The Kraus Project
The Kraus Project
Jonathan Franzen
A hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and prophetic writers in Europe: a relentless critic of the popular media’s manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumerism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But even though his followers included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely prophet, and few people today are familiar with his work. Thankfully, Jonathan Franzen is one of them.In THE KRAUS PROJECT, Franzen not only presents his definitive new translations of Kraus but annotates them spectacularly, with supplementary notes from the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and the Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann. Kraus was a notoriously cantankerous and difficult author, and in Franzen he has found his match: a novelist unafraid to voice unpopular opinions strongly, a critic capable of untangling Kraus’s often dense arguments.While Kraus lampoons the iconic German writer Heinrich Heine and celebrates his own literary heroes, Franzen’s annotations soar over today’s cultural landscape and then dive down into a deeply personal recollection of his first year out of college, when he fell in love with Kraus.Painstakingly wrought, strikingly original in form, THE KRAUS PROJECT is a feast of thought, passion, and literature.
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Copyright (#)
4th Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2013
Simultaneously published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2013
Copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Franzen
Footnotes by Paul Reitter copyright © 2013 by Paul Reitter Footnotes by Daniel Kehlmann copyright © 2013 by Daniel Kehlmann
Jacket design by Rodrigo Corral
Jacket art by Matt Buck, after the cover for the first issue of Die Fackel
Jonathan Franzen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
The original essays and afterwords in this volume are from Karl Kraus's collection Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie, ed. Christian Wagenknecht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989). "Man frage nicht…" appeared in Die Fackel no. 888, October 1933.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007517435
Ebook Edition © October 2013 ISBN: 9780007517459 Version: 2017-03-28
Praise (#u063d2b6d-6FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
From the reviews of The Kraus Project:
Financial Times Book of the Year
‘An experimental collage of texts, and all the better for it … The Kraus Project is tremendously readable and is refreshingly skeptical of the cult of digital cool. Franzen’s prose has an appealing briskness and a polemical force’
Jason Cowley, Financial Times
‘Engrossing, highly original … Franzen finds in the unduly neglected Kraus a model of how to provoke readers while at the same time getting them to do some work’
Edmund Fawcett, New York Times Book Review
‘It IS worth it, despite, as well as because of, the difficulties, so congratulations all round … thanks to Franzen, more people will remember him’
Nicholas Lezard, Evening Standard
‘A passionate and concerned work … You can understand why Franzen likes him, and sees a dearth of such elegance today’
Jonathan Dean, Sunday Times
TO
DORIS AVERY
AND IN MEMORY OF
GEORGE AVERY
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE (#u063d2b6d-2FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
COPYRIGHT (#)
PRAISE
DEDICATION (#)
HEINE AND THE CONSEQUENCES (1910) (#)
NESTROY AND POSTERITY (1912) (#)
AFTERWORD TO “HEINE AND THE CONSEQUENCES” (1911) (#)
BETWEEN TWO STRAINS OF LIFE: FINAL WORD (1917) (#)
LET NO ONE ASK … (1933) (#)
NOTES (#)
HEING UND DIE FOLGEN (#)
NESTROY UND DIE NACHWELT (#)
NACHWORT ZU „HEINE UND DIE FOLGEN“ (#)
ZWISCHEN DEN LEBENSRICHTUNGEN (#)
MAN FRAGE NICHT … (#)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#)
KEEP READING (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY JONATHAN FRANZEN
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
HEINE AND THE CONSEQUENCES (#)1 (#)
Two strains of intellectual vulgarity: defenselessness against content and defenselessness against form. The one experiences only the material side of art. It is of German origin. The other experiences even the rawest of materials artistically. It is of Romance origin. To the one, art is an instrument; to the other, life is an ornament. In which hell would the artist prefer to fry? He’d surely still rather live among the Germans. For although they’ve strapped art into the Procrustean Folding Bed of their commerce, they’ve also made life sober, and this is a blessing: fantasy thrives, and every man can put his own light in the barren window frames.2 (#) Just spare me the pretty ribbons! Spare me this good taste that over there and down there delights the eye and irritates the imagination. Spare me this melody of life that disturbs my own music, which comes into its own only in the roaring of the German workday.3 (#) Spare me this universal higher level of refinement from which it’s so easy to observe that the newspaper seller in Paris has more charm than the Prussian publisher. Believe me, you color-happy people, in cultures where every blockhead has individuality, individuality becomes a thing for blockheads.4 (#) And spare me this mediocre chicanery in place of one’s own stupidity! Spare me the picturesque moil on the rind of an old Gorgonzola in place of the dependable white monotony of cream cheese! Life is hard to digest both here and there. But the Romance diet beautifies the spoilage; you swallow the bait and go belly-up. The German regimen spoils beauty and puts us to the test: how do we re-create it? Romance culture makes every man a poet. Art’s a piece of cake there. And Heaven a hell.5 (#)
Heinrich Heine, however, has brought the Germans tidings of this Heaven, to which their heart is drawn with a longing that has to rhyme someplace and that leads in subterranean passages directly from the countinghouse to the Blue Grotto. And, on a byway that German men avoid: from chopped liver to the blue flower.6 (#) It was inevitable that the one with their longing and the other with their longings would consider Heinrich Heine the Fulfiller. Tuned by a culture for which the mere material of daily life suffices as a complete artistic experience, Heine provides mood music for a culture whose experience of art begins and ends with the attractions of its content.7 (#) His writing works from the Romance feel for life into the German conception of art.8 (#) In this configuration it offers the utile dulci, it ornaments German functionality with French spirit.9 (#) And so, in this easy-to-read juxtaposition of form and content, in which there is no discord and no unity, it becomes the great legacy from which journalism continues to live to this very day, a dangerous mediator between art and life, a parasite on both, a singer where it should only be a messenger, filing reports where a song would be in order, its eye too fixed on its goal to see the burning color, blinded to all goals by its pleasure in the picturesque, the bane of literary utility, the spirit of utiliterature.10 (#) Instrument made into ornament, and so badly degenerated that even the current mania for decorating consumer goods can scarcely keep up with the progress of applied art in the daily press; because at least we have yet to hear that the Wiener Werkstätte is manufacturing burglary tools.11 (#) And even in the style of the most up-to-the-minute impressionistic journalism the Heinean model does not disavow itself. Without Heine, no feuilleton.12 (#) This is the