by Karl Kraus
94. From an aphorism in Nietzsche’s Dawn (1881).
95. “Kraus is reworking, and repurposing against Heine, yet another of Heine’s own lines, which is itself a reworking of a line by Börne. Heine writes in the long poem Atta Troll (1847), ‘No talent, and yet a character!’” —PR
96. Here is Reitter’s helpful parsing in The Anti-Journalist: “Kraus’s Heine is a Jewish parvenu. He deals in the sweet, non-nourishing superficialities of Western culture. But again, as a Moses, Heine remains a transformative moment for the Jews. Thus Kraus suggests that Heine’s feuilletonistic writing, a verbal eau de cologne, has a kind of foundational significance in German-Jewish culture, or, for the turn-of-the-century Jewish literati, ‘the consequences.’ If Heine is a foppish Moses in assimilated Jewish culture, his textual legacy, feuilletonism, would amount to its saccharine sacred text.”
97. The heroine of the Goethe tragedy Iphigenie auf Tauris.
98. This is Kraus’s most concise formulation of the paradox of linguistic originality. “Farewell,” a very old word, is born anew by Goethe’s use of it in Iphigenie.
Nestroy and Posterity (1912)
1. Johann Nestroy (1801–1862) was a leading figure in the golden age of Viennese theater, in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although virtually unknown outside Austria (owing in part to the Austrian inflection of his lower-class characters’ language), he was widely loved at home for his comic genius. Like Shakespeare, Nestroy was an inveterate borrower of well-worn plots, which he executed with unapologetic panache, and he had a Shakespearean gift for rendering his buffoons at once ridiculous and sympathetic. His language was brilliant and his plot structures were crisp, but because so much of his work was mistakable for what Kraus will here call “routine,” and because comedy is everywhere (and especially in Germany) held in lower esteem than tragedy, his reputation at the time of Kraus’s celebration of him was closer to Gilbert and Sullivan’s than to Shakespeare’s.
In “Nestroy and Posterity” (1912), Kraus was doing the inverse of what he’d done two years earlier in “Heine and the Consequences”—championing an underrated writer rather than taking down an overrated one. The reader should be warned that the Nestroy essay is, in places, even denser than the Heine. But here again Kraus is leveraging a seemingly intramural literary fight into a very broad cultural critique, which is the essence of his method: he jumps directly from a small ill (the fact that Nestroy is underrated, misread, and substantially forgotten) to the largest of ills (the dehumanizations of technology, the false promises of Progress and Enlightenment). The stakes here are even higher and more directly relevant to our own times.
2. Sic. Although it’s no excuse for misspelling his name, Kraus hated Shaw for some of the same reasons he hated Heine. “For Kraus,” says Daniel Kehlmann, “Shaw is the prototype of the modern, shallow, media-compatible journalist-litterateur whose fame rests largely on having interesting opinions and giving original interviews: who talks to every newspaper and doesn’t have the least interest in language itself.” Even in Pygmalion, which appears to be preoccupied with language, Henry Higgins is presented as a scientist of spoken English. Shaw gives Higgins a big and predictable emotional blind spot—our egghead has a lesson to learn about the human heart, etc.—while remaining palpably infatuated with Higgins’s smarty-pants scientific hauteur.
Regarding Roosevelt, Paul Reitter comments: “No fan of America, Kraus disliked Theodore Roosevelt, who seemed so very American; he even commented snidely on Roosevelt’s game attempt, in 1910, to speak a little German to a German choral group. In this sentence, though, Kraus has in mind Roosevelt’s push for technological progress, his modernizing streak. Kraus wasn’t a technophobe in his everyday life. In 1914, when Vienna had few automobiles and many automobile accidents (see the first scene in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities), Kraus bought a car and had himself driven around by a chauffeur. Nor was Kraus averse, later on, to air travel. But around 1908 he came to believe that our technological capabilities and our imaginative faculties were going in opposite directions—the former were going up and, as a result, the latter down—and this thought really scared him. It’s what made him into the ‘apocalyptic satirist.’ In the essay ‘Apocalypse’ (1908), he writes, ‘Culture can’t catch its breath, and in the end a dead humanity lies next to its works, whose invention cost us so much of our intellect that we had none left to put them to use. We were complicated enough to build machines and too primitive to make them serve us. We operate a worldwide system of traffic along a narrow route in the brain.’”
