The Kraus Project

by Karl Kraus

  I definitely had this disease of the mind in Berlin. The cure, for me, was to stop spinning in circles of theory and start living. It was only much later, when I was struggling with my third novel, that I came to appreciate Freud for what he had to teach the fiction writer: that we relate to the world by way of the psychological objects we make of the people closest to us; that a human personality is best understood as a collection of selves in conflict; that we know less than we think we know; that there’s no cure for the human condition. Freud, to his credit, became reluctant to speak of cures.

  Nowadays such values are, if not lost and forgotten, then certainly embattled. A culture in which people can’t sit still for five minutes without pawing their smartphones gets the hopelessly tautological intellectual framework it deserves: “Personality is all just brain chemistry!” If Freud’s insights are denied universally enough and vehemently enough, it ceases to matter that vehement denial is a reliable sign that an insight has hit the mark. If the self is just a ghost in the machine anyway, you might as well embrace the machine and, while you’re at it, make yourself one. Id is what you type on your smartphone when you want it to auto-correct and write “I’d.”

  50. Another passage where Kraus’s sputtering rage makes him all but unintelligible. My guess is that “Nordic integral” is a dig at Ibsen; Reitter points out that “dying amid beauty” is a phrase from the final scene of Hedda Gabler. As for “rule de tri,” Reitter, Kehlmann, and Franzen are collectively stumped. Maybe it has to do with conventional love triangles.

  51. “Kraus isn’t suggesting that the new ‘psychological operetta’ provided authentic release. Operetta, in his view, shouldn’t make psychological or any other kind of sense: again, its deep realism derives precisely from its nonsensicality. In a later essay on the ‘domestication’ of operetta, Kraus would write, ‘The demand that operetta should hold up before pure reason is the source of pure operetta idiocy.’ He added, a few lines later, ‘Psychology is the ultima ratio of ineptness, and in this way operetta, too, has been flattened.’” —PR

  52. “From the 1890s until the First World War, Kraus admired Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946), whose naturalist dramas won him much applause. But when the war started, Hauptmann, like so many German artists, made patriotic statements in support of it, and Kraus became critical of him. Later, during the Weimar Republic, Kraus found Hauptmann outright insufferable. He’d been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1912, and as he became a cultural figurehead in the new Germany he began to style himself as an author of Goethe-like significance. (See the portrayal of Mynheer Peeperkorn, who’s loosely based on Hauptmann, in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.)

  “Ferdinand Raimund (1790–1836) was an actor, writer, and director who gained renown in (and beyond) Vienna for his comedies and farces. Often seen as Nestroy’s immediate forebear in Austro-humor, Raimund got plenty of official recognition after his death—a theater in Vienna was named after him, as was a street—but he wasn’t generally taken seriously as a figure in high culture. Kraus thought otherwise. Defending Raimund against Alfred Polgar’s less enthusiastic appraisal, Kraus declared him to be ‘the greatest Austrian poet.’ Granted, for Kraus, this wasn’t saying all that much, but he meant it as a major compliment, and Raimund belonged to the small group of authors whose works he read onstage. Nowhere in Die Fackel does Kraus offer an appreciation of Raimund anywhere near as thorough as ‘Nestroy and Posterity,’ but he did make it clear that he prized the beauty of Raimund’s language.” —PR

  53. “Ludwig Anzengruber (1839–1889) was also an Austrian playwright. Like Raimund and Nestroy, he wrote ‘folk’ plays, some of them comedies, and the three authors are often grouped together. But only Anzengruber won a larger following outside of Austria. Theodor Fontane and Friedrich Engels, among others, found his portrayal of folklife to be winningly concerned with social conditions. Kraus, however, was not impressed. Without dwelling on why, he made Anzengruber out to be the lesser author and was irked by his greater acclaim.” —PR

  54. “A mocking allusion to the titles of Anzengruber’s tragedy Hand and Heart (1874) and Karl Schönherr’s drama Faith and Home (1910). Shortly after the latter appeared, Kraus printed in his Fackel Berthold Viertel’s positive assessment of it. But Kraus later stressed that he hadn’t read it himself, and he poked fun at Schönherr’s stylistic deficiencies and his way of celebrating provincial culture.” —PR

