The Kraus Project

Jonathan Franzen

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780007517459
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Colecciones literarias europeas

NOTES

Heine and the Consequences (1910)

1. Along with Goethe, Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) was the most famous German literary figure of the nineteenth century. He was known not for his novels (he didn’t write any) or his drama (his plays were never much produced) or his thinking (it was deliberately unsystematic) but for his lyric poetry and for the characteristic wit and irony of his reportage and travel writing and polemics. His countrymen could all quote his witticisms (e.g., “The more I get to know people, the more I like dogs”) and recite his poems (an extraordinary number of them were set to music), and his style and attitudes made him an attractive figure internationally. Although he had some of Norman Mailer’s pugnacity and political ambition and talent for self-advertisement, and some of Mark Twain’s quotability, his posthumous reputation probably bears better comparison with a figure like Bob Dylan than with that of any writer. To his many admirers, especially in France, Heine’s flight in 1831 from German repression to Parisian “exile” was a moment of iconic significance akin to Dylan’s switch to electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Like Dylan, Heine was a Jew who converted to Christianity (for Heine, it was an early and humiliating career exigency), but in the eyes of his readers he remained distinctively a Jew, and the reader of this essay should keep in mind that Karl Kraus’s attempted demolition of Heine’s reputation was not simply an assault on a pop hero of Dylanesque stature but a salvo in the cultural wars of antisemitism and Zionism that were raging in Germany and Austria at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The non-German-speaking reader may want to know that “Heine” rhymes with “mynah.”
Karl Kraus (1874–1936) was an Austrian satirist and a central figure in fin de siècle Vienna’s famously rich life of the mind. From 1899 until his death, Kraus edited and published the influential magazine Die Fackel (The Torch); from 1911 onward, he was also the magazine’s sole author. Although Kraus would probably have hated blogs, Die Fackel was like a blog that pretty much everybody who mattered in the German-speaking world, from Freud to Kafka to Walter Benjamin, found it necessary to read and have an attitude toward. In Kraus’s many aphorisms, he was no less quotable than Heine—“To be sure, a dog is loyal. But why should that make it an example for us? It’s loyal to man, not to other dogs.”—and at the height of his popularity he drew thousands to his public readings.
In later footnotes I’ll recount how I fell under Kraus’s spell and undertook to translate the essay/polemic/satire/manifesto “Heine and the Consequences,” which appeared as a pamphlet in 1910 and in Die Fackel in 1911 and which, like much of Kraus’s best work, has hitherto frightened off English translators. For now, let me just make a small plea for patience with Kraus’s prose. He’s hard to read in German, too—deliberately hard. He was the scourge of throwaway journalism and a stickler for the interpenetration of form and content, and to his followers (he had a cultlike following) his dense and intricately coded style formed an agreeable barrier to entry; it kept the uninitiated out. Kraus himself remarked of the critic and playwright Adolf Bartels, whom he’ll be attacking here, “If he understands one sentence of the essay, I’ll retract the entire thing.” When I first read Kraus, I was baffled by a lot of his sentences. But as I reread him and began to figure out what he was up to, the sentences suddenly popped into clear focus, one after another, until eventually I could understand almost all of them; it was like learning a foreign language.
And Kraus is foreign, more so than his better-known contemporaries, because his work was so particularly tied to his own time and place—to long-forgotten controversies, to rivals now obscure, to newspapers and literary works that only scholars read anymore. And yet, paradoxically, Kraus has more to say to us in our own media-saturated, technology-crazed, apocalypse-haunted historical moment than his more accessible contemporaries now do. He himself was well aware of the paradox: he was a farseeing prophet whose work was always focused on what was right in front of him. He was, very consciously, speaking to us; but to be able to hear him we have to know what he was talking about. I’ve therefore mustered a large corps of footnotes to elucidate his topical and literary references, to offer some shortcuts to deciphering his sentences, to give an account of the angry young person I was when I first read him, and to suggest some ways in which his work might matter to the world we live in now.