Culture can’t catch its breath: to me the most impressive thing about Kraus as a thinker may be how early and clearly he recognized the divergence of technological progress from moral and spiritual progress. A succeeding century of the former, involving scientific advances that would have seemed miraculous not long ago, has resulted in high-resolution smartphone videos of dudes dropping Mentos into liter bottles of Diet Pepsi and shouting “Whoa!” while they geyser. Technovisionaries of the 1990s promised that the Internet would usher in a new world of peace, love, and understanding, and Twitter executives are still banging the utopianist drum, claiming foundational credit for the Arab Spring. To listen to them, you’d think it was inconceivable that Eastern Europe could liberate itself from the Soviets without the benefit of cell phones, or that a bunch of Americans revolted against the British and produced the U.S. Constitution without 4G capability.
3. Nowadays, the refrain is that “there’s no stopping our powerful new technologies.” Grassroots resistance to these technologies is almost entirely confined to health and safety issues, and meanwhile various logics—of war theory, of technology, of the marketplace—keep unfolding automatically. We find ourselves living in a world with hydrogen bombs because uranium bombs just weren’t going to get the job done; we find ourselves spending most of our waking hours texting and e-mailing and tweeting and posting on color-screen gadgets because Moore’s law said we could. We’re told that, to remain competitive economically, we need to forget about the humanities and teach our children “passion” (to use Thomas Friedman’s word in a 2013 Times column) for digital technology and prepare them to spend their entire lives incessantly reeducating themselves to keep up with it. The logic says that if we want things like Zappos.com or home DVR capability—and who wouldn’t want them?—we need to say goodbye to job stability and hello to a lifetime of anxiety. We need to become as restless as capitalism itself.
Not only am I not a Luddite, I’m not even sure the original Luddites were Luddites. (They had no systematic beef with technology; it simply seemed practical to them to smash the steam-powered looms that were putting them out of work.) In developing this book, I’m relying on software and silicon to facilitate discussions with Kehlmann and Reitter in two other time zones, and I’m enchanted with everything about my new Lenovo ultrabook computer except its name. (Working on something called an IdeaPad tempts me to refuse to have ideas.) I don’t mind technology as my servant; I mind it only as my master. But not long ago, when I was intemperate enough to call Twitter “dumb” in public, the response of Twitter addicts was to call me a Luddite. Nyah, nyah, nyah! It was as if I’d said it was “dumb” to smoke cigarettes, except that in this case I had no medical evidence to back me up. People did worry, for a while, that cell phones might cause brain cancer, but the purported link has been revealed to be feeble to nonexistent, and now nobody has to worry anymore.
4. No matter how many times I read it, I can’t make full sense of this sentence, although it does help, a little bit, to plug in the example of the anterior thoughts of the Framers of our Constitution and their benefit to our current planet. Kehlmann also helpfully notes: “The sentence elaborates on a line of thought that Kraus began in his poem ‘To Eternal Peace’: that there’s nothing more noble than the pleasure (a pleasure experienced by Kant, whom the poem is about) of knowing that future generations will have things better than one’s own. Our present does exactly th
e opposite, not only not working for later generations but actually making things worse for them.”
5. Kehlmann considers it a near certainty that somewhere in an earlier edition of Die Fackel is a reference to someone’s having circled the world in fifty days—a reference that Kraus’s readers would have recognized here. Reitter suspects the reference is to Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, amended to fifty because it’s fifty years since Nestroy’s death.
6. “The phrase about the operator forgetting the Word comes from Goethe’s poem ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.’” —PR
7. Here’s a little glimpse of what’s getting lost in translation: in the original, “the intellect didn’t understand” is the beautifully repetitive der Verstand verstand nicht. Although the translator is mostly just grinning and bearing these losses, he thought he’d mention this one.