  55. I.e., somebody from the revolutionary year of 1848.

  56. “The eminent Kraus scholar Christian Wagenknecht has (plausibly) speculated that Kraus was thinking, above all, of Theodor Herzl, the dignified (if also somewhat dandified) newspaper editor and founder of political Zionism. In 1901 Kraus wrote a long response to Herzl’s critique of Nestroy, charging Herzl not only with not having read and not having understood Nestroy but also with having leaned on (Heinrich) Laube’s and (Emil) Kuh’s attempt to protect ‘dignity’ against the eruptive ‘wit-genius’ on display in Nestroy’s dramas.” —PR

  “By the way, another Kuh, Anton Kuh,” says Kehlmann, “was a brilliant writer whose essay ‘Zarathustra’s Ape’ is still the best and funniest attack on Karl Kraus ever. To my knowledge, Kraus, who really did respond to everything that had anything to do with him, never said a word about the essay in Die Fackel.”

  “Kraus’s response,” says Reitter, “was to take Kuh to court for defamation of character, something he had done before with other people. He won the case, and Kuh, who was unwilling to pay the fines the court imposed, fled Vienna for Berlin.”

  57. “Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863) was a much-admired German author—Kafka and Schnitzler were devoted readers of his diaries—who criticized Nestroy in his letters, calling him a ‘genius of nastiness’ and his farces ‘poisonous and amoral.’ Earlier, Hebbel had received Nestroy’s work more kindly. His tone changed after the appearance (and success) of Nestroy’s Judith and Holofernes (1849), which parodies Hebbel’s breakthrough drama Judith. Brief accounts of Moritz Saphir and Jean Paul can be found in the notes to ‘Heine and the Consequences.’” —PR

  58. “The annual ball of Vienna’s association of liberal writers and journalists.” —PR

  59. I was suspicious of politics myself when I started reading Kraus. The sixties had continued well into the seventies, but they were definitely over by ’77, the year of my arrival at college, which was also the name of the first Talking Heads album. What David Byrne sang ironically on the band’s second record soon came to be straightforwardly true of me and New Wave music and its associated high-strung styles: “I have adopted this and made it my own.” I saw Byrne and Joe Strummer and Elvis Costello on small stages in Philadelphia and Munich, and by my senior year I’d managed to become what passed for a hipster at my rather dowdy college. While the music at every big college dance still culminated in Springsteen’s “Rosalita,” our smaller literary parties were not complete without “Contort Yourself.” We needed to feel we represented something new, and what felt new was suggested in the Richard Hell refrain: “I belong to the blank generation and / I can take it or leave it each time.”

  In Berlin I went further and articulated a principled rejection of politics. I did still like the Marxist theorists, the Frankfurt School especially, because their critique of the “reifications” and “hypostasis” and “one-dimensionality” of consumer capitalism was New Wave in spirit. But the necessary simplifications of political praxis (“I am right and you are wrong”) were incompatible with the complexities of literature (“Who’s to say who’s right?”) as I construed it. The particular fervor of my construal was probably rooted in the same privileged-kid psychology as Kraus’s—I wanted to be free to play with language, I didn’t want to be constricted by political definitions, I wanted to stand out, not sign on—and it was heightened in Europe, where culture was more saturated with politics than in America, and heightened further in Berlin, which, when I arrived, was seething with anti-Reaganism and anti-Americanism.

&nb
sp; I could understand Berlin’s preoccupation with politics: the city was occupied by opposing Cold War military forces, and people were genuinely afraid that Reagan’s saber rattling would set off a war of tactical nuclear weapons. But it hurt my feelings that the German students in the Hofmannsthal seminar disliked me simply because I was American. When Reagan visited Berlin that October and a young protester fell under the wheels of a city bus and was killed, I detected something unseemly in the resulting outcry, as if the peaceniks had been looking for their Kent State moment and now they had one. (The poor bus driver: I saw him sobbing on the evening news.) The peaceniks all struck me as hopelessly retro, with their wispy beards and their olive-drab jackets and their No Nukes buttons; Donovan, long since spurned and forgotten in the States, was still a headlining performer in Germany. And the punks, whom I was now encountering on the street, rather than listening to their music in my dorm room, were dirty, violent, and boring. German punks did uglier things with their faces and hair and clothes than punks of any other nation, and their humor consisted of a repeated, dopily ironic embrace of the term “asozial” (“antisocial”), which was what their critics called them.

