Karl Kraus 3. Monster [Unmensch]

"Karl Kraus"
by Walter Benjamin [translated from the German by Edmund Jephcott]
Germany, 1931

"Monster [Unmensch]," to my mind the least linguistically explosive of the three sub-sections in Benjamin's study on Karl Kraus although of course only relatively speaking at that, still begins with a typical Benjamin bombshell in which he compares "the genuine satirist" Kraus with "the scribblers who make a trade of mockery and who, in their invectives, have little more in mind than giving the public something to laugh about" (378).  What makes a true satirist like Kraus stand out from this pack of lightweight jokers?

In contrast, the great type of the satirist never had firmer ground under his feet than amid a generation about to mount tanks and put on gas masks, a mankind that has run out of tears but not of laughter.  In him civilization prepares to survive, if it must, and communicates with him in the true mystery of satire, which consists in the devouring of the adversary.  The satirist is the figure in whom the cannibal was received into civilization.  His recollection of his origin is not without filial piety, so that the proposal to eat people has become an essential constituent of his inspiration, from Jonathan Swift's pertinent project concerning the use of the children of the less wealthy classes, to Léon Bloy's suggestion that landlords of insolvent lodgers be conceded a right to the sale of the lodgers' flesh.  In such directives, great satirists have taken the measure of the humanity of their fellow men.  "Humanity, culture, and freedom are precious things that cannot be bought dearly enough with blood, understanding, and human dignity"--thus Kraus concludes the dispute between the cannibal and human rights.  One should compare his formulation with Marx's treatment of the "Jewish question," in order to judge how totally this playful reaction of 1909--the reaction against the classical ideal of humanity--was likely to become a confession of materialist humanism at the first opportunity.  Admittedly, one would need to understand Die Fackel from the first number on, literally word for word, to predict that this aesthetically oriented journalism, without sacrificing or gaining a single motif, was destined to become the political prose of 1930.  For this it had to thank its partner, the press, which disposed of humanity in the way to which Kraus alludes in these words: "Human rights are the fragile toy that grownups like to trample on and so will not give up" (ibid.).

 

From this beginning on genre matters, Benjamin traces the satirist's career arc through operettas (Benjamin: "Just as prattle seals the enslavement of language through stupidity, so operetta transfigures stupidity through music" [379]), through his public readings, through his "hate poems" (383) and finally back to his polemics--all making me wish I knew more about Kraus than I do.  Perhaps Benjamin felt the same for, despite a poetic summation at the end in which he seeks to portray the protean "monster" Kraus as the archetypal angel of "a humanity that proves itself by destruction" (387), it's this earlier quote on our corrosive hero's "combative aspect" that ironically feels like the most revealing R.I.P. to me: "No one can grasp the necessity that compelled this great bourgeois character to become a comedian, this guardian of Goethean linguistic values a polemicist, or why this irreproachably honest man went berserk" (386).

Source

As previously noted, "Karl Kraus" appears on pp. 361-390 of the Walter Benjamin anthology, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008).

Karl Kraus 2. Demon

"Karl Kraus"
by Walter Benjamin [translated from the German by Edmund Jephcott]
Germany, 1931

As quotable as Benjamin is throughout his wide-ranging essay on Kraus, it's in the middle section, "Demon," where you really begin to appreciate his profundity and his artistry as a critic.  Benjamin doesn't see Kraus as a polemicist who is drawn to pontificating about evil in order to perform some greater good for the rest of us.  In fact, he scoffs at the idea of Kraus as an "ethical personality" at all: "The dark background from which Kraus's image detaches itself," Benjamin writes, "is not formed by his contemporaries, but is the primeval world [Vorwelt], or the world of the demon" (370).  Kraus' vanity, "his unconquerable need to be perceived" is undeniable according to the critic.  But to what end?  Benjamin sees it as arising from a complex interplay of "self-expression" and "self-unmasking" in which, perhaps unwittingly at times, Kraus offers up his own life as a performative "sacrifice to his vanity" (370-371).  Benjamin: "Idiosyncrasy as the highest critical organ--this is the hidden logic of that self reflection and the hellish state known only to a writer for whom every act of gratification becomes at the same time a station of his martyrdom, a state experienced, apart from Kraus, by no one as deeply as by Kierkegaard."  Kraus, quoted by Benjamin: "I am perhaps the first instance of a writer who simultaneously writes and experiences his writing theatrically" (371).

