The Kraus Project

by Karl Kraus

  And so, sometime in the nineties, I took my bad Kraus translations out of my active file cabinet and put them into deeper storage. Kraus’s sentences never stopped running through my head—And they all have a tone of discovery, as if the world had only just now been created … Reality is a meaningless exaggeration of all the details satire left behind fifty years ago—but I didn’t think about my project again until I met Daniel Kehlmann. I felt that I’d outgrown Kraus, felt that he was an angry young man’s kind of writer, ultimately not a novelist’s kind of writer. What’s drawn me back to him now is partly my affection for Kehlmann and my susceptibility to his enthusiasm; partly the opportunity to understand better, thanks to Paul Reitter, what the hell Kraus was talking about; and partly the beauty of Kraus’s language and humor, to which I’ve attempted to do more justice here than I did at twenty-three; but also, and maybe most important, a nagging sense that apocalypse, after seeming to recede for a while, is still in the picture.

  In my own little corner of the world, which is to say American fiction, Jeff Bezos of Amazon may not be the Antichrist, but he surely looks like one of the Four Horsemen. Amazon wants a world in which books are either self-published or published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon reviews in choosing books, and with authors responsible for their own promotion. The work of yakkers and tweeters and braggers, and of people with the money to pay somebody to churn out hundreds of five-star reviews for them, will flourish in that world. (Kraus’s dictate “Sing, bird, or die” could now read “Tweet, bird, or die.”) But what happens to the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels? As fewer and fewer readers are able to find their way, amid all the noise and disappointing books and phony reviews, to the work produced by the new generation of this kind of writer—I’m thinking of Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, Adam Haslett’s You Are Not a Stranger Here, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s Ms. Hempel Chronicles, Clancy Martin’s How to Sell—Amazon is well on its way to making writers into the kind of prospectless workers whom its contractors employ in its warehouses, laboring harder for less and less, with no job security, because the warehouses are situated in places where they’re the only business hiring. And the more of the population that lives like those workers, the greater the downward pressure on book prices and the greater the squeeze on conventional booksellers, because when you’re not making much money you want your entertainment for free, and when your life is hard you want instant gratification (“Overnight free shipping!”).

  But so the physical book goes on the endangered-species list, so responsible book reviewers go extinct, so literary novelists are conscripted into Jennifer Weinerish self-promotion, so the Big Six publishers get killed and devoured by Amazon, so independent bookstores disappear: this looks like an apocalypse only if most of your friends are writers, editors, or booksellers (as most of mine are). Plus it’s possible that the story isn’t over. Maybe the Internet experiment in consumer reviewing will result in such flagrant corruption (already one-third of all online product reviews are said to be bogus) that people will clamor for the return of professional reviewers. Maybe an economically significant number of readers will come to recognize the human and cultural costs of Amazonian hegemony and go back to local bookstores or at least to barnesandnoble.com, which offers the same books and a superior e-reader, and whose owners have more progressive politics. Maybe people will get as sick of Twitter as they once got sick of cigarettes. Twitter’s and Facebook’s latest models for making money still seem to me like one part pyramid scheme, one part wishful thinking, and one part repugnant panoptical surveillance.

  I could, it’s true, make a larger apocalyptic argument about the logic of the machine, which in Kraus’s day was still localized in Europe and America but has now gone global and is accelerating the denaturization of the planet and sterilization of its oceans. I could point to the transformation of Canada’s boreal forest into a toxic lake of tar-sand by-products, the leveling of Asia’s remaining forests for Chinese-made ultra-low-cost porch furniture at Home Depot, the damming of the Amazon and the endgame clear-cutting of its forests for beef and mineral production, the whole mind-set of “Screw the consequences, we want to buy a lot of crap and we want to buy it cheap, with overnight free shipping,” and the direct connection between this American mind-set and a new Chinese prosperity that—in a classic Krausian collision of old values with new valuables—funds the slaughter of millions of Pacific sharks for the luxury of their fins and tens of thousands of African elephants for their ivory. And meanwhile the overheating of the atmosphere, meanwhile the calamitous overuse of antibiotics by agribusiness, meanwhile the widespread tinkering with cell nucleii, which may well prove to be as disastrous as tinkering with atomic nucleii. And, yes, the thermonuclear warheads are still in their silos and subs.

  But apocalypse isn’t necessarily the physical end of the world. Indeed, the word more directly implies an element of final cosmic judgment. In Kraus’s invocation of the Deluge at the end of “Nestroy,” as in his talk of a “fully dehumanized zone” in his “Final Word” (my translation of which will follow this long dilation) and his endless chronicling of crimes against truth and the German language in The Last Days of Mankind, he’s referring not merely to physical destruction. In fact, the great title of his play would be better rendered in English as The Last Days of Humanity: “dehumanized” doesn’t mean “depopulated,” and if the First World War spelled the end of humanity in Austria, it wasn’t because there were no longer any people there. Kraus was appalled by the carnage, but he saw it as the result, not the cause, of a loss of humanity by people who were still living. Living but damned, cosmically damned.