French disease he smuggled in to us.13 (#) How easy it is to get sick in Paris! How lax the morality of the German feel for language becomes! The French language lets every filou have his way with her. You have to prove yourself a man in full before the German language will give you the time of day, and that’s only the beginning of the trouble you’re in for. With French, though, everything goes smoothly, with that perfect lack of inhibition which is perfection in a woman and a lack in a language. And the Jacob’s ladder that leads to her is a climax you’ll find in the German dictionary: Geschmeichel, Geschmeide, Geschmeidig, Geschmeiß.14 (#) Anybody and everybody can procure her services for the feuilleton. She’s a lazy Susan of the mind. The most well-grounded head isn’t safe from flashes of inspiration when it deals with her. We get everything from languages, because they contain everything that can become thought. Language arouses and stimulates, like a woman, brings joy and, with it, thought.15 (#) The German language, however, is a companion who will think and make poetry only for the man who can give her children. You wouldn’t want to be married like this to any German housewife. And yet the woman of Paris need say nothing except, at the crucial moment, très jolie, and you’ll believe anything of her. Her mind is in her face. And if her partner had beauty in his brain as well, Romance life would not be merely très jolie but fecund, ringed not by bibelots and dainties, but by deeds and monuments.16 (#)
If they say of a German author that he must have learned a lot from the French, this is the highest praise only if it isn’t true. For it means: he’s indebted to the German language for what the French gives to everybody. People here are still being linguistically creative when people over there are already playing with the children, who came blowing in, nobody knows how. But ever since Heinrich Heine imported the trick, it’s been purely an exercise in diligence if a German feuilletonist goes to Paris to fetch himself some talent.17 (#) If somebody nowadays actually goes to Rhodes because people dance better there, he is truly an excessively conscientious swindler. That was still necessary in Heine’s day. You’d been to Rhodes, and back here people believed that you could dance.18 (#) Today they’ll believe that a cripple who has never left Vienna can dance the cancan, and many a person who never had a single good finger now plays the viola.19 (#) The profitable return on distance from the reader should never be underestimated, and foreign milieus continue to be what gets taken for art. People are very talented in the jungle, and talent begins in the East around the time you reach Bucharest.20 (#) The writer who knocks the dust off foreign costumes is getting at the fascination of the material in the most convenient way imaginable. And so a reader with a brain has the strongest distrust imaginable of storytellers who knock about in foreign milieus. The best-case scenario continues to be that they weren’t there; but most of them are unfortunately so constituted that they actually have to take a trip in order to tell a story. Of course, to have spent two years in Paris isn’t merely the advantage of such Habakkuks, it’s their definition.21 (#) They strew the drifting sand of French, which finds its way into the pockets of every dolt, into the eyes of German readers. And let the inverse of an epigram of Nestroy,22 (#) this true satirical thinker, apply to them: things go well enough from Paris to St. Pölten, but from there to Vienna the road gets very long!23 (#) (If the local swindlers don’t make a killing of their own along this stretch.)24 (#) Now, with Paris, not only the content was acquired but the form as well. The form, though—this form that is only an envelope for the content, not the content itself; that is merely dress for the body, not flesh to the spirit—this form only had to be discovered once for it to be there for all time. Heinrich Heine took care of that, and thanks to him our gentlemen no longer need betake themselves to Paris. You can write feuilletons today without having personally sniffed your way to the Champs Élysées. The great trick of linguistic fraud, which in Germany pays far better than the greatest achievement of linguistic creativity, keeps working in generation after generation of newspapers, furnishing casual readers everywhere with the most agreeable of excuses for avoiding literature.25 (#) Talent flutters aimlessly in the world and gives sweet nourishment to the philistine’s hatred of genius. Writing feuilletons means twining curls on a bald head; but these curls please the public better than a lion’s mane of thoughts. Esprit and charm, which presumably were necessary in developing the trick and becoming adept at it, are now passed on by it automatically. With an easy hand, Heine pushed open the door to this dreadful development, and the magician who brought talent within reach of the unendowed surely himself doesn’t stand all that far above the development.26 (#)
The trick keeps working. Paralleling the kitschification of practical life via ornament, as traced by the good American Adolf Loos, is an interlarding of journalism with intellectual elements, but here the resulting confusion is even more catastrophic.27 (#) Instead of draining the press intellectually and restoring to literature the juices that were “extracted” from it—extorted from it—the progressive world proceeds ever afresh with the renovation of its intellectual decorations. The literary ornament doesn’t get demolished, it gets modernized in the Wiener Werkstätten of the mind. Feuilleton, mood reporting, fluff pieces—the motto “Feather Thy Nest”28 (#) brings the poetic flourish, too, into the homes of the masses. And nothing is more important to journalism than restoring the gloss, again and again, to the glaze of corruption. The more it adds to the profiteer’s intellectual and material wealth, the greater its need to cloak its ill intentions pleasingly. In this, the Mind itself lends a hand, sacrificing itself, as does the spirit that was stolen from the Mind. A Sunday edition’s catch can no longer take place without dangling the highest of literary values as bait, the Economist no longer goes in for robbery unless the surviving representatives of culture act as fences.29 (#) But far more disgraceful than literature’s marching in the triumph of this pillage, far more dangerous than this attachement of intellectual authority to the villainy, is the villainy’s interlarding, its gilding, with the Mind, which it has siphoned off from literature and which it drags along through the local pages and all the other latrines of public opinion. The press as a social institution—since it’s simply unavoidable that the dearth of imagination get filled up with facts—would have its place in the progressive order. But what does the news that it rained in Hong Kong have to do with the Mind? And why does an arranged stock-market catastrophe or a small extortion or even just the unpaid suppression of a fact demand the entire grand apparatus, in which academics don’t shy from collaborating and for which even aesthetes will hustle so hard that their feet sweat? That train stations or public toilets, works of utility and necessity, are cluttered up with decorative junk is tolerable. But why are thieves’ dens fitted out by van de Velde?30 (#) Only because their purpose would otherwise be obvious at a glance, and passersby would not willingly have their pockets turned inside out twice a day.31 (#) Curiosity is always stronger than caution, and so the chicanery dolls itself up in tassels and lace.
