Edward Timms
KARL KRAUS: APOCALYPTIC SATIRIST
Volume Two: The Post-War Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika
639pp. Yale University Press. £35 (US $50).
0 300 10751 X
The reason it is difficult to respond to the writings of Karl Kraus is this: for him the devil was in the detail, in the minutest elements of lexicon and grammar, of typography and punctuation. The sickness of language, which was that of a dying Central European civilization, could only be diagnosed and fought against at the microscopic scale, by an implacable philology of irony and vengeance, by tactics of reading not only between the lines, but between the letters in mendacious words. This, in turn, entailed Kraus’s immersion in the leviathan trash of contemporary journalism, bureaucratic jargon, political rhetoric, legal parlance and the vacant avalanche of commercial advertising. The millions of angry words which Kraus wrote addressed millions of instances of semantic waste, of “anti-matter”. In the beginning, he quipped bitterly, was not the Word, but the press. This means that a dominant proportion of Kraus’s polemics, essays and articles, famously published in his magazine, Die Fackel, deals with intensely local, often ephemeral targets. The mosaic of allusion, of playful or contemptuous reference, of strident or masked citation is itself a formidable collage, a montage as cunning and kaleidoscopic as that in the best of film and Surrealist art. But to appreciate it fully, an archival familiarity with the journalistic, civic, judicial, theatrical, erotic currents of Kraus’s Vienna before and after the First World War is indispensable. Comprehensive footnotes would exceed the concise wit and fury of the text. Inevitably, so much of Karl Kraus’s satire, as biting, as circumstantially grounded as Juvenal’s or that of Pope’s
Dunciad, is now as dusty as its targets.
But then there is the “other” Kraus, the apocalyptic on an epic scale. There is the vast canvas of Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, of the Dritte Walpurgisnacht, prose-poetic frescos whose overwhelming dimensions seem to counterpoint the concentrated minimalism of Kraus’s “counter-journalism” (does Edward Timms perceive this dialectic?). Here are works, in part yet to be discovered, which seek to embrace, to dramatize the entire catastrophe of 1914–18 and of the bestial flowering of Nazism. With eerie foresight, Kraus had fixed on Hitler’s potential as early as 1923. He had seen the night rise over Europe out of the madness of the trenches. He had sensed in the mustard gas on the Western front the gas of the Nazi ovens to come. Hence the prophetic sweep, the teeming prodigality of his “books of revelation”. Hence the gust of prophecy which induced Karl Kraus, decades prior to the triumph of barbarism, to proclaim that technological progress would make “purses out of human skin”. Only Kafka, who read Kraus’s “enervating orgies” close to the time of his own death, matches Kraus’s genius for clairvoyance. The cancer of prophecy lies deep in Jewish sensibility.
One approach to Kraus’s duality is a comparison with Pound’s Cantos. There are many analogies. As the recent gathering and publication of Pound’s literary-economic articles in Italian confirms, both seers were possessed by the conviction that the ruin of language and that of
economic-social conditions go hand in hand. As in some doomed spiral, the one fuels the other. Both the Cantos and Kraus’s writings seek to conjoin extreme “locality”, temporal detail and even private reference with grand horizons of history. They aim at a palimpsest of allusion and citation, incorporating in their stylistic and polemical texture documents both literary and political. The pulse is one of anger and exhortation. The effect is that of a patchwork quilt at times dazzlingly coherent, at other times bewildering and awkward to make out. In consequence, it is virtually impossible to arrive at any ordered conspectus of the interplay of the lyric and the epic, of the occasional and the enduring in either the Cantos or Karl Kraus’s “epic theatre” of argument and vision. Commentary and elucidation have to proceed thematically and by segmentation.
Edward Timms has chosen to do so in this second volume of his Kraus study, Apocalyptic Satirist: The post-war crisis and the rise of the swastika. What we have here is not primarily a biographical exposition but a thematic analysis of Kraus’s role in a collapsing Austro-Hungarian edifice and, more particularly, in Vienna after 1918. This latter subject has been extensively treated, yet it remains a complex of creativity and pathology almost unique in Western civilization. Even a summary drum-roll of the relevant names challenges belief: Freud, Musil, Wittgenstein, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Carnap, Kafka, Loos, Mach, Kokoschka, Broch (who is seminal but does not evenfigure in Timms’s index). These all took part in an implosion of individual genius and interaction – intellectual, political, erotic – so concentrated as to generate almost every component of what we call “modernity”. Vienna was a city in which Mahler and the young Hitler may well have boarded the same streetcar, in which Judaism and mounting anti-Semitism were fatally enmeshed. Professor Timms sets out the
political drama, the sociology, the media and the artistic climate of Vienna and shrunken Austria from November 1918 to the Anschluss with both clarity and an enviable command of the manifold sources.