  But a judgment like this obviously depends on what you mean by “humanity.” Whether I like it or not, the world being created by the infernal machine of techno-consumerism is still a world made by human beings. As I write this, in the fall of 2012, it seems as if half the advertisements on network television are featuring people bending over smartphones; there’s a particularly noxious/great one in which all the twenty-somethings at a wedding reception are doing nothing but taking smartphone photos and instantly texting them to one another. To describe this dismal spectacle in apocalyptic terms, as a “dehumanization” of a wedding, is to advance a particular moral conception of humanity; and if you follow Nietzsche and reject the moral judgment in favor of an aesthetic one, you’re immediately confronted by Bourdieu’s persuasive connection of aesthetics with class and privilege; and the next thing you know, you’re translating The Last Days of Mankind as The Last Days of Privileging the Things I Personally Find Beautiful.

  And maybe this is not such a bad thing. Maybe—I already had intimations of this in Berlin, at twenty-two, alone at my desk—apocalypse is, paradoxically, always individual, always personal. (Think of the Grumbler, alone at his desk, sinking into the psychotic solipsism that’s the end point of his apocalyptic thinking.) I have a brief tenure on earth, bracketed by infinities of nothingness, and during the first part of this tenure I form an attachment to a particular set of human values that are shaped inevitably by my social circumstances. If I’d been born in 1159, when the world was steadier, I might well have felt, at fifty-three, that the next generation would share my values and appreciate the same things I appreciated; no apocalypse pending. But I was born in 1959, when TV was something you watched only during prime time and on weekends, and people wrote letters and put them in the mail, and every magazine and newspaper had a robust Books section, and venerable publishers made long-term investments in young writers, and New Criticism reigned in English departments, and the Amazon Basin
was intact, and antibiotics were used only to treat serious infections, not pumped into healthy cows. It wasn’t necessarily a better world (we had bomb shelters and segregated swimming pools), but it was the only world I knew to try to find my place in as a writer. And so today, fifty-three years later, Kraus’s signal complaint in the Nestroy essay—that the new world has lost the capacity even to be a posterity—can’t help ringing true to me. Kraus was the first great instance of a writer fully experiencing how modernity, whose essence is the accelerating rate of change, in itself creates the conditions for personal apocalypse. Naturally, because he was the first, the changes felt particular and unique to him, but in fact he was registering something that has become a fixture of modernity. The experience of each succeeding generation is so different from that of the previous one that there will always be people to whom it seems that key values have been lost and there can be no more posterity. As long as modernity lasts, all days will feel to someone like the last days of humanity. Kraus’s rage and his sense of doom and apocalypse may be the antithesis of the upbeat rhetoric of Progress, but, like that rhetoric, they remain an unchanging modality of modernity.

  Paul Reitter offers this very astute refinement: “For Kraus, it did matter what the particular changes were, though we certainly might be able to appropriate his apocalypticism in such a way that it doesn’t. In Kraus’s day, and even before it, there was a lot of theorizing about the destabilizing effects of modernity—‘all that is solid melts into air,’ etc.—which led to intense crises of the self, maybe even to something like personal apocalypses. What Kraus contributed to the conversation, I think, is the insight that the rise of the mass media machine is an absolutely central part of this process (it’s one of its enabling conditions as much as it’s one of its consequences), not least because of the inherent antagonisms between the ascendant mass media and the (privileged) kind of spirituality/imaginativeness that, as Kraus saw it, makes us human. And my sense is that the key point of continuity, in terms of Kraus’s relevance, is this dynamic, rather than the persistence of a general culture of rapid change. Today there are people who embrace the radicalized culture of media as something that will finally enable us to actualize our full potential as social beings, and then there are those—a lot of them, I think—who have brooded over books like Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together and are wrestling with apocalyptic doubts and wondering whether our even more insane media moment will spell the end of an essential part of us (even if their notion of what’s essential differs from the Krausian notion of an essential imaginative Spirit, and even as they themselves screw around on their iPads). For the latter group, Kraus should be an inspired voice from the past, because even if the human imagination proved more durable than he thought it would, he was the first to size up the apocalyptic-seeming confrontation between mind and modern media machine, and he expressed it more forcefully and memorably than anyone else ever has.”

