Karl Kraus 3. Monster [Unmensch]

"Karl Kraus"
by Walter Benjamin [translated from the German by Edmund Jephcott]
Germany, 1931

"Monster [Unmensch]," to my mind the least linguistically explosive of the three sub-sections in Benjamin's study on Karl Kraus although of course only relatively speaking at that, still begins with a typical Benjamin bombshell in which he compares "the genuine satirist" Kraus with "the scribblers who make a trade of mockery and who, in their invectives, have little more in mind than giving the public something to laugh about" (378).  What makes a true satirist like Kraus stand out from this pack of lightweight jokers?

In contrast, the great type of the satirist never had firmer ground under his feet than amid a generation about to mount tanks and put on gas masks, a mankind that has run out of tears but not of laughter.  In him civilization prepares to survive, if it must, and communicates with him in the true mystery of satire, which consists in the devouring of the adversary.  The satirist is the figure in whom the cannibal was received into civilization.  His recollection of his origin is not without filial piety, so that the proposal to eat people has become an essential constituent of his inspiration, from Jonathan Swift's pertinent project concerning the use of the children of the less wealthy classes, to Léon Bloy's suggestion that landlords of insolvent lodgers be conceded a right to the sale of the lodgers' flesh.  In such directives, great satirists have taken the measure of the humanity of their fellow men.  "Humanity, culture, and freedom are precious things that cannot be bought dearly enough with blood, understanding, and human dignity"--thus Kraus concludes the dispute between the cannibal and human rights.  One should compare his formulation with Marx's treatment of the "Jewish question," in order to judge how totally this playful reaction of 1909--the reaction against the classical ideal of humanity--was likely to become a confession of materialist humanism at the first opportunity.  Admittedly, one would need to understand Die Fackel from the first number on, literally word for word, to predict that this aesthetically oriented journalism, without sacrificing or gaining a single motif, was destined to become the political prose of 1930.  For this it had to thank its partner, the press, which disposed of humanity in the way to which Kraus alludes in these words: "Human rights are the fragile toy that grownups like to trample on and so will not give up" (ibid.).

 

From this beginning on genre matters, Benjamin traces the satirist's career arc through operettas (Benjamin: "Just as prattle seals the enslavement of language through stupidity, so operetta transfigures stupidity through music" [379]), through his public readings, through his "hate poems" (383) and finally back to his polemics--all making me wish I knew more about Kraus than I do.  Perhaps Benjamin felt the same for, despite a poetic summation at the end in which he seeks to portray the protean "monster" Kraus as the archetypal angel of "a humanity that proves itself by destruction" (387), it's this earlier quote on our corrosive hero's "combative aspect" that ironically feels like the most revealing R.I.P. to me: "No one can grasp the necessity that compelled this great bourgeois character to become a comedian, this guardian of Goethean linguistic values a polemicist, or why this irreproachably honest man went berserk" (386).

Source

As previously noted, "Karl Kraus" appears on pp. 361-390 of the Walter Benjamin anthology, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008).

Karl Kraus 2. Demon

"Karl Kraus"
by Walter Benjamin [translated from the German by Edmund Jephcott]
Germany, 1931

As quotable as Benjamin is throughout his wide-ranging essay on Kraus, it's in the middle section, "Demon," where you really begin to appreciate his profundity and his artistry as a critic.  Benjamin doesn't see Kraus as a polemicist who is drawn to pontificating about evil in order to perform some greater good for the rest of us.  In fact, he scoffs at the idea of Kraus as an "ethical personality" at all: "The dark background from which Kraus's image detaches itself," Benjamin writes, "is not formed by his contemporaries, but is the primeval world [Vorwelt], or the world of the demon" (370).  Kraus' vanity, "his unconquerable need to be perceived" is undeniable according to the critic.  But to what end?  Benjamin sees it as arising from a complex interplay of "self-expression" and "self-unmasking" in which, perhaps unwittingly at times, Kraus offers up his own life as a performative "sacrifice to his vanity" (370-371).  Benjamin: "Idiosyncrasy as the highest critical organ--this is the hidden logic of that self reflection and the hellish state known only to a writer for whom every act of gratification becomes at the same time a station of his martyrdom, a state experienced, apart from Kraus, by no one as deeply as by Kierkegaard."  Kraus, quoted by Benjamin: "I am perhaps the first instance of a writer who simultaneously writes and experiences his writing theatrically" (371).

