Creative Destruction: Karl Kraus and the Paradox of Satire (Published in Seminar 49.1, 2013)
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Crossref JAKOB NORBERG Creative Destruction: Karl Kraus and the Paradox of Satire (Published in Seminar 49.1, 2013) The object of satire often bothers the satirist. Of course, satire is nothing but the attempt to ridicule or condemn an object – the venality and decadence of society, the vanity and mediocrity of the literati, and so on. To invoke a recent attempt to determine the constants of satirical writing, the satirizing author seeks to gain the reader’s approval for the aggression or negative critical energy he or she directs against an object or experience familiar to both (Schönert 9). But the claim about the bothersome target has an additional meaning: satirists do not want the objects they have singled out for censure to define their art. They may rage against an ugly world, but this, they claim, does not condemn their art to ugliness. Satire should instead be valued for the skill with which someone or something is being criticized or the height from which it is being attacked. In his discussion of satire in Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, Friedrich Schiller acknowledges this problem in the process of diminishing its significance: Stehen wir nur hoch in der Beurteilung, so hat es nichts zu sagen, wenn auch der Gegenstand tief und niedrig, unter uns zurückbleibt. Wenn uns der Geschichtschreiber Tacitus den tiefsten Verfall der Römer des ersten Jahrhunderts schildert, so ist es ein hoher Geist, der auf das Niedrige herabblicke, und unsere Stimmung ist wahrhaft poetisch, weil nur die Höhe, worauf er selbst steht und zu der er uns zu erheben wußte, seinen Gegenstand niedrig machte. (742) According to Schiller, satire is saved from the badness of its object because it is written from a point of great elevation. Society may only seem to be so deeply in decline because of the effect of distance on perception, for it is the high vantage point of the satirist rather than some intrinsic quality that makes the object of satire appear fallen. But Schiller’s ingenious rhetoric draws attention to a perennial problem in satire. Satirical writers frequently fear that their work risks being vitiated by the baseness of its material and will turn into yet another medium for the corruption that they want to eliminate. The writings of the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus (1874–1936) provide numerous illustrations of satire’s entanglements, or the troubling contamination of satire by its object. In the pages of his journal, Die Fackel, Kraus occasionally despaired at society’s ability to trump his critique by means of its absurd, thought-defying evilness. The intended object of satire, he felt, could overpower the satirical effort. Faced with the horrors of the First World War, for instance, Kraus claimed that he as a satirist was deprived of words. In the article “In dieser großen Zeit,” published at the eve of the war, Kraus exclaimed: “Die jetzt nichts zu sagen haben, weil die Tat das Wort hat, sprechen weiter. Wer etwas zu sagen hat, trete vor und schweige!” (2). There can be no playful “victory of intelligence over stupid power” when this power is set in motion to ruin all of civilization (Frye 113). But critically minded readers of Kraus also claimed that his texts inflicted ferocious violence rather than remedied it and thus were as terrible as the society it castigated. According to the author Elias Canetti, once an admirer of Kraus, the audience of the hectoring satirist lived under a sort of dictatorial rule (51). Kraus, then, could not escape society’s constitution, and some asserted that he embodied some of its worst tendencies. To his supporters, and perhaps to himself, he was unfortunately helpless to remedy the ills of his day and his satire could only reproduce banality and badness. To his critics, his unrelenting rhetoric and command over his supporters turned him into a tyrant in Viennese culture. In the first case, Kraus’s satire is deemed helpless to overcome the absolute badness of society by means of critical representation; in the second, the satire perversely reduces critical thought and in this way colludes with the conditions it purports to challenge. Kraus himself was often frustrated by the constraints and dangers of his preferred genre. Throughout his career, he was haunted by satire’s inescapable proximity to the objects of its rebuke, and his work contains a series of attempts to relieve it of its embroilments. At times, he congratulates his victims for being pulled into literary history through his attacks on them; at others, he worries that his satire may never survive his own time and place because of the dead weight of insignificant individuals and events. In both these situations, the relationship of his satire to the objects of its literary aggression, a relationship constitutive of the genre, remains unresolved. Unavoidably