This, the First Translation of the Great Political Satire Karl Kraus Produced

FOREWORD

This, the first translation of the great political satire Karl Kraus produced in his final years, is a critical bombshell, a book that patiently and devastat- ingly documents the role of the media—newspapers, journals, radio broadcasts, speeches, pamphlets, even poems—in solidifying Hitler’s control of Germany in the early months following his election to the chancellorship on January 30, 1933. Far from providing any sort of resistance, the German media almost immediately started providing cover and propaganda for the Nazi regime and did so with great cleverness and surprising literary skill. What we now call “fake news” (Falschmeldung) was the order of the day—a frightening mélange of half- truths and distortions that played on the consciousness of ordinary citizens, convincing them that the new regime was doing the right thing. In the Age of Trump, Kraus’s book could hardly be more timely, although, as I shall suggest below, the differences between our time and the Nazi interregnum are also re- markable. As the editor-translators tell us in their introduction, Die Dritte Walpurgis- nacht was composed and typeset between May and September 1933, but Kraus put it aside, worrying that its publication might provoke terrible reprisals against the Jews of Germany (and, by extension, Austria). Kraus never witnessed the Anschluss—he died in 1936—and then the war intervened: Die Dritte Wal- purgisnacht was not published until 1952. Translation has proved to be a major challenge because the book contains so many local and arcane references to persons and places as well as many literary allusions: it presupposes a certain familiarity with everyday life in the Germany and Europe of the early 1930s as well as with Goethe and other German writers. But, as Edward Timms, until his death the leading Kraus scholar in English, and his expert collaborator Fred Bridgham have understood, once we grant Kraus his particular donnée—that creative citation from documentary material can tell us more about a particular moment than can any “objective” historical account—Kraus’s essay becomes surprisingly accessible, especially for a contemporary audience accustomed to conceptual writing and art. Together with Kraus’s great documentary drama The

vii viii Foreword

Last Days of Mankind, which Bridgham and Timms translated and published in 2015, The Third Walpurgis Night introduces us to a Karl Kraus who was much more than the author/editor of the wicked journal Die Fackel or the coiner of clever political aphorisms, as he is primarily known in the anglophone world. This Karl Kraus is a great Swiftian satirist. The technique of The Third Walpurgis Night is almost entirely one of appro- priation: Kraus gives us over a thousand excerpts from the political discourse of the first six months of 1933, interspersing hundreds of literary allusions, many of them from Goethe, but also dozens from Shakespeare, and other lyric and dramatic works. Even when we don’t recognise the source of this or that citation, the impact of Kraus’s satire is extraordinary, and the contemporary reader will experience a shock of recognition on page after page. Walpurgisnacht: the first recording of the word was by Johannes Praetorius in 1668, referring to the Christian feast day of the eighth-century abbess St. Walpurga, a feast traditionally celebrated with bonfires and fireworks on the eve of May Day (April 30), to ward off witches and demons. Kraus is of course referring primarily to the famous Walpurgisnacht scenes in Faust 1 and 2, but Goethe’s treatment of the demonic has none of Kraus’s ferocious political ani- mus: Kraus once remarked that a second Walpurgis night was World War I, whose catastrophic outcome he predicted immediately in 1914 and satirized mercilessly in The Last Days of Mankind (1922). The third Walpurgis night, in any case, is a scene of writing—the “writing on the toilet wall”, as Kraus put it, initiated immediately upon Hitler’s assumption of power. The book’s famous opening sentence,“Mir fällt zu Hitler nichts ein”, is meant quite literally: Kraus’s focus is not on Hitler’s Mein Kampf or on the Führer’s own speeches—that would be too easy—but on what appeared, day by day, in print, on the radio, and in public forums. From reports in provincial German newspapers, to the seemingly liberal Austrian Neue Freie Presse, to the commentary of Hitler’s famed Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels as well as the rhetoric of respected thinkers like Martin Heidegger and Gottfried Benn, the Nazi ethos—and especially its virulent hatred for the Jews—was relentlessly and carefully promoted. The case of Goebbels is especially interesting. In American war movies of the 1940s Goebbels and Goering (Hitler’s deputy) were usually represented as sinister versions of Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello. But Goeb- bels was no clown. The top student in his high school class and the holder of a Heidelberg doctorate in Romantic literature, Goebbels was a failed littérateur turned bank clerk, who had joined the Nazi Party as early as 1924. Well educated and just clever enough to be extremely dangerous, he paid lip service to Foreword ix avant-garde notions of “Making It New”, assuring his readers that “Things are on the move”. Radio, Goebbels is quoted as declaring, “should never only play the ideological card”, nor should “art always beat the big drum”. Appealing to educated readers, he vigorously denounced kitsch: “no more electoral slogans on everyday crockery” or “the misuse of the Nazi symbol on every sheet of rolls of paper in places where the walls are already covered with the same symbol”. The campaign “against kitsch” is then twisted to justify the call to arms against the “un-German spirit”, although in fact that campaign could hardly have been kitschier as when, for the Reich Chancellor’s first visit to Berlin’s City Hall, “on both sides of the vestibule heralds in historical dress were to be lined up”. Kraus’s portrait of Goebbels, a collage from various texts, especially his Reichstag Speech of 8 May 1933, is a small masterpiece:

[Goebbels] has attitude and empathy, he knows about stimulus and impetus, application and implication, dramatic presentation, filmic transposi- tion, flexible formulation, and the other aids to radical renewal, he has experience and perspective, indeed for both reality and vision, he has zest for life and world-philosophy, he approves of ethos and pathos but also mythos, he supplies subordination and integration into the living-space and working space of the nation, he embraces the emotional realm of community and the vitalism of personality . . . he acknowledges fluidity, accessibility, and significant form and can distinguish between the expan- sive and the convulsive . . . at all events he recognises potential for devel- opment and defines emotionally the type that, inescapably, in the final analysis must surely eventuate in trend-setting hegemony and knows that . . . the goal is totality, though in the first instance steely romanticism— in short, you can’t fool him about anything that was previously to be found in the cultural ragbag of the Berliner Tageblatt or Berliner Zeitung and that, whether modern German or modern Jewish, denoted a world sucked dry by those who saw the rest as suckers.

Note how this passage moves from the seeming praise for Modernist tech- niques—I say “seeming”, because the very first word, “attitude”, is ambiguous, as are “stimulus” and “impetus”, and “vision” is qualified by being coupled with “reality”—and makes its way to the “world sucked dry” by none other than “modern Jewish” writers. Indeed, all the buzzwords of avant-garde “radical renewal” are slightly skewed, creating absurd parallels, puns, and double enten- dres. The phrase “he approves of ethos and pathos but also mythos”, for ex- ample, conflates Aristotle’s argument in the Poetics that mythos (plot) is the heart of tragedy with the Rhetoric’s analysis of ethos (the presentation of self ) x Foreword and pathos (the appeal to the audience). In Kraus’s sentence, mythos becomes sheer myth—the lies the people are told by the Nazi press—and hence dis- torts the ethical and pathetic arguments. The whole absurd catalogue culmi- nates in the phrase trend-setting hegemony, which in fact means that the new “trend”—or law!—is the hegemony of the state, whose “goal is totality”, posing as a “steely romanticism”. To make the critique palatable, Goebbels places the blame on “modernism”, “whether modern German or modern Jewish”, but it is the latter—those urban “bloodsuckers” from Berlin—who are bleeding our people “dry”. And complaints lodged against the “cultural ragbag” of the Berlin (i.e., Jewish) literary press is essential under the new “trend-setting hegemony”! But it is not only politicians like Goebbels who distort the language this way. Kraus has a few astonishing pages on Heidegger’s Inaugural Address as Vice- Chancellor of Freiburg University in May 1933, commenting on the passage where the philosopher defines the “spiritual world of a people” as “the power of profoundly preserving its earthly and blood-based strengths as the power of the innermost arousal and utmost upheaval of its existence”. “The attachment to a combination of blood and soil”, Kraus responds in an absurdist twist, “which these unfathomable advocates of violence now eagerly expound, could remind us of another hazard, not philosophical but medical, arising from such a combination: tetanus. Thus the psychosis might be traced back to an epidemic of national spasms characteristic of those who strut their stuff on parade grounds or lecture platforms or are capable of doing both at once.” The “tetanus” mentality is everywhere: Kraus cites the following comment by Gottfried Benn:

You claim that what’s happening in Germany today [violent upheaval] constitutes a threat to culture, to civilisation, as if a horde of savages were threatening the very ideals of mankind, but let me ask you in return: what do you imagine the twelfth century, say, was like, the transition from Romanesque to Gothic sensibility, do you think it would have been up for discussion? . . . That a vote would have been taken: round arches or pointed arches? The apse: circular or polygonal—a matter for debate?

Of course not! And so intellectuals should make an effort “to see only what is elemental, thrusting ever forward to its inevitable outcome”. Kraus juxtaposes these highbrow appeals to German tradition—its völkisch past or great Christian architecture—to accounts beginning to appear in the local newspapers detailing the torture and murder of this or that Jewish shop- keeper who refused to give up his shop or leave town. In these early months of the Third Reich, even the German Jews themselves were eager to advocate “converging with the German national character so as to develop characteris- Foreword xi tics that do not form part of the primeval Jewish racial heritage”. Dismissing talk of atrocities committed against Jews, the “Honorary President” of the National German Jews declared that such “spontaneous” actions have nothing to do with policy: “[we] are absolutely convinced that the resolute will of the government and the leadership of the National Socialist party is to maintain law and order”. One business firm that had hired a number of Jews went on the record to protest that “there has not been a single case of persecution or attacks on people who think differently or on members of foreign states, specific races, or religious communities.” Indeed, in the words of Hitler’s Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen, “We must move from a nationalism that divides our peoples to an international security system that unites them.” That system turned out to be none other than the rule of the SS, the armed wing of the party whose later role would be to carry out the Final Solution. The newspapers continue peddling the peace doctrine: in the May 1933 issue of the Jewish-owned Neue Freie Presse, the declaration is made that “The anti-German atrocity propaganda will spontaneously dissolve into nothingness through the power of truth.” The very same month (May ’33), an invitation was sent out to the faculty of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt:

The Student Volunteer Corps invites all professors to the burning of Marxist and other pernicious writings, which will take place on the Römerberg on the evening of Wednesday, 10 May. In the light of the great symbolic importance of the ceremony, the stu- dents would welcome the presence of the entire professorial body. Accordingly, I invite colleagues to attend in large numbers. The procession, with musical accompaniment, will march from the University to the Römerberg on Wednesday evening at 8 pm. The student fraternities will participate in uniform, as will the SA battalions. Signed: Krieck Vice-chancellor

The burning of the books! Here “other pernicious writings” is, of course, just a code word for Jewish material. “An age of barbarism begins”, as Nietzsche has it in a cruel aphorism Kraus quotes, “the academy will do its bidding.” No profes- sor, it seems, raises the slightest objection (by May the Jewish professors have all been purged). Nor do the media question the following commentary made by Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess:

In some foreign countries, the propaganda aimed against Germany has recently seized on the untrue assertion that the National Socialist Ger- xii Foreword

man Workers’ Party aims to annex parts of Switzerland, of Holland, of Belgium, of Denmark, etc. Nonsensical as this imputation is, there are nevertheless some who believe it. The Leadership of the Reich accordingly considers it of the utmost importance to state that no one in Germany seri- ously thinks of laying a finger on the independence of other states.

