Nestroy and Posterity" (1912), Kraus Was Doing the Inverse of Promises of Progress and Enlightenment)
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[}(~~ (U)~ W~@J~<b ,r ESSAYS BY KARL KRAUS TRANSLATED AND ANNOTATED BY JONATHAN FRANZEN WITH ASSISTANCE AND ADDITIONAL NOTES FROM PAUL REITTER AND DANIEL KEHLMANN A BILINGUAL EDITION FOURTH ESTATE • London Fourth Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB www.4thestate.co.uk TO First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2013 Simultaneously published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2013 DORIS AVER~ Copyright© 2013 by Jonathan Franzen Footnotes by Paul Reitter copyright© 2013 by Paul Reitter Footnotes by Daniel Kehlmann copyright © 2013 by Daniel Kehlmann AND IN MEMOR' 2 Jonathan Franzen asserts the moral right to GEORGE AVEI be identified as the author of this work The original essays and afterwords in this volume are from Karl Kraus's collection Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie, ed. Christoph Wagenknecht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989). "Man frage nicht ... " appeared in Die Facke/ no. 888, October 1933. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN HB 978-0-00-751743-5 ISBN TPB 978-0-00-751824-1 Designed by Abby Kagan Hand-lettering and illustrations by Matt Buck Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives pk All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. MIX Paper from DFSC reaponelbla sources www.fsc.019 Fsc· coo1454 FSC™ is a non-profit international organisation established to promote the responsible management of the world's forests. Products carrying the FSC label are independently certified to assure consumers that they come from forests that are managed to meet the social, economic and ecological needs of present and future generations, and other controlled sources. Find out more about HarperCollins and the environment at www.harpercollins.eo.uk/green W~~T~@~• ij,M lQ) lQ) 0 ~,MlQ) ~~IHIW~lLT 1@~T~~OT~ ZUM 50. TODESTAGE ON THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS DEATH ~' I r,¥ii: '~i 1.Johann Nestroy (1801-1862) was a leading figure in the golden age r..... rt of Viennese theater, in the first half of the nineteenth century. Al- f~: though virtually unknown outside Austria (owing in part to the Aus- }' trian inflection of his lower-class characters' language), he was widely <· f loved at home for his comic genius. Like Shakespeare, N estroy was an I'l ; '~, l !.i ti\ ____,,,II__ :(, lr ~' 1:'' [~', Wir konnen sein Andenken nicht feiern, indem wir uns, wie's We cannot celebrate his memory the way a posterity ought to, by einer Nachwelt ziemt, zu einer Schuld bekennen, die wir ab- acknowledging a debt we're called upon to honor, and so we zutragen haben. So wollen wir sein Andenken feiern, indem wir want to celebrate his memory by confessing to a bankruptcy that uns zu einer Schuld bekennen, die wir zu tragen haben, wir In- dishonors us, we inhabitants of a time that has lost the capacity sassen einer Zeit, welche die Fahigkeit verloren hat, Nachwelt zu to be a posterity ... How could the eternal Builder fail to learn sein ... Wie sollte der ewige Bauherr nicht von den Erfahrungen from the experiences of this century? For as long as there have dieses Jahrhunderts lernen? Seitdem es Genies gibt, wurden sie been geniuses, they've been placed into a time like temporary als Trockenwohner in die Zeit gesetzt; sie zogen aus und die tenants, while the plaster was still drying; then they moved out Menschheit hatte es warmer. Seitdem es aber Ingenieure gibt, and left things cozier for humanity. For as long as there have wird das Haus unwohnlicher. Gott erbarme sich der Entwick- been engineers, however, the house has been getting less habit- lung! Er lasse die Kiinstler lieber nicht geboren werden, als mit able. God have mercy on the development! Better that He not inveterate borrower of well-worn plots, which he executed with un- apologetic panache, and he had a Shakespearean gift for rendering his championing an underrated writer rather than taking down an over- buffoons at once ridiculous and sympathetic. His language was bril- rated one. The reader should be warned that the Nestroy essay is, in liant and his plot structures were crisp, but because so much of his work places, even denser than the Heine. But