  The one thing the peaceniks and the punks and I had in common was that we were competing for low-cost housing. The standard method for finding something affordable was to go to Zoo Station at six on Saturday night, stand in line at the newsstand that was the first in the city to sell the Sunday paper, and then hurry with the real-estate listings to the nearest pay phone. The third time I did this, I was interviewed by a TV crew reporting on the city’s housing crisis, and I was near enough to the head of the line that I managed to be the first person to call a landlady, Frau Keller, who had a furnished room to let. The room was way up in bleak Reinickendorf, far from the university and close to nothing except the airport, which was directly across the street. The furniture was cheap, hideous, and damaged, the communal bathroom was grim, Frau Keller was unfriendly and suspicious of me, one of the neighbors had a loud and gagging cough, and the rent was more than I could afford.

  I took the place. Hadn’t the eponymous Malte Laurids Brigge, in the Rilke novel that I knew whole chunks of by heart, become a real writer in his depressing furnished room in Paris? To economize, I switched to hand-rolled cigarettes and subsisted on cheap bread and cheese from a nearby Aldi discount market. I set up my typewriter on a small, damaged table and smoked and typed from noon to midnight. I was soon so accustomed to the roar of jets taking off that I perceived it only negatively, as a drop in the audibility of my radio. Outside, the days were getting shorter and the weather worse. The last words of A Moveable Feast—“when we were very poor and very happy”—are at once beautiful and untrue to my own experience. I was very poor but not very happy. Except for my host parents, I had no German friends, not even any acquaintances, and the remoteness of Reinickendorf discouraged socializing with the few North Americans I knew. My companions were myself, the flimsy characters in the story I was writing, and my fiancée, whose responses to my letters typically came two weeks after I’d sent them.

  V had been offered full scholarships at the country’s best English lit graduate programs and had chosen Columbia because living in Manhattan seemed like the literary thing to do; her apartment was across the street from our summer sublet. One afternoon I got a letter from her in which she reported that she’d “broken training”—had slept with a guy I’d known, and distrusted, at college. I had nothing if not time to respond to this news in writing. I admitted, briefly, to feeling jealous, but I stressed, over and over, that I wasn’t angry with her. If anything, I felt proud of her. Her infidelity wasn’t nice, but I was in flight from the niceness of the midwestern place I’d come from. Her infidelity made her interesting. Not for a second did I imagine breaking off the engagement. But I did immediately set about paying her back.

  A week before her bombshell letter arrived, as I was leaving a university building where I’d gone to attend a lecture on Walter Benjamin that turned out to have been canceled, I’d run into two American girls I’d known a little bit during my year in Munich. One was the daughter of the commander of American forces in Berlin; the other, W, was staying with her at the general’s palatial house. I’d spent a long evening barhopping with the two of them, fleeing the undanceable music that students in Berlin unaccountably considered dance music; and now, with the implied permission V had given me, I went out on a date with W alone. She had literary ambitions whose vagueness I contrasted unfavorably with the grandiosity of mine, but she was a kind, attractive, warm-blooded twenty-two-year-old and I was desperately lonely. At the end of the evening, we started kissing on the U-Bahn platform. She boarded a train, I remained on the platform, and we kept kissing while the conductor said, as conductors said at every stop, “Zurückbleiben!” (“Stay back!”). When the conductor then drily added, for our benefit, “Aufhören” (“Stop it”), I felt as if the impersonal German system had melted a little bit, as a gift to me.

  A few evenings later, on Halloween, I arrived at the general’s with a copy of Fredric Jameson’s The Prison-House of Language, which I’d been reading on the train. A high wall surrounded the house, and guards were patrolling with assault rifles, which made me feel at once safer and less safe inside. W and I ate and drank and danced with the general’s daughter, who then discreetly vanished, leaving us alone in a top-floor guest room. Like V, who’d avowed her love for me before betraying me, I avowed my love for V before going to bed with W. Unlike V, however, I didn’t have contraceptives, and so I fell technically short of returning her favor—a failure that haunted me during all the years we were married. Early the next morning I slipped out of the house and read about the prison-house of language all the way back to Reinickendorf.

