The Kraus Project (13 page)

54
.
“Detlev von Liliencron (1844–1909), a late-blooming German writer of Nietzsche’s generation, appealed to Kraus for a number of reasons.
Foremost among these was a feature of Liliencron’s style that other critics belittled: its rawness and apparent lack of refinement.
In addition to printing some of Liliencron’s poems in
Die Fackel
, Kraus liked to do what he’s doing here, namely, play Liliencron’s earthiness off against the aestheticism of Heine’s heirs.
      
“Gottfried August Bürger (1747–1794) was a
Stürmer und Dränger
, a poet of the ‘Storm and Stress’ movement.
But unlike, say, the young Goethe, Bürger was known for producing non-recondite verses that ‘the people’ could appreciate, which is why Bürger’s work lends itself to being paired with Liliencron’s.
‘The Wild Hunter’ (‘Der wilde Jäger’) is the title of a poem by Bürger.” —PR

55
.
“
Simplicissimus
was a German humor magazine that ran from 1896 to 1944 and was famous for its pictorial caricatures.
(Not long after the Heine essay appeared, it printed a nasty sketch of Kraus, displeasing him in the extreme.) By juxtaposing images of a ‘philistine’ responding to Heine in very different ways,
Simplicissimus
had wittily evoked an oddity in Heine’s reception, one that resulted from the infectiousness of his work.
Both in life and in death, Heine was at once loved and reviled: we can add to our list of tentative superlatives that Heine was the most popular
and
the most hated German author of the nineteenth century.
But it wasn’t simply that Heine had many fans as well as many foes.
Even some of his bigoted detractors couldn’t resist his poems and especially, as Kraus will emphasize, the musical settings that had made them so popular.
Even some of the people who abominated Heine in theory enjoyed him in practice, and didn’t manage to hide or explain it.” —PR

56
.
“Heine’s tactic of framing his poems as ‘songs,’ from his early
Book of Songs
to his autumnal
Hebrew Melodies
, proved to be a brilliant success, for there was hardly a composer in Germany who failed to take Heine up on the invitation to set his words to music.
In 1829, the year after the
Book of Songs
appeared, Franz Schubert set six of the poems.
By the 1950s, the number of settings ran to about three thousand, which is surely some kind of record.” —PR

57
.
“Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten.”
According to Daniel Kehlmann, this is the one Heine poem that every German knows.
“The poem is so famous, such a part of the German collective consciousness, that even the Nazis couldn’t take it out of schoolbooks, anthologies, and calendars.
Instead, they simply removed the name Heine from the books and wrote ‘Author unknown’ above the poem.
This is infuriating, of course, but also funny in a certain way.”
      
According to Paul Reitter, “Friedrich Silcher (1789–1860) was a German composer known mostly for his songs and, above all, for his popular setting of Heine’s ‘Lorelei.’”

58
.
“Kraus is playing off another Heine poem made famous by its musical setting: ‘On Wings of Song’ (‘Auf Flügeln des Gesanges’).
The key setting was Felix Mendelssohn’s.” —PR

59
.
Here is the opening of Goethe’s famous poem:

Über allen Gipfeln

Ist Ruh,

In allen Wipfeln

Spürest du

Kaum einen Hauch

     
And again, in my amateur translation:

On every peak

Is silence.

In the top of every tree

You sense

Barely a breath.

     
Kraus was later prompted to call the poem a “national jewel,” after an atrocious patriotic pastiche of it appeared in a newspaper during the First World War:

Under every sea—

Is the U-boat.

Of England’s fleet

You note

Barely a smoke.

     
This kind of cleverness now mainly resides on the front page of the
New York Post
.

60
.
My translation of the artful fake in question (“Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam”):

A pine tree stands lonely

On a barren northern height.

It sleeps; it’s covered by

White blankets of snow and ice.

It’s dreaming of a palm tree

which, in a far-off Eastern place,

is grieving, silent and lonely,

Upon a burning rock face.

61
.
“In the beginning was Eros: Kraus formed an attachment to Offenbach (1819–1880) in 1900, when he saw the beautiful actress Annie Kalmar performing in Offenbach’s
Tales of Hoffmann
(one of the few “serious” operas he wrote).
The association of Offenbach’s music with Kalmar, whom Kraus came to adore, gave it a special personal resonance for him.
By 1909, he had also started to theorize about Offenbach’s aesthetic virtues.
This was the time when Kraus really began taking aim at both the Viennese feuilleton and the established cultural institutions that had facilitated its rise.
Not coincidentally, it was also the time when Kraus started to celebrate noncanonical forms and figures—vaudeville, a theater troupe that spoke Jewish dialect, Else Lasker-Schüler, Offenbach—for having more to offer than their prestigious counterparts, which lacked fantasy and were, in his opinion, dangerously out of touch with reality.
In a 1909 essay on Offenbach, for example, Kraus points up the contrast between the emptiness of official theater culture and the ‘thought-provoking nonsense’ of Offenbach’s operettas.
The latter have the potential to be a true ‘
Gesamtkunstwerk
,’ Kraus claims, for they capture the absurdity characteristic of modern life.
In the 1920s Kraus adapted and translated Meilhac and Halévy’s libretti, and he began to give ‘speech-song’ readings of Offenbach—a lot of them.
During the last decade of his life he devoted more than a third of his stage performances to Offenbach (123 of 346).” —PR