2. In the dichotomy of “Romance” versus “German,” which runs throughout this essay, “Romance” refers to “Romance language” or “Latin,” particularly French or Italian.
Paul Reitter, the distinguished Kraus scholar and the author of the more learned of these footnotes, points out that the line about the “barren window frames” is taken from Schiller’s poem “The Song of the Bell” (“Das Lied von der Glocke”). Kraus is constantly, and without attribution, quoting and echoing texts that would have been familiar to his audience but are mostly not familiar to foreign readers a century later.

3. Kraus’s suspicion of the “melody of life” in France and Italy still has merit. His contention here—that walking down a street in Paris or Rome is an aesthetic experience in itself—is confirmed by the ongoing popularity of France and Italy as vacation destinations and by the “envy me” tone of American Francophiles and Italophiles announcing their travel plans. If you say you’re taking a trip to Germany, you’d better be able to explain what specifically you’re planning to do there, or else people will wonder why you’re not going someplace where life is beautiful. Even now, Germany insists on content over form. If the concept of coolness had existed in Kraus’s time, he might have said that Germany is uncool.
This suggests a more contemporary version of Kraus’s dichotomy: Mac versus PC. Isn’t the essence of the Apple product that you achieve coolness simply by virtue of owning it? It doesn’t even matter what you’re creating on your MacBook Air. Simply using a MacBook Air, experiencing the elegant design of its hardware and software, is a pleasure in itself, like walking down a street in Paris. Whereas, when you’re working on some clunky, utilitarian PC, the only thing to enjoy is the quality of your work itself. As Kraus says of Germanic life, the PC “sobers” what you’re doing; it allows you to see it unadorned. This was especially true in the years of DOS operating systems and early Windows.
One of the developments that Kraus will decry—the dolling-up of German language and culture with decorative elements imported from Romance language and culture—has a correlative in more recent editions of Windows, which borrow ever more features from Apple but still can’t conceal their essential uncool Windowsness. Worse yet, in chasing after Apple elegance, they betray the old austere beauty of PC functionality. They still don’t work as well as Macs do, and they’re ugly by both cool and utilitarian standards.
And yet, to echo Kraus, I’d still rather live among PCs. Any chance that I might have switched to Apple was negated by the famous and long-running series of Apple ads aimed at persuading people like me to switch. The argument—that Macs are pretty, easy to use, free of bugs, unsusceptible to viruses, etc.—was eminently reasonable, but it was delivered by a personified Mac (played by the actor Justin Long) of such insufferable smugness that he made the miseries of Windows attractive by comparison. You wouldn’t want to read a novel about the Mac: what would there be to say except that everything is groovy? Characters in novels need to have actual desires; and the character in the Apple ads who had desires was the PC, played by John Hodgman. His attempts to defend himself and to pass himself off as cool were funny, and he suffered, like a human being. To return to Kraus’s dichotomy, I could easily imagine the PC being played by a German actor and the Mac by a Frenchman, never the other way around.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t add that the concept of “cool” has been so fully coopted by the tech industries that some adjacent word like “hip” is needed to describe those online voices who proceeded to hate on Justin Long and deem John Hodgman to be the cool one. The restlessness of who or what is considered hip nowadays may be an artifact of what Marx famously identified as the “restless” nature of capitalism. One of the worst things about the Internet is that it tempts everyone to be a sophisticate—to take positions on what is hip and to consider, under pain of being considered unhip, the positions that everyone else is taking. Kraus may not have cared about hipness per se, but he certainly reveled in taking positions and was keenly attuned to the positions of others. He was a sophisticate, and this is one reason Die Fackel has a bloglike feel. Kraus spent a lot of time reading stuff he hated, so as to be able to hate it with authority.

