by Karl Kraus
How the knot started tightening. When I began to cry, I knew that I couldn’t keep typing. But I wanted to describe what I was feeling. I thought of taking the paper out and writing it longhand. But then the thought, the feeling, of wanting to describe what was happening—this became what was happening. The impulse of wanting to control (through writing) this lack of control turned out to be the real source of the lack of control. So that every time I thought of ceasing to be crazy and going back to the typewriter, I became more crazy and more furious with the typewriter, until I was biting the sheet. It became clear to me that this could go on indefinitely, until the neighbors called the police. So I gave up on the idea of describing this (because IT COULD NOT BE DESCRIBED) and surrendered myself to my self-preservative instinct, went to call [W]. Why the front door nearly did it to me: I was powerless to stop it from being a symbol of the imprisonment I felt not being able to describe what was happening, the schizophrenic fight between the side of me that kept wanting to narrate and the side that refused to be narrated anymore. That the latter side was confronted nonetheless by a symbol nearly drove it into complete control. (One sees in hindsight, of course, how the unconscious tends to the self-tightening: how in all my pulling on the door (which I’ve had some trouble with before), I didn’t once think of pushing.)
After I finished this letter and put it in the mail, I was too frightened and disgusted by my typewriter to touch it for several days. I took W’s advice and went out more to see people, including the young Canadian, James, who turned out to be gay. He was having all manner of guilt-free sexual adventures and intrigues, and for an apartment five times the size of mine, in a more accessible neighborhood, he was paying less rent than I was. I still had my literary superiority, but it was all I had.
V responded to my own bombshell letter with worry and sympathy but also the news that she was thinking about harming herself; she mentioned the sharpness of her letter opener and the five-story drop from her bedroom window. (“Letter” and “story”: the section of my brain devoted to significance continued to find it everywhere. I couldn’t distinguish reality from literary figure, a threat from a trope, which was the whole trouble with living through letters and stories.) In a different letter, she reported that she was still “seeing” her guy in New York—it hadn’t been the one-night stand that I’d supposed. I was very confused by this, but my little psychotic episode had so frightened me that I smothered my confusion with avowals of love, fidelity, optimism, and concern for V’s well-being.
After my unsatisfactory visit to Vienna, my new Canadian friend offered to let me live with him and split his already low rent. Among the many reasons I said yes was that his place was on Karl-Marx-Straße, which I thought would be a very cool address. I immediately wrote a letter of tortured apology and self-justification to Frau Keller, asking to be excused from my lease and to get my security deposit back, since I was giving her the required thirty-day notice.
A few days before V arrived to spend her winter break with me, Frau Keller came to my room to inspect it for damage. She was a short, stout, sallow, miserable person. I repeated that I’d given her proper notice and was due a refund of 350 marks; she replied that she was about to be hospitalized for a “procedure.” As if in a trance, she began to circle the room, pointing out, with heavy sighs of disapproval, the cracked glass top of the coffee table, the broken hinge on the wardrobe, the disgusting stains on the carpeting—all features of the room she’d rented me. I said that she knew very well that earlier tenants had done the damage. In reply, she sighed once more, shook her head, unbuttoned the top of her dress, and reached into her enormous bra. I thought she was going to take out a wad of cash, but instead she pulled down the bra and showed me a large bandage on one of her breasts. “Ist verbrannt, Herr Franzen,” she said, looking me gravely in the eye. “Ist verbrannt.” “It’s burned up, Mr. Franzen.” I never got my money back.
60. In the original, “scientific paper pushers” is Wissenschaftlhuber. Reitter: “Kraus is playing on the Austrianism Gschaftlhuber, which means ‘someone who makes a lot of his job without being good at it’ or, more simply, ‘poseur.’”
