The Kraus Project

by Karl Kraus

  70. Daniel Kehlmann unpacks this: “‘Warm’ in German is a code word for gay. So the sentence means: ‘The one [I, Heine] may enjoy eating onions [may be Jewish], but the other [Platen] has more feeling for men [is gay], and to me even a crooked cook [an ugly, coarse woman] is preferable to a gay aesthete.’ Heine destroyed Platen by outing him, and Kraus, in turn, can’t forgive him for that. Rightly so, I think.”

  71. Kehlmann again: “Kraus is quoting a late poem of Heine’s in which Heine avows that this manure-smelling milkmaid is dearer to him than his entire posthumous reputation as a poet. Kraus isn’t finding fault with the thought itself, but he considers it dishonest and finds the image of the cook and the milkmaid, which recurs constantly in Heine, stale to the point of cliché. To Kraus, when it comes to sexuality, Heine is narrow-mindedly judgmental in a journalistic way.”

  Exactly. What Platen did with boys is vile.

  72. “Moritz Saphir (1795–1858) was a German-Jewish satirist and journalist who has often been seen as forming some kind of cultural continuum with his fellow German Jews Börne and Heine, even though, as Kraus implies, Saphir’s humor tended to be considerably lower brow.” —PR

  73. Hirsch-Hyacinth is a character in Heine’s The Baths of Lucca.

  74. “In Ludwig Börne, Heine quotes both the conversations he had with Börne and Börne’s Letters from Paris (1830–34), where Börne blasts Heine for lacking political seriousness. It’s in the Letters that Börne describes Heine as someone with ‘talent’ but no ‘character.’ Strangely, Heine often cites Börne’s damaging accusations and formulations without doing anything to debunk them.” —PR

  75. “Ludwig Börne includes an extended anecdote about porcelain. As Heine has it, Börne once explained to him that it was by publicly smashing a tea service that Napoleon tamed Europe’s aristocrats. Fearing for their beloved porcelain, they became more compliant. Next, according to Heine, Börne proceeded to confess that upon acquiring a ‘sumptuous’ tea service of his own, he began to appreciate how those aristocrats felt. He even started to worry about how his activities as a critic might affect his porcelain. How would his porcelain fare if he had to flee across the border and there was no time to pack carefully? In the end, however, Börne gets his priorities in order. Heine closes out the anecdote by (imaginatively) citing Börne as saying, ‘“But I am still strong enough to break my porcelain bonds, and if the authorities make it hot for me, truly, the beautiful gilded teapot, and the scenes of marital bliss and St. Catherine’s tower and the Guard Headquarters and the homeland, will all fly out the window, and I will be a free man again.”’” —PR

  76. Cf. Hemingway vs. Faulkner.

  77. “Having once been amorously involved with Jeanette Wohl, Börne later cohabited with her and her husband. Heine presents the arrangement in Ludwig Börne as being both unseemly and the result of sexual deficiencies on Börne’s part. On the other hand, Heine also plays with the idea that it should have been difficult for Börne to sustain his erotic desire for Wohl. According to Heine, her face grew to resemble ‘an old piece of matzoh.’ It was insults of this kind that landed Heine in a near-fatal duel. Ludwig Börne scandalized a lot of people—Friedrich Engels called the book ‘the most execrable thing ever written in German’—but it put Wohl’s husband, Salomon Strauß, in a positively murderous frame of mind. After a few rounds of verbal sparring, Strauß issued a challenge, and on September 7, 1841, a shot from his pistol nicked Heine in the hip. There was, however, another side to the reception of Ludwig Börne. When friends tried to warn Heine that the book’s content might cause trouble, he riposted, ‘But isn’t it beautifully written?’ Over the years, quite a few readers would reinforce that opinion. Thomas Mann, for example, effused that Ludwig Börne features ‘the most brilliant German prose before Nietzsche.’ So by questioning the literary quality of the book, Kraus was expanding the objections to what was already Heine’s most unpopular work. By implication, moreover, Kraus was upholding a principle dear to him: that ethical and stylistic problems tend to go together.” —PR