Kraus' "mimetic genius, imitating while it glosses, pulling faces in the midst of polemics," inspires some of Benjamin's finest, most penetrating writing about "the demon in the man" that is Kraus (371).  You don't, I hope you'll agree, even need to know anything about Kraus to appreciate an arresting description like this:

[Kraus] imitates his subjects in order to insert the crowbar of his hate into the finest joints of their posture.  This quibbler, probing between syllables, digs out the larvae that nest there in clumps.  The larvae of venality and garrulity, ignominy and bonhomie, childishness and covetousness, gluttony and dishonesty.  Indeed, the exposure of inauthenticity--more difficult than that of the merely bad--is here performed behavioristically.  The quotations in Die Fackel are more than documentary proof: they are the props with which the quoter unmasks himself mimetically.  Admittedly, what emerges in just this connection is how closely the cruelty of the satirist is linked to the ambiguous modesty of the interpreter, which in his public readings is heightened beyond comprehension.  "To creep"--this is the term used, not without cause, for the lowest kind of flattery; and Kraus creeps into those he impersonates, in order to annihilate them.  Has courtesy here become the mimicry of hate, hate the mimicry of courtesy?  However that may be, both have attained perfection, absolute pitch.  "Torment," of which there is so much talk in Kraus in such opaque allusions, here has its seat.  His protests against letters, printed matter, documents are nothing but the defensive reaction of a man who is himself implicated.  But what implicates him so deeply is more than deeds and misdeeds; it is the language of his fellow men.  His passion for imitating them is at the same time the expression of and the struggle against this implication, and also the cause and the result of that ever-watchful guilty conscience in which alone the demon is his element (371-372).

It would be easy enough to stop at this point given how much Benjamin has already shed light on the slippery Kraus, but he isn't done trashing the explanations of the Kraus fans who posit "compassion" as one of the hidden wellsprings of the Austrian's art:

No!  This incorruptible, piercing, resolute assurance does not spring from the noble poetic or humane disposition that his followers are so fond of attributing to him.  How utterly banal, and at the same time how fundamentally wrong, is their derivation of his hatred from love, when it is obvious how much more elemental are the forces here at work: a humanity that is only an alternation of malice and sophistry, sophistry and malice, a nature that is the highest school of aversion to mankind and a pity that is alive only when interlaced with vengeance (372).

Is Benjamin's a partisan study?  You be the judge.  Citing Brecht's great quote about Kraus, "When the age laid hands upon itself, he was the hands" (372), Benjamin then moves on from Kraus' primal desire for vengeance to his apocalyptic vision of justice.  Whatever you make of the argument, the language itself is impeccable, insistent: "Nothing is understood about this man until it has been perceived that, of necessity and without exception, everything--language and fact--falls, for him, within the sphere of justice.  All his fire-eating, sword-swallowing philology in the newspapers pursues justice just as much as language" (373).  But where does this sense of justice originate from other than from within the demon himself?  One of Benjamin's answers may surprise you for it's none other than Baudelaire whom he sees as one of Kraus' spiritual ancestors:

Only Baudelaire hated, as Kraus did, the satiety of healthy common sense, and the compromise that intellectuals made with it in order to find shelter in journalism.  Journalism is betrayal of the literary life, of mind, of the demon.  Idle chatter is its true substance, and every feuilleton poses anew the insoluble question of the relationship between the forces of stupidity and malice, whose expression is gossip.  It is, fundamentally, on the complete agreement of two forms of existence--life under the aegis of mere mind, and life under the aegis of mere sexuality--that the solidarity of the man of letters with the whore is founded, a solidarity to which Baudelaire's existence is once again the most inviolable testimony (376).