Kraus' "mimetic genius, imitating while it glosses, pulling faces in the midst of polemics," inspires some of Benjamin's finest, most penetrating writing about "the demon in the man" that is Kraus (371).  You don't, I hope you'll agree, even need to know anything about Kraus to appreciate an arresting description like this:

[Kraus] imitates his subjects in order to insert the crowbar of his hate into the finest joints of their posture.  This quibbler, probing between syllables, digs out the larvae that nest there in clumps.  The larvae of venality and garrulity, ignominy and bonhomie, childishness and covetousness, gluttony and dishonesty.  Indeed, the exposure of inauthenticity--more difficult than that of the merely bad--is here performed behavioristically.  The quotations in Die Fackel are more than documentary proof: they are the props with which the quoter unmasks himself mimetically.  Admittedly, what emerges in just this connection is how closely the cruelty of the satirist is linked to the ambiguous modesty of the interpreter, which in his public readings is heightened beyond comprehension.  "To creep"--this is the term used, not without cause, for the lowest kind of flattery; and Kraus creeps into those he impersonates, in order to annihilate them.  Has courtesy here become the mimicry of hate, hate the mimicry of courtesy?  However that may be, both have attained perfection, absolute pitch.  "Torment," of which there is so much talk in Kraus in such opaque allusions, here has its seat.  His protests against letters, printed matter, documents are nothing but the defensive reaction of a man who is himself implicated.  But what implicates him so deeply is more than deeds and misdeeds; it is the language of his fellow men.  His passion for imitating them is at the same time the expression of and the struggle against this implication, and also the cause and the result of that ever-watchful guilty conscience in which alone the demon is his element (371-372).

It would be easy enough to stop at this point given how much Benjamin has already shed light on the slippery Kraus, but he isn't done trashing the explanations of the Kraus fans who posit "compassion" as one of the hidden wellsprings of the Austrian's art:

No!  This incorruptible, piercing, resolute assurance does not spring from the noble poetic or humane disposition that his followers are so fond of attributing to him.  How utterly banal, and at the same time how fundamentally wrong, is their derivation of his hatred from love, when it is obvious how much more elemental are the forces here at work: a humanity that is only an alternation of malice and sophistry, sophistry and malice, a nature that is the highest school of aversion to mankind and a pity that is alive only when interlaced with vengeance (372).

Is Benjamin's a partisan study?  You be the judge.  Citing Brecht's great quote about Kraus, "When the age laid hands upon itself, he was the hands" (372), Benjamin then moves on from Kraus' primal desire for vengeance to his apocalyptic vision of justice.  Whatever you make of the argument, the language itself is impeccable, insistent: "Nothing is understood about this man until it has been perceived that, of necessity and without exception, everything--language and fact--falls, for him, within the sphere of justice.  All his fire-eating, sword-swallowing philology in the newspapers pursues justice just as much as language" (373).  But where does this sense of justice originate from other than from within the demon himself?  One of Benjamin's answers may surprise you for it's none other than Baudelaire whom he sees as one of Kraus' spiritual ancestors:

Only Baudelaire hated, as Kraus did, the satiety of healthy common sense, and the compromise that intellectuals made with it in order to find shelter in journalism.  Journalism is betrayal of the literary life, of mind, of the demon.  Idle chatter is its true substance, and every feuilleton poses anew the insoluble question of the relationship between the forces of stupidity and malice, whose expression is gossip.  It is, fundamentally, on the complete agreement of two forms of existence--life under the aegis of mere mind, and life under the aegis of mere sexuality--that the solidarity of the man of letters with the whore is founded, a solidarity to which Baudelaire's existence is once again the most inviolable testimony (376).