  78. I suspect that the word “rootlessness” is loaded, since assimilated German-Jewish writers were commonly reproached, by both antisemites and Zionists, for their rootlessness. According to the stereotype, they could be only mimics or parasites of more authentic literary traditions—hence their overrepresentation in feuilletons. The best German-Jewish writers of the early twentieth century, Kafka and Benjamin as well as Kraus, were all searching for deeper identities in which to root themselves. Kraus, a world-class mimic, would have felt the reproach of rootlessness the most keenly. His defense, as Reitter argues in his excellent Kraus study, The Anti-Journalist, was to problematize the pairing of “imitation with superficiality and of originality with authenticity. It is as if the way to establish a truly radical position as a Jewish journalist was to take an avant-garde stand, in both theory and practice, on precisely these issues.” The result, Reitter contends, was “a radical performance of German-Jewish identity.”

  Kafka seems to have recognized this aspect of Kraus’s project while questioning its success as a tactic for escaping the terrible in-between position in which German-Jewish writers found themselves. Kafka is said to have remarked, “Karl Kraus locks Jewish writers in his hell, watches over them, disciplines them strictly. However, he forgets that he, too, belongs in this hell.” Kafka was no doubt partly right about this: no matter how strenuously Kraus avowed that he was writing for posterity, posterity will always struggle with his having radically performed his German-Jewish identity on texts and controversies that grow ever more antiquated and inaccessible. But I think that Kraus was also genuinely liberated by his ferocious attachment to the German language and to a culturally transcendent spirit of literature running from Greek myth and Shakespeare through Goethe and Nestroy.

  79. “Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825) wrote under the name Jean Paul. The author of bildungsromane, edgy satires of the old regime, and novels that brood over the oppositions between poetry and reality, Jean Paul connected with some of the big intellectual movements of his age: the Enlightenment, Classicism, Romanticism. But he was always something of an outsider in the German literary culture. Having tried hard to diminish Goethe’s standing, he was in turn largely dismissed by the Romantics. In 1804 he moved from Berlin to Bayreuth, and from then on he stayed away from the literary scene, while continuing to write. Thus Jean Paul took on an aura of independence, which formed part of his appeal for Kraus, his fellow loner.” —PR

  80. I.e., like Kraus’s own. He could almost be a rapper here, boasting of his potency and belittling his adversary’s. And I, as a late adolescent, was susceptible to it, as I was to the humor of a phrase like “would mainly like to escape with its life.” I was blissfully unaware of the dangerous territory Kraus was entering with his talk of a “flood of filth” unleashed by the Jew Heine. (The raw sincerity of the phrase, in this context, contrasts with his more playful and sophisticated use of antisemitic tropes elsewhere in the essay.) But Kraus’s call for a return to purity, and his offer of a complete system for making sense of the world in terms of its contamination: this I could respond to, the way a twenty-two-year-old today might respond to local organic farming or to radical Islam.

  81. Halbweltschmerz: literally “half-world-weariness,” which in German combines ‘demimonde’ with ‘weltschmerz.’ Characteristic Krausian wordplay.

  82. The Heine poem Kraus is referencing, “Old Rose” (“Alte Rose”), is notably nasty. Heine compares a beautiful girl whom he knew in his youth to a budding rose. He pursued her when she burst into bloom, but she fought him off with her thorns. Now, when she’s old and faded, she’s pursuing him, looking for love, but there’s a bristle on a wart on her chin—a new kind of thorn. It sticks him as she tries to kiss him, and he tells her to shave. This kind of thing may be rarer in Heine’s late poetry, but I’m with Kraus: it speaks to Heine’s moral character.

  83. “God will pardon me, that’s his job.�
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  Reitter: “According to one witness, this was Heine’s deathbed response to the question: How do things stand with you and God?”

