The Kraus Project

by Karl Kraus

  31. “Oskar Sachs (1869–1941) was one of the few Viennese actors who got a kind word from Kraus. In ‘The Last Actors’ essay, only Sachs and Alexander Girardi are spared Kraus’s scorn—more on Girardi below.” —PR

  32. “Christened after a director whose name Nabokov would have loved, Karl Carl, the Carltheater was located in Leopoldstadt and served as a center of Nestroy activity. Nestroy’s works were often performed there, frequently with him acting in them. And from 1854 until 1860 he held the position of the director of the theater.” —PR

  33. “Alexander Girardi (1850–1918) was Vienna’s most famous operetta singer and comic actor at the turn of the century, known particularly for his roles in Ferdinand Raimund’s farces. So in celebrating Girardi, Kraus wasn’t exactly swimming against the current of popular opinion. Indeed, Girardi was a trendsetting celebrity in Vienna. People would imitate how he dressed and talked, even how he walked. But Kraus went much further in his assessment of Girardi than most critics. As Kraus himself emphasized, he had little company in proclaiming that Vienna lost its ‘cultural heart’ when Girardi left for an engagement in Germany. In the same context (the 1908 essay ‘Girardi’), Kraus began to develop the idea that Girardi’s ‘extraordinarily self-asserting’ way of using ‘scenic possibilities for creative portrayal’ didn’t lend itself to performing works of great literary value—hence Girardi’s lack of compatibility with Nestroy, whom Kraus sees as an author of satirical literature operating as a dramatist. Girardi’s own gift for satire thrives precisely where the literary value of what he is performing is weak. Kraus observes, about one of his performances, ‘if the script was superficial amusement, the accent employed was the deepest mocking of demagogic language,’ and goes on to say that Girardi ‘ignores the literature’ in the works he performs. It’s the less self-asserting Oskar Sachs who is more ‘Nestroy-ready’ (‘nestroyfähig’) in the ‘Girardi’ essay, just as he is in ‘Nestroy and Posterity.’” —PR

  34. Kehlmann says: “This is a ridiculous insult. Max Reinhardt was arguably the greatest stage director of the twentieth century; calling him ‘a layman of the stage’ is just pure ressentiment.”

  Reitter explains: “Max Reinhardt (1873–1943) was a hugely influential director whom Kraus belittled for over thirty years. As so often with Kraus’s feuds, things were different—that is, better—in the beginning. Born near Vienna, Reinhardt met Kraus in 1892, when both participated in a student production of Schiller’s The Robbers. Reinhardt excelled in the role of Spiegelberg while Kraus flopped as Franz Moor; this led him to give up his dreams of becoming an actor. If he envied Reinhardt, he didn’t show it at the time. Indeed, he wrote in support of Reinhardt for years, openly acknowledging his ‘gifts.’ But around 1905, when Reinhardt was achieving celebrity status, Kraus’s position changed. A combination of old and new jealousies may have been at work; certainly Reinhardt thought so. But there were also genuine differences of principle and practice. Kraus’s drama The Last Days of Mankind may have a list of characters that runs to thirteen pages, and it may also call for war propaganda films to be used as a scenic backdrop, but Kraus for the most part was a theatrical minimalist. In his own performances he often sat on a bare stage behind an unremarkable table on which there would be only papers and a glass of water. Reinhardt, by contrast, was known for his big stagings and elaborate sets. In 1911 he produced the Berlin premiere of Hofmannsthal’s Everyman in a circus arena. Later that year, he turned the Exhibition Centre at Earls Court in London into a cathedral for his staging of Karl Vollmoeller’s The Miracle. And in 1922 Reinhardt and Hofmannsthal mounted their drama The Salzburg Great World Theater in an actual cathedral—prompting Kraus, who had secretly converted to Catholicism in 1911, to proclaim that he was now leaving the church ‘out of antisemitism.’

  “In an essay written before ‘Nestroy and Posterity,’ Kraus remarks that Reinhardt’s desire to have Girardi perform in a Nestroy cycle is an example of Reinhardt’s ‘snobbism.’ Reinhardt presumably knows that Girardi isn’t right for the role, but he wants a big name because he’s a snob, and that’s what snobs want. ‘Nestroy and Posterity’ upgrades the insult, in a way. Now Reinhardt, as a ‘layman of the stage,’ doesn’t even seem to recognize how incompatible Girardi and Nestroy are. Now it’s ignorance and incompetence that led him to propose a Nestroy cycle.”

