Kraus the prophet - Don’t ask why all this time I never spoke

Why have I been avoiding writing this final bit about Karl Kraus?  Because it is too sad, I will bet that’s why.

There are some things you would rather be wrong about.  What I mean is, if you enjoy worrying about catastrophes, I would rather you be wrong.  Maybe you would rather be right, catastrophe and all.  How would I know what you want.

Ricardo de las Caravanas de Recuerdas asks a useful question about Kraus: how “to determine where the slippery satirist ends and where the full-on real life nutjob begins”?  Kraus is one of the few true satirists.  Like Jonathan Swift and Thomas Carlyle, he is most serious exactly when he is most outrageous, when he says what he cannot possibly mean.  Although he likely does not mean what he says in exactly the way he says it.  Satirists are aggravating.

Kraus was both comedian and prophet, Isaiah at the Laugh Factory, Jeremiah Seinfeld.

Newspaper vendors (“E-e-xtra”) are heard throughout The Last Days of Mankind.  At the beginning of his final long monologue, The Grumbler, the Kraus-like pessimist, hears one:

GRUMBLER:  So it is five o’clock.  The answer is here, the echo of my blood-haunted madness.  And no longer does anything resound to me out of ruined creation except this one sound, out of which ten millions who are dying accuse me of still being alive, I who had eyes to see the world, and whose stare struck it in a fashion that it became as I saw it…  Have I deserved this fulfillment of my deathly fear of life?...  Why is my shout of protest not stronger than this tinny command that has dominion over the souls of a whole globe?  (V.54)

The jokes that were funny even at the beginning of the war have turned into something else.  The final scene, German and Austrian officers at a feast, is full of cheers and laughter, puns and jokes, but jokes like this:

GERMAN GENERAL STAFF OFFICER:  Yes sir – our German hand-gas-grenade type B!  With that thing the poisonous substance sprays out and creates suppurating wounds, with a secretion like an honest-to-goodness case of the clap.  (Laughter.)

The party is finally destroyed by artillery and replaced with “apparitions,” essentially a film montage of wartime atrocities, running from the pathetic to the gruesome.  In a strange turn, the apparitions begin singing, even when they are frozen corpses, children drowned by the sinking of the Lusitania, or twelve hundred horses drowned in the torpedoing of an Italian ship, an episode that Kraus mentions elsewhere in the play.  Dead trees have a song.  So do the ravens:

While you gluttons join in gorging,
We don’t do so badly, either.
Since we follow all your armies,
Never have we ached from hunger.

And then – well, Kraus is almost done.  Jeremiah’s prophecy is almost complete.  Except for the grumble grumble Epilogue that sounds if anything even wilder.

I would have thought that the end of the war would relieve some of the apocalyptic pressure on Kraus.  Perhaps it did for a time.  By 1933, though, Kraus was defeated.  He stopped publishing.  He realized that his weapons were useless against the Nazis.  He lived for a few more years, dying in 1936, never having to witness the worst, although he had already guessed it.

Here is his how he ended his career, his last published work, from p. 259 of In These Great Times:

Don’t ask why all this time I never spoke,
Wordless am I,
and won’t say why.
And silence reigns because the bedrock broke.
No word redeems;
one only spoke in dreams.
A smiling sun the sleeper’s images evoke.
Time marches on;
the final difference is none.
The word expired when that world awoke.

Kraus the comedian - now that we have Obu brand, we lack for nothing

The Last Days of Mankind is a piece of post-Biblical prophecy that ends with the destruction of humanity:

(The glow dies out.  Total darkness.  The , on the horizon, the wall of flames leaps high.  Death cries off stage.)

In fact the play ends twice, but the 1974 abridgement does not include the epilogue which includes – I am quoting a “Critical Analysis” by Franz Mauthner that follows the play – a sentence that is “probably the longest in German literature and also the longest catalogue of the sins of the German people” and a second apocalypse, for which God, in his own voice but oddly the words of the Emperor Franz Josef, denies all responsibility: “I did not will it so.”

But despite all this The Last Days of Mankind is mostly a comedy.  Monty Python stuff.  Blackadder.

SUBSCRIBER:  The rumor circulating in Vienna is that there are rumors circulating in Austria.  They’re even going from mouth to mouth, but nobody can tell you –

PATRIOT:  Nobody knows anything specific, but there must be something to it if even the government has announced that rumors have been spread.  (V. 17)

And thus a “rumors about rumors” sketch is up and running, with no one having any idea what the rumored rumors might be about.