It owes its best advantage to that Heinrich Heine who so loosened the corset on the German language that today every salesclerk can finger her breasts. What’s ghastly about the spectacle is the sameness of these talents, which are all as alike as rotten eggs. Today’s impressionistic errand boys no longer report the breaking of a leg without the mood and no burning of a building without the personal note that they all have in common. When the one describes the German kaiser, he does it exactly the same way the other describes the mayor of Vienna, and the other can’t think of anything to say about wrestlers except what the one has to say about swimming in a river. Everything suits everything always,32 (#) and the inability to find old words counts as subtlety when the new words already suit everything. This type is either an observer who in opulent adjectives amply compensates for what Nature denied him in nouns, or an aesthete who makes himself conspicuous with his love of color and his sense of nuance and still manages to perceive things in the world around him as deeply as dirt goes under a fingernail.33 (#) And they all have a tone of discovery, as if the world had only just now been created, when God made the Sunday feuilleton and saw that it was good.34 (#) The first time these young people go to a public bath is when they’re sent in as reporters. This may be an experience. But they generalize it. The method for depicting a Livingston in darkest Leopoldstadt35 (#) is obviously of great help to the impoverished Viennese imagination. For it cannot imagine the breaking of a leg unless the leg is described to it. In Berlin, despite foul ambitions, the situation is not so grave. If a streetcar accident occurs there, the Berlin reporters describe the accident. They single out what is exceptional about this streetcar accident and spare the reader what is common to all streetcar accidents. If a streetcar mishap occurs in Vienna, the gentlemen write about the nature of streetcars, about the nature of streetcar mishaps, and about the nature of mishaps in general, with the perspective: What is man?… As to the number killed, which might possibly still interest us, opinions differ unless a news agency settles the question. But the mood—all of them capture the mood; and the reporter, who could make himself useful as a rubbish collector for the world of facts, always comes running with a shred of poesy that he grabbed somewhere in the crowd. This one sees green, that one sees yellow—every one of them sees color.36 (#)
Ultimately, all amalgamation of the intellectual with the informational, this axiom of journalism, this pretext for its plans, this excuse for its dangers, is and was thoroughly Heinean—be it now also, thanks to the more recent Frenchmen and to the friendly agency of Herr Bahr, somewhat psychologically inclined and garnished with yet a bit more “meditativeness.”37 (#) Only once was there a pause in this development—its name was Ludwig Speidel.38 (#) In him, the art of language was a guest at the greasiest dives of the Mind. The press may feel that Speidel’s life was an episode that cut disruptively into the game begun by Heine. And yet he seemed to side with the incarnate spirit of language, summoning it on holidays to the filthiest entertainment places, so that it could see the goings-on. Never was a colleague more dubious than this one. They could parade the living man around, all right. But how long they resisted giving the dead man the honor of a book! How they sensed that a complete edition here could bring that humiliation which they once imbibed by the spoonful as pride. When they finally decided to let the “associate” into literature, Herr Schmock had the cheek to undertake the commentary, and the hand of the editor, making things cute and topical, saved for the Viennese viewpoint as much as could be saved by a grouping of Speidelian prose around the Viennese viewpoint.39 (#) An artist wrote these feuilletons, a feuilletonist compiled these works of art—the distance between Mind and press becomes doubly appreciable thereby. The journalists were right to hesitate so long. They weren’t idle in the meantime. People yearned for Speidel’s books—the journalists invoked his modesty and gave us their own books.40 (#) For it is the evil mark of this crisis: journalism, which drives great minds into its stable, is meanwhile overrunning their pasture. It has plundered literature—it is generous and gives its own literature to literature. There appear feuilleton collections about which there’s nothing so remarkable as that the work hasn’t fallen apart in the bookbinder’s hands. Bread is being made out of bread crumbs. What is it that gives them hope of enduring? The enduring interest in the subjects they select. If one of them chatters about eternity, shouldn’t he be heard for as long as eternity lasts? Journalism lives on this fallacy. It always has the grandest themes, and in its hands eternity can become timely; but it gets old just as easily. The artist gives form to the day, the hour, the minute. No matter how limited and conditional in time and location his inspiration may have been, his work grows the more limitlessly and freely the further it’s removed from its inspiration. It goes confidently out of date in a heartbeat: it grows fresh again over decades. What lives on material dies before it does. What lives in language lives on with it.41 (#) How easy it was to read the chitchat every Sunday, and now that we can check it out of the library we can barely get through it. How hard it was to read the sentences in Die Fackel, even when we were helped by the incident they referred to.42 (#) No, because we were helped by it! The further we’re removed from the incident, the better we understand what was said about it. How does this happen? The incident was close and the perspective was broad. It was all forewritten. It was veiled so that the inquisitive day couldn’t get at it. Now the veils are rising …43 (#)
But Heinrich Heine—even the aesthetes who are rescuing his immortality in an island publishing house44 (#) (these gloriously impractical minds whose cerebral wrinkles trail away into ornament) have nothing more impressive to say about him than that his reports from Paris “have become the still-vital masterwork of modern journalism”; and these Robinsons of literary seclusion take Heine’s artistic word for it that his articles “would be very useful in developing a style for popular themes.” Here again you can sense the kinship of those who reside equally far from the Mind: those who live in form and those who live in content; who think in the line and who think in the surface; the aesthetes and the journalists. In the problem of Heine they collide. They live on off him and he in them. So it’s by no means urgent to talk about his work. What is increasingly urgent is to talk about his influence, and about the fact that his work isn’t capable of bearing up under an influence that German intellectual life will little by little cast off as unbearable. This is the way it will play out: each follower of Heine takes one tile from the mosaic of his work until no more remain. The original fades because the repellent glare of the copy opens our eyes. Here’s an original that loses what it lends to others. And can you even call something an original when its imitators are better? Naturally, to appreciate an invention that has since perfected itself into a modern machine, you have to apply historical justice. But in making an absolute judgment, don’t you have to concede that Heinrich Heine’s prose has now been surpassed by the observationally inclined technicians, the style boys, and the swindlers of charm? That this prose, which signifies wit without perspective and perspectives without wit, was quite certainly surpassed by those feuilletonists who not only read Heine but took extra pains to go to the source of sources—to Paris? And that there have since appeared imitators of his poetry who manage the feelings and the newsman’s wrinkle of disdain no less glibly, and who in particular are no less deft in making the little joke of the little melancholy, which the hurdy-gurdy verse helps so nimbly to its feet. Because, after all, nothing is easier to outfit with every modern convenience than a lyrical arrangement. It’s true that nobody would dare compare himself to Heine in the extent of his output and the scope of his intellectual interests. But today every Itzak Wisecrack45 (#) can probably outdo him when it comes to making an aesthetic anesthetic46 (#) and using rhyme and rhythm to turn candied husks of thought into cherry bombs.