Benjamin concludes this part of his work with a somewhat complicated--and perhaps not altogether convincing--argument linking Kraus' hatred of the press with his defense of prostitution, the commoditization of words and the commoditization of the flesh (a Kraus flashback: "Penury can turn every man into a journalist, but not every woman into a prostitute" [375]).  Although I'm not sure I buy all of it, I have to admit that Benjamin's musings on sexuality and the mind as it possibly pertains to Kraus did permit one final sneak attack that sort of waylaid me.  The subject?  An evocation of Kraus' nights which, perhaps on account of its lack of romanticism about the tortured artist, speaks to me more than it otherwise should:  "His night, however, is not a maternal night, or a moonlit, romantic night: it is the hour between sleeping and waking, the night watch, the centerpiece of his threefold solitude: that of the coffeehouse, where he is alone with his enemy; of the nocturnal room, where he is alone with his demon; of the lecture hall, where he is alone with his work" (377).

Source

"Karl Kraus."  In Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008, 361-390).

Karl Kraus 1. Cosmic Man [Allmensch]

"Karl Kraus"
by Walter Benjamin [translated from the German by Edmund Jephcott]
Germany, 1931

Walter Benjamin's 1931 essay on Karl Kraus and his Viennese newspaper Die Fackel, conveniently divided into the sections "1. Cosmic Man [Allmensch]," "2. Demon" and "3. Monster [Unmensch]" and all introduced by a Kraus epigraph, is almost as much fun to read as Kraus himself.  Although I hope to return to the second and third parts of the essay later in the week (the thing's just too rich to try and cover in one post), here's the German critic's attention-grabbing beginning:

In old engravings, there is a messenger who rushes toward us crying aloud, his hair on end, brandishing a sheet of paper in his hands--a sheet full of war and pestilence, of cries of murder and pain, of danger from fire and flood--spreading everywhere the Latest News.  "News" in this sense, in the sense that the word has in Shakespeare, is disseminated by Die Fackel [The Torch].  Full of betrayal, earthquakes, poison, and fire from the mundus intelligibilis.  The hatred with which it pursues the tribe of journalists that swarms into infinity is not only a moral hatred but a vital one, such as is hurled by an ancestor upon a race of degenerate and dwarfish rascals that has sprung from his seed.  The very term "public opinion" outrages Kraus (361).

 

While you'd think it'd be hard to maintain the intensity level of that opening, Benjamin shifts from this "visual" introduction of Kraus to a descriptive appraisal of Kraus' motivations without any appreciable loss of adrenaline.  After calmly stating that the empty phrase is Kraus' enemy, "the unmasking of the inauthentic" is the source of his hatred of the press (362-363), Benjamin launches into a feverish appreciation of Die Fackel's role in the combat:

 

The intertwining of biblical magniloquence with stiff-necked fixation on the indecencies of Viennese life--this is its way of approaching phenomena.  It is not content to call on the world as witness to the misdemeanors of a cashier; it must summon the dead from their graves.  --Rightly so.  For the shabby, obtrusive abundance of these scandals in Viennese coffeehouses, the press, and society is only a minor manifestation of a foreknowledge that  then, more swiftly than anyone could perceive, suddenly arrived at its true and original subject: two months after the outbreak of war, Kraus called this subject by name in his speech "In These Great Times," with which all the demons that inhabited this possessed man passed into the herd of swine who were his contemporaries (363-364).

 

Although I'd already want to read more about Kraus (and read more by Benjamin) from that last line of Benjamin's alone, the essayist inserts a head-spinning excerpt from "In These Great Times" (the mercurial Kraus: "Let him who has something to say step forward and be silent!") before adding:

 

Everything Kraus wrote is like that: a silence turned inside out, a silence that catches the storm of events in its black folds and billows, its livid lining turned outward...the polemical possibilities of every situation are totally exhausted.  With what precautions this is surrounded can be seen from the barbed wire of editorial pronouncements that encircles each edition of Die Fackel, as from the razor-sharp definitions and provisos in the programs and lectures accompanying his readings from his own work.  The trinity of silence, knowledge and alertness constitutes the figure of Kraus the polemicist (364-365, ellipses added).

 

Those of you who know how Kraus ended his career will understand why Benjamin was startlingly prescient about the Austrian polemicist here.  Those of you who know how Benjamin ended his career may well wonder whether the writing was already on the wall for both of these men.