61. “In February of 1908 Kraus notched one of his most satisfying victories in the eternal struggle against the Neue Freie Presse. The occasion was a small earthquake that had rattled Vienna. Posing as a civil engineer and a regular reader of the newspaper, Kraus sent in a pseudoscientific letter full of risible claims—e.g., ‘what we have here is telluric earthquake (in the narrow sense),’ rather than ‘a cosmic earthquake (in the broad sense)’—which the NFP nevertheless printed as serious commentary. Three years later, Kraus struck again. He managed to sneak into the NFP under another pseudonym (at the time, the paper had a policy of not mentioning him) and again by submitting a report on an earthquake, in which he pretended to be a scientist and offered up a number of absurdities. Among the more over-the-top of these was that ‘half an hour before the earthquake, the Grubenhund that had been sleeping in the laboratory began to howl.’ Despite the Hund (dog) in it, the word ‘Grubenhund’ doesn’t refer to a kind of dog. It’s a term for a cart used in mining (the second earthquake was supposed to have taken place in mining country). With the phrase ‘the problem of the Grubenhund,’ Kraus evokes the lazy credulity with which newspapers treated expert scientific testimony. In the essays that revealed the hoaxes, ‘The Earthquake’ and ‘The Grubenhund,’ Kraus also suggests that the NFP’s Jewish loyalties played a role in the debacle. Kraus gave his first made-up civil engineer a name and address that invited the NFP to infer that the engineer was a Jew. If he hadn’t done so, Kraus maintains, the NFP would have screened the letter more carefully.” —PR
62. “The Nestroy line cited by Kraus sends up the would-be scientific talk about the expected appearance, in 1834, of Halley’s Comet. Kraus is proposing that the line could have been used, eighty years later, for a prank like his earthquake dispatch: in 1910, the comet’s predicted return had attracted a lot of journalistic attention.” —PR
63. The Vormärz was the period between 1815 and the revolution of March 1848. Literally “Before March.”
64. “The historian Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature back when ‘literature’ was construed more broadly (1902), had insisted that systematic study of a topic should be embarked on without presuppositions and had thereby prompted a debate about objectivity in the human sciences. Kraus had his doubts about Mommsen’s ideal. In 1901 he’d published in his Fackel ‘The Presuppositionless Mommsen,’ a screed against Mommsen by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and he’d defended Chamberlain when a reader sent in a letter attacking his piece. Kraus’s oxymoronic phrase ‘dogmas of its presuppositionlessness’ suggests that Mommsen’s ideal was self-contradictory: the idea that forgoing presuppositions will be productive is itself a (liberal) presupposition.
“The final phrase, about art and life, plays on the last line of the prologue to Schiller’s Wallenstein.” —PR
65. “In Nestroy’s The Evil Spirit Lumpazivagabundus, there’s a character named Signora Palpiti, who turns out to come from Purkersdorf. Ludwig Wahrmund was an Austrian expert on ecclesiastical law whose ‘modern’ views got him into trouble with the church. Louis Treumann was a Viennese opera singer whose arrest for breach of contract was something of a scandal. Kraus had covered both ‘affairs’ in 1908 issues of the Fackel.” —PR
66. “‘Roast-chicken era’ is a literal translation of Backhendlzeit, which is basically the Austrian equivalent of the term Vormärz—it refers to the 1815–1848 period. Kraus is using the conventional meaning while playing on its literal one, with his talk of ‘fresh-baked seriousness.’ The moral historian in question is Friedrich Schlögl, and the passage Kraus cites comes from Schlögl’s book On Viennese Folk Theater (1883).
“In the quoted passage itself: Die beiden Grasel was a theatrical adaptation of a folksy novel of the same title, published in 1854. The ‘Josefstadt’ (Theater in der Josefstadt)
was already a venerable theater and is now the oldest one continuously performing in Vienna. Tapper was a popular card game, usually played by three people and often involving gambling; it’s featured in a number of Schnitzler’s works, including Lieutenant Gustl (1901).” —PR
67. A front-page article in the Times business section on August 9, 2012:
TIME WASTERS, POINTLESS BUT FUN
Times have changed since the best way to pass an idle 10 minutes was Nokia’s famous Snake, or whatever flavor of game was built into your old, dumb cellphone. These basic games were simple entertainment and they were fun—to an extent. But with smartphones, we have thousands of app-enabled ways to pass the time waiting in line at the post office or even when struck with insomnia …
Times have changed: the watchword of the ideology of Progress. Aren’t we lucky that our phones are so smart now! The only thing that hasn’t changed is the tone of writers celebrating how things have changed.