8. In the original, for “humanity,” Kraus unexpectedly uses the Latinate Humanität rather than the Germanic Menschlichkeit. Kehlmann says: “My guess is that it’s an echo of Nietzsche, ‘O Voltaire, o humanity [Humanität], o idiocy!’ All of Kraus’s contemporary readers would have heard a faint echo of Nietzsche and his loathing of Enlightenment in that word. But that’s just a guess.” Following a tip from a fellow scholar, Reitter notes that Kraus is also probably echoing an often-cited rhyme by the Austrian writer Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872):
Der Weg der neuern Bildung geht:
Von Humanität,
Durch Nationalität,
Zur Bestialität.
(The road of modern education leads:
From humanity,
Through nationality,
To barbarity.)
I’d like to unpack this sentence fragment further, since, of all of Kraus’s lines, it’s probably the one that has meant the most to me. An “infernal machine” is an explosive or destructive device constructed to deliberately cause harm; the German term, Teufelswerk (literally “devil’s work”), sharpens the Krausian paradox of the phrase “of humanity.” Kraus in this passage is evoking the Sorcerer’s Apprentice—the unintended unleashing of supernaturally destructive consequences. Although he’s talking about the modern newspaper, his critique applies, if anything, even better to contemporary techno-consumerism. For Kraus, the infernal thing about newspapers was their fraudulent coupling of Enlightenment ideals with a relentless and ingenious pursuit of profit and power. With techno-consumerism, a humanist rhetoric of “empowerment” and “creativity” and “freedom” and “connection” and “democracy” abets the frank monopolism of the techno-titans; the new infernal machine seems increasingly to obey nothing but its own developmental logic, and it’s far more enslavingly addictive, and far more pandering to people’s worst impulses, than newspapers ever were. Indeed, what Kraus will later say of Nestroy could now be said of Kraus himself: “He attacks his small environs with an asperity worthy of a later cause.” The profits and reach of Moriz Benedikt, the publisher of the Neue Freie Presse, were pitifully small by the standards of today’s tech and media giants. The sea of trivial or false or empty data is thousands of times larger now. Kraus was merely prognosticating when he envisioned a day when people had forgotten how to add and subtract; now it’s hard to get through a meal with friends without somebody reaching for an iPhone to retrieve the kind of fact it used to be the brain’s responsibility to remember. The techno-boosters, of course, see nothing wrong here. They point out that human beings have always outsourced memory—to bards, historians, spouses, books. But I’m enough of a child of the sixties to see a difference between letting your spouse remember your nieces’ birthdays and handing over basic memory function to a global corporate system of control.
9. The Koh-i-noor, at 106 metric carats, was once the largest known diamond. It now resides in the crown of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II.
10. Reitter notes: “When Kraus published ‘Nestroy and Posterity,’ in May of 1912, Nestroy was generally considered, for all his popularity, to be no more than an author skilled at vernacular farces—a fun and sometimes vulgar form of entertainment that didn’t ultimately have much depth. Only Kraus and a few others thought he was a great artist.”
Kehlmann continues: “Kraus’s persistent championing of Nestroy had consequences: Nestroy today is acknowledged to be perhaps the greatest comic genius in Austrian literature. His plays are produced and he’s read in school; he’s a classic whose literary status is no longer in dispute—at least in Austria. In Germany, people maybe know just the name. His plays are neither read nor produced. And this has nothing to do with their being hard to follow: the right way to produce him, as Kraus himself will point out, is not in Austrian dialect but in clear High German with a slight Austrian intonation. The problem is that the Prussian canon has, in general, very little room for Austrian writers and, in particular, no interest in humor. This is a subject too complex to be treated properly even in footnotes as deviant as ours. But Goethe and Schiller were explicitly opposed to humor in literature, there was never a Voltaire in German letters, and even a comic genius like Nestroy or a master of witty polemic like Kraus finds very little traction with readers and theatergoers in Germany. Germans and humor: the old, great, sad problem…!”