 

Source

"Karl Kraus" appears on pp. 361-390 of the Walter Benjamin anthology, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008).  Walter Benjamin photo above: photographer unknown.

Dead Souls #1

Dead Souls [Mertvye dushi] (Vintage Classics, 1996)
by Nikolai Gogol [translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky]
Russia, 1842

Having been at least twenty-five years since I last drove my "rather handsome, smallish spring britzka" (3) with the California license plates through the comedic nooks and crannies of Nikolai Gogol's eternally youthful 33-year old mind, I arrive here today finally ready to tell you all that Volume One of Dead Souls was just about as funny as I'd remembered it.  Unfortunately, the incomplete Volume Two was just as "memorable" as ever as well--I didn't really remember anything from it from the first time around, but that's understandable now that I see that it's written in a way that makes you wonder how the uproarious novelist with the 1967 Love Forever Changes haircut suddenly became "unfunny" between volumes one and two.  That lone literary/hair coiffing complaint aside, I'm certainly sorry it took so long for me to ever get around to rereading Gogol's novel/"poema."  Ostensibly a novel-length tale about the antihero Chichikov's con man-like attempts to buy himself into a new tax bracket by purchasing "dead souls" to fraudulently populate a would-be nobleman's estate in provincial Russia, Dead Souls is--genre matters notwithstanding--really just a superb specimen of a Siglo de Oro-style picaresque novella metafictionally updated and transplanted to early 19th century Russia  and including an unreliable narrator just as roguish as its putative protagonist.  Before any of y'all Gogol fanboys get too mad at me over that "just," here's a solid single paragraph hand-picked to give others an idea of why I'd happily recommend this work to virtually anyone:

Happy the writer who, passing by characters that are boring, disgusting, shocking in their mournful reality, approaches characters that manifest the lofty dignity of man, who from the great pool of daily whirling images has chosen only the rare exceptions, who has never once betrayed the exalted tuning of his lyre, nor descended from his height to his poor, insignificant brethren, and, without touching the ground, has given the whole of himself to his elevated images so far removed from it.  Twice enviable is his beautiful lot: he is among them as in his own family; and meanwhile his fame spreads loud and far.  With entrancing smoke, he has clouded people's eyes; he has flattered them wondrously, concealing what is mournful in life, showing them a beautiful man.  Everything rushes after him, applauding, and flies off following his triumphal chariot.  Great world poet they name him, soaring high above all other geniuses in the world, as the eagle soars above other high fliers.  At the mere mention of his name, young ardent hearts are filled with trembling, responsive tears shine in all eyes...  No one equals him in power--he is God!  But such is not the lot, and other is the destiny of the writer who has dared to call forth all that is before our eyes every moment and which our indifferent eyes do not see--all the terrible, stupendous mire of trivia in which our life is entangled, the whole depth of cold, fragmented, everyday characters that swarm over our often bitter and boring earthly path, and with the firm strength of his implacable chisel dares to present them roundly and vividly before the eyes of all people!  It is not for him to win people's applause, not for him to behold the grateful tears and unanimous rapture of the souls he has stirred; no sixteen-year-old girl will come flying to meet him with her head in a whirl and heroic enthusiasm; it is not for him to forget himself in the sweet enchantment of sounds he has evoked; it is not for him, finally, to escape contemporary judgment, hypocritically callous contemporary judgment, which will call insignificant and mean the creations he has fostered, will allot him a contemptible corner in the ranks of writers who insult mankind, will ascribe to him the qualities of the heroes he has portrayed, will deny him heart, and soul, and the divine flame of talent.  For contemporary judgment does not recognize that equally wondrous are the glasses that observe the sun and look at the movement of inconspicuous insects; for contemporary judgment does not recognize that much depth of soul is needed to light up the picture drawn from contemptible life and elevate it into a pearl of creation; for contemporary judgment does not recognize that lofty ecstatic laughter is worthy to stand beside the lofty lyrical impulse, and that a whole abyss separates it from the antics of the street-fair clown!  This contemporary judgment does not recognize; and will turn it all into a reproach and abuse of the unrecognized writer; with no sharing, no response, no sympathy, like a familyless wayfarer, he will be left alone in the middle of the road.  Grim is his path, and bitterly will he feel his solitude (133-134).

