The Kraus Project

by Karl Kraus

  “Could there be similar dynamics—minus the Jewish element—operating in some of our own contemporary literary scenes? The anecdotal evidence keeps piling up. Let’s say that someone has given you a recent novel. You can’t recall seeing reviews of the book, but it looks like a high-end production. The press that published it is a very good one, and on its cover are blurbs from respected figures in the world of letters. Would you be surprised to learn that the author of the novel lives in Park Slope with a husband and two young children? Would you be surprised to read, on the author’s website, that she grew up in Lake Forest, was educated at Brown, and teaches writing as an adjunct at the New School? When I encounter such author information, I sometimes wonder how the economics work. Advances are small, book sales are declining, teaching jobs don’t pay well, and Park Slope is very expensive, as are kids. Maybe the family is just getting by. But in an age of soaring college tuition and health insurance costs, not many people from an affluent background are willing to take upon themselves the hazards of real, open-ended downward mobility. Maybe, then, the husband is a lawyer or in finance. Yet mixed couples aren’t the norm, I’m told. If the husband is a fellow author, it may well be that the couple has gotten help from its baby-boomer parents. And if that’s so, writing doesn’t, and probably won’t ever, pay the biggest bills.

  “But there’s still the desire as well as the pressure to succeed. For literati, as for professors of literature, the increasingly steep straight path to recognizable signs of accomplishment is to produce conventional work of high quality. I enjoy a lot of the writing created on this route, and I’m not about to echo Kraus’s apocalyptic condemnation of the talented authors who take it. What feels sad, nevertheless, is that at a time when a relatively small percentage of the New York literary scene appears to be supporting itself through its writing, a high percentage of the scene is so very cautious. Indeed, the scene routinely demands of itself and others both cautiousness and the display of the most uncontroversial virtues (balance, moderation, warmth, etc.). God forbid that a novelist should be a little mean to her characters. Much more than in previous eras, we find such authorial harshness framed as reason enough for a (cautiously) negative review. Of course, sometimes the calls for niceness are themselves nasty. But in the more august places, that’s certainly not the norm. One can be generally for civility in reviewing and still be alarmed by the fact a measured, polite, unfavorable appraisal of Joseph Anton, which appeared in The New York Review of Books (and exhibits a particular dislike for the ‘egregiously uncharitable’ treatment of exes in Rushdie’s memoir), could win notoriety as a full-on ‘takedown’ job. Or consider that a few years ago, the critic and novelist Dale Peck got a lot of attention merely by being rude to some well-known writers. Consider also that even as brilliant a reviewer as the late John Leonard has been posthumously taken to task for the immoderation that was a function of his exuberance. So what if his riffing and ranting wasn’t always comprehensible? It was unfailingly fun, and the style was his alone. But it made Leonard’s Times reviewer ‘yearn for a more straightforward or prioritized analysis.’ Because, of course, critics should all sound more or less alike.”

  I might add that the tyranny of niceness, in contemporary fiction, is enforced by terror of the Internet and its ninth-grade social dynamics. Writers afraid of running afoul of the bloggers and the tweeters, of becoming universally “known” as not a nice person, can defend themselves with laudable sentiments: literacy and self-expression are good, bigotry is bad, working people are the salt of the earth, love is more important than money, technology is fun, gentrification is a serious problem, animals have feelings, children are less corrupt than adults, and so on. To attempt a harsh critique of the electronic system that reduces writers to these bromides is to risk having it become common “knowledge” that you’re a hater, a loner, not one of us.

