Edge of Irony

Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire

Marjorie Perloff

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780226328492
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Among the brilliant writers and thinkers who emerged from the multicultural and multilingual world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For them, the trauma of World War I included the sudden loss of the geographical entity into which they had been born: in 1918, the empire was dissolved overnight, leaving Austria a small, fragile republic that would last only twenty years before being annexed by Hitler's Third Reich. In this major reconsideration of European modernism, Marjorie Perloff identifies and explores the aesthetic world that emerged from the rubble of Vienna and other former Habsburg territories—an "Austro-Modernism" that produced a major body of drama, fiction, poetry, and autobiography.Perloff explores works ranging from Karl Kraus's drama The Last Days of Mankind and Elias Canetti's memoir The Tongue Set Free to Ludwig Wittgenstein's notebooks and Paul Celan's lyric poetry. Throughout, she shows that Austro-Modernist literature is characterized less by the formal and technical inventions of a modernism familiar to us in the work of Joyce and Pound, Dada and Futurism, than by a radical irony beneath a seemingly conventional surface, an acute sense of exile, and a sensibility more erotic and quixotic than that of its German contemporaries. Skeptical and disillusioned, Austro-Modernism prefers to ask questions rather than formulate answers.

CHAPTER ONE

The Mediated War

Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind

My business is to pin down the Age between quotation marks.

What has been proposed here is nothing less than a drainage system for the huge swamps of phraseology.

KARL KRAUS, Die Fackel1

Act 1, scene 1. The stage directions read, “Vienna. Ringstrasse at Sirk Corner. Flags wave from the buildings. Loud acclamation for soldiers marching by universal excitement. The crowd breaks up into small groups.” The newsboys with their “Extra, Extra,” announcing the outbreak of war, are interrupted by a drunk demonstrator who shouts, “Down with Serbia! Hurrah for the Habsburgs! Hurrah! For S-e-r-bia!” and is immediately kicked in the pants for his mistake. A crook and a prostitute exchange insults, as two army contractors, talking of possible bribes the rich will use to avoid the draft, cite Bismarck’s words, in the Neue Freie Presse (Vienna’s major newspaper at the time of the assassination of the archduke in Serbia), to the effect that the Austrians deserve kissing. One officer tells another that war is “unanwendbar” (of no use) when he really means, as his friend points out, “unabwendbar” (unavoidable). A patriotic citizen praises the coming conflict as a holy war of defense against “encirclement” by hostile forces, and the crowd responds by making up rhymes (in Viennese dialect), denigrating the enemy:

STIMMEN AUS DER MENGE: Serbien muß sterbien . . . A jeder muß Sterbien!

EINER AUS DER MENGE: Und a jeder Ruß—

EIN ANDERER (brülend):—ein Genuß!

EIN DRITTER: An Stuß! (Gelächter)

EIN VIERTER: An Schuß!

DER ZWEITE: Und a jeder Franzos?

DER DRITTE: A Roß! (Gelächter)

DER VIERTE: An Stoß!

ALLE: Bravo! An Stoß! So is!

DER DRITTE: Und a jeder Tritt—na, jeder Britt!

DER VIERTE: An Tritt!

ALLE: Sehr guat! An Britt für jeden Tritt! Bravo!

VOICES IN THE CROWD: Serbia must die. . . . Each one must die.

MAN IN THE CROWD: And every Rusky

ANOTHER: (shouting): Fun for usky!

A THIRD: What a hoot! (laughter)

A FOURTH: In with the boot!

THE SECOND: And every Frog?

THE THIRD: Dies like a dog. (laughter)

THE FOURTH: Kick him!

ALL: BRAVO! Kick him!

THE THIRD: Kick after kick—for every Britt!

THE FOURTH: Attention!

ALL: Terr-ific! A Britt for every kick! Bravo!2

If this dialogue, written in 1915, strikes us as cleverly mimetic of street slang, think again. For the rhymed insults of the Russians, French, and British were actually taken from a German cartoon postcard (August 25, 1914), in which two soldiers wearing spiked helmets (here designated as Willi and Karl) are attacking the enemy (figure 2).3

Figure 2. “Jeder Tritt ein Britt.” Postcard featuring a drawing by A. H. “Feldpostbrief,” Crefeld, August 25, 1914.

Reframed, the verses appear in what is probably the first—and perhaps the most remarkable—documentary drama written: Karl Kraus’s devastating Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind). Kraus’s dialogue, as in the scene above, sounds colloquial and nothing if not “natural,” representing as it does a variety of linguistic registers based on social class, ethnicity, geographical origin, and profession. But a large part of the play is drawn from actual documents, whether newspaper dispatches, editorials, public proclamations, minutes of political meetings, or manifestos, letters, picture postcards, and interviews—indeed, whatever constituted the written record of the World War I years. “The most improbable deeds reported here,” writes Kraus in his preface, “actually took place. . . . The most implausible conversations in this play were spoken verbatim; the shrillest inventions are quotations” (Russell, 20; LTM, 9). The technique is montage: quotations from Shakespeare and Goethe are interspersed with cabaret song, patriotic ode, tableau vivant, vaudeville, puppet play, and, in the later acts, even photomontage so as to create a strange hybrid—part tragedy, part operetta, part carnival, part political tract—in which “high” and “low” come together in a new blend. “A document,” as Kraus puts it, “is a character; reports rise up as living forms while the living die as editorials; the feuilleton gains a mouth and delivers its own monologue; clichés stand on two legs—some men are left with only one” (Russell, 20–21; LTM, 9). And throughout, the comic, the hilarious, the grotesque, the surreal dominate. “In Berlin,” as Kraus had famously quipped, “things are serious but not hopeless. In Vienna, they are hopeless but not serious.”4

