The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus (2013) are four bilingual
(German and English) essays and a poem by the Austrian satirist (1874-1936).
The author, Jonathan Franzen, is 53 years old, recalling his year in Berlin
studying Kraus as a 22-year old in 1982. Franzen’s updates his 1982 notes and
argues that Kraus is relevant today.
From 1899 Kraus established a ‘blog-like’ magazine called Die Fackel (The Torch) and became its
sole author from 1911. Its aim was to be independent from mainstream media,
apolitical, to ‘give the oppressed a voice’ and to ‘expose the obfuscations of
the established press’ so that it would be easier to ‘recognize the urgent
social matter.’ At its peak it had 30,000 readers. Notoriously difficult to
understand, Kraus bragged of having a ‘savage proficiency in mimicking other
writers’ and said he deliberately wrote in an obscure way to prevent others
from mimicking him. Hence Franzen translates and annotates his essays.
The first essay is Heine and the Consequences, which Kraus wrote in
1910-11 about German writer Heinrich Heine (1797-1856). Kraus mocks Heine who
lived in Paris for almost 30 years – ‘he goes to Paris to fetch himself some
talent.’ This is in reference to writers who travel to write, because Kraus
exclusively wrote about Vienna, his hometown. Franzen compares this to revering
Ernest Hemingway as the face of 20th century American literature
when he wrote primarily about the countries he visited.
Kraus also debates the difference between French literature (form –
‘pretty, easy to read’ literature), German literature (content – ‘functional
and intellectually rigorous’) and Austrian literature (in-between the two).
Franzen annotates this argument as MacBook Air versus PC or cool versus uncool,
and adds ‘Germans may be uncool but they made cool things.’ Kraus is scathing
of Heine’s works – a person who wrote no novels, no plays and ‘only known for
his lyric poetry and for his wit and irony of his reportage and travel writing
and polemics.’
Franzen asks why Kraus is always so angry. ‘Kraus spent a lot of time
reading stuff he hated, so as to be able to hate it with authority.’ Kraus was
known as The Great Hater (but a ‘tender and generous man in his private life’).
‘He was a late child in a prosperous, well-assimilated Jewish family’ that made
him ‘financially independent for life’ with a ‘close circle of good friends.’
Although Kraus never married he ‘had some brilliant affairs and a deep
long-term relationship with Sidonie.’
Kraus was angry with newspapers, privileged writers, journalists,
politicians, literary historians, the liberal bourgeoisie, and anyone he
considered ‘false’ – virtually everyone. Was there anyone who escaped his
anger? Yes – Kraus liked two artists: British playwright William Shakespeare
(1564-1616) and Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy (1801-1862) because they were
ahead of their times, ‘take such accurate note of human nature’s weakness’ and
‘would never become obsolete.’ The second essay in this book is about Nestroy,
written in 1912, which is not a rage against Nestroy, but a rage against
modernization and the machine.
Franzen admits in this book that at 22 he was also an angry young man:
‘I had an overly dominant superego in Berlin … I was solitary, depressive,
conventional, prudish, workaholic, given to philosophizing.’ He identified with
Kraus because ‘we were both angry, apocalyptic, and arguably megalomaniacal.’
Franzen finishes the novel with one of Kraus’s poems, Let No One Ask.
The first three lines are: Let no one ask what I’ve been doing since I spoke/I
have nothing to say/and won’t say why.’ Kraus said ‘I can’t think of anything
to say about Hitler’ and he shutdown his magazine. He remained ‘unshakably
silent’ except for one issue in August 1933, which contained an obituary of his
friend, Austrian architect, Adolf Loos, and this poem. All the while he was
writing a lengthy book called The Third
Walpurgis Night, published in excerpts in 1934 and posthumously published
in its entirety in 1952. The poem is about the powerlessness of words and the
powerfulness of silence. Franzen describes it as a ‘chilly masterpiece that
gives voice to its own muteness.’
Franzen states that Kraus has ‘more to say to us in our own
media-saturated, technology-crazed, apocalypse-haunted historical moment than
his more accessible contemporaries now do.’ He argues that Kraus was the
‘eloquent, fulminating, incorruptible seer.’
This book is for people who like literary satire and Franzen, and for
those who can endure the back-and-forth between Kraus’s essays and Franzen’s
footnotes as he tries to explain the period, places, people, and expressions.
It is dense, didactic and a dedication to the works of Kraus – and as verbose
in Franzen’s notes as it is in Kraus’s original essays. It might also be a way
for Franzen to purge his own adolescent anger.
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