  35. “One of Kraus’s more famous self-descriptions reads: ‘I am perhaps the first case of an author who simultaneously experiences his writing as an actor.’ Less well known is that the aphorism continues: ‘Would I therefore want to entrust another actor with my text? Nestroy’s intellectuality is untheatrical. The actor Nestroy was effective because he said what no listener would have understood so quickly that no listener could understand him.’ The actual point of the aphorism is to underscore the affinity between Kraus, the actorly writer, and Nestroy the writerly actor.

  “What seems really astonishing now is that before an essay like ‘Heine and the Consequences’ was read, it was heard. Kraus began giving public lectures in the spring of 1910, and ‘Heine and the Consequences,’ which wasn’t published until the end of that year, was among the first things he brought to the stage. We can only wonder how many of Kraus’s allusions and echoes his most educated listeners were able to pick up on as the words flew by.” —PR

  36. “By 1912 Kraus had been championing Wedekind and his works for nearly a decade. He had even produced—and participated in—a private staging of Pandora’s Box in 1905, when public performances of it were banned. Kraus played the role of Kungu Poti, Imperial Prince of Uahubee; Wedekind assigned himself the part of Jack the Ripper. This kind of self-casting wasn’t unusual for him, and it linked him, as Kraus points out, to the writer-actor Nestroy. Kraus particularly lauded Wedekind’s handling of his great theme, which he construed as a version of one of his own themes: gender conflicts reveal both the misogyny and the larger ethical bankruptcy of bourgeois society. Kraus insisted on Lulu’s status as a victim, ‘a destroyer because she is destroyed from all sides.’ The ‘world of the poet Frank Wedekind,’ he wrote in 1905, is one ‘in which woman isn’t cursed with taking the cross of ethical responsibility from man, should she ripen to aesthetic perfection. His deep knowledge, which understands the gap between blooming lips and bourgeois attitudes, is perhaps the only knowledge today worthy of a dramatist.’” —PR

  37. Kehlmann cuts through some of the fog here: “Kraus is talking about the fact that Wedekind also worked as an actor, playing his own roles, writing roles for himself, and therefore adding an element of personal confession, which is a slightly untheatrical effect but very effective on a different level.”

  38. “Sigmund Wilheim (1849–1911) was one of the few theater critics in Austria whom Kraus respected. Kraus compared Wilheim’s style to that of Ludwig Speidel, the only feuilletonist he admired, and he wrote, in his obituary for Wilheim, ‘he truly understood theater, and he was the first in Vienna to comprehend something of Wedekind.’” —PR

  39. “From Pandora’s Box (1904).” —PR

  40. Wedekind’s play of 1894.

  41. “From Nestroy’s farce The Insignificant Man (Der Unbedeutende, 1846).” —PR

  I’m reluctant to add to the already astronomical footnote tally by separately noting the sources of all the Nestroy lines that Kraus will be quoting, but Paul Reitter has done such excellent work in tracking them down that I will list the rest of them here, in order of appearance. 1.) From Nestroy’s farce My Friend (Mein Freund, 1851). 2.) From Nestroy’s farce The Talisman (Der Talisman, 1840). 3.) From Nestroy’s farce The Evil Spirit Lumpazivagabundus (Der böse Geist Lumpazivagabundus, 1833). 4.) From Nestroy’s farce A Man Full of Nothing (Der Zerrissene, 1844). 5.) Also from A Man Full of Nothing. 6.) From Nestroy’s farce The Two Night Wanderers (Die beiden Nachtwandler, 1836). 7.) From Nestroy’s farce Earlier Conditions (Frühere Verhältnisse, 1862). 8.) From The Two Night Wanderers. 9.) From Nestroy’s farce Earlier Conditions. 10.) From My Friend. 11.) Fro
m The Two Night Wanderers. 12.) From Nestroy’s farce Terrible Fear (Höllenangst, 1849). 13.) From Lumpazivagabundus.