  87. “Kraus bragged of possessing a savage proficiency in mimicking other writers, and some of his readers agreed. Walter Benjamin, for example, once commented that Kraus’s literary impersonations were so intense and accurate that they felt ‘cannibalistic.’ One could almost see the ‘blood dripping from his lips,’ according to Benjamin. But Kraus may have been even prouder of how hard it was to copy his own style, of how it resisted mass consumption and reproduction in a way that Heine’s, with its ‘consequences,’ hadn’t. As Benjamin’s friend Gershom Scholem put it, Kraus ‘fought a war for incomprehensibility.’ This is the spirit in which Kraus contends, in his Heine essay, that ‘to expose the thief is to have exposed the owner.’ Attempts to pass off imitations as Heine’s own work, as well as a parroting of Heine that reached the point of forgery—all that is unsavory stuff, of course. However, the scholars who have set about trying to identify the fraud, and present themselves as intervening on Heine’s behalf, don’t realize that they’re just further ‘exposing’ the ur-offense, which is that Heine’s style facilitates such criminal activity. Kraus made the same argument a little more directly just after ‘Heine and the Consequences’ had appeared in Die Fackel. Under the heading ‘My Professional Opinion,’ he quotes in full a poem whose authorship was being debated and then asserts that whether or not Heine actually wrote the poem doesn’t matter. In either case, it’s ‘from Heine’—that is, ultimately Heine’s doing.” —PR

  Titles like “My Professional Opinion,” which mocks the earnest literary experts, make me love Kraus.

  88. I think there’s a lot of truth in this, but Kraus also seems to be making an implicit claim about his own decision to remain rooted in Vienna, in contradistinction to Heine. Here’s the story I tell myself about his agon with Heine. Basically, Kraus arrives too late. He’s an assimilated Jew who has an enormous facility with language but strikingly less talent with “original” forms such as poetry, drama, and fiction. And unfortunately there’s already been a German-speaking Jew like him—Heine—who, worse yet, became one of the most famous and influential writers of the previous century. Kraus needs room to live and to work and to believe in the necessity of his work, and what does he have to hold on to in his struggle against his famous precursor? His feeling that there was something wrong with Heine—with the work, the man, his language. And so the story that he tells himself is that Heine was a proto-Kraus who betrayed his gifts by his moral failings and thereby betrayed assimilated German Jews, too. Heine helped create the stereotype of the rootless, linguistically facile Jew. Without Heine, no feuilleton, yes. But also: without Heine, Kraus could simply have been a great satirist who happened to be Jewish. Hence, I propose, the ferocity of the attack in this essay, and the peculiarly moral tone of it. If Kraus also sounds an antisemitic note, it’s because he’s trying to annihilate the bad Jew, the stereotypical Jew, so as not to hate himself. That so many Gentile German philistines are willing to forgive Heine’s Jewishness only adds to his rage.

  I, too, often make moral arguments about art, but on my better days I’m suspicious of them, because I’m aware of the envy, the powerlessness and self-pity, that lurks behind them. Back in the 1990s, I spent a lot of time assembling a moral case against John Updike. I was offended (rightly, I still think) by Updike’s famous comparison of a writer’s work to excretion: you take in life, digest it, and shit it out in paragraphs. Updike was very proud of his three-pages-per-day regularity, and I didn’t need to know much about his personal history to imagine his mother crowing over the neatness and beauty of his daily bowel movements. My moral complaint was that Updike had tremendous, Nabokov-level talent and was wasting it, because he was too charmed by his daily dumps and too afraid of irregularity to take the kind of big literary risks that might have blocked him for a year or two. His lifelong penchant for alliteration was of a piece with this. It made reading even his otherwise fine stories about the Maples painful; I couldn’t get through more than a few lines without running aground on the anal-retentive preciousness of his prose. Updike was exquisitely preoccupied with his own literary digestive processes, and his virtuosity in cloc
king and rendering the minutiae of daily life was undeniably unparalleled, but his lack of interest in the bigger postwar, postmodern, socio-technological picture marked him, in my mind, as a classic self-absorbed sixties-style narcissist. David Foster Wallace was the one who actually called Updike an asshole in print (in the New York Observer), but I felt the same way. If you’d suggested that I envied Updike for his unobstructed productivity or for all the women he got to go to bed with him (and then wrote about in graphic detail), I would only have restated my moral case more trenchantly.