OPTIMIST:  What do you say to the rumors?

GRUMBLER:  I am not aware of them, but I believe them.  (V. 18)

Act II, Scene 17 is the Restaurant Sketch, including the patriotic food jokes:

GENTLEMAN:  No, wait a minute – perfidy noodles – whatever does that mean?

WAITER:  Well, macaroni!

GENTLEMAN:  Oh, yes, right – Scoundrel’s salad, what’s that?

WAITER:  Salad with Italian dressing.

A woman at a pricey spa (“No Wounded Soldiers Allowed”) has become completely corrupted, able to speak only the language of propaganda and advertising:

FRAU WAHNSCHAFFE:  I have only two children, and unfortunately they are not yet eligible for military service.  And, to make things even worse, one of them, to our sorrow, is a girl.  So I have to make do by fantasizing that my boy has already been at the front, and has, naturally, already met a hero’s death.  (III.40)

Then she turns to her own duties.  I presume Kraus is simply giving her actual exhortations from newspapers and magazines:

We had a wholesome broth made with the Excelsior brand of Hindenburg cocoa-cream soup cubes…  In the beginning we really missed ersatz margarine, but now that we have Obu brand, we lack for nothing…  Today we’re going to try the much-praised hodgepodge with Yolktex brand of ersatz egg made from carbonite of lime and baking powder, and a bit of Saladfix, a delicious additive that I prefer by far to Salatin as well as to Saladol.

Battlefield skits, incompetent officers, idiotic leaders, self-serving journalists, repulsive psychiatrists – oh how Kraus hated psychiatry.  But as the play progresses, the tone darkens – as does the war – the comedy becomes blacker and in many cases moves beyond the comic as the absurd becomes nightmarish.  Finally Kraus blows it all up, which I suppose, in my next post, is where Kraus week should end.

Notes toward The Last Days of Mankind - this drama has no actor other than all mankind

“In These Great Times” (1914) is bookended by “Tourist Trips to Hell” (1920), concentrated Karl Kraus.  Half of the articles four pages consists of a reproduction of an actual advertisement for an actual organized tour of recent battlefields:

You ride through destroyed villages to the fortress area of Vaux with its enormous cemeteries containing hundreds of thousands of fallen men.

You receive in the best hotel in Verdun a luncheon with wine and coffee, gratuities included.

And the other half is Kraus’s spitting, incredulous response, although I am not sure any response is necessary besides pointing and glaring:

You receive unforgettable impressions of a world in which there is not a square centimeter of soil that has not been torn up by grenades and advertisements.

Kraus’s argument is again literary.  People should visit battlefields; people who visit battlefields should eat lunch.  The offense of the advertisement is in the language, and what the language implies.

The translations are from the old In These Great Times collection, which presents the advertisement as a four page foldout, the original German on the left, and a spatially accurate English translation on the right.  Richard at Caravanas de Recuerdas just wrote about “Tourist Trips to Hell,” including more of Kraus’s shock as well as a photo of Kraus reading the piece – half of the advertisement faces the camera.  For Kraus, the end of the war did not mean the end of the horror.

In between the two pieces, Kraus wrote a unique masterpiece, The Last Days of Mankind, an 800 page satirical play in five acts and 259 scenes about the public face of the war, the war as seen through censored newspaper reports, official dispatches, and propaganda.  Much of the text – perhaps as much as half – is not by Kraus, but is a collage of quotations.  The plot is the war.  Each act covers a year of the war, and the action that begins in Vienna gradually expands to Germany and elsewhere.  The characters are journalists, officers, politicians – anyone, really – with dialogues between the Optimist and the Grumbler frequently recurring.  The Grumbler is often said, by people with a weak understanding of fiction, to be the stand-in for Kraus himself.

The play lends itself to rearrangement – any performance would require it – and I have seen three attempts to give the poor English reader a glimpse of the contents.  The German Library selection of Kraus includes one key scene, the Grumbler’s final monologue and statement of purpose:

I have written a tragedy, whose perishing hero is mankind, whose tragic conflict, the conflict between the world and nature, has a fatal ending.  Alas, because this drama has no actor other than all mankind, it has no audience! 

In These Great Times compresses the play into less than a hundred pages.  The selection looks performable, but becomes deceptively coherent and more directly pacifistic, when the play’s pacifism is actually more ambiguous.  Or so it seems in the longest available selection, the 230 pages of the 1974 translation (by Alexander Gode and Sue Ellen Wright) on which I will rely for the next couple of days. 