Heinrich Heine the poet lives only as a canned youthful sweetheart. None is in greater need of reassessment than this one. Youth soaks up everything, and it’s cruel to take many things away from it later. How easily the soul of youth is impregnated, how easily things that are easy and slack attach themselves to it: how worthless a thing has to be for its memory not to be made precious by the time and circumstances of its acquisition! You’re not critical, you’re pious when you love Heine. You’re not critical, you’re blasphemous when you try to talk somebody who grew up with Heine out of his Heine. An assault on Heine is an invasion of the everyman’s private life. It injures reverence for youth, respect for boyhood, veneration of childhood. To presume to judge firstborn impressions according to their merit is worse than presumptuous. And Heine had a talent for being embraced by young souls and thus associated with young experiences.47 (#) Like rating the melody of a hurdy-gurdy, to which I was unstoppably drawn, above Beethoven’s Ninth, owing to a subjective urge. This is why grown-ups don’t have to put up with anyone who wants to dispute their belief that Heine is a greater poet than Goethe. Yes, it’s on the luck of association that Heinrich Heine lives. Am I so relentlessly objective as to say to someone: go, look, the peach tree in the garden of your childhood is quite a bit smaller than it used to be. He had the measles, he had Heine, and he gets hot in recollecting every fever of youth. Criticism should stay quiet here. No author needs reassessment as badly as Heine, no one bears up under it so poorly, no one is so protected from it by every fond illusion. But I have the courage to recommend it only because I’m hardly in need of it myself, because I failed to experience Heine at a time when I would have had to overrate him. There comes a day where it’s no concern of mine that a gentleman who has long since become a banker once crept to his beloved under the strains of “You have diamonds and pearls.”48 (#) And where you become rude at the sight of old brains still being affected by the charm with which this tearful materiality once captivated young hearts, and the syrup of sentimental moods adheres to literary judgments. When you get right down to it, the hankerings of youth could also have been satisfied by Herr Hugo Salus.49 (#) I don’t fancy myself guiltless of giving a bit of culture the benefit of the situation in which I experienced it, or of confusing it with the attendant mood. I retain a warm glow from Heine’s Berlin letters, for example, because the melody “We wind for you a bridal wreath,” which Heine makes fun of there, is congenial to me. But only in my nerves. In my judgment, I am mature and willing to distinguish merits. The memory of how the garden smelled when your first love walked through it is of general concern to the culture only if you’re a poet. You’re free to overvalue the occasion if you’re capable of making a poem out of it. When, once, in a booth at the Prater,50 (#) I saw a lady in tights floating in the air (which I now know was done with mirrors), and a hurdy-gurdy was accompanying her with “Last Rose,” my eyes were opened to beauty and my ears to music, and I would have ripped to shreds the man who told me that the lady was writhing around on a plank and the tune was by Flotow.51 (#) In criticism, though, unless you’re speaking to children, you have to be allowed to call Heine by his true name.