  Later on, after Updike ceased to seem like such a threat, I went through a period of feeling deeply censorious of Philip Roth, because he didn’t seem to care about his many glaring technical deficiencies as a fiction writer, and because his admirers didn’t seem to, either. Roth’s writing seemed to me, as Kraus says of Heine’s, “always and overplainly informative,” which was why, I believed, the philistines had come to tolerate him a lot better than he tolerated the philistines. As with Updike, my judgments had a flavor of Krausian moralism: Roth was lazy, Roth was an asshole, etc. Naturally, I believed that I was merely sticking up for vital aesthetic virtues—a fiction writer ought to be able to write good dialogue, create convincing and well-rounded female characters, and let a story tell itself without discursive intrusions—but these “vital” virtues happened to coincide with some of my own abilities as a fiction writer. To make my moral case against Roth, I had to ignore or downplay other plausible virtues, most notably Roth’s heroic fearlessness of his readers’ moral judgments, because I subterraneanly envied his fearlessness and wanted people to pay attention to me and not him. This was the kind of thing Nietzsche had in mind when he mocked the “slave” mentality of moral judgments.

  “Heine and the Consequences” is the document of Kraus’s struggle to overcome his great precursor. On his own terms, he may have succeeded; his best-known and most shattering work, The Last Days of Mankind (a documentary “drama” of the First World War), was written in the decade that followed. German readers, however, are not so convinced that he vanquished Heine. Daniel Kehlmann, for example, loves the essay and grants that Kraus scores a lot of points off Heine in it. “But,” he says, “Heine is still wonderful, too.”

  Reitter offers a more fact-based counternarrative to mine:

  “I agree that stereotypes about Jews and journalism weighed on Kraus: that’s the whole point of The Anti-Journalist, my Kraus book. But for all of Kraus’s sensitivity to how his writing was perceived, he was utterly convinced of its value and excellence. This was in notable contrast to many other gifted German-Jewish writers, including Schnitzler, Wittgenstein, and Kafka. The total absence of (Jewish) self-questioning in Kraus’s personal communications is, indeed, remarkable. Kraus also thoroughly debunked the linguistic standards at the center of such self-questioning. He believed what he wrote about the bogusness of the genius-imitation hierarchy that antisemites never tired of invoking. His critique of it proceeded from the core of his understanding of language, as one of the more earnest lines of this essay makes clear: ‘a creative head may say originally what somebody else has already said, and somebody else may already be imitating a thought that won’t occur to a creative head until later.’ Gershom Scholem, an enthusiastic early reader of the essay and a particularly alert observer of antisemitic discourse, was partaking of the essay’s spirit when he wrote of Kraus: ‘He never had an original thought in his life,’ and ‘that is meant here infinitely more as a compliment than as a criticism.’

  “Charged with merely imitating genius, Heine responded by saying that since people can’t seem to tell the difference between his imitation and the original, he’ll go on imitating. Kraus wouldn’t have been as self-effacing (never mind Heine’s irony), and he wouldn’t have accepted the implication that real genius and imitation are necessarily two different things. Unlike Heine, moreover, Kraus didn’t have much trouble brushing off antisemitic slights (in part because, unlike Heine, he kept underestimating the danger of antisemitism). No doubt the low standing of his particular talents ate at Kraus, who was forever instructing readers to rate them higher; and he probably did blame Heine for fostering the development of a disadvantageous network of stereotypes about Jewish writing. In the end, though, it’s hard to see how these stereotypes led Kraus to the brink of hating himself. If the fierceness of his campaign against Heine seems telling, keep in mind that Kraus was similarly fierce in going after many other writers, both Jewish and non-Jewish.”

  89. This sentence is no easier to digest in the original. And yet it more or less makes sense, especially if you know that a lazzarone is a lowest-class Neapolitan beggar or idler.