 

Although Gogol doesn't need any seconds in what's obviously at least in part a Man vs. Cliché duel that's going on here in this discussion of the writer's métier, it'll help you to better appreciate one of the finer offscreen aspects of his wit if I mention that this paragraph follows a preceding one in which the money-hungry, social climber Chichikov is said to be "in the merriest spirits."  Gogol then compares his creation to a dreamy 20-year old with romantic visions of Spain who "is in heaven and has come calling on Schiller" before reality returns and "lands him back on earth, and even on Haymarket Square, and even near a pot-house, and workaday life again goes strutting before him" (131-132).  From here, it's but a short, unencumbered stroll to the duel assignation spot in the paragraph above from whence, mockingly employing both rhetorical topoi and language like a kinder, gentler version of the Comte de Lautréamont, Gogol humorously takes aim at contemporary writers and readers for only wanting to indulge in an altered version of reality--and a hypocritically sanitized one at that.  It's all pretty lighthearted as far as reproaches go, but wait, did the author really just call readers the "poor, insignificant brethren" of one type of writer and then insultingly compare human life to "the movement of inconspicuous insects" under his own writer's glass?  More on Dead Souls later in the week if, for nothing else, the chance to share a couple of other extended paragraph highlights with you.  To tide you over until then, here's a semi-random example of Gogol's mastery of the shorter, punchier, less-cerebral sentence format: "The party ended, as usual, with a fight" (196). 

Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852)

 

Other Dead Souls group read posts

Scott G.F. Bailey of six words for a hat

stout individuals never take a back seat

"Ha, ha, ha!" he cried with a gesture of astonishment: Dead Souls of La Mancha

soaring high above all other geniuses in the world

It would be better for the reader, if he is willing, to make up the end of that story for himself



The Foundation Pit

The Foundation Pit [Kotlovan] (NYRB Classics, 2009)
by Andrey Platonov [translated from the Russian by Robert & Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson]
USSR, 1987 & 1994

"And who might you be?" asked the old man, folding his respectful face for an attentive expression.  "Are you a swindler...or simply a bourgeois boss?"

"I'm...I'm from the proletariat," reluctantly announced Chiklin.

"Aha--today's tsar!  In that case, I'll wait for you."

(The Foundation Pit, 47)

I finished The Foundation Pit--named after the novel's not so subtle symbolic fictional foundation pit for a future, indestructible, all-proletarian, and never to be completed workers' dwelling that just might double for the Soviet Socialist Republic's grave--a few weeks back and liked it well enough despite its occasional heavyhandedness, I suppose.  However, it's really too bad that the novel's had to follow on the heels of Karl Kraus Week in the reviewing queue because not everybody can do disgruntled political satire and social commentary quite like Herr Kraus can.  Nein!  In any event, a reviewer from The Irish Times has I think rightly pegged Platonov's book, begun in the late 1920s but not published as a complete text until 1994, as an "absurdist parable."  Ditto for translators Robert Chandler and Olga Meerson, who in their afterword to the novel describe the work as "a philosophical fable" but one in which "the world [that] Platonov evokes...is a hell where both language and labor have lost their meaning, where nearly every character is alienated from his own self, and where acts of violence are seen by both perpetrators and victims as the most normal thing in the world" (157-158).  Assuming you like absurdist philosophical fables much more than I do, this all sounds great and sometimes is.  Those not so fond of absurdist poli sci schtick may well be bored at times, though.  Since Platonov probably amused me a little more often than he frustrated me, I'll try to stay positive here.  What I liked best about the work is the way it brings the recently fired/"made redundant" factory worker Vohschev (1) into contact with a cross-section of Soviet society at the height of the collectivization efforts and the terror famine--what Chandler and Meerson refer to as "among the greatest--but also the least acknowledged--catastrophes of Soviet history" (153).  This historic backdrop lends gravitas to what's occasionally some less than riveting storytelling, but on the other hand Platonov must have done something right to eventually make me feel sympathy for the orphan girl Nastya who is introduced announcing "kill the kulaks" and things of that nature.  What did I like least about the work?  Well, I guess I'm just not all that into the absurdist political humor scene, comrade.  Nyet. Also, there's nothing raw or visceral about the writing here unlike what you'd find in an alienation-fixated contemporary like Arlt or Broch: Platonov's daring is all about his themes, not his rather spaced out language.  One possible exception--Nastya, rejoicing that a big black bear "was on our side and not on the bourgeoisie's," asks a memorable question on page 108: "He suffers too...so that means he's for Stalin, doesn't it?"