  42. “Kraus was nothing if not polemical, yet he tended not to apply the term ‘polemical’ to himself or to writers whom he admired. In fact, he often used it to describe attacks against him, with ‘polemical’ implying, as it still does, a lack of fairness. But Kraus’s definition of the category ‘polemic’ is rather neutral. In an essay that appeared a few months after ‘Nestroy and Posterity,’ Kraus distinguishes polemic from satire, explaining that the former ‘operates within the format of the bad object’ and that its specific function is to ‘expose the disparity between high standing and insignificance.’ The point of polemic is, evidently, to take down what’s overrated.” —PR

  43. “A very personal line,” says Kehlmann. “Kraus was constantly reproached for being ‘only corrosive,’ and this is his response to that.” I would add that this entire essay—a loving celebration of Nestroy’s brilliance—is a response to that.

  44. The latter part of this sentence fragment is obstinately opaque. But it may help to compare the “counterfeit irony” of Heine—who doesn’t actually credit the emotion of the girl who’s moved by a sunset, and who undercuts it with a snarky, conventional-minded reference to the earth’s rotation—with the functioning of high emotion in a genuinely satirical work like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. The pathos of the mortally wounded Snowden’s refrain in that novel (“I’m cold”) stands in meaningful aesthetic relation to Heller’s acidic satire of the logic preventing Snowden from escaping endless bombing missions.

  45. Sadly, more untranslatable wordplay here: in the original, “disputatious catalogue” is a play on “catalogue raisonné,” which works in German because Raisonneur means “disputer” or “person who wrangles.”

  46. “Nestroy’s contemporaries Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Heinrich Laube, and Emil Kuh, all of them authors of consequence, charged Nestroy with ‘cheapening our ideals through his toxic nastiness.’ This sounds a lot like a well-worn criticism of Kraus, and it may be what Kraus is alluding to with the sarcastic line ‘noble impulses.’” —PR

  47. The Princess of Eboli is Don Carlos’s beloved in the Schiller play.

  48. In the world of books nowadays, there’s the related paradox of the thousand-page biography. Precisely when the world accelerated technologically and our time for reading began to shrink, the average length of biographies seemed to double. It’s as if being bored has become the way to reassure yourself that you’re doing serious reading, as opposed to playing Angry Birds.

  49. “A neologism that (playfully) expresses Kraus’s position on psychoanalysis—the Greek word ‘psychros’ means ‘fatuous’ and ‘insignificant.’ Kraus was famously critical of psychoanalysis. Indeed, his most widely cited aphorism is a dig at it: ‘Psychoanalysis is that disease of the mind for which it believes itself to be the cure.’ Kraus also liked to speak of the ‘psychoanals.’ He believed that psychoanalysis was driven by psychological pathologies—‘you head to the entrance of a stranger’s unconscious when your own home is dirty’—but his chief complaint was with the invasiveness and reductionism of its methods. These he even managed to portray as the result of a particularly Jewish striverism: ‘They control the press; they control the banks; and now they control the unconscious, too!’ Most often, though, Kraus pointed up the intellectual limitations of psychoanalysis: ‘A good psychologist can quickly get you inside his head.’ Especially appalling to him was the psychoanalytic interpretation of art, which he regarded as a kind of desecration—‘muddy boots’ in the ‘holy place of the artist’s dream.’

  “It may be that in going after psychoanalysis Kraus was thinking more of Freud’s followers than of Freud himself. He tended not to name names in his attacks, though he did occasionally make fun of Freud’s name. There was, in any case, some friendly contact between Freud and Kraus. Presenting himself as a devoted reader of Die Fackel, Freud solicited Kraus’s support in a series of letters written between 1904 and 1906. Kraus, for his part, attended several of Freud’s lectures around that time, and in November 1905 he publicly applauded him for trying to debunk the view that homosexuality should be seen as a dangerous form of deviance. Yet despite the common ground between them, the solidarity that Freud hoped for never materialized. The correspondence, never robust, petered out altogether, while Kraus’s mocking of psychoanalysis and some of its basic principles (e.g., the Oedipus complex) persisted for decades.” —PR