His charm, according to his grown-up defenders, is a musical one. To which I reply: to be responsive to literature, you don’t need to be responsive to music; all you need from music to create a mood is the melody, the rhythm.52 (#) I don’t need a mood when I’m doing literary work; I create a mood in myself by working. To get the juices flowing, I use a tone from a miniature spinet that is actually a cigar box and which, if pressed on, emits a few old Viennese notes that have been locked inside it for a hundred years. I’m not musical; Wagner would disturb me in this situation.53 (#) And if I sought the same kitschy stimulus of melody in literature, I could produce no literature on such a night. Heine’s music may, by the same token, suffice for musicians who require more significant disclosures from their own art than his little bit of euphony affords. What, then, is poetry in the Heinean style, what is that German taste in art into whose prettinesses and wittinesses the wild hunt of Liliencron’s language burst, as the avant-gardist Gottfried August Bürger’s once had?54 (#) Heine’s poetry: it is mood or opinion with the Hark! hark! of jingling bells. This poetry is melody—so much so that it demands to be set to music. And it owes more to this music than its own for its success with the philistines. Simplicissimus once poked fun at the kind of German who crosses himself to ward off Heine, only to sing his “Lorelei” later on, blissfully drunk on emotion, “nevertheless.”55 (#) Two images: but the contrast isn’t as glaring as it may seem at first glance. For the philistines who curse Heine don’t rise to the true philistine confession until the second image, when they sing him. When a popular song is made out of a poem, is it insight into the poem’s literary value that makes the song popular?56 (#) How many German philistines would know what Heine means if Herr Silcher hadn’t set “I know not what it means”57 (#) to music? But is it an argument for the poet that this clientele would have clamored for his undifficult poetry even if it hadn’t been delivered to them on wings of song?58 (#) Oh, this narrow-minded hatred of Heine, which targets the Jew, tolerates the poet, and bleats along with a sentimental melody with or without a musician’s later help. Art brings life into disorder. The poets of humanity restore chaos again and again; the poets of society do their singing and lamenting, their blessing and cursing, within a well-ordered world. All those for whom a poem amounts to an agreement between themselves and the poet, sealed with rhyme, flee to Heine. All those who wish to join the poet in his pursuit of urbane allegories and his establishment of relations with the outside world will consider Heine a greater poet than Goethe. But those who consider a poem to be the revelation of a poet lost in his observation of Nature, not of a Nature lost in the observations of the poet, will be satisfied to reckon Heine a technician skilled at pleasure and sorrow, a speedy outfitter of stock moods. When Goethe shares in—and shares with us—the “silence on every peak,” he does it with such intensely felt kinship that the silence can be heard as an intimation.59 (#) But if a pine tree in the North stands on a barren peak and dreams of a palm tree in the Orient, it is an exceptional courtesy of Nature to oblige Heine’s yearning allegorically. Seeing an artful fake like this in the show window of a confectioner or a feuilletonist might put you in a good mood if you’re an artist yourself. But does that make its manufacturer one?60 (#) Even the plain outline of a perception of Nature, from which barely visible threads spin themselves out toward the soul, seems to me more lyrical than the dressing-up of ready-made moods, because it presupposes empathy. In this sense, Goethe’s “Stillness and Sea” is lyric poetry, as are Liliencron’s lines: “A river babbles its happy way across the land, a field of ripe rye gathers in the west, then Nature leans her head upon her hand and, weary from her work, takes rest.” Deeper moods arise from a reflecting heathscape on a summer morning than from reflective palms and pine trees; for here Nature rests her head upon her hand, while there Heinrich Heine pressed his hand to his cheek … You’re ashamed that between fears and tears there ever existed such slick intercourse that went by the name of poetry; you’re almost ashamed of the polemics. But you should open the Book of Songs and try reading the right-hand and the left-hand pages higgledy-piggledy, interchanging the lines. You won’t be disappointed, if you’re not disappointed with Heine. And those who are already disappointed will, for the first time, not be. “The little birds, they chirped so fine / Glad lovesongs did my heart entwine.” That can stand right or left. “In those darling little eyes of thine”: this need not simply rhyme with “My dear darling’s mouth as red as wine” and “blue little violets of thine eyes sublime” or, again, with “thine little red-rosy cheeks divine”; at every point the plea could stand: “Dear little darling, rest thy little hand upon this heart of mine,” and nowhere in this dear little chamber of poesy would the transposition of mine and thine be felt as a disturbance. On the other hand, Heine’s entire “Lorelei,” say, could not be substituted for Goethe’s “Fisher,” even though the only seeming difference is that the Lorelei influences the boatman from above, whereas the watery woman influences the fisher from below. Truly, Heinean verse is operetta lyrics, which even good music isn’t ruined by. Meilhac and Halévy’s lines wouldn’t be out of place in the Book of Songs:
I am thine
Thou art mine
What heavenly luck is ours
A pair of doves
So much in love
Cannot be found beneath the stars.
This is exactly the sort of shallowness that, in combination with Offenbach’s music, generates genuine emotive value or takes on deeper satirical significance.61 (#) Offenbach is music, but Heine is merely the words for it. And I don’t believe that a real poet wrote the lines:
And when I wailed to you about my pain,
You all just yawned in mute disdain;
Yet when I set it out in lyrical phrases,
You couldn’t wait to sing my praises.
But it’s an epigram; and it perfectly captures the mass appeal of Heine’s love poetry, in which the little songs are merely the ornament of big sorrows, not their naturally inevitable expression. The same mass appeal by which the poet Heine feels so rewarded. This is a poet who writes, in one of his prefaces, that his publishers have shown the most gratifying faith in his genius by means of the large first printings they’re wont to make of his work, and who points proudly to the account books in which the popularity of his poetry stands registered. This pride is as little surprising as that popularity. How, indeed, could lyrical work in which ideas are candied, rather than crystallized, fail to be greeted with universal satisfaction? At no point before, say, his deathbed poetry did verse become for Heine such a creative necessity that it had to be verse; and these rhymes are papillotes, not butterflies: paper ruffles often folded for no other reason than to demonstrate a fold. “I could have said all of that very well in good prose,” an amazed Heine writes after setting a preface in verse, and he continues: “But when one reads through the old poems again to polish them up with a view to republication, one is unexpectedly surprised by the jingling routine of the rhyme and meter…” It is indeed nothing but a journalism that scans: that keeps the reader minutely informed about his moods. Heine is always and overplainly informative. Sometimes he says it with blue flowers from someone else’s garden, sometimes directly. If the factual poem “The Holy Three Kings” had been written by a poet, it would be a poem. “The little ox bellowed, the little child screamed, and the three holy kings did sing.” This would be the mood of factuality. In Heine’s hands, though, it’s merely a dispatch. This becomes quite clear in a passage of the “Vitzliputzli”:62 (#)
One hundred sixty Spaniards
Met their death that day;
More than eighty others
Were taken by the Indians.
Seriously wounded, too, were many
Who only later died.
Nearly a dozen horses were lost,
Some killed, some captured.
According to our local correspondent. And, as with the factuality, so with the feeling, so with the irony: nothing immediate, everything utterly graspable with that second hand that can grasp nothing but the material. In the petting of mood, in the tickling of wit.
But the gates made my darling
Slip silent to a rendezvous;
A fool is always willing
When a foolish girl is too.
