Oskar Kokoschka's 1925 portrait of Karl Kraus. Oil on canvas, 65 x 100 cm, Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna.
When, in these great times, I’m in need of encouragement and inspiration, I often turn back to Viennese satirist Karl Kraus (1874-1936), who in his 1919 masterpiece The Last Days of Mankind presented readers with a five-act tragedy limning the death of the spirit in the years leading up to the First World War. As a journalist he founded Die Fackel (The Torch) in 1899, a red-covered journal (you can see it under Kraus’ left hand in Oskar Kokoschka’s portrait of the writer above) which, after 1911, he wrote entirely on his own: “I no longer have collaborators,” he joked at the time. “I used to be envious of them. They repel those readers whom I want to lose myself.”
Kraus listed his themes at one point as: “Sex and untruth, stupidity, abuses, cadences and clichés, printer’s ink, technology, death, war and society, usury, politics, the insolence of office … art and nature, love and dreams,” castigating politics as “what a man does in order to conceal what he is and what he himself does not know.” Along with his literary career, Kraus was also a playwright; in 1929 Peter Lorre starred in Die Unüberwindlichen at Vienna’s Volksbühne, a satire of Vienna’s police chief whom Kraus held responsible for the deaths of ninety people during a street demonstration; the play was shut down after one performance. He also had a long career as a solo performer (he gave over seven hundred performances over 44 years), long before the likes of Spalding Gray and Mike Daisey, reciting from not only his own works but also those of Brecht, Goethe and Shakespeare to large enthusiastic audiences. A champion of Schoenberg and critical foe of Freud, he and his works were central influences on Wittgenstein and others.
Above all Kraus conceived of the precision of language as essential, well-aware that the corruption of language is the corruption of the soul, even when it came to spelling and punctuation. Austrian composer Ernst Krenek remembered a meeting with the writer:
At a time when one was generally decrying the bombardment of Shanghai by the Japanese, I met Karl Kraus struggling over one of his famous comma problems. He said something like: I know that everything is futile when the house is burning. But I have to do this, as long as it is at all possible; for if those who are obliged to look after commas had always made sure they were in the right place, then Shanghai would not be burning.
His work for many years has been considered as untranslatable and few volumes are available in English; however, a Penguin Classics anthology has been rumored for years, and several out-of-print volumes (an abridgement of The Last Days of Mankind and two anthologies, No Compromise and In These Great Times) reflect the spirit of Kraus’ work quite well. In print there is a single volume of Kraus’ aphorisms. The standard English language biography is the magisterial two-volume Karl Kraus: Apocalpytic Satirist by Edward Timms (volume one is available from amazon.com here, volume two is here). And for German speakers the entire 1899-1936 run of Die Fackel is available online (registration is free). Wikipedia’s page on Karl Kraus is a useful introduction for those not familiar with the writer.
Would that we had Kraus with us today; how fortunate for him that he is not. “Unhappy is the land that has no heroes!” says Galileo’s student Andreas in the Bertolt Brecht play. “No,” Galileo corrects him: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”