here again Kraus is leveraging was mistakable for what Kraus will here call "routine," and because a seemingly intramural literary fight into a very broad cultural critique, comedy is everywhere (and especially in Germany) held in lower es- which is the essence of his method: he jumps directly from a small ill teem than tragedy, his reputation at the time of Kraus's celebration of ( the fact that N estroy is underrated, misread, and substantially forgot- him was closer to Gilbert and Sullivan's than to Shakespeare's. ten) to the largest of ills (the dehumanizations of technology, the false In "Nestroy and Posterity" (1912), Kraus was doing the inverse of promises of Progress and Enlightenment). The stakes here are even what he'd done two years earlier in "Heine and the Consequences"- higher and more directly relevant to our own times. 136 / NESTROY UND DIE NACHWELT NESTROY AND POSTERITY / 137 \j ' __l_' ".I?:i ! 1~ I\ dem Trost, wenn sie auf die Nachwelt kommen, wiirde diese es allow artists to be born than with the consolation that this future besser haben. Diesel Versuche sie es nur, sich als Nachwelt zu of ours will be better for their having lived before us. This world! fiihlen, und sie wird iiber die Zumutung, ihren Fortschritt dem Let it just try to feel like a posterity, and, at the insinuation that Umweg des Geistes zu verdanken, eine Lache anschlagen, die zu it owes its progress to a detour of the Mind, it will give out besagen scheint: Kalodont ist das Beste. Eine Lache, nach einer a laugh that seems to say: More Dentists Prefer Pepsodent. A Idee des Roosevelt, instrumentiert von Bernhard Shaw. Es ist die laugh based on an idea of Roosevelt's and orchestrated by Bern- Lache, die mit allem fertig und zu allem fahig ist. Denn die hard2 Shaw. It's the laugh that's done with everything and can do Techniker haben die Briicke abgebrochen, und Zukunft ist, was whatever. For the technicians have burned the bridges, and the 2. Sic. Although it's no excuse for misspelling his name, Kraus hated Shaw for some of the same reasons he hated Heine. "For Kraus," says Daniel Kehlmann, "Shaw is the prototype of the modem, shallow, media-compatible joumalist-litterateur whose fame rests largely on having interesting opinions and giving original interviews: who talks to every newspaper and doesn't have the least interest in language it- self." Even in Pygmalion, which appears to be preoccupied with lan- guage, Henry Higgins is presented as a scientist of spoken English. Shaw gives Higgins a big and predictable emotional blind spot-our egghead has a lesson to learn about the human heart, etc.-while re- maining palpably infatuated with Higgins's smarty-pants scientific hauteur. Regarding Roosevelt, Paul Reitter comments: "No fan ofAmerica, Kraus disliked Theodore Roosevelt, who seemed so very American; he even commented snidely on Roosevelt's game attempt, in 1910, to speak a little German to a German choral group. In this sentence, though, Kraus has in mind Roosevelt's push for technological progress, his modernizing streak. Kraus wasn't a technophobe in his everyday life. In 1914, when Vienna had few automobiles and many automobile accidents (see the first scene in Musil's The Man Without Qualities), Kraus bought a car and had himself driven around by a chauffeur. Nor was Kraus averse, later on, to air travel. But around 1908 he came to believe that our technological capabilities and our imaginative faculties were going in opposite directions-the former were going up and, as a result, the latter down-and this thought really scared him. It's what 138 / NESTROY UND DIE NACHWELT NESTROY AND POSTERITY / 139 . ' . l1··•· sich automatisch anschlieil.t. Diese Geschwindigkeit weiil. nicht, 3 I future is: whatever follows automatically. This velocity doesn't dail. ihre Leistung nur wichtig ist, ihr selbst zu entrinnen. Leibes- i realize that its achievement is important only in escaping itsel£ gegenwartig, geisteswiderwartig, vollkommen wie sie ist, diese Present in body, repellent in spirit, perfect just the way they are, Zeit, hofft sie, werde die nachste sie iibernehmen, und die Kinder, these times of ours are hoping to be overtaken by the times die der Sport mit der Maschine gezeugt hat und die Zeitung ahead, and hoping that the children, spawned by the union of genahrt, wiirden dann noch besser lachen konnen.