Andrey Platonov (1899-1951)

I read The Foundation Pit as 1/2 of a two-man group read with Dwight from A Common Reader--hope that he will have a response of his own to the novel up soon.

Self-Admiration

"Self-Admiration"
by Karl Kraus [translated from the German by Helene Scher]
Austria, 1908

Since Tom from Wuthering Expectations has already sufficiently immortalized both Kraus' caustic aphorisms and his only half-translated but yet doubly apocalyptic play The Last Days of Mankind, I'd like to exit stage right from my formal participation in Karl Kraus Week with a quick look at Kraus' delirious self-encomium innocuously titled "Self-Admiration."  Before we begin, though, I should probably admit that one of the questions that's been increasingly nagging me during my 33-page introduction to the Austrian wiseass this week--although one that I've been more or less assiduously avoiding anyway--is trying to determine where the slippery satirist ends and where the full-on real life nutjob begins.  Is such a thing even possible to pinpoint?  In his introduction to the Kraus et al. anthology that I've been using, Dirck Linck, while not exactly answering my question, at least gives me the comfort of knowing that even sage specialists have taken late Kraus' literary aims seriously within their particular regional and temporal contexts: "What Kraus, Broch, and Canetti present in their works is a symptomatology of the epochal violence that was clearing the ground for the terrors of National Socialism.  It is no coincidence, therefore, that both Broch and Canetti backed up their literary works with significant theoretical reflections on mass psychology, jurisprudence, and politics, all aimed at the totalitarian disposition of the century" (x).  "Self-Admiration," it will soon become clear, is an apolitical early work that has nothing to do with "the totalitarian disposition of the century" or anything like that although I do like the sound of the description enough to repeat it.  That being said, can the five-page essay get us any closer to identifying where the artist ends and the con artist begins when it comes to Kraus' idiosyncratic aesthetic disposition?  Ridiculously, I'm not really sure!  Kraus begins his lively but problematic essay with two epigraphs, one from Schopenhauer and one--devilishly--from Kraus himself.  The latter: "Self-admiration is permissible if the self is beautiful.  It becomes an obligation if the reflecting mirror is a good one."  Before the laughter has died down, Kraus assails the reader with yet another back-patting brick through the window in his opening sentence: "That I accept the reproach of self-admiration as the observation of a character trait well known to me and that I respond, not with contrition, but by continuing the provocation--this my readers should know by now" (19).  In what follows, Kraus makes the argument--ironic perhaps but just how ironic?--that it's not wrong for him to be arrogant or vain given his talent level.  "Viennese intellectuals ought to be grateful to me for having taken the trouble off their shoulders and preserved their reputation" he writes.  "Whoever gladly dispenses with praise from the multitude, will not deny himself the chance to be his own partisan" he adds (ibid.).  Lambasting the Viennese critics who "are hiding their respect for me, which grows greater by the day, behind the cowardly mask of convention," Kraus then drops two tasty autobiographical tidbits about how he and his one-man newspaper were apparently perceived by some in his early 20th century audience, claiming that "I am considered to be merely a watchdog for the corrupt machinations of a city" in one paragraph and that he is "an author who publishes his diary as a periodical" in another (20).  If it's hard to know how much Kraus was joking at this remove in time, perhaps the question doesn't really matter all that much anyway.  For it's hard not to like a writer who can conceive of his oeuvre as a diary and who will defend himself from the accusation from "riffraff" that "my preoccupation with myself, my position, my books, and my enemies" takes up half his "literary activity" when he himself readily admits, "it takes up all of my literary activity" (23).  I, for one, am sorry that Karl Kraus Week has come to a close.

