Category Archives: Karl Kraus

Silence and withdrawal in these great times

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Oskar Kokoschka, Karl Kraus II. 1925. Oil on canvas, 65 x 100 cm. Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna

I live in an era of decline and inhabit a doomed domain.
–Karl Kraus[1]

The concept that this is the most advanced, the most progressive, of all times, rather than an era of the decline of the human spirit, does our hearts good and caresses our amour-propre. It is a consideration that arises from a profound misunderstanding of the biological functions of evolution, as well as the embrace of a central assumption of Hegelian history, and it gives moreover pride of place to the young. As the most recent inhabitants of a planet or a culture, we are therefore the best, knowing the most, and find the past disposable as a matter of aesthetic and moral consideration. Which is not to say that from our privileged position at the apex of human and cosmic development we can pick up those scraps which are most useful to us. We stand on the shoulders of giants, but still we see more than they, is the underlying assumption.

There is of course no basis in any sense for this assumption. If Karl Kraus touched a truth for himself and others of his sensibility in the early years of the 20th century with the observation above, then we enter not the fourth millennium of progress of the human spirit in these years but rather the second century of its decline. It is a sobering assessment, and Adorno, Benjamin and others, all of whom found in Kraus an exemplary spirit of their great times, extended his melancholy.

The role of art in a doomed society, if there is one, has been much on my mind recently, for it’s fair to ask what it may look like in an era of decline. I have never been able to embrace the Nietzschean solution for either art or life; no one who truly understands the truth that Schopenhauer expressed can ever properly do  so. David Ian Rabey in English Drama Since 1940 suggests that a central question for theatre in a declining society is “How do we live?” (And consequently and perhaps more relevant its corollary, “How do we die?”) Obviously any artistic expression must be a rear-guard action in this era; Expressionist, Neue Sachlichkeit and New Expressionist work, which foreground the expression of the individual spirit and the depths which sound its true identity, is one approach, and perhaps the most radically sound. But even this expression becomes more and more pointless and invisible, at least from the perspective of that declining culture, and it becomes harder and harder to justify the effort and the time required. It is not available to all of us to act as Klimt did when he withdrew his three great paintings for the University of Vienna and retreated into the extraordinary but more private beauty of his final period.

It may be that the Expressionist must now remain silent in a final gesture of antagonism to decline. Upon the beginning of the conflagration of the First World War, Kraus mourned the dead individual and dead culture in their initial stages of disintegration and decay, and as this second century of decline continues, his words echo perhaps more softly now, soon themselves no doubt to be consigned to nothingness:

In these great times which I knew when they were this small; which will become small again, provided they have time left for it; and which, because in the realm of organic growth no such transformation is possible, we had better call fat times and, truly, hard times as well; in these times in which things are happening that could not be imagined and in which what can no longer be imagined must happen, for if one could imagine it, it would not happen; in these serious times which have died laughing at the thought that they might become serious; which, surprised by their own tragedy, are reaching for diversion and, catching themselves redhanded, are groping for words; in these loud times which boom with the horrible symphony of actions which produce reports and of reports which cause actions: in these times you should not expect any words of my own from me — none but these words which barely manage to prevent silence from being misinterpreted. … In the realm of poverty of imagination where people die of spiritual famine without feeling spiritual hunger, where pens are dipped in blood and swords in ink, that which is not thought must be done, but that which is only thought is unutterable. Expect no words of my own from me. Nor would I be able to say anything new, for in the room in which one writes there is such noise, and at this time one should not determine whether it comes from animals, from children, or merely from mortars. He who encourages deeds with words desecrates words and deeds and is doubly despicable. … Let him who has something to say come forward and be silent![2]

And perhaps more blunt an epitaph — for his work, for the human spirit, for the culture and so many other things besides — is Kraus’s final poem, written on 13 September 1933 and which touches me particularly today for some reason:

Don’t ask why all this time I never spoke.
Wordless am I,
and won’t say why.
And silence reigns because the bedrock broke.
No word redeems;
one only speaks in dreams.
A smiling sun the sleeper’s images evoke.
Time marches on;
the final difference is none.
The word expired when that world awoke.[3]

Footnotes
  1. Quoted in Patrick Werkner, Austrian Expressionism: The Formative Years. Translated by Nicholas T. Parsons. Palo Alto, CA: The Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, 1993, p. 2. [↩]
  2. Karl Kraus, In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1990, pp. 70-71. [↩]
  3. Ibid., p. 259. [↩]

Remembering Jacob Bronowski

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Jacob BronowskiIn the late 1960s, the BBC began to commission a series of 13-part programs featuring “personal histories” of a variety of human endeavors. The first was Sir Kenneth Clark’s Civilization, which traced the evolution of humanity through its art and culture. Future programs, which proved extraordinarily successful in both Britain and the U.S. when they were presented on PBS, included The Shock of the New (Robert Hughes on modern and contemporary art), America (Alistair Cooke), The Age of Uncertainty (John Kenneth Galbraith on economics), and perhaps the most popular, Cosmos (Carl Sagan).

In the early 1970s, the BBC commissioned Jacob Bronowski to write and host The Ascent of Man, which traced the evolution of humanity through the history of its science. Bronowski was a polymath: professionally a mathematician and biologist, he was also an editor, critic (an expert on William Blake), chess expert and something of a raconteur. In 1939, he wrote this poem about Viennese satirist Karl Kraus:

“The Death of Karl Kraus”

Kraus died in time: before the God
he honored as his equal, who shot
Lorca, and brutally smashed
Mühsam’s delicate ears, washed
Vienna with his cleaning squads.

Now becomes God the anger which
Kraus spilled upon the dunged and rich
ferment Vienna. God also saw
the Danube spawn this medlar culture,
and plunged to drain it like a ditch.

Would Kraus to-night think it given
him as a grace, if he were driven
by boors to clean latrines? Or would
that bitter Jew pray for his God’s
forgiveness, but would not forgive?

O yes, the age which he disowned
was easy, ageing, overblown.
Kraus prayed an age sharp as day
might etch his eyes: who, had he stayed,
would see an age like night come down,

and sharp and savagely blind
the poet’s eyes, and splash his mind
bloody from a knacker’s wall.
Hate and terror walk the malls.
Below the city, torture mines

the cellars. O Mühsam, Lorca,
I call to you across the dark
age, ere my voice too is dumb.
Give courage when the headsmen come.
Give to the desecrated God
who Kraus unleashed, once more his manhood.
Give light where only ghosts, your ghosts are.

He considered The Ascent of Man, which was transmitted in 1973, just a year before his death, his crowning achievement. Covering science from the birth of mankind 400,000 years ago to contemporary advances in genetics and cloning, Bronowski’s overview introduced a general audience to the remarkable advances of mankind in understanding the world in which it pursued its aims.

It’s unfortunate that these series are rarely re-screened (though episodes of The Ascent of Man are available online here); the 13-hour format allowed for a depth of analysis unavailable to shorter forms; while The Civil War, Baseball and other Ken Burns documentaries may have emerged from them, few have joined unique personal perspectives to broad historical surveys and lack the idiosyncratic touch of these original BBC presentations. My father, who would have celebrated his 81st birthday today, was a great fan of the shows, especially The Ascent of Man. At the end of the 11th episode, “Knowledge or Certainty,” Bronowski visited Auschwitz to consider the uses to which science and administration had been put during the first half of the twentieth century, and chillingly described the tragic marriage of science and power. Its final image also recalls Howard Barker’s Found in the Ground; it is almost as if the play extended this image to a sublime and terrifying consideration of justice:

Karl Kraus

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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.”