4. You’re not allowed to say things like this in America nowadays, no matter how much the billion (or is it two billion now?) “individualized” Facebook pages may make you want to say them. Kraus was known, in his day, to his many enemies, as the Great Hater. By most accounts he was a tender and generous man in his private life, with many loyal friends. But once he starts winding the stem of his polemical rhetoric, it carries him into extremely harsh registers.
(“Harsh,” incidentally, is a fun word to say with a slacker inflection. To be harsh is to be uncool; and in the world of coolness and uncoolness—the high-school-cafeteria social scene of Gawker takedowns and Twitter popularity contests—the highest register that cultural criticism can safely reach is snark. Snark, indeed, is cool’s twin sibling.)
As the essay will make clear, the individualized “blockheads” that Kraus has in mind here aren’t hoi polloi. Although Kraus could sound like an elitist, and although he considered the right-wing antisemites idiotic, he wasn’t in the business of denigrating the masses or lowbrow culture; the calculated difficulty of his writing wasn’t a barricade against the barbarians. It was aimed, instead, at bright and well-educated cultural authorities who embraced a phony kind of individuality—people Kraus believed ought to have known better.
It’s not clear that Kraus’s shrill, ex cathedra denunciations were the most effective way to change hearts and minds. But I confess to feeling some version of his disappointment when a novelist who I believe ought to have known better, Salman Rushdie, succumbs to Twitter. Or when a politically committed print magazine that I respect, n+1, denigrates print magazines as terminally “male,” celebrates the Internet as “female,” and somehow neglects to consider the Internet’s accelerating pauperization of freelance writers. Or when good lefty professors who once resisted alienation—who criticized capitalism for its restless assault on every tradition and every community that gets in its way—start calling the corporatized Internet “revolutionary,” happily embrace Apple computers, and persist in gushing about their virtues.

5. Submerged in this paragraph is the implication that Vienna, which was Kraus’s great subject, was an in-between case. Its language and orientation were German, but it was the co-capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was Roman Catholic and reached far into southern Europe, and it was in love with its own notion of its special, charming Viennese spirit and lifestyle. (“The streets of Vienna are paved with culture,” goes one of Kraus’s aphorisms. “The streets of other cities with asphalt.”) To Kraus, the supposed cultural charm of Vienna amounted to a tissue of hypocrisies stretched over profound and soon-to-be-catastrophic contradictions, which he was bent on unmasking with his satire. The essay’s opening paragraph may come down harder on Latin culture than on German, but Kraus was actually fond of vacationing in Italy and had some of his most romantic experiences there. For him, the place with the really dangerous disconnect between content and form was Austria, which was rapidly modernizing and industrializing while retaining early-nineteenth-century political and social models. Kraus, being a newsman manqué, was obsessed with the role of modern newspapers in papering over the contradictions. Like the Hearst papers in America, the bourgeois Viennese press had immense political and financial influence and was demonstrably corrupt. (Kraus devoted much of his early career to exposing its corruption, gleefully naming names.) Although, unlike Hearst, who created the Spanish-American War in 1898, the Viennese press never succeeded in directly starting a conflict, it profited greatly from the First World War and was instrumental in sustaining charming Viennese myths like the “hero’s death” through years of mechanized slaughter. The Great War was precisely the Austrian apocalypse that Kraus had been prophesying, and he relentlessly satirized the press’s complicity in it.
Vienna in 1910 was, thus, a special case. And yet you could argue that America in 2013 is a similarly special case: another weakened empire telling itself stories of its exceptionalism while it drifts toward apocalypse of some sort, fiscal or epidemiological, climatic-environmental or thermonuclear. Our Far Left may hate religion and think we coddle Israel, our Far Right may hate illegal immigrants and think we coddle black people, and nobody may know how the economy is supposed to work now that our manufacturing jobs have gone overseas, but the actual substance of our daily lives is total electronic distraction. We can’t face the real problems; we spent a trillion dollars not really solving a problem in Iraq that wasn’t really a problem; we can’t even agree on how to keep health-care costs from devouring the GNP. What we can all agree to do instead is to deliver ourselves to the cool new media and technologies, to Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, and to let them profit at our expense. Our situation looks quite a bit like Vienna’s in 1910, except that newspaper technology (telephone, telegraph, the high-speed printing press) has been replaced by digital technology and Viennese charm by American coolness.

6. From Jewry to Romant...