  84. “A reference to Offenbach’s operetta Bluebeard (1866), which Kraus adored.” —PR

  Kraus is having fun with with Heine’s poem “The Asra,” which, in good Romantic fashion, is set in an exotic sultanate. Every evening, the sultan’s beautiful daughter takes a walk in her garden and sees a young slave boy who’s getting paler day by day. Finally she asks him who he is, and he tells her that he’s from a Yemeni tribe, the Asra, “who die when they love.” With the comparison with Offenbach, Kraus is mocking both the secondhand “misery” of the poem and the passive, unmasculine suffering of its author’s persona.

  85. “‘What Does the Lonely Tear Want?’ (‘Was will die einsame Träne?’) is the title of one of Heine’s most famous ‘songs.’ Robert Schumann set the poem to music in 1840.” —PR

  86. Why was Kraus so angry? Consider the facts. He was a late child in a prosperous, well-assimilated Jewish family whose business generated a large enough and steady enough income to make him financially independent for life. This in turn enabled him to publish Die Fackel exactly as he wished, without making concessions to advertisers or subscribers. He had a close circle of good friends and a much larger circle of admirers, many of them fanatical, some of them famous. He was an electrifying public speaker, capable of filling the largest theaters, which went a long way toward satisfying his youthful ambition to be an actor. Although he never married, he had some brilliant affairs and a deep long-term relationship with Sidonie. He seems to have suffered nothing like the conflicts with his father that Kafka had with his, nor to have regretted not having children. His only significant health problem was a curvature of the spine, and even this had the benefit of exempting him from military service. So how did a person so extremely fortunate become the Great Hater?

  Kafka once diagnosed in German-Jewish writers a “terrible inner state,” related to a bad relationship with Judaism. A bad inner state can certainly be discerned in Kraus’s agon with Heine, as in a handful of other Kraus texts (including “He’s Still a Jew” and his short play Literatur) and in his strikingly personal vendetta against certain Jews, including the publisher of the Neue Freie Presse. But Kraus’s Jewish problem seems to me at most a supporting element in his larger project—his exposure of Austrian hypocrisies and corruption, his championing of language and literature he considered authentic and underappreciated. And although there was certainly plenty to be angry about in Austrian society, there’s plenty to be angry about in every society; most people find ways to keep their anger from consuming their lives. You could understand a Viennese laborer with a sixty-hour workweek in bad conditions being enraged. But the privileged and sociable Kraus?

  I wonder if he was so angry because he was so privileged. In “Nestroy and Posterity,” the Great Hater defends his hatred like this: “acid wants the gleam, and the rust says it’s only being corrosive.” Kraus hated bad language because he loved good language—because he had the gifts, both intellectual and financial, to cultivate that love. And the person who’s been lucky in life can’t help expecting the world to keep going his way; when the world insists on going wrong ways, corrupt and tasteless ways, he feels betrayed by it. He could have enjoyed a good life if only the bad world hadn’t spoiled it. And so he gets angry, and the anger itself then further isolates him and heightens his sense of specialness. Being angry at newspapers beloved by the bourgeoisie was a way for Kraus to say “I don’t belong to you” to a bourgeoisie whose upward striving was uncomfortably close to his own. His anger at the privileged writers who pulled strings to escape combat in the First World War was a kind of homeopathic attack on the even greater privilege that he himself enjoyed, the privilege of a morally pure medical excuse not to serve. He was a journalist who savaged other journalists, most of whom, unlike him, had to work for a living. Anger relieved some of the discomfort of his own privilege, by reassuring him that he was also a victim.

  Kraus, like any artist, wanted above all to be an individual, and his anger can further be seen as a violent shrugging-off of categories that threatened his individual integrity. His privilege was just one of these categories. As the scholar Edward Timms writes in his magisterial study of Kraus, “He was a Jew by birth, an Austrian by nationality, a Viennese by residence, a German by language, a journalist by profession, bourgeois by social status and a rentier by economic position. Amid the ideological turmoil of Austria-Hungary, all of these ascribed identities seemed like falsifications.” For much of his life Kraus was defiantly antipolitical; he seemed to form professional alliances almost with the intention of later torpedoing them spectacularly; and he was given to paradoxical utterances like “It is known that my hatred of the Jewish press is exceeded only by my hatred of the antisemitic press, while my hatred of the antisemitic press is exceeded only by my hatred of the Jewish press.” Since it is also known that Kraus’s favorite play was King Lear, I wonder if he might have seen his own fate in Cordelia, the cherished late child who loves the king and who, precisely because she’s been the privileged daughter, secure in the king’s love, has the personal integrity to refuse to debase her language and lie to him in his dotage. Privilege set Kraus, too, on the road to being an independent individual, but the world seemed bent on thwarting him. It disappointed him the way Lear disappoints Cordelia, and in Kraus this became a recipe for anger. In his yearning for a better world, in which true individuality was possible, he kept applying the acid of his anger to everything that was false.