Edward Timms, in his two volume critical biography of Kraus, writes that “[t]his edition eliminates from the play antisemitic and anti-capitalist utterances which might give offence to American readers.”*  The notion that whoever the American readers of Kraus might have been in 1974 would have been “offended” by “anti-capitalist utterances” is hilarious; the idea that British readers would not be offended by Kraus’s anti-Semitism is a different kind of joke.  All right, Timms did not think that sentence through.  But I take the warning that I am working with a fragment of a text, however impressive the fragment.

*  Edward Timms, Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist, 1986, Yale UP, p. 429.

Karl Kraus, war writer - his misused language beautifies a misused life

Karl Kraus has become a World War I writer.  It is a strange fate.  The prophet was right, so his prophecy swallowed him.  Clichéd, thoughtless language really did lead to the apocalypse, or at least an apocalypse, a war that quickly became an inescapable nightmare.  The crazy guy with the “World Is Ending” sign was right.  At least metaphorically right.

Also relevant is that much of Kraus’s best writing is in one way or another about the war.  The two decades of writing leading up to it becomes background for The Last Days of Mankind.  Such are the vicissitudes of masterpieces.

Kraus’s first major response to the world war, an article he read in November 1914 and published in December, is titled “In These Great Times,” a horrible phrase taken from the newspapers, a phrase that is easy to mock:

… the times measure themselves and are astonished at how great they have become overnight.  But they have probably always been great, and I simply did not notice it.  Thus it was an optical fault of mine to perceive them as small.  (80)

I had planned to chew through this article for a post or two, but upon review I have discovered that it is so think and knotted, as rhetorically complex as Thomas Carlyle, that I am mostly baffled.  The argument is built of paradoxes:

Let him who has something to say come forward and be silent!  (71)

Perhaps the obscurity of detail helped keep Kraus out of prison.  He was the only major German-language writer to speak out against the war.  Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Hauptmann, Thomas Mann – all wrote and spoke enthusiastically in favor of the German and Austrian cause, at least for a time.  Arthur Schnitzler was wiser; he followed Kraus’s advice and was silent.  Only Kraus spoke in opposition, although the nature of his opposition changed and broadened as the costs of the war grew.

The main target remained the same, though.  Kraus’s greatest enemies were other writers, especially journalists (the line in quotations marks is from Antony and Cleopatra, a messenger’s response to Cleopatra’s anger over bad news.):

“Gracious madam, I that do bring the news made not the match.”  But the reporter does make the match, sets the house on fire, and turns the horrors he fabricates into truth.  Through decades of practice he has produced in mankind that degree of unimaginativeness which enables it to wage a war of extermination against itself…  he has the reflected glory of heroic qualities at his disposal, and his misused language beautifies a misused life – as though eternity had saved its apex for the age in which a reporter lives. (76)

The cause of war – or at least this war – is unimaginativeness, which is caused by misused language.  This is a writer’s argument, a literary argument.  How many people could possibly find it convincing?  But it is not a paradox to Kraus, at least, and his anger at the press and the poets is real enough.

“In These Great Times” can be found in the 1976 Carcanet collection In These Great Times, ed. and trans. Harry Zohn.  The forthcoming Penguin Classics Kraus anthology is titled In This Great Time and Other Writings, so I will bet you one silver dollar that the essay will be in that book too.

I must wait until my writings are outdated - it's Karl Kraus week!

A wiser, more experienced writer,  for instance a professional critic, would have no qualms introducing a week about Viennese satirist and scold Karl Kraus by lightly rewriting the introductory piece I wrote a month ago.  A fool and an amateur, I will just point to it.  The Jonathan Franzen book about Karl Kraus is still on Amazon, evidence but not proof that it is not a prank.

I hear noises which others don’t hear and which disturb for me the music of the spheres, which others don’t hear either.

Today I will borrow some of Kraus’s aphorisms to help describe him.  They are all taken from Karl Kraus, Hermann Broch, Elias Canetti, Robert Walser: Selected Short Writings (Continuum, 2006), pp. 24-33.  For some reason the entire Kraus section is available, at least in the United States, via Google Books.

Kraus was a satirist and cultural critic.  I suppose today we would call him a media critic, since he spent so much time attacking journalism, (“No ideas and the ability to express them – that’s a journalist”).  His weapons include parody, scorn, and even reason, but his main form of attack is accurate quotation.  Kinda hitting below the belt.  His work is filled with lines borrowed from advertising, politicians, and newspapers, sometimes ironically repurposed, sometimes devastating when presented as flatly as possible.