“The ‘etc.’” Kraus remarks wryly, “presumably refers to Austria and Czechoslo- vakia”. But even as Hess could protest that the Third Reich had no designs on other nations, Nazi propaganda was quietly undermining Austrian resistance to the upcoming Anschluss. The first step—a favourite Nazi ploy—was to reverse the roles of aggressor and victim. As Kraus notes, “The headline ‘Heimwehr assault’—based on the mere appearance of broken bones—makes it possible to denounce as a lie the frivolous assertion that defenders of the Austrian homeland were attacked by Nazis. For nowadays it is always the perpetrator who is attacked, assuming the role of victim at least in the sense that he was forced to use violence.” Thus there are daily complaints that German diplomats or agents are being abused in Vienna. On radio, there’s a complaint that “a German journalist was made to share a cell with an Austrian homosexual.” Or again the Austrians are portrayed as hopeless troublemakers, as in this item from the Völkischer Beobachter:

If the responsible men in the government continue to trample the rights of the people underfoot, a terrible awakening will bring it forcibly home to them with indisputable certainty that, on the day of the coming insurrec- tion, no one will go unpunished for ruling a people through despotic acts and prohibitions.

The reference is to Engelbert Dollfuss, the Austrian chancellor (1932–34) who defied Hitler and was determined to avoid Anschluss: his own authoritarian rule—he had dismissed parliament on grounds of treason and was hence attacked by the Socialists as an Austro-Fasc ist—was a perfect target for the Nazi attack machine. Instead of directly attacking Austrian Jews, the Nazi press could condemn the Catholic Dollfuss and thus sow sedition. “While Germany under the rule of Adolf Hitler is heading for an economic boom, Austria under the des- potism of Herr Dollfuss is facing ruin.” Or: “Harmless tourists, visiting a kindred people, are exposed to such [brutal] treatment.” Or again: “Germans love Austria but increasingly feel at risk: Germany wants to remain at least inwardly linked to Austria, with which it is inseparably linked by ties of blood.” There are those ties of blood again. Step by step, the Dollfuss regime is be- littled and attacked, so that when, on 25 July 1934, Dollfuss is assassinated by the Nazis in cold blood, right inside his Chancellery office, the public has been Foreword xiii primed to condone the crime. Even translation (from the British and French papers) is used to cement the fake news. When the London Times notes that “In Great Britain there has never been very strong public support for the possible merger of the Austrian and German peoples”, the German translation reads: “In England there has never been strong opposition to the question of a possible unification of Germany with Austria.” Such faux translation goes hand in hand with another device: the “re-vindication of the content of a proverbial ex- pression”, in cases “where an originally bloody or violent content has long since been transposed onto the plane of intellectual conflict”. When we say “an eye for an eye”, for instance, we mean revenge, not that we are literally going to pull out our enemy’s eye. But in Nazi rhetoric, the situation is reversed: metaphor is turned into hyperbole:

We don’t say: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. No, if someone puts out our eye, we’ll cut off his head, if someone knocks out our tooth, we’ll shatter his jaw.

Similarly the metaphor “rubbing salt in the wound”, which has not been taken literally for centuries, is suddenly enacted as a necessary punishment for this or that troublesome Jew:

When the old comrade inflicted a deep cut on his hand while peeling potatoes, a group of Nazis laughed mockingly and forced his heavily bleeding hand into a sack of salt. They found the old man’s cries of agony a great joke.

Indeed, one can take “the people” at their word; when they claim that “they won’t harm a hair on the head of any Jew”, says Kraus, “it’s evidently the only treatment that wasn’t inflicted, while many a Jew lost the skin off his scalp or had his head shaved so as to be branded with the sign under which the Nazi idea has conquered”. And so the most blatant atrocities can be justified. Even the simplest phrase, like the address “Meine Damen und Herren” (Ladies and Gentlemen) becomes “Meine Männer und Frauen”, a phrase with a very differ- ent valence, “Frauen” referring either to wives or to women who are not ladies, and “Männer” stressing physical capacity based on gender itself. Throughout the book, Kraus maintains his distance, seemingly doing nothing but put before us documents that speak for themselves. But in Section 29, toward the end of the book, he speaks more personally:

