thus catchable.” —PR

  66. Daniel Kehlmann notes that this line simply isn’t fully understandable. But it’s clearly of a piece with the paradoxical conception of originality which Kraus is advancing in this paragraph: that every conceivable thought has always existed (hence the “permanent” here), and that writers find their way, through language, from the particulars of their time and place (“what’s self-evident”) to the same permanently existing thoughts. As evidence for this conception, Kraus observes elsewhere (in “Nestroy and Posterity”) that aperçus from different languages and different centuries all have strikingly similar cadences. This notion of the latency of thought in language seems to me both somewhat correct and somewhat self-serving, in that it applies best to Kraus’s own aphoristic style of writing (less well, say, to novels) and that originality is a vexed subject for a satirist whose work is fueled by the writing of others. I get the sense here of Kraus chafing against the confines of his particular gifts—for mimicry, in particular—and defending himself against charges that his work is derivative or parasitic. He protests perhaps too much.

  67. “Building off of his ideas about spiritualism and sensualism, Heine, in his book Ludwig Börne (1840), sets up a dichotomy between the ‘Nazarene’ and ‘Hellene’ types. The former are ascetic, contemptuous of beauty, and fixated on abstract ideals (like Christian nihilists, in Nietzsche’s terminology); Hellenes are just the opposite. Heine then uses this duality to explain why his relationship with Ludwig Börne (1786–1837), a progressive critic who looked like a natural ally, had been destined to sour. Given that Heine is a Hellene and Börne a Nazarene, they never really had a chance. But Ludwig Börne is a book that abounds with inconsistencies, and spiritualists and Nazarenes don’t always come off so badly. Indeed, Heine lauds both the Old and the New Testament, and his stress on the value of spiritualism amounts to a further affinity with Nietzsche—never mind Kraus’s claim that Heine anticipates Nietzsche in only one way. For in a formulation akin to the Dionysian-Apollonian interplay in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, Heine writes, in Ludwig Börne, that the most sublime art results from precisely a confluence of opposites: ‘Shakespeare is at once Jew and Greek, or with him perhaps both elements, spiritualism and art, have permeated each other in a conciliatory way, and developed into a higher whole.’” —PR

  68. “Once Kraus’s mentor, Maximilian Harden (1861–1927) had become Kraus’s enemy by the time he wrote ‘Heine and the Consequences.’ That they split shouldn’t have surprised anyone. What else tends to happen when you have two big egos—who share a love of invective—relating to each other within a mentor-mentee dynamic? But if the break was a matter of time, it was also a function of principle. In 1907 Harden used the platform of his newspaper The Future to expose Count Philip Eulenberg, a close adviser to Wilhelm II, as a homosexual. This act—as well as the moralizing that accompanied it—ran counter to a cause that Kraus had been pushing for years. Since 1902, Kraus had been insisting that modern journalism’s pursuit of sex scandals has the same dangerous effect as the regulation of sexual conduct through modern ‘ethics laws.’

  “Kraus liked to play up his proclivity for erotic exploration—‘because it is illegal to keep wild animals, and house pets give me no pleasure, I’d rather stay unmarried’—and
for him the threat of public shaming promotes a conformity that makes life less colorful and less fun. Even worse is that this threat shuts down ethical deliberation where consenting adults should be honing their ethical faculties, in the most intimate sphere: the bedroom. Thus Kraus believed that, like the ‘ethics court,’ Harden’s treatment of Eulenberg did nothing but produce ‘unethical individuals,’ and Kraus said as much in print. His doing so, or having done so, gives his reference to Harden in ‘Heine and the Consequences’ its meaning. It’s what allows the line about Heine anticipating Harden to serve as a segue into Kraus’s critique of Heine’s ‘Platen polemic,’ a section of The Baths of Lucca (1830) that takes aim at the homosexuality of another aristocrat, Count von Platen. While he was feuding with Harden, Kraus boasted that he had, in effect, ‘rubbed out’ his opponent. This is why Kraus gave a subsequent polemic the title ‘Maximilian Harden: An Obituary’ (1908), and also why he speaks here of ‘the late Maximilian Harden.’” —PR

  69. “It was Heine who started the fight with Platen, or, more properly, with Count August von Platen-Hallermünde, a poet whose homosexuality was a kind of open secret. Heine acknowledged Platen’s gifts as a writer, to be sure: his talent as a sonneteer was undeniable. But Heine, who regarded homosexuality as a perversion, also felt that there was something off about Platen’s poetry. Even before the ‘Platen polemic,’ Heine had connected Platen’s lyrical inclinations—i.e., his attachment to ancient Greek and Persian verse forms and his choice of motifs—with his sexual leanings. Indeed, Heine had complained that he could hear a ‘sighing after pederasty’ in Platen’s work. This, though, was in private. Publicly, Heine contented himself at first with pouring scorn on the Persia-inspired formalism with which Platen was associated. The idea here was to disparage another formalistic poet as well, one whose sexual orientation wasn’t an issue, so jokes about homosexuality would have been difficult to pull off. But even without such humor, the initial affront was too much for Platen. His response stemmed in part from his high opinion of himself—he saw himself as Goethe’s successor—and in part from his low opinion of Heine, which, in turn, stemmed partly from a snobbish antisemitism. Without really knowing much about Heine, Platen swiftly set about trying to put him in his (Jewish) place. The counterattack took the form of a play, The Romantic Oedipus, which appeared in 1829, and contains quite a few antisemitic barbs. Having recently been subjected to an even sharper anti-Jewish obloquy, Heine was in no mood to accept Platen’s insults as a fair settling of the score. Instead he opted for escalation, and thus the ‘Platen polemic’ came to be. It begins with a mischievous bit of editing: Heine lops off part of a line of Platen’s poetry, so that what’s left reads, ‘I am like woman to man.’ From there Heine keeps going and going: not even Platen’s use of antisemitic discourse escapes the charge of effeteness. As Heine brings his case against Platen to a close, he demonstrates how much more forcefully he can hurl antisemitic abuse. Heine’s readers weren’t impressed, however. Most thought that he had crossed the line; Goethe, for instance, remarked that assaults like Heine’s have no place in the world of letters.” —PR