  90. “Should there be a Heine monument in Germany or Austria? When Kraus wrote ‘Heine and the Consequences,’ the question had been looming large in Germany and Austria for more than two decades. In 1906 Kraus himself entered the fray with a short piece entitled ‘Around Heine,’ in which he attacks both sides in the long-running monument debate. He dismisses the (thoroughly antisemitic) stand against a Heine monument as blustering ‘idiocy,’ but, typically, he seems more interested in flaying Heine’s ‘liberal’ supporters, in part for their efforts to bring Heine into line with their own, less subversive literary values. Kraus concludes that Heine both does and doesn’t deserve a monument, and that the real reason he shouldn’t get one is that the one he would get would surely misrepresent him. Between the publication of ‘Around Heine’ and ‘Heine and the Consequences,’ Kraus revised his take on Heine, while the monument debate intensified in Austria. In 1907 Wilhelm II bought the palace on Corfu that Empress Elisabeth had owned, and he promptly shipped to France the Heine monument that ‘Sissy,’ a great Heine admirer, had unveiled in 1891. (This was actually the second Heine monument to be exiled; the first, commissioned by the city of Düsseldorf to mark the centenary of Heine’s birth, was unveiled in 1899—in the Bronx.) Among the many Austrians who weighed in on whether Heine merited a monument was the young Adolf Hitler, who was adrift in Vienna in 1907. Oddly enough, it appears that Hitler belonged to the pro-monument camp. According to Reinhold Hanisch, a friend of his during his Vienna years, Hitler maintained that Heine was a great German poet and that Germany should memorialize him in stone. Germany’s first Heine monument was unveiled in Frankfurt in 1913; the Nazis vandalized it not long after Hitler completed his rise to the chancellorship.” —PR

  91. “Gustav Karpeles (1848–1909) was a proudly Jewish literary critic who, in 1868, had made the case that Heine was essentially a Jewish writer. Adolf Bartels (1862–1945) was the antisemitic literary critic who had been leading the fight to deny Heine a statue in Germany, his argument being that Heine was essentially a Jewish writer, and not a German one. By grouping together Karpeles and Bartels on the same ‘cultural subcommittee,’ Kraus is doing something he had done elsewhere, most notably in his critique of Zionism: he’s pointing to structural parallels between the language of Jewish self-consciousness and that of antisemitic discourse. In Kraus’s view, both sides were obsessed with identifying the Jewishness of works by secular Jewish writers; and as they tried to identify that Jewishness, critics of both Karpeles’s and Bartels’s ilk relied on crude ideas about how an author’s Jewish heritage could manifest itself in his or her literary output.” —PR

  And, thus, Kraus’s observation that it doesn’t matter which side wins the debate.

  92. “Kraus is working with a line by Goethe, a line that underscores the resemblance, in German, between the words ‘speak’ [sprechen] and ‘language’ [Sprache]—‘Ein jeder, weil er spricht, glaubt auch über die Sprache sprechen zu können’ [‘every person believes, because he speaks, that he can speak about language’]. Following Goethe, Kraus, too, is suggesting that as a result of the sprechen-Sprache resemblance, the German language is particularly vulnerable to the problem: all speakers see themselves as capable of comprehending it.” —PR

  93. Although the word “personality,” as applied to people like Paris Hilton
and Charles Barkley, has taken on adspeak flavor in English, Kraus is using it approvingly here.

  Kraus will get into the problem of technology and the Mind more extensively in “Nestroy and Posterity.” But a lot of good writers have lately been fretting, mostly in private, about what it means that they can’t interest themselves in Facebook and Twitter. I think it means that they have personalities. This feels like strangely meager consolation, though, when you see the rest of the world giving itself heedlessly (I almost wrote “headlessly”) to the new technologies.

  Immersing myself in Kraus in my twenties helped innoculate me against technology envy. I internalized his distrust and made it my own, even though, in the early 1980s, technology to me meant little more than TV, airliners, nuclear weaponry, and the minibus-size computer at the seismology lab where I worked part-time. Because I’d used computers in high school and college and was an early adopter of computerized word processing, I’ve persisted in the quaint conviction that technology is a tool, not a way of life. The metastatic and culturally transformative technological advances of the last two decades have struck me as vindications of Kraus’s warnings. In 1910 he was already not impressed; and his work showed me the way to not being impressed myself. But even I am not immune to feelings of dread and, yes, envy when I see books being routed by electronics in the sexiness contest.