This joke isn’t made by any real cynic whose love has given him the slip. And no poet calls these words to a girl who is moved by the sunset she is watching:
My girl, now don’t you frown,
This happens all the time;
In front here it goes down
And comes back up from behind.
Not out of respect for the girl; out of respect for the sunset.63 (#) Heine’s cynicism is at the same level as the girl’s sentimentality. And as his own sentimentality. And when, greatly moved, he says of himself, “there I wove my tender Rhymes out of Balm and Moonlight,” you may well want to be as cynical as he is and ask him—Herr Heine, now, don’t you frown—whether he didn’t perhaps mean to write “there I wove my tender Rhymes for Balm & Moonlight,” and whether this might not be the very publishing house to whose account books he was just referring.64 (#) Poetry and satire—the phenomenon of their alliance becomes comprehensible: neither of them is there, they meet on the surface, not in the depths. This tear has no salt, and this salt doesn’t salt. When Heine—what is the phrase?—“punctures the mood with a joke,” I have the impression that he wants to sprinkle salt on the tail of the pretty bird: an old experiment; the bird still flutters away.65 (#) With Heine, the illusion succeeds, if not the experiment. You can prove the contrary to him; to him, but not to his credulous audience. He wasn’t simply taken along through life as an early accompanist of everyday lyrical experiences, he was also always, by virtue of his intellectualism, passed along by people’s youthful idiocy to their more enlightened selves. And they want to be enlightened about everything, just not about Heine, and even if they awaken from his dreams they still have his wit.
This wit, however, in verse and prose, is an asthmatic cur. Heine isn’t capable of driving his humor to the height of pathos and chasing it down from there. He trots it out, but he can’t make it jump. “Just Wait!” is the title of a poem.
Because I flash with such success
You think at thundering I can’t excel!
But you’re all wrong, for I possess
A talent for thundering as well.
Dreadful it will stand the test,
When come the proper day and hour;
You shall hear my voice at last,
The thunderous word, the weather’s power.
The wild storm on that day will cleave
Full many an oak tree tall,
Full many a palace wall will heave
And many a steeple fall!
These are empty promises. After all, what does Heine say about Platen?
In words, a splendid deed
That you intend to do someday!—
How well I know this breed
Who borrow time but do not pay.
Here is Rhodes, now come and show
Your art, this is your chance!
Or hold your tongue and go,
If today you cannot dance.
“A talent for thundering as well”—that sounds like journalism, doesn’t it? But from thunder not a sound and from the lightning only a twinkle. Only glimmerings, only the heat lightning of thoughts that went down somewhere or will sometime.
For just as an original thought need not always be new, so the person who has a new thought can easily have got it from someone else. This will remain a paradox for everyone except those who believe that thoughts are preformed, and that the creative individual is merely a chosen vessel, and that thoughts and poems existed before thinkers and poets—those who believe in the metaphysical way of thought, which is a miasma, whereas opinion is contagious, that is, it requires direct contact in order to be caught, in order to spread. Thus a creative head may say originally what somebody else has already said, and someone else may already be imitating a thought that won’t occur to the creative head until later. And it’s only in the rapture of linguistic conception that a world grows out of chaos. The subtlest illumination or shading of a thought, the tinting, the toning: only work like this goes truly unlost; no matter how pedantic, laughable, and meaningless it may seem at the time, it will eventually come to benefit the general public and yield, in the end, as a well-deserved harvest, those opinions that today are sold unripe with wanton greed. Everything that’s created remains as it was before it was created. The artist fetches it down from the heavens as a finished thing. Eternity has no beginning. Poetry or a joke: the act of creation lies between what’s self-evident and what is permanent.66 (#) Let there be light, again and again. It was already there and can reassemble itself from the spectrum. Science is spectral analysis: art is the synthesis of light. Thought is in the world, but it isn’t had. It’s refracted by the prism of material experience into elements of language; the artist binds them into a thought. A thought is a discovered thing, a recovered thing. And whoever goes looking for it is an honest finder; it belongs to him even if somebody before him has already found it.
In this and only in this way did Heine anticipate Nietzsche with the idea of a Nazarene type.67 (#) He demonstrates, with every word of his polemic against Platen, how far removed he was from the world of Eros and Christianity, which nevertheless shows up in his poem “Psyche” with such neat serendipity. In the transformations of Eros, Heine was able to see only the goal of experience, not the way of it; he applied ethical and aesthetic norms to it, and here, where we arrive at the border between the demonstrably true and the demonstrably silly, he anticipated not Nietzsche but the late Herr Maximilian Harden.68 (#) In the famous Platen polemic—which owes its fame solely to our pulp interest in the persons involved and to the even pulpier pleasure we get from the part under attack, and which would have to have destroyed Heine’s reputation if there existed in Germany a feeling for true polemical power instead of the mere carping of meanness—in this document, Heine chooses to make his erotic confession with the words:69 (#)
The one likes to eat onions, the other has more of a feeling for warm friendship, and I as an honest man must frankly confess that I like to eat onions, and a crooked female cook is dearer to me than the most beautiful friend of beauty.70 (#)
This isn’t gentlemanly, but it isn’t profound, either. He apparently had no concept of the diversity of sexual love, which confirms itself even in the things it rejects, and he crammed this wide world into the crude schema of man and woman, normal and abnormal. Indeed, even on his deathbed, the image that comes to hand is of the milkmaid who “kisses with thick lips and strongly smells of cow chips,” although here she’s only supposed to be more warming than fame, not warm friendship.71 (#) The person who understands the soul this way is a feuilletonist! Heine’s polemic is feuilletonistic in the disconnectedness with which opinion and wit run alongside each other. The outlook can reach no further than the humor can. A person who makes fun of his adversary’s sex life is incapable of rising to polemical power. And a person who ridicules his adversary’s poverty can make no better joke than this: Platen’s Oedipus would “not have been so biting if its author had had more to bite on.” Bad opinions can only make bad jokes. The play of wit and word, which compresses whole worlds of contrast onto the tiniest of surfaces and can therefore be the most valuable