Now I ask myself how I was able to find my way through this dark laby- rinth, while the German language—my language—was led astray by the hypocritical urgings of a mischievous will o’ the wisp; stumbling over xiv Foreword

roots and snags even more treacherous than the linguistic minefield of the World War, while I was both encouraged and deterred by well- meaning readers demanding clear views as visibility deteriorated after the political landslide? Posing such questions to myself is to query in the same breath the moral justification of questioning the Nazi seizure of power, an event of elemental force whose workings provide a link between the press and my bias against it. . . . I go about this with a greater degree of responsibility and with insight into the connection between both evils. For National Socialism has not destroyed the press; rather, the press has created National Socialism. Apparently only as a reaction, but actually as a fulfilment of its true nature. (emphasis added)

As mentioned earlier, Kraus did not live to see the Anschluss and World War II; he died in 1936. Would he have softened his view of the press? I doubt it, but most readers, myself included, will find his conclusion that the press created National Socialism, rather than the other way around, exaggerated, if not just plain wrong. Press iniquities were Kraus’s monomania, and one can point, as Walter Benjamin did in his famous essay on Kraus, to “the strange interplay between reactionary theory [the trust in traditional bourgeois individualism] and revolutionary practice that we find everywhere in Kraus”.1 True, Kraus had no theory of Fascism: indeed, he avoided all larger theoretical formulations. But what he understood is that, whatever the sources of Nazi ideology, once on the scene, it was the media that were able to gain acceptance for the Nazi agenda, and to do so much more rapidly and easily than would seem possible. And if this was the situation in 1933, think of our own social media world and its avenues of dissemination and control. How do the two moments of history—the 1930s and the 2010s—compare? Much has been made by recent commentators of the parallel between the fall of the Weimar Republic and our own now-shaky democracy, and Trumpian doublespeak is regularly compared to that of the Nazis. The president’s “Fascist” ideas and undemocratic executive orders are roundly deplored, with fake news becoming the byword of the day. At one level, of course, the differences are more profound than the similari- ties. Today it is precisely the media—CNN, MSNBC, The New Yorker, The New York Times—that practice Resistance, that question each and every statement President Trump makes and that call out his abuses of racism and sexism. The government takeover of the entire press that occurred in the Germany of Feb- ruary 1933 is thus unthinkable in the contemporary United States or, for that matter, in Western Europe. Foreword xv

The press situation thus seems to be the opposite of Germany’s in 1933. But not quite. Fake news is by no means confined to the right; left news outlets are just as likely as the right to make statements that are blatantly false or at least biased—statements that are never questioned. I recall that during the fabled Arab Spring, CNN’s Anderson Cooper regularly pointed at the large numbers of protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square as evidence of the revolution’s widespread popular support. Interviews with politicians and ordinary citizens seemed to confirm Cooper’s optimism. We regularly heard, on this and the other major networks, about the unstoppable new drive toward democracy in the Middle East. Then when the Egyptian movement utterly failed and the military dic- tatorship took over, no explanations were given: Egypt simply disappeared from the CNN radar screen, and attention turned elsewhere. The wrong news is no news. Kraus had an uncanny understanding for this state of affairs: he understood that it is the reporting of events, not the events themselves, that shapes our thinking. Nothing comes to us unmediated. His Third Walpurgis Night can thus be read not only as brilliant satire but also as cautionary tale: “Breaking News”—and everything now seems to be “Breaking News”—is less true story than attention-getting device so that whatever is or is not the case, the media come out on top. However wrong their predictions, they are never penalized for them, and however negative their assessments, they are still seen as providing a valuable service. A year into the Trump presidency, CNN, which attacks and ridicules Trump from morning till night, was able to hire more than a dozen new reporters on the strength of the profits the network had made in its exposé of the president’s iniquities. In media-speak, nothing succeeds like the success of having a clearly defined object of attack, a scapegoat. In its brilliant and cruel dissection of the Nazi media of 1933, The Third Walpurgis Night is thus a truly prophetic work.

Marjorie Perloff This page intentionally left blank