The Kraus Project (29 page)

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

9
.
“Here, too, Kraus is accentuating the negative to the point of stretching the truth.
Yes, some early reviewers of ‘Heine and the Consequences’ expressed annoyance.
But there were also favorable responses.
Readers of
Die Fackel
would have known this because Kraus, who liked to catalogue and comment on reactions to his work, publicly kept track of how his Heine essay went over with the critics.
In two separate discussions he complains of being misunderstood—no surprise there.
Yet the impression that emerges isn’t that Kraus’s (uncomprehending) reviewers were for the most part hostile.
To the contrary, the initial reception of ‘Heine and the Consequences’ seems to have been, on balance, admiring.
Consider how Kraus begins the first of his two discussions.
He writes, ‘Thoroughly in agreement with ‘Heine and the Consequences’ are the accounts in: the
Zeit am Montag
(Berlin, December 5); the
Freisinnige Zeitung
(Berlin, December 11); the
Londoner General-Anzeiger
(December 24); the
Hamburger Nachrichten
(December 25); and, further,
Die Wage
(Vienna, December 25).’
Kraus goes on to quote Franz Pfemfert, a well-known cultural critic, taking him to task in the magazine
Der Demokrat
.
But Pfemfert didn’t so much question Kraus’s arguments as charge him with being irresponsible.
According to Pfemfert, Adolf Bartels and Heine’s other antisemitic detractors would find plenty of new ammunition in ‘Heine and the Consequences.’
So what if Kraus had attempted to distance his position on Heine from Bartels’s?
Did he really think that a screamer like Bartels would care about such disclaimers?
Having brushed off Pfemfert’s accusation, Kraus proceeds to cite and mock a review that presents ‘Heine and the Consequences’ as a rare misstep by a great author.
And that’s it for the disapproval.
Kraus’s next move is to quote a passage from a letter by the esteemed, recently deceased critic Samuel Lublinski, in which Lublinski says about Kraus’s essay: it is ‘the most formidable attack’ on Heine ‘and also the most compelling one.’
In the final excerpt Kraus provides, his reviewer gushes, ‘I rank his Heine book above all previous books about Heine.’
Kraus’s second discussion, published just one month later, isn’t much different.
The review on which it focuses ends with the lines: ‘Heine and the Consequences’ is ‘an achievement one cannot ignore.
All in all, it comes across as a timely verdict.’
      
“For the next few decades, ‘Heine and the Consequences’ continued to elicit mixed responses.
Perhaps most notable is the resonance it found among the Frankfurt School thinkers, who, like Kraus, were concerned about the commodification of literature.
In 1931 Walter Benjamin called the essay the best thing ever written about Heine.
And in 1956, on the hundredth anniversary of Heine’s death, Theodor Adorno described Kraus’s ‘judgment’ of Heine as ineradicable.
Eventually, though, the debate about ‘Heine and the Consequences’ was taken over by critics who hadn’t come of age in Kraus’s world, and who as a group had a harder time getting past the antisemitic stereotypes in his text.
When this happened, ‘Heine and the Consequences’ fell into disfavor.
Hence the fact that Edward Timms mentions it only
twice
in his landmark Kraus study of 1986.” —PR