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? .

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