68. “‘Gschnas’ is an Austrian term for a costume ball.” —PR
69. I love this line just as it is, but it’s also tempting to update it to begin, “Reality TV shows are…”
70. “A prestigious annual literary prize named after the Austrian writer Eduard Bauernfeld (1802–1890). Kraus often took issue with the prize committee’s decision.” —PR
71. This is a very tough sentence, but I think what Kraus is talking about has a contemporary analogue in cable news: the phony coziness that tolerates the grotesque “expansion” of trivial news, traffics touristically in stories that ought to have no place in public discourse, and makes no tonal distinctions in its blending of serious and meaningless news items.
72. I remember being naive about sex when I was twenty-two, but not a prude, and so it’s a disagreeable surprise, when I’m looking through my old letters, to find a horrified and judgmental reference to my Canadian friend’s Italian porno magazines. I sound just like my father, at least regarding the magazines (unlike him, I had no problem with “the fairies,” as he called them). Indeed, come to think of it, although I was trying in Berlin to deracinate myself and become a person beyond my parents’ ken, I in fact was replicating my father’s personality almost point by point. I, too, was solitary, depressive, conventional, prudish, workaholic, given to philosophizing, drawn to pretty women but unshakably loyal, and wary of pleasure lest the pursuit of it consume my whole life. It’s true that I was afraid of my father’s judgments and frustrated by his inability to understand what I had to say about literature and art, frustrated by his reserve and silences; but I don’t think I ever once morally faulted him. I knew that, unlike me, he’d grown up in a hardscrabble town and hadn’t had a liberal education.
The person I faulted was my mother. It would be another twenty years before I appreciated the ways in which I’m like her, too. In 1982 she seemed to me a bitch on wheels. (That I had a problem with a morally stringent and boundary-trampling mom and had plunged into a rather insane relationship with a morally stringent and boundary-trampling woman was one of those obvious, important facts that I somehow couldn’t see.) By late February, when the semester ended in Berlin, my mother’s health had improved enough that I’d been forced to invent a new reason not to break the news of my engagement to her. She was talking about coming to England with my father in April, and (as I explained to V) it would be best for me to meet them there and give them the news in person. (Anything to buy a few more months.) But then, as I was about to leave Berlin for a month in Spain, I learned that the England trip was off. Spain instantly ceased to be a sunny haven where I could relax and work on my novel and became the forbidding Inquisitional place where I would have to write an awful letter to my parents.
I stayed in a small village, in a small house belonging to my friend Ekström’s parents. There was no telephone, and my only company was the village cats and two expat British ladies, one a drunk, the other a bigot, both of them very kind to me. I smoked two packs of Ducados a day and consumed little else but coffee, chocolate, bread, and gin, and then wondered why I couldn’t sleep; in the sole picture I took of myself in the village, I look like a fifty-year-old psychiatric patient. But somehow, one night, in the way you might finally dive into a freezing-cold lake, because you’re there to swim, I managed to write the necessary letter—making the usual carbon copy, of course, although it’s a document I can’t bear to read even thirty years later. The lake wasn’t so catastrophically cold once I was in it. My parents’ letters in reply came two weeks later, my father’s reasonable and accommodating, my mother’s a scream of pain and anger. At some level I’d imagined their replies would annihilate me. That I survived them amounted to a revelation: however gigantically my parents loomed in my imagination, they had no actual control over what I did with my life.