  5. “Kraus is referring to The Great Wall of China, a collection of his essays, and Dicta and Contradicta, a book of his aphorisms. Both had recently been published by the same press that put out ‘Heine and the Consequences’—namely, the Albert Langen Verlag.” —PR

  6. “If the pamphlet’s readership wasn’t what Kraus wanted it to be, neither was it as bad as he’s making it out to have been. Readers quickly went through the first two editions; in 1911, Langen released a third edition, even though ‘Heine and the Consequences’ had been reprinted in Die Fackel.” —PR

  7. “A play on a line from Goethe’s poem ‘Ballad,’ ‘Die Kinder, sie hören es gerne’ (‘The children, they’re happy to hear it’). And yet another play on Heine’s line, from the ‘Lorelei’ poem, ‘Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten’ (‘I know not what it means’).” —PR

  8. “Which brings us back to the question of what Kraus hoped to accomplish with ‘Heine and the Consequences.’ Here’s a story I’ve been telling myself about the essay. Kraus composed it at the moment when his skepticism toward psychoanalysis was intensifying, maybe even peaking, in the aftermath of his bitter falling-out with a member of Freud’s circle, Fritz Wittels. After the split, Wittels had proceeded to analyze Kraus in a most unflattering way. In a paper titled ‘The Fackel Neurosis,’ delivered to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in January 1910, Wittels proposed that Kraus’s hatred of Moriz Benedikt be seen as a neurotic symptom, stemming from an unresolved oedipal tension with his own father. It isn’t clear whether Kraus knew exactly what Wittels said about him, but Kraus published some of his harshest aphorisms about psychoanalysis only a few months later. And it’s very tempting, therefore, to read ‘Heine and the Consequences’ as Kraus’s response to the psychoanalytic talk about him. The message being: If you want to know how to stage a conflict with a literary father figure, read and learn.

  “And here’s another story I tell myself. 1909 marked the tenth anniversary of the founding of Die Fackel. German literary culture made (still makes) a big deal of anniversaries, and the date occasioned fawning tributes to Kraus, several of which he printed. He also published some unsatisfying retrospective thoughts of his own. What feels off about them is that they don’t address how his orientation had changed. Kraus presented, as the compliment of which he was ‘proudest,’ a congratulatory note from a reader who described himself as a ‘simple worker’; and yet Die Fackel had recently taken a more literary turn and lost some of its following among Vienna’s working class. Similarly, Kraus’s anniversary aphorisms gesture at continuity—‘upon being told that there’s someone who hasn’t slept for ten years, this snoring present rolled onto its other side’—but his aphorisms, which would play a key role in Die Fackel, had begun to appear in mature form only around 1907. They were, indeed, part of the paper’s literary turn.

  “It may seem odd to speak of such a shift. Kraus had always been known as an excellent stylist and satirical wit, and his literary judgments really mattered to people. Before he started feuding with Franz Werfel, he was enthusiastic about him, and when Kraus published one of Werfel’s early poems in Die Fackel it was, for Werfel, like a dream come true. Die Fackel was literary from the start, in the sense both of having literary qualities and of being concerned with literature. What changed was the degree of literariness. During the early years, Kraus simply didn’t deliver rhetorical performances like ‘Heine and the Consequences.’ This is why so few of his most quotable lines derive from that decade.

  “But the turn itself: what caused it? It may have had something to do with the restlessness of midlife—Kraus certainly became restless in many ways around this time. It was in 1910 that he began to hold public readings, which no doubt encouraged him to pay even more attention to the sound of his sentences and to fully unleash his dazzling capacity for verbal mimicry. A year later, Kraus made himself Die Fackel’s sole author; he also converted, secretly, to Catholicism. But I think a better explanation for the turn is that, as Kraus’s critique of the effects of literary journalism became more apocalyptic and more central to his mission, he felt moved to oppose those effects more concertedly on the level of form as well. He did this by cultivating an even more difficult, even more literary style, hoping to jump-start the imaginations that the feuilleton was deadening. In essence, Kraus went from being a journalist against journalism to being a literary journalist against literary journalism.

  “In 1909, Kraus had missed a good opportunity to give an account of this new paradox. But he soon made up for it with ‘Heine and the Consequences.’ Using Heine as a foil, the essay responds to the need for an updated self-explanation and delivers it resoundingly, albeit by way of a radicalized paradoxicality. It’s here that Kraus expresses his mature critique of the feuilleton most thoroughly; it’s also here that he spells out the differences between the feuilleton and his own artistic journalism most explicitly (‘It was veiled so that the inquisitive day couldn’t get at it. Now the veils are rising…’). And if you wanted to draw attention to your self-explanation, what better foil could there be than
Heine, the ardently beloved and badly embattled ur-feuilletonist in German culture? ‘Heine and the Consequences’ didn’t get the kind of initial notice that Kraus had hoped for. But how would he have fared with a self-justifying takedown of one of the later literary journalists whom he went after just as fiercely—and with as much moral opprobrium—and whom he actually devoted a lot more space to savaging? Kraus reckoning with Heine in sensationalistic, spectacularly paradoxical ways, leveling antisemitic-sounding criticisms against Heine only to undermine some of the basic principles of antisemitic discourse (e.g., the originality-imitation hierarchy): this was something new.” —PR