  Let me turn to my own example, since I’ve been reading it into Kraus’s story anyway.

  I was a late child in a loving family that, although it wasn’t nearly prosperous enough to make me a rentier, did have enough money to place me in a good public school district and send me to an excellent college, where I learned to love literature and language. I was a white male heterosexual American with good friends and perfect health, and beyond all this I had the immeasurably good fortune not only to discover very early what I wanted to do with my life but to have the freedom and the talent to pursue it. I had such an embarrassment of riches that I can barely stand to enumerate them here. And yet, for all my privileges, I became an extremely angry person. Anger descended on me so near in time to when I fell in love with Kraus’s writing that the two occurrences are practically indistinguishable.

  I wasn’t born angry. If anything, I was born the opposite. It may sound like an exaggeration, but I think it’s accurate to say that I knew nothing of anger until I was twenty-two. As an adolescent, I’d had my moments of sullenness and rebellion against authority, but, like Kraus, I’d had minimal conflict with my father, and the worst that could be said of me and my mother was that we bickered like an old married couple. Real anger, anger as a way of life, was foreign to me until one particular afternoon in April 1982. I was on a deserted train platform in Hannover. I’d come from Munich and was waiting for a train to Berlin, it was a dark gray German day, and I took a handful of German coins out of my pocket and started throwing them on the platform. There was an element of anti-German hostility in this, because I’d recently had a horrible experience with a penny-pinching old German woman, and it did me good to imagine other penny-pinching old German women bending down to pick the coins up, as I knew they would, and thereby aggravating their knee and hip pains. The way I hurled the coins, though, was more generally angry. I was angry at the world in a way I’d never been before. The proximate cause of my anger was my failure to have sex with an unbelievably pretty girl in Munich, except that it hadn’t actually been a failure, it had been a decision on my part. A few hours later, on the platform in Hannover, I marked my entry into the life that came after that decision by throwing away my coins. Then I boarded a train and went back to Berlin and enrolled in a class on Karl Kraus.

  Paul Reitter kindly refines my theory and elaborates:

  “Kraus hated his fellow German-Jewi
sh writers for many reasons, not the least of which was that they wasted what he himself was so determined to use: privilege. Certainly many German-Jewish writers had money troubles, and Kraus, to his credit, was quite sensitive to the problem of penury—he helped keep the (German-Jewish) poets Peter Altenberg and Else Lasker-Schüler afloat. Yet a lot of fin de siècle German-Jewish authors were, as Kraus saw it, like him: well positioned to take some risks. Like him (and, say, Stefan Zweig), they were the children of the newly emancipated and prosperous Gründerzeit generation. If their fathers often tried to steer them into business, as Kraus himself suggests in his drama Literatur, there were resources to fall back on, something that ultimately made turning to letters much easier. Nor was there any lack of talent; Kraus always claimed that the German-Jewish literati had an abundance of that. But despite having so many advantages, these writers mostly chose to play it safe, reinforcing a bad paradigm of feuilletonism or parroting the latest style of expressionism, while treating such cultural authorities as the Neue Freie Presse with servile respect. The psychological needs and assimilationist tendencies that drove German-Jewish authors to do this were of interest to Kraus: hence the play Literatur, which Kafka esteemed and which, in fact, inspired his famous meditations on the ‘terrible inner state’ of German-Jewish writers. However, those needs and tendencies didn’t excuse anything. As motives for bad linguistic behavior, they struck Kraus as tawdry.