I do not know the work of H. L. Mencken so well, but he might be thought of as an American cousin of Kraus, an enemy of cant, propaganda, and officialese.  This sounds like Mencken, doesn’t it?

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse.

Well, it sounds like any number of curmudgeons.  Kraus is a classic Austrian curmudgeon, perhaps the first great one.

My public and I understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I do not say what it would like to hear.

Both Kraus’s topicality and his emphasis on language have caused problems for translators.  Some – perhaps much – of Kraus’s writing is probably not worth the necessary compromises, although I would like to see some careful, scholarly, independently wealthy translator prove me wrong.  Regardless, enough good pieces can be and have been translated to provide Caravana de Recuerdos and me with plenty of material.

My readers believe that I write just for the day because I write about the day.  So I must wait until my writings are outdated.  Then they may possibly achieve timelessness.

Kraus wrote one long piece, The Last Days of Mankind, nominally a play, a savage, complex treatment of World War I that is said to be 800 pages long.  About a quarter is available in a 1974 English version, and even that mangled fragment is a masterpiece.  Perhaps the best-selling Franzen book will inspire someone to finish it.

The dog sniffs first, then lifts his leg.  One cannot well object to this lack of originality.  But that the writer reads first, before he writes, is pitiful.

Hey, careful with the teeth, there, Karl!

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.

Austria, what a naïve place you are!

That cheerful thought is courtesy of Peter Altenberg, the archetypal Viennese coffeehouse Bohemian, who spent his life wandering from café to café and writing Baudelaire-inspired prose poems or articles of short fiction or whatever they are.  As collected in the 2005 Archipelago book Telegrams of the Soul, his importance seems more historical than literary, but that is a thought I hope to sketch out some other time.  For the title line in context, see p. 120.

A greater writer, a greater figure, is the Diogenes of Vienna, Karl Kraus, who moved from journalism to founding his own paper Die Fackel (“The Torch”) in 1899 to writing every word of its contents for twenty-five years:

I no longer have collaborators.  I used to be envious of them.  They repel those readers whom I want to lose myself.

Kraus is highly quotable.  This one is from In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader (Carcanet, 1984, p. 5).  It is amusing to joke that this or that old timey writer, Montaigne or Dr. Johnson or what have you, would now be a blogger.  Not a joke with Kraus.

Along with his articles, jokes, vitriol, parodies, shivs, and bile, Kraus also sometimes presented one-man performances of Shakespeare plays which must have been a sight.  Somewhere along the way he wrote an enormous play-like object titled The Last Days of Mankind, published 1918-19, of which a fraction has been translated.  Perhaps if we all read it someone will translate the whole thing!  I will do my part.

What other Austrian books might I try to read?

I am in the middle – no, closer to the front – of a long, tedious, magnificent Adalbert Stifter novel, Der Nachsommer (“Indian Summer”, 1856).  I have written plenty about Stifter before and recommend him strongly to patient readers, but anyone who introduces himself to Stifter with this novel is insane, no offense.   His subsequent novel, Witiko (1867), is reputed to be even more boring, which if true is an achievement.

Another mid-century writer who should have no existence in English is the comedic playwright Johann Nestroy, but one of his Viennese dialect comedies was adapted by Thornton Wilder and eventually turned into the 1964 musical Hello, Dolly!  That exclamation point is in the title of the show, but I also lay claim to it – what, really?  More appealing to me is that the same play was adapted by Tom Stoppard as On the Razzle (1981).

The young Salzburg poet Georg Trakl I read in November.  I should revisit him.  The other major poet of the period is Rainer Maria Rilke whom I should also revisit (after fifteen years).

If I stick to the kind of cutoff date I used in previous reading projects, say something around 1919, I will then stop before I get to Rilke’s best-known works, the Sonnets to Orpheus and Duino Elegies (both 1923).  I thus also cordon off most Robert Musil, all Joseph Roth, most Stefan Zweig, most Ernst Weiss, etc. etc.  Unwise, perhaps, but it is a guideline, not a rule.

An important exception: Young Törless (1906) is Robert Musil’s first novel, a story of boarding school sadism with a humanist turn.  It also features a long monologue about the meaning of imaginary numbers.  I have read it twice and will likely read it again.  A fine readalong book, but c’mon, The Last Days of Mankind, right?

Perhaps it is clearer why what once seemed like a project of wide scope has come to seem a bit narrow.  Valuable reading but less fun for more casual participants.

Tomorrow:  some supplementary or alternative paths that may well be more fruitful than anything I have mentioned so far.