In his analysis of the role the media play in disseminating the case for war, Kraus is startlingly contemporary: turn on CNN at this moment and you find yourself witnessing the spin familiar to readers of Kraus’s devastating exposures of mediaspeak in his own famous paper Die Fackel (plate 4) as well as in Last Days of Mankind—a spin made possible, as Kraus knew only too well, by the simple fact that journalists are never held responsible for the accuracy of their reports, much less their predictions. When, for example, CNN’s Anderson Cooper was covering the Egyptian uprising of January 2011, he couldn’t say enough about the marvels of the Arab Spring with its “Facebook Revolution” and ostensible thirst for “democracy.” Today, with the el-Sisi military dictatorship in full command, Cooper’s evening dispatches almost wholly ignore the Egyptian situation (there’s now ISIS and Syria to cover!), as if the CNN anchor had always known the Arab Spring was doomed. How information is disseminated in a world where truth is subject to the daily news cycle: this is the condition Kraus tackled with uncanny prescience.

The large-scale reliance on citation and documentary “evidence” distinguishes The Last Days of Mankind from its avant-garde counterparts in Russia, Italy, and France. Unlike the zaum (beyond-sense) poetry of the Russian avant-garde, unlike the parole in libertà and “destruction of syntax” of Italian Futurism, or the fragmentation, hyperbolic “non-sense,” and elaborate verbal play of Dada, in both its French and German incarnations,5 Kraus’s writing opts for the seeming transparency of coherent sentences and “normal” paragraphs. His political manifestos in Die Fackel are written in straightforward prose rather than experimenting with innovative typographical page design as do F. T. Marinetti and Tristan Tzara. But Kraus’s satiric vision depends as much as theirs upon the technology and dissemination of printed matter only recently made available to poets and artists of his moment, and he made the most of it so as to convey what Karl Kraus called the unimaginable—a world of war whose purpose was never really defined and yet which literally shattered the lives of the empire’s citizenry. Indeed, rupture for the citizens of the Dual Monarchy was much more extreme than for Germany, which did not, after all, forfeit its basic identity: its geographic and ethnic prewar contours, like those of France and Great Britain, remained essentially intact.

The unimaginable had been anticipated by Kraus as soon as the war broke out in August 1914. In Die Fackel for December 5, 1914, the lead article was called “In dieser großen Zeit” and begins as follows:

In this great Time

which I still remember when it was so small; which will become small again if there is enough time, and which, because in the realm of organic growth no such transformation is possible, we prefer to address as a fat time and also a hard time; in this time where the very thing happens that one could not imagine, and in which that must happen which one can no longer imagine, and could one imagine it, it wouldn’t happen—; in this serious time which died laughing at the possibility that it could become serious: which, surprised by its tragedy, longed for distraction, and which, catching itself engaging in some new action, searches for words; in this loud time, which threatens to disclose the horrible symphony of deeds, to bring forward reports—reports that lead to action: in this time you should not expect a single word from me. . . . Let him who has something to say come forward and be silent.6

The unimaginable war is not mentioned once in this anti-manifesto, which generates mutations on the word time (Zeit), repeated here eight times—a time that from Kraus’s particular perspective was entirely out of joint. His, it should be noted, was a wholly atypical reaction to the Great War: from Rainer Marie Rilke’s patriotic “Fünf Gesange” (“Five Songs”), which begins with the words “Zum ersten Mal seh ich dich aufstehn / hörengesagter fernster unglaublicher Krieger-Gott” (For the first time I see you stand up / you legendary most distant unbelievable Warrior-God), to Hugo von Hoffmansthal’s “Österreich’s Antwort” (Austria’s Reply), the initial response of Austrian writers to the outbreak of war was enthusiastic support. Even Robert Musil, later to take such a different stance, wrote in 1914,

A new feeling was born. . . . A stunning sense of belonging tore our hearts from our hands. . . . Now we feel gathered into a ball, fused together by an inexpressible humility, in which the individual suddenly counts for nothing besides his elementary task of defending the tribe. This feeling must always have been present: it has now awakened . . . a bliss; and over and above its earnestness, a huge security and joy.7

Here and elsewhere Austrian writers echoed their German counterparts, the most famous (or perhaps infamous) example being Thomas Mann, whose 1914 essay “Thoughts in Wartime” (“Gedanken im Kriege”) argued that the resort to war was entirely justified, a tremendous creative event that would bring about national unity, moral elevation, and the values of genuine “culture,” as represented by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wagner, vis-à-vis the shallow “civilization” of a corrupt France and England.8

When, in the late war years, artists and writers began to understand the very real horror of the Great War, they turned their attention from politics and culture to the ordeal of those who had actually fought in the trenches. Here the most striking German work was Ernst Jünger’s The Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern) of 1920, with its graphic account of frontline combat. By the time Eric Maria Remarque’s pacifist All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen Nichts Neues) was published in 1928, the mood had shifted completely. “This book,” says Remarque in a headnote to what was to become an international best seller and later a celebrated film, “is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try...