Austro-Hungarian armies had suffered proportionately heavier losses than those of any other country. Territorial amputations at Versailles were equally catastrophic. Agitation for union with Germany began as early as 1919 in parts of Catholic-dominated Austria unreconciled both to defeat and to the dominance of a more or less democratic, more or less secular and permissive Vienna. The ideals of socialism, of economic liberalism, of Communism and proto-fascism of every shade clashed in a carved-up country much of whose rural population clung to a peculiarly nocturnal, racist brand of Roman Catholicism. Again and again, Kraus found himself caught in the middle. These ambiguities were compounded by recurrent crises of personal identity. Kraus’s Jewishness is an intricate, somewhat murky topic and it is hardly a reproach to say that Timms’s touch is only sporadically reliable. In October 1899, Kraus formally abandoned the Jewish community. In April 1911 he became a Catholic, an unusual move. Obsessed by the power and foresight of the Old Testament, aware of the Church’s hypocrisy and impotence in the face of fascism, Kraus would leave the Christian fold and revert to some kind of agnostic and ironic Judaism. He was all too aware of the part played by Jewish financiers and entrepreneurs in the brutal expansion of the mass market. A good many of the elite publicists and hacks whom he sought to hunt down were Jews. Courageously, Kraus faced down Jew-baiting hoodlums in Innsbruck. At the same time, his taste for aristocratic hospitality, for the elegance of the old order, greatly complicated the stance he adopted towards his own Judaism. Karl Kraus was, distinctly, Proust’s contemporary. Eros chimed with great houses and emblazoned names (the Lichnowskys, the Lobkowitzes). This tangle and the nervous discomforts that it triggered marked the ardent, profound (finally Platonic?) love of Kraus for Sidonie Nadherny. Her estate at Janowitz became his refuge and arcadia. Their travels in Italy and the Austrian Alps, always chaperoned, were idyllic. At a possibly crucial point, Rilke’s unctuous dislike of Jews and, it may be, envy of Kraus’s public stature, intervened. How could she, he urged Sidonie, entrust her life to a suitor so essentially “alien”?
What remains utterly Jewish in Kraus’s concerns is not only the dark, mordant laughter, but the biblical prophetic idiom of the major interventions. As does a veritable obsession with the law and the visitations of injustice on often helpless, innocent men and women (again, the parallels with Kafka are organic). Kraus’s intimations of the coming collapse of the judicial structures in Central Europe after the First World War, his excoriations of corrupt tribunals and a venal police read, at times, like translations of Amos. Walter Benjamin’s witness, which Timms quotes, is decisive:
“In Kraus, halachic writing breaks magnificently through the mountainous landscape of the German language . . . . The man is one of the rapidly diminishing minority that have a conception of freedom, but he can only serve freedom by becoming senior prosecutor. Precisely this mode of existence is today the most passionate prayer for redemption that passes through Jewish lips.”
Kraus’s “despairing radicalism of the centre” – Ernst Krenek’s astute definition – drew on traumas, on an instability both public and private.
These tensions make the more awesome Kraus’s tireless, volcanic productivity. During 1919–23 alone, he produced 140 issues of Die Fackel and staged 150 public readings. Seventy readings were held in Prague and other Czech towns between 1920 and 1936. Timms describes Kraus’s manic industry: manuscripts and corrected proofs, laboured on overnight, were rushed to the printer for resetting (often a dozen sets were called for). No minutiae of typography and design escaped Kraus’s exhausted notice. An erratum, a mangled quotation were, precisely as in the ritual and creed of the scribes who copied the Torah rolls, a blot on truth itself. Add to this translations ranging from Shakespeare to Offenbach, the composition of poems, and a vast correspondence.