  I’ve had a lot of dumb ideas in my life, but none dumber than the one of combining letters and journals the way V and I did that year. If I hadn’t been so ambitious, I might have considered that letters are for the Other and journals for the self, and that the romantic dialogue of letters is at odds with a journal’s insistence on honest confession, and that it’s dangerous and ultimately impossible to wholly hand over the self to the Other; but since, again, V and I were united in ambition, and since the point of all our writing was to develop our styles and improve our skills, I persisted with the project even after V’s bombshell letter had alerted me to the danger. My explicitly stated goal was to save the American novel—from social one-dimensionality, from critical preoccupation with the prison-house of language, from the off-putting avant-gardism of Pynchon and his kind. Frau Heilgendorff had recently introduced me to a young, aspiring Canadian writer, and after my first dinner with him I’d summarized to V the difference between him and me: “He wants to be part of the non-French-Canadian nationalistic renaissance; I want to be Mohammed.” And further:

  I understood that the difference between us is that he is sane and I am not … Crazy is not something you “go,” it’s something you become, gradually, through an accretion in the section of the brain devoted to significance.

  I was well aware of the “megalomania” that V and I were fostering in each other, but my life in Berlin was so bizarrely deformed by literary ambition, and my twelve-hour days of smoking and typing so far from a healthy or happy social existence, that I could justify our letter/journal project only by prosecuting it with ever-crazier single-mindedness. It was like kissing in the doorway of a subway car: I managed to steal one night in bed with W before the doors of my existence closed and I returned to my room to wring significance out of it, by writing about it.

  After acknowledging to V that it would be painful for her to read any details, I gave her quite a few details. (Good writers used details, and we were trying to make good writers of each other.) Then I rambled on for a few pages about religion and philosophy—

  It’s clear that I haven’t read enough marxist lit., because I’ve never seen a marxist confront what has always struck me as the one problematic term in the entire ideology
, namely guilt, the factor that exempts the philosopher from class conflict, since he or she has a privileged position in society yet wants to eliminate the privilege—

  before getting to the problem of the prison-house of language, which I was trapped in even as I sat there. The more I tried to write about what I was feeling, the more I seemed simply to be creating language about language, piling up signifiers that referred to themselves and carried me further from, not closer to, the moral and emotional horror of what I’d done to W, which was to use her as a signifier in the hermetic literary world of me and V—

  because dangerous things happen when you spend a night pretending the person you’re with is someone else, pretend so vigorously that reality disappears and you’re left with this face, these kitten eyes that belong to—whom? WHOM? WHOM WHOM WHOM?

  At this point I went literally crazy for about fifteen minutes. Tried to pull my face off with my fingers, tried to rip up the bedsheets with my teeth, ran downstairs and tried to leave the building to call W, but I couldn’t unlock the street door, no matter how hard I yanked on it. Some shadow thing in me, some thing that my conscious self could never see clearly but that was no less me than my conscious self was, had momentarily got the upper hand.

  The thing in control of me made me give the street door a despairing kick, and—it seemed like a miracle, a gift from the world or from God—the lock freed up. Out on the street, liberated from my prison-house, I became halfway sane. I met W for a drink and a proper farewell (she was leaving for Spain the next morning), and she told me it sounded as if I was spending too much time alone. The next day, alone, I described to V what had happened while I was typing:

  It began when I called up the picture of those kitten eyes. That’s what made me crumple up and cry. But what made it bad was something else: it was like a self-tightening knot, as I guess I knew it would be, if it ever happened. I’ll tell you what my impulses were: to smash the typewriter, to throw it out the window. to smash the mirror with it, smash the window, then smash it. to smash the mirror with the ashtray, to pound the typewriter with the ashtray, to throw the ashtray through the window. to cut my face with a knife. to throw myself out the window. to bloody my fingers trying to rip the typewriter to pieces.