Source

Thanks again to Tom for inciting me to read the irrepressible crackpot Karl Kraus as part of Wuthering Expectations' The Austrian Literature Non-Challenge.  Tom's final post this week,  "Kraus the prophet - Don't ask why all this time I never spoke," pays a fitting tribute to Kraus' complexity with some melancholy reflections on what finally silenced "one of the few true satirists." "Self-Admiration" can be found on pages 19-23 of Dirck Linck, ed., Selected Short Writings: Karl Kraus, Hermann Broch, Elias Canetti, Robert Walser (New York & London: Continuum, 2006).  Kraus: "The world considers it more important for someone not to regard his work as great than that it be great."  Goethe, as quoted by Kraus: "Only good-for-nothings are modest" (22-23).

Tourist Trips to Hell

"Tourist Trips to Hell"
by Karl Kraus [translated from the German by Frederick Ungar]
Austria, 1920

"I didn't ask for sunshine, and I got World War III."

Sex Pistols, "Holidays in the Sun"

If "The Cross of Honor," a homily on some of the idiocies of Austrian prostitution laws c. 1909, was a good example of a rather frisky and witty Karl Kraus, the later "Tourist Trips to Hell" is an excellent example of an altogether different Herr Kraus: angry, indignant, denunciatory...punk?  Our hero, you see, wasn't much of a fan of World War I nor of the motley collection of culture-less entities variously gathered under the rubric of mankind.  Two out of two ain't bad, eh?  "I have in my hands a document that surpasses and seals the shame of this age, and would warrant assigning a place of honor in a cosmic boneyard to this money-hungry mess that calls itself mankind.  If ever a newspaper clipping meant a clipping of creation--here we face the utter certainty that a generation to which such solicitations could be directed no longer has any better instincts to be violated" (4).  The newspaper clipping in question, a two-page spread from the Basel, Switzerland rag Basler Nachrichten pimping "BATTLEFIELD EXCURSION TRIPS BY CAR!" in oversized type to woo just-post WWI vacationers to visit the battlefield at Verdun in order to understand "the quintessence of the horror of modern warfare" in between guided tours and sumptuous dining "with ample meals at first-rate restaurants" for the all-inclusive price of 117 Swiss francs (6-7), is an outrage that prompts Kraus to mock it in ad-like bullet points by comparing it to a sort of media version of Verdun in which "this most gruesome spectacle of bloody delirium through which the nations let themselves be dragged to no purpose whatsoever" pales in comparison with the "enormity" of the offending ad (4).  Overkill?  Not the way Kraus sings it, anticipating the Sex Pistols' formulation of "a cheap holiday in other people's misery" only sans jackboots and power chords. In any event, the following bullet points, all lifted from pages 5 and 8 of Kraus' broadside, will allow you to decide for yourself what a tourist trip to hell might look like:

• You receive a newspaper in the morning.
• You will learn that 1,500,000 bled to death exactly at the spot where wine and coffee--and everything else--are included.
• You understand that all this came about so that some day, when nothing was left of the glory except moral bankruptcy, at least a battlefield par excellence would still be available.
• You realize that what the competition can offer--the Argonne and Somme battles, the boneyards of Rheims and St. Mihiel--is a mere trifle compared with the first-class offering of the Basler Nachrichten.  They will doubtless succeed to fatten their list of subscribers using the casualties of Verdun.
• You realize that these nations have criminal laws to protect the life and even the honor of these press scoundrels who make a mockery of death and a profit out of catastrophe, and who particularly recommend this side trip to hell as an autumn special.
• You will have unforgettable impressions of a world in which there is no single square centimeter not rutted by shells and advertisements.
• And if, even then, you have not recognized that your very birth has brought you into a murderers' pit and that a mankind which profanes even the blood it shed is shot through and through with evil, and that there is no escaping it and no help--then the devil take you to a battlefield par excellence!

Source

"Tourist Trips to Hell," "reviewed" for Tom's Karl Kraus week, appears on pages 4-8 of editor Dirck Linck's Selected Short Writings: Karl Kraus, Hermann Broch, Elias Canetti, Robert Walser (New York & London: Continuum, 2006).  Tom's own latest writings on Kraus can be read about here and here.