Karl Kraus’s public readings quickly became legendary. They were integral to his persona and mission. They were dramatic in the highest degree, Kraus’s voice and mien miming the characters in the plays that he “enacted”. Among Shakespearean texts, he privileged Timon, as Karl Marx had done. His recitals of the great Austrian comic playwright Nestroy excelled anything the actual theatre could offer. He read formidably from his own works. Generations of auditors listened spellbound. Accounts of these dramas of the intellect, of these satyr-plays and verbal operettas, amount to a secondary literature of their own. The most eloquent report is Elias Canetti’s. He attended approximately one hundred of these soirées, often mesmerized: “A hall that was packed to the aisles fell under the sway of a voice whose influence persisted even when it fell silent, but the dynamics of such an auditorium can no more be described than the Wild Hunt of ancient legend”. Between 1913 and 1938, Kraus read 161 times in a crowded, fervent Konzerthaus. On one occasion, where he recited the lyrics of songs, though “recitation” scarcely conveys the musicality of his performance, Kraus took almost thirty curtain calls. Unquestionably, Kraus’s ear for the demonic forces in political rhetoric, for the venom of propaganda in Nazism, corresponded to oratorical and hallucinatory impulses within himself. No less than his essays and eschatological Lesedramen, Kraus’s readings were “counter-creations”, both quickening into fierce life and subverting ironically the original script.
Timms deals in authoritative detail with Kraus the litigant. The begetter of Die Fackel had the means and the energy to sue for defamation, to contest in the courts those who in turn charged him with libel. Like the lecturer’s platform, the tribunal was a stage on which Kraus could enforce his anger and derision. Caricatured, lampooned – the analogues with Kierkegaard did not escape him – Kraus struck back fiercely. As Timms justly observes, his polemic often came to be cast in a forensic mode, looking to readers versed in criminology. Until the financial stress of the early 1930s, Kraus donated to charity the substantial damages awarded him by the courts. In dealing with his adversaries, Kraus the plaintiff could be both generous and ruthless. But in a much larger sense, his recourse to the law sprang from the disgust, from the moral outrage he had suffered when reporting on the “hangman’s justice” of martial courts in 1914–18, a feeling strengthened by the conduct of judges during the rise of Nazism.
The last years were bitter. Kraus believed with sceptical ardour in an independent Austria. This sad patriotism allied him inescapably with the agents of reaction and obscurantism whom he loathed. At the same time, he sensed that the expansionist policies of the Reich would prove irresistible (his final visit to Berlin, during which he gave three readings, took place in mid-November 1932). One of his terminal publications bore the title, soon to be famous, Warum die Fackel nicht erscheint. In a phrase too often taken out of context, Kraus confessed that on the matter of Hitler “nothing occurred to him” – a formulation at once sarcastic and tragically powerless. Confronting the tide of violence in Vienna’s streets, Karl Kraus found himself endorsing both the abolition of trial by jury and the censorship, partial at least, of the press. The Dritte Walpurgisnacht, with its acrid references to Hitler’s and Goebbels’s language, with its iconic enlistment of Macbeth and Goethe’s Faust, would appear only in 1952. Kraus’s health was failing and though he wrote to the last moment, his death, on June 12, 1936, came as a release.
As Edward Timms’s book unfolds, Karl Kraus seems to fade from it. Digressions are frequent and prolix. They extend to the Second Vienna School of Music, to Goethe and the laws of nature, to Heidegger and Victor
Klemperer’s memoirs of National Socialist oppression and jargon. The tawdry chronicle of Austrian domestic politics, of the Heimwehr and the macabre destiny of Dollfuss absorb more and more of Timms’s attention. His lucid expositions will serve the student and the specialist. It is Karl Kraus himself who becomes somewhat spectral. We learn little of his personal and inner life, of the genesis of stylistic creation which makes Die letzten Tage a colossus, largely neglected, yet comparable (also in regard of neglect) to Goethe’s Faust II. The poet in Kraus was fitful, but on occasion of compelling talent. At his cherished Janowitz, in the dark autumn of 1933, he composed one of the decisive poems in modern German:
Man frage nicht, was all die Zeit ich machte.
Ich blieb stumm;
und sage nicht, warum.
Und Stille gibt es, da die Erde krachte.
Kein Wort, das traf;
man spricht nur aus dem Schlaf.
Und träumt von einer Sonne, welche lachte.
Es geht vorbei;
nachher war’s einerlei.
Das Wort entschlief, als jene Welt erwachte.
Nietzsche’s songs of the night have something of this lapidary desolation. Kraus, virtuoso of language, had registered the eclipse of the Word (in the sense of Logos). Timms’s specification “on Hitler’s world’s awaking” enfeebles the reach of Kraus’s epitaph. The death-rattle had become loud in 1914. Will this devoted monument to Kraus induce English-speaking readers to attempt his works (attention is growing in France)? If so, the debt to Edward Timms will be considerable.