  I agree with Kraus that there’s a lot to find fault with in Freud: his overemphasis on sex, his brute-force application of the Oedipus story, his fascination with puns (to me, any school of thought or literature that makes too much of puns is a priori suspect), his too-neat contraption of id, ego, and superego, and so on. But the reason he’s easy to find fault with is that he was articulating something that had never been articulated—he was grasping at something nearly ineffable; he was trying to be a scientist of things unknowable through science—and if Kraus had been a reader of novels I think he might have acknowledged this. Freud was developing a theory to account for psychological truths that his beloved Dostoyevsky had noticed and embodied in his novels: that we do things that we’re not aware of doing; that we often, and without hypocrisy, say the opposite of what we really mean; that just because a motive is irrational doesn’t mean it makes no sense; that we strenuously deny precisely the things that are truest about us; that we fail to see certain obvious, important facts that are right in front of us; that we so often unaccountably sabotage ourselves. Maybe the satirist and the aphorist and even the dramatist can safely ignore Freud’s ideas, but the realist novelist cannot.

  This may be the place to confess that immersing myself in the letters and the narrative of my year in Berlin makes me feel bad. The particulars are so elusive and fleeting that they’re hard to capture in words, but they have to do with my feeling that I’m still the same person I was at twenty-two but also was never that person, not even then. As if, by way of writing and introspection and self-consciousness, I had the same kind of distance from myself then that I now have by virtue of being thirty years older. That there’s the thinking, planning, self-improving me, and then there’s a me that just does what it does—makes mistakes that I know to be mistakes. In 1982 I could feel that my consciousness was riding along on something it couldn’t account for. And I went ahead and did a thing that makes no sense to me now: I married somebody I was unlikely to stay married to. Probably I did it because I was trying to control—to overthink—something that ultimately can’t be controlled. I wanted to plan out a whole life, because thinking and planning were safer than simply immersing myself in life and seeing what happened. But the controlling, clamping-down self now seems to me not the ego or the superego; it seems, itself, like the id. Freud’s schema would suggest that I had an overly dominant superego in Berlin, overriding the impulses of the id and forcing myself to do the “right” thing, but this isn’t how it feels. In the letters, the superego always enters late, in a particularly grating tone of optimism, and tries to put the best face on what the fearful, control-seeking id has done. The whole thing makes me very sad.

  Freud’s psychic architecture of id, ego, superego is more mysterious and suggestive in the original German: the It, the I, and the Over-I. The German word for “id,” “Es,” points toward my objectness—I’m not just good old familiar me, I’m also an It, a thing in the world—better than “id” does (at least for us non-Latin-readers). “Id” to me evoked and still evokes the image of some hot, sexual, powerful, toadlike thing inside me that is nonetheless part of “my” self. It is more radical, because it suggests that the me I know, my consciousness as I move through the world, is really just a ghost in the machine, a mysterious by-product of a body composed of dumb atoms. Like other great schools of twentieth-century criticism—like structuralism, which posits a self constituted by the language it speaks, and like Marxism, for which the self is the instrument of ideo
logy—Freudianism undermines the notion of an individual with free will and limitless agency. If you look too closely at the self, it disappears.

  If I insist that Freud was basically right—that the It does what it does and that my consciousness trails behind it like a yapping little dog, pretending to be in control, inventing motives whose effect is to blind it to what’s really going on—I’m susceptible to a structuralist critique: the reason I think that I’m the ghost in the machine of It is that language is separate from its speaker. What I’m describing as a disconnect between self and It is in fact an artifact of the disconnect between me and what I’ve spoken or written—because pursuit of the elusive It can happen only via language. What haunted me in 1982 and briefly drove me crazy wasn’t some chimerical Freudian id but the words that I’d been typing as I hunted for it; it was the words, not the id, that existed independent of me.

  And then there’s the Marxist critique: psychoanalysis is a bourgeois institution, a diversion for those with the time and money for it. You think you’re trying to demystify yourself and better understand the interplay of It and I and Over-I, but in fact all you’re doing is developing a new and bigger mystification to obscure your privilege. The real It is economic and class relations, which create the ideology that governs you; and so no wonder the It is scary to you. The “Unconscious” is the sex-drenched bogeyman that you invent to avoid the real bogeyman of ideology; and thus, for the hard-line Marxist as for Kraus, psychoanalysis is the disease of the mind for which it believes itself to be the cure.