“Kraus himself had quite a bit to say about this problem,” Reitter adds. “He was predictably hard on what he once called ‘the overwhelming humorlessness of German literature.’ And where it did attempt to be funny, according to him, it tended to be filthy in the most puerile way: ‘No experience is more important to German humorists than the process of digestion.’”
11. By “subject matter,” Kraus appears to mean “the object or content of satire” (we’re up against the tricky word “Stoff” again), but I don’t think he gives us enough information here to understand the final phrase. I’d understand it better if he’d written “perennial fascination” instead of “undying nature,” but unfortunately he didn’t. Kehlmann’s comment may nevertheless be illuminating: “‘Stoff’ is a key word for Kraus. In his opinion, we shouldn’t be laughing at the content of satire, because the only thing that matters is our aesthetic enjoyment of how the content is arranged—the form, in other words.”
12. Pretty clearly a reference to Heine’s transformative importance to later generations of German-Jewish writers, and to the maintenance of his reputation by newspapers controlled and substantially written by German Jews. “They take care of their own,” is perhaps the unsavory implication here, “and Nestroy, being Gentile, doesn’t have that advantage.” Reitter adds: “At least some of Kraus’s readers would have known that ‘no Kaddish will be said’ is a Heine quotation. The source is Heine’s poem ‘Memorial Service’ (‘Gedächtnisfeier’).”
13. “Heinrich Friedjung (1851–1920) was an assimilated Jewish historian and journalist who wrote for the Neue Freie Presse and shared its dual commitments to liberalism and a German patriotism that could go over into a saber-rattling nationalism. He had, in short, all the makings of a Kraus target. But it was through a sensational act of gullibility that Friedjung got Kraus’s full attention. In 1909, it looked as if the Serbian response to Austria’s annexation of Bosnia might give the Austrian-Hungarian government the opportunity to invade Serbia. Thus the government found itself in need of a moral justification for the war it wanted. The Austrian foreign minister turned to none other than Friedjung, handing him forged documents that he proceeded to run with. Writing in the Neue Freie Presse, Friedjung tried to make the case that the Austro-Hungarian regional administration in Bosnia had entered into a conspiracy with the anti-Habsburg government in Belgrade. Soon, however, the Serbs backed down. The threat of war abated, whereupon the regional administration that Friedjung had accused of treason brought a libel suit against him—and won. For Kraus, the really damning thing was a point that Friedjung had managed to prove in his defense: he hadn’t known that the documents on which he’d based his claims were forgeries. Kraus’s essay on the affair (‘The Trial of Friedjung,’ 1909) contains some memorable re
marks about the forces driving Austrian history—‘its events are a function of the conflict between stupidity and randomness’—but his focus is on the related issue of the state of reading in Austria. ‘Austria in orbe ultima: in a world that’s been deceived, Austria has kept its credulity longer than anyone else. It is journalism’s most willing victim, for it not only believes what it sees in print, it believes the opposite when it sees that in print, too.’ The reason Friedjung merits only one mention in ‘Nestroy and Posterity’ is that Kraus had just written an essay dealing exclusively with Friedjung’s (1908) attempt to interpret Nestroy as a ‘mockingbird’ with a liberal outlook. Unsurprisingly, Kraus wasn’t about to let stand the ultimate bad reader’s reading of Nestroy, but here, according to Kraus, Friedjung may actually have been aware of the tendentiousness of his interpretation. Finding some dark solace in that, Kraus writes, ‘Only this time it isn’t quite believable that Herr Friedjung is acting out of honest belief.’” —PR
14. “So, was Kraus, whose experimental style influenced Brecht and Schönberg, a reactionary modernist? Walter Benjamin once suggested as much. His essay ‘Karl Kraus’ (1931) describes its subject’s work as a mix of ‘reactionary theory and revolutionary practice.’ But as Benjamin himself knew, this formulation was misleading.