kind of play, must, in Heine’s hands, as in the hands of the dismal Saphir, become a slack pun, because there are no moral funds to underwrite it.72 (#) I believe he twice makes awful reference to somebody having a bad case of “melancolic.” Such coinages—as also, for example, his quotations from the “sownets” of Platen or his avowal that he and Rothschild have been on “famillionaire” terms—he naturally then blames on Hirsch-Hyacinth.73 (#) This from a polemicist who talks about his trusty Protestant kitchen hatchet! A hatchet that can’t even trim a sentence! The structural backbone of his attack on Börne consists of direct quotations from Börne, and every time he brings Börne out to speak you can detect quite precisely the point at which Börne stops and Heine’s own yakking takes over.74 (#) He does it in the heavy-handed porcelain story.75 (#) At every step, you want to revise, condense, deepen. “In addition to the passage of the Polish soldiers, I have characterized the occurrences in Rhenisch Bavaria as the next lever which, following the July Revolution, gave rise to the agitation in Germany and had the most profound influence even on our countrymen in Paris” is not a sentence I would have let stand. The parts without a frame; the whole without composition; that short-windedness that has to keep catching itself in a new paragraph, as if to say “So, and now let’s talk about something else.”76 (#) Had Heine been capable of aphorism (for which, indeed, the longest wind is needed), he could have made it through even a hundred pages of polemic. Of Börne, the ethically and intellectually rejected person who towers over the writer attacking him, he says, “In the end, all of his hostilities were nothing more than the petty jealousies that the little drummer boy feels for the great drum major—he envies me for the big plume that struts so boldly in the wind, and for my richly embroidered uniform, on which there’s more silver than he, the little drummer boy, could buy with his entire life savings, and for the skill with which I twirl my big baton, etc.” The skill is undeniable; and the drum major is also dead-on. Heine sees in Börne’s household “an immorality that disgusts” him; his “soul’s entire feeling for purity” bristles “at the thought of coming in the slightest contact with Börne’s immediate surroundings.” He has also wondered for the longest time whether Madame Wohl is Börne’s lover “or merely his wife.”77 (#) This perfectly fine joke is characteristic of the rootlessness78 (#) of Heine’s wit, for it pays off with the opposite of Heine’s notion of sexual morality. Heine would have to have been curious, in a straightforward bourgeois way, as to whether Madame Wohl was Börne’s wife or merely his lover. Indeed, on his deathbed he still sets great store by his avowal that he never touched a woman he knew was married. But there are yet more embarrassing contradictions in this piece. Jean Paul, for example, is called “the muddled polymath of Bayreuth,” while Heine says, of himself, that he has “planted in the literature of Europe monuments redounding to the eternal credit of the German Mind.”79 (#) The German Mind, however, would mainly like to escape with its life; and it will rise again only when the intellectual flood of filth in Germany has run its course: when people again begin to appreciate the mental labor of linguistically creative manliness80 (#) and to distinguish it from the learnable manual labor of linguistic ticklings. And will there then be anything left of Heine but his death?
The deathbed poetry, parts of Romancero, Lamentations, Lazarus: here he no doubt had the best of all helpers in raising his form to the level of genuine figuration. It took the experience of dying to make Heine a poet. It was a dictate: sing, bird, or die. Death is an even better helper than Paris; death in Paris, pain and homesickness, they do finally accomplish something authentic.
I hear the trot, the hooves beat near,
The dark rider comes to fetch me here—
He tears me away, from Mathilde I must part,
Oh, the thought will burst my heart!
This is a different poetry from the one whose success is proven in the account books. For Heine’s influence derives from the Book of Songs, not the Romancero, and if you want to judge the accomplishments by the man, you have to open the former, not the latter. Death concentrates, death clears away the trifling underworld-weariness81 (#) and lends pathos to the cynicism. Heine’s witticisms, so often just the dissonance of an unlyrical perspective, produce a higher harmony here. Compressed by its extinction, his wit finds more powerful fusions; and tasteless items such as “Get thee to a nunnery, dear child, or get thee a shave” become rarer.82 (#) The mot traditionally ascribed to him, “Dieu me pardonnera, c’est son métier,”83 (#) is perhaps, in its much-admired triteness, an invention of those who wanted Heine to remain true to his style to the end. But it suits the whole not badly. Both in belief and unbelief, Heine can’t rid himself of the imagery of commerce. Love itself says to the god of songs that “it demands guarantees,” and the god asks how many kisses Love will advance him against his golden lyre. And meanwhile Heine’s cynicism, this stale potpie of wit and woe, has become rather pleasing to the German palate, though the palate may not want to admit it. Compared with Offenbach, in whose orchestra the thousand-year misery is ringed by a dance of eternal delight, this ridiculer of misery looks like a trained Asra next to a born Bluebeard—to the kind that kills when it loves.84 (#)
… What does the lonely tear want?85 (#) What does a humor want which smiles through tears because both the strength to cry and the strength to laugh are lacking? But the “brilliance of language” isn’t lacking, and it runs in the family. And it’s uncanny how few people notice that it comes from chopped liver, and how many have spread it all over their household bread. Their noses are stuffed, their eyes are blind, but their ears are wide open to every hit song.86 (#) And so, thanks to Heine, the feuilleton has evolved to the highest level of perfection. There’s nothing to be done with an original, but copies can always be improved. When the imitators of Heine began to fear that somebody would expose them, all they had to do was become forgers of Heine, and they could go into mass production under his name. They take up a lot of space in the literature of Heine. But the experts who succeeded in exposing the fraud aren’t expert enough to realize that to expose the thief is to have exposed the owner.87 (#) He himself broke into the house with a skeleton key, leaving the door open behind him. He set a bad example for his successors. He taught them the trick. And the farther the trick spread, the more delicious it became. Thus the pieties of journalism demand that every editorial masthead today include at least a bedbug from Heine’s “mattress grave.” Every Sunday it creeps flatly through the columns and stinks the art out of our noses! But to be tricked out of a real life in this way is entertaining to us. In times that had time, art gave us one to resolve. In times that have the Times, form and content are split apart for faster understanding. Because we have no time, writers are obliged to say in many words what could have been succinctly put. So Heine really is the forerunner of modern nervous systems, praised by artists who fail to notice that the philistines have tolerated him a lot better than he tolerated philistines. For the philistines relent in their hatred of Heine when they take his poetry into account, while the artists take Heine’s hatred of philistines into account in order to rescue his personality. And so, eternally relevant because of a misunderstanding, he vindicates the pretty coinage “cosmopolite,” in which the cosmos reconciled itself to politics. Detlev von Liliencron had a merely provincial outlook. But it seems to me that he was more cosmic in Schleswig-Holstein than Heine was in the cosmos. In the end, the people who never came out of their province will go farther than the people who never came into one.88 (#)