Benjamin concludes this part of his work with a somewhat complicated--and perhaps not altogether convincing--argument linking Kraus' hatred of the press with his defense of prostitution, the commoditization of words and the commoditization of the flesh (a Kraus flashback: "Penury can turn every man into a journalist, but not every woman into a prostitute" [375]).  Although I'm not sure I buy all of it, I have to admit that Benjamin's musings on sexuality and the mind as it possibly pertains to Kraus did permit one final sneak attack that sort of waylaid me.  The subject?  An evocation of Kraus' nights which, perhaps on account of its lack of romanticism about the tortured artist, speaks to me more than it otherwise should:  "His night, however, is not a maternal night, or a moonlit, romantic night: it is the hour between sleeping and waking, the night watch, the centerpiece of his threefold solitude: that of the coffeehouse, where he is alone with his enemy; of the nocturnal room, where he is alone with his demon; of the lecture hall, where he is alone with his work" (377).

Source

"Karl Kraus."  In Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008, 361-390).

Karl Kraus 1. Cosmic Man [Allmensch]

"Karl Kraus"
by Walter Benjamin [translated from the German by Edmund Jephcott]
Germany, 1931

Walter Benjamin's 1931 essay on Karl Kraus and his Viennese newspaper Die Fackel, conveniently divided into the sections "1. Cosmic Man [Allmensch]," "2. Demon" and "3. Monster [Unmensch]" and all introduced by a Kraus epigraph, is almost as much fun to read as Kraus himself.  Although I hope to return to the second and third parts of the essay later in the week (the thing's just too rich to try and cover in one post), here's the German critic's attention-grabbing beginning:

In old engravings, there is a messenger who rushes toward us crying aloud, his hair on end, brandishing a sheet of paper in his hands--a sheet full of war and pestilence, of cries of murder and pain, of danger from fire and flood--spreading everywhere the Latest News.  "News" in this sense, in the sense that the word has in Shakespeare, is disseminated by Die Fackel [The Torch].  Full of betrayal, earthquakes, poison, and fire from the mundus intelligibilis.  The hatred with which it pursues the tribe of journalists that swarms into infinity is not only a moral hatred but a vital one, such as is hurled by an ancestor upon a race of degenerate and dwarfish rascals that has sprung from his seed.  The very term "public opinion" outrages Kraus (361).

 

While you'd think it'd be hard to maintain the intensity level of that opening, Benjamin shifts from this "visual" introduction of Kraus to a descriptive appraisal of Kraus' motivations without any appreciable loss of adrenaline.  After calmly stating that the empty phrase is Kraus' enemy, "the unmasking of the inauthentic" is the source of his hatred of the press (362-363), Benjamin launches into a feverish appreciation of Die Fackel's role in the combat:

 

The intertwining of biblical magniloquence with stiff-necked fixation on the indecencies of Viennese life--this is its way of approaching phenomena.  It is not content to call on the world as witness to the misdemeanors of a cashier; it must summon the dead from their graves.  --Rightly so.  For the shabby, obtrusive abundance of these scandals in Viennese coffeehouses, the press, and society is only a minor manifestation of a foreknowledge that  then, more swiftly than anyone could perceive, suddenly arrived at its true and original subject: two months after the outbreak of war, Kraus called this subject by name in his speech "In These Great Times," with which all the demons that inhabited this possessed man passed into the herd of swine who were his contemporaries (363-364).

 

Although I'd already want to read more about Kraus (and read more by Benjamin) from that last line of Benjamin's alone, the essayist inserts a head-spinning excerpt from "In These Great Times" (the mercurial Kraus: "Let him who has something to say step forward and be silent!") before adding:

 

Everything Kraus wrote is like that: a silence turned inside out, a silence that catches the storm of events in its black folds and billows, its livid lining turned outward...the polemical possibilities of every situation are totally exhausted.  With what precautions this is surrounded can be seen from the barbed wire of editorial pronouncements that encircles each edition of Die Fackel, as from the razor-sharp definitions and provisos in the programs and lectures accompanying his readings from his own work.  The trinity of silence, knowledge and alertness constitutes the figure of Kraus the polemicist (364-365, ellipses added).

 

Those of you who know how Kraus ended his career will understand why Benjamin was startlingly prescient about the Austrian polemicist here.  Those of you who know how Benjamin ended his career may well wonder whether the writing was already on the wall for both of these men.

 

Source

"Karl Kraus" appears on pp. 361-390 of the Walter Benjamin anthology, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008).  Walter Benjamin photo above: photographer unknown.