tied to the world that they condemn, Kraus’s texts employ a number of escape strategies, and although these moves and arguments do not necessarily follow one another in chronological succession, they can be arranged into a series of steps. This article will reconstruct Kraus’s course in the period up to the First World War by identifying three stages in his attempt to distance himself from his satirical target: his renunciation of any loyalty or commitment to the object of his satire; his denial of the assumption that satire has an object corresponding to anything in a shared reality; and, finally, his curious declaration that satire somehow generates its object out of itself, albeit in the form of relentless negativity. The article will close with reflections on the contradictions that plague Kraus’s always witty and always inventive but still desperate struggle to push an unworthy world out of his satirical art. Even when hate-driven destruction is presented as an entirely independent, indeed creative enterprise and therefore in no way defined by the depravity and banality of all the things it ridicules and condemns, it cannot cut its ties with what it hates. Satire remains uncomfortably associated with the object of critique, and the dignity and meaning of the satirical art is always under threat. Kraus shows us that satire is a troubled, perhaps even anxious, genre. Kraus repeatedly claims that he is not loyal to his surroundings – the Austrian nation, the city of Vienna, or the profession of literary critics and journalist – and that he does not write out of love. This is partly a reversal of a standard argument made by practitioners of satirical writing. To gain acceptance for their writing among a large audience despite the genre’s aggressiveness, satirists often claim to labour for the general health of society. They present themselves as dutiful “public servant[s] fighting the good fight” (Elliott 265). And against accusations of illegitimate destructiveness, they assert a commitment to some now-distant greatness and present their work as a first step toward reform. Among the roles traditionally assumed by satirists in their self- explications, one finds the teacher, moralist, doctor, and judge, all figures involved in correcting people and the ways of the world (Schönert 38). One could add that vocal nonconformists often present themselves as society’s true loyalists, with varying success. A critical opinion, they imply, is less a threat to the cohesion and survival of the group than an addition to its self- understanding and an aid in its development; dissent is an epistemic and ethical resource. If the satirist in the tradition of Jonathan Swift is caught urinating on the royal palace, he would probably claim that he was only trying to extinguish a fire. As a satirist who seeks to distance himself from society rather than shore up his own acceptability, however, Kraus is not interested in dressing up his rejections as reform-oriented feedback. Instead, he embraces the role of the unnecessarily abrasive figure and portrays his reckonings as serial manifestations of an irrepressible character trait. His savage suggestion to ban reproduction in Vienna, for instance, cannot be understood as a step proposed in the interest of restoring a greater and more authentic Vienna: “Vorschläge, um mich dieser Stadt wieder zu gewinnen: Änderung des Dialekts und Verbot der Fortpflanzung” (“Pro Domo et Mundo” May 1911, 16). By saying that the city will be improved and gain his respect only through its long- term extinction, Kraus subverts the language of reform. The idea that hate is really, deep down, love, is common in the literature on misanthropes. Reading British literature in the Victorian period, Anthony Lane writes that the period’s novelists typically assumed that hatred of people was a “psychological affliction caused largely by unrequited love” (9–10). Familiar with this strategy of reincorporating haters into society, Walter Benjamin claims that Kraus is ill-served by admirers who claim that his hatred has its origins in a more humane affect: “die Herleitung seines Hasses aus Liebe” is, Benjamin writes, “höchst banal und grundfalsch zugleich” (348). The attempts at psychologising hate and turning it into a distorted form of devotion only represent the followers’ wish to mediate between their idol and their society. But Benjamin is not alone in arguing that hate cannot be traced back to love. As the phenomenological philosopher Aurel Kolnai points out, the person who hates a particular object is not disturbed by this object’s regrettable but ultimately eliminable flaws but by its essential constitution: “Wen wir so recht abgrundtief hassen, den wollen wir keineswegs erziehen und veredeln: Im Gegenteile, es sind nicht seine Mängel, sondern seine Werte, die uns stören” (107). Someone guided by love may indeed seek to improve a flawed but cherished object, but the hater’s ultimate objective is always to purge the world more completely.