I still had a month on my two-month rail pass, and after returning to Berlin I went on to Amsterdam and then to Munich for a polite visit with a nerdy and bespectacled girl, a friend of good friends of mine at college, who was working as an au pair for a year. I’d spoken with X once or twice at parties, and “Write to X” had been at the top of my to-do list all year, without my ever writing to her. The first thing I discovered, in Munich, was that without her terrible glasses and her dowdy liberal-college overalls and hairstyle she was breathtakingly beautiful. The next thing I discovered was that “Write to J” had been at the top of her to-do list in Munich, without her ever writing; the coincidence seemed highly Significant. Within a day, I’d banished all thought of V, and thirty-six hours later I was in bed with X and trying to decide, quickly, whether to call off my engagement, because X refused to consummate things unless I called it off. She was a midwestern Latina, and her moderate craziness (which was a thing I found irresistible in women at that point in my life) was tempered by a decency and practicality that reminded me of home. I was wildly attracted to her, and we’d been talking nonstop for three days, piecing together a complicated network of college friendships and liaisons whose superstitious upshot was that we were meant to be. I wasn’t constituted to tell a lie to get the sex I wanted, but why I didn’t take the opportunity to shrug off the immense and not particularly joyful complication of me and V, a complication embodied in the half million words we’d typed to each other since the previous summer, is harder to understand. I—or It—must have been bent on replicating my father’s life of work, of duty, of loyalty; of gratification delayed or even denied altogether. Sex looks like nothing or like everything, depending on when you look at it, and it must have been looking to me like nothing in Munich, at the predawn hour when you’re finally exhausted by unsatisfied desire and only want to sleep a little. Not until I was back in my clothes and standing on a train platform in Hannover, a few hours later, hurling pfennigs, did it look like everything again.
73. Or that Goethe had Asperger’s syndrome, which was one thesis of the long, earnest paper that a German psychologist recently e-mailed me out of the blue.
74. Now that our populace has stopped worrying about the several thousand Russian thermonuclear weapons still aimed at our cities and controlled by a populace that drinks vodka like water, it’s difficult to convey how primary and real and present the atomic danger seemed to many of us in 1982. (Timothy Garton Ash, who was in Berlin around that time, expected nuclear war within ten years.) Every time a clap of thunder awoke me in the night, my first thought was that the apocalypse had come. At any moment of any day, some person or machine in Nebraska or Siberia could make a mistake, I would be killed an hour later, and within a year or two no vertebrate animal on the planet would be alive. And Berlin aggravated my fears, not only because it was a Cold War hot spot but because it still bore grim scars of past apocalypses and near apocalypses. My host family lived near the site of the infamous Wannsee Conference; the wasteland where the Nazi central command bunker had been located was now AUTODROM, a closed track where student drivers could practice; and the West Berlin U-Bahn and the S-Bahn both had lines running underneath East Berlin, passing stations wh
ose entrances had been bricked up twenty or thirty years earlier. In the older S-Bahn trains you could open the windows and practically reach out and touch advertising posters that had been put up in the 1950s. The very quaintness of these yellowed ads for cigarettes and chewing gum was ominous; I imagined our own contemporary billboards persisting in forever-deserted stations after all human life had been expunged.
When I remember how oppressed I was by fears and premonitions of thermonuclear war, and how unlikely it seemed that the world would last long enough for me to have a normal life span, it makes more sense to me that I stuck with V and our engagement. Young people are said to have no conception of their mortality, but I had the opposite problem: I thought I’d be lucky to live another ten years. And so I needed to accomplish a whole life now. V and I needed to save the world (or at least the American novel) now. If I was still alive at thirty-two, I’d be so happy not to be dead that I could deal with any bad consequences of having married young. The apocalyptic and the megalomaniacal were so intertwined in me that they almost amounted to the same thing. After my narrow escape from Munich, I was also angry, angry at the world for having denied me the pleasure of sex with X; and when I then came to the angry, apocalyptic, and arguably megalomaniacal Karl Kraus, I found the paternal example I’d been looking for.