The music of an ocean of mud - an invitation to read Karl Kraus before - well, see below

An invitation: please join Richard of Caravanas de Recuerdos and me as we read a selection of the works of the angry Austrian satirist Karl Kraus.  We are shooting for the end of April.  I mean I am shooting etc.

Why do you want to join us?  Many reasons.

1.  Strictly speaking the selections selected add up to about thirty (30) pages.  They are all available at Google books as part of the euphoniously titled Karl Kraus, Hermann Broch, Elias Canetti, Robert Walser: Selected Short Writings (Continuum, 2006).  Three of Kraus’s short newspaper pieces, a couple of scenes from his enormous semi-play The Last Days of Mankind (1919), and ten pages of aphorisms.  How we all love reading page after page of aphorisms.

Kraus is available in English in many forms, and I am reading a bit beyond those thirty pages.  I strongly recommend that anyone remotely curious take a look at the piece titled “Tourist Trips to Hell,” which is pure Kraus compressed into a few pages.

2.  Pure Kraus is intense.  He was the great one-man critic of his time, mostly writing in the 922 issues of his self-published newspaper, Die Fackel (“The Torch”), mostly writing the entire contents of the paper.  His special concern was language, particularly the ways it was abused by advertising and bureaucracy.

Let my style capture all the sounds of my time.  This should make it an annoyance to my contemporaries, but later generations should hold it to their ears like a seashell in which there is the music of an ocean of mud.

As part of his devotion to language, Kraus also performed one-man readings of entire plays – Schiller, Goethe, Shakespeare – acting only by voice and expression, or sang complete Offenbach operettas, “dancing” “with the fingers of his hand” (see Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind, 1975, p. 257).

I find Kraus quite funny, but his attempt to preserve language and culture was serious.  The first world war drove him to new heights of expression; the rise of Hitler silenced him.  “If proof was needed for the authenticity of Karl Kraus’s satirical work, it was provided by his knowledge that satire was defeated” (Heller, 259).

3.  Apparently Jonathan Franzen’s next book is about Karl Kraus.  The Kraus Project is the title.  The book appears to consist of Franzen’s translations of Kraus mixed with his essays about Kraus.  When I first saw the book I thought Amazon had been hacked by a prankster.  The translations are described as “definitive,” so screw you, previous (and future) translators, and Franzen “annotates them spectacularly,” a unique feat in the history of annotation.  The annotations also “soar[] over today’s cultural landscape.”  I believe I just mentioned that Kraus was particularly concerned with language, as corrupted by, for example, advertising? 

Regardless, it appears that the book is genuine, and that Franzen perhaps thinks of himself as something of a Karl Kraus for our time, a prophet of the coming apocalypse, this time brought on by environmental destruction, social media, and Amazon.com.

As Kraus says, “Artists have a right to be modest and a duty to be vain.”

In September, a lot of book reviewers will be doing some cramming on Kraus, so this is your chance to get the jump on them.