62
.
“‘Vitzliputzli,’ a long and biting poem by Heine, is about the conquistadores’ guileful victory over the Aztecs and the revenge plans of the Aztec god who wants to torment Europe.” —PR

63
.
Boy, does Kraus nail what’s wrong with Heine’s sunset poem.
And yet, when I was twenty, I found this poem hilarious.
I welcomed its puncturing of the earnestness of the other German literature I’d been reading.
I thought, wow, this guy is one of
us
.
Heine has remained popular with Germans because they feel the same way I did: he’s a relief from the heaviness of so much of German culture.
For Germans, experiencing Heinean irony is like escaping to a Latin country where life is freer and lighter; they read him the way they flock to the Mediterranean for their vacations.
      
The German term “Romantic irony” is synonymous with Heine (even if Heine saw himself as a post-Romantic author and the Romantics promoted their own brand of irony).
I first encountered it in 1979, in Munich, where I was enrolled in a junior-year-abroad program run by Wayne State University.
Imagining that American students might be homesick on a major holiday, the program’s director, Frau Doktor Riegler, annually organized a formal Thanksgiving dinner to which professors and other dignitaries were invited, and for some reason Frau Doktor Riegler singled me out to give a speech at the dinner.
I wrote the kind of faux-philosophical confection I’d perfected as a style reporter for my college newspaper, and Frau Doktor Riegler vetted it and approved it.
When I delivered the speech, though, I inflected its serious passages with an irony borrowed from the Talking Heads—in the years before I discovered Kraus, David Byrne was my number one hero—and I got a lot of laughs and made some progress toward impressing the Bryn Mawr girl I was bent on impressing.
Afterward, Frau Doktor Riegler chided me for having deceived her about the nature of my speech.
“What you did,” she said, “is called Romantic irony, Herr Franzen.
Very clever of you.”
Kraus would say that I was imitating Heine
before I’d even read him
.
I was doing what smart-ass adolescents do, undermining substance with irony because they don’t have substance yet themselves, or because they’re afraid of the substance that they do have, afraid of the intensity of their own emotion at the sight of a sunset, or afraid (as in my case, on Thanksgiving) of how powerfully they love their childhood home.
Heine’s poem about the girl and the sunset is smart-ass.
It shouldn’t wear well as you get older, and Kraus was incensed that grown-up Germans, who’d taken up Heine in their own smart-ass days, continued to place him alongside Goethe, a poet of real substance who respected sunsets.

64
.
Balm and Moonlight in the original are “
Veilchenduft”
and “
Mondschein
,” which, as Reitter notes, would have been recognizable as German-Jewish surnames, or as parodies of them.

65
.
“According to an old superstition, sprinkling salt on the tail of a bird would cause it to become crazy—and thus catchable.” —PR

66
.
Daniel Kehlmann notes that this line simply isn’t fully understandable.
But it’s clearly of a piece with the paradoxical conception of originality which Kraus is advancing in this paragraph: that every conceivable thought has always existed (hence the “permanent” here), and that writers find their way, through language, from the particulars of their time and place (“what’s self-evident”) to the same permanently existing thoughts.
As evidence for this conception, Kraus observes elsewhere (in “Nestroy and Posterity”) that aperçus from different languages and different centuries all have strikingly similar cadences.
This notion of the latency of thought in language seems to me both somewhat correct and somewhat self-serving, in that it applies best to Kraus’s own aphoristic style of writing (less well, say, to novels) and that originality is a vexed subject for a satirist whose work is fueled by the writing of others.
I get the sense here of Kraus chafing against the confines of his particular gifts—for mimicry, in particular—and defending himself against charges that his work is derivative or parasitic.
He protests perhaps too much.

67
.
“Building off of his ideas about spiritualism and sensualism, Heine, in his book
Ludwig Börne
(1840), sets up a dichotomy between the ‘Nazarene’ and ‘Hellene’ types.
The former are ascetic, contemptuous of beauty, and fixated on abstract ideals (like Christian nihilists, in Nietzsche’s terminology); Hellenes are just the opposite.
Heine then uses this duality to explain why his relationship with Ludwig Börne (1786–1837), a progressive critic who looked like a natural ally, had been destined to sour.
Given that Heine is a Hellene and Börne a Nazarene, they never really had a chance.
But
Ludwig Börne
is a book that abounds with inconsistencies, and spiritualists and Nazarenes don’t always come off so badly.
Indeed, Heine lauds both the Old and the New Testament, and his stress on the value of spiritualism amounts to a further affinity with Nietzsche—never mind Kraus’s claim that Heine anticipates Nietzsche in only one way.
For in a formulation akin to the Dionysian-Apollonian interplay in Nietzsche’s
The Birth of Tragedy
, Heine writes, in
Ludwig Börne
, that the most sublime art results from precisely a confluence of opposites: ‘Shakespeare is at once Jew and Greek, or with him perhaps both elements, spiritualism and art, have permeated each other in a conciliatory way, and developed into a higher whole.’” —PR