What attracted Nietzsche to Heine—he had delusions of smallness when, in Ecce Homo, he wrote that his and Heine’s names would go down together through the centuries—must have been that hatred of Germany which embraces every ally it can find. But when you hold up the lazzarone as a cultural ideal alongside the German constable, there certainly seems to be nothing more German than such idealism, which takes a plagiarizing romanticism for something to be aspired to.89 (#) The intellectual problem of Heine, this refresher of German air, certainly should not be overlooked alongside the artistic problem of Heine: indeed, it runs alongside. And yet here, once, some oxygen was let into the room of Germany, and after a momentary improvement it tainted the air. That someone with nothing to say is better off saying it understandably: this perception was the relief for which Germany thanks its Heine after those difficult times when the people with something to say were all incomprehensible. And this undeniable piece of social progress has been attributed to art, since Germans are unshakable in their opinion that language is the means of expression common to both writers and speakers. With all due respect to Heine’s enlightening achievement, he wasn’t so great a satirist as to be deemed unworthy of a monument.90 (#) In fact, he was such a small satirist that the stupidity of his times has descended on posterity. Granted, this posterity builds itself the monument that it refuses to give him. But truly it also builds itself the one it wants for him. And if it doesn’t follow through with its monument, it at least leaves its calling card on Heine’s grave and reassures itself of its piety in the newspaper. As long as the secret balloting about his immortality continues, his immortality will continue, and when a nation of fraternity brothers has a problem, it won’t be making an end of it so soon. But the cultural subcommittee is manned by the Karpeleses and the Bartelses, and whichever way the decision finally falls, it won’t prove anything for the Mind.91 (#) The squalid all-in-due-courseness of this debate, the perennial timeliness of antiquated perspectives, is the perfect emblem for a literary phenomenon in which nothing is eternal but the personality type, which runs through time from nowhere. This type, who amazes his contemporaries by having more talent on their level than they do, has inflicted grievous damage on the art of language, which everyone who speaks believes he can understand.92 (#) We no longer recognize the personalities, and the personalities envy the technicians.93 (#) If Nietzsche admires Heine’s technique, then he is given the lie by every sentence he himself ever wrote. Except one: “You have attained mastery when you neither err nor hesitate in the execution.”94 (#) The converse of this shallow insight is the artist’s business. His achievement is scruples. He seizes, but, after seizing, he hesitates. Heine was a go-getter of the language; never did he cast his eyes down before her. Here is how his credo reads: “The axiom that we may know the character of an author from his style is not unconditionally correct; it is applicable merely to that mass of authors who depend upon momentary inspirations to guide their pens, and who obey the word more than they command it. With artistes, this axiom is inadmissible, for these are masters of the word, they manipulate it to whatever end they please, coin it according to their whim, write objectively, and their character does not betray itself in their style.” And that’s what he was: a talent, because no character; except he confused the artistes with the journalists.95 (#) As for the mass of authors who obey the word, they are unfortunately very few. These are the artists. Talent is what the others have: for it is a character defect. Here Heine utters his unconditional truth; he needs it against Börne. But since he writes objectively and, as a master of the word, manipulates it to whatever end he pleases, the opposite suits him against Platen. In Platen, “unlike the true poet, the language has never become master”; he has, “rather, become a master in the language, or, rather, on the language, like a virtuoso on an instrument.” Heine is objective. Against Börne: “The deeds of an author consist in words.” Against Platen: he calls his achievement “in words, a splendid deed”—“so entirely unfamiliar with the essence of poesy that he doesn’t even know that the word is a deed only for a rhetorician, whereas for a true poet the word is an event.”
Which was it for Heine? Neither deed nor event but intention or accident. Heine was a Moses who tapped his staff on the rocks of the German language. But speed isn’t sorcery, the water didn’t flow from the rock, he simply brought it up with his other hand; and it was eau de cologne.96 (#) Heine turned the miracle of linguistic creation into a magic act. He achieved as much as can be achieved with language; greater still is what can be created out of language. He could write a hundred pages, but he couldn’t shape the language of the hundred pages that weren’t written. When Iphigenie97 (#) begs for a kind parting word and the king says to her, “Farewell!” it’s as though leave were being taken for the first time in the world, and a “Farewell!” like this outweighs the Book of Songs and a hundred pages of Heine’s prose. The mystery of the birth of the old word was foreign to him.98 (#) The language was at his command. Yet never did she reduce him to silent ecstasy. Never did her favor force him to his knees. Never did he follow paths invisible to the profane reader’s eye, approaching the place where love first begins. Oh, the marrow-burning rapture of experiences in language! The danger of the word is the delight of thought. What turned the corner there? Not even seen and already loved! I plunge into this adventure.
NESTROY (#)1 (#)AND POSTERITY (#)
ON THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS DEATH
We cannot celebrate his memory the way a posterity ought to, by acknowledging a debt we’re called upon to honor, and so we want to celebrate his memory by confessing to a bankruptcy that dishonors us, we inhabitants of a time that has lost the capacity to be a posterity … How could the eternal Builder fail to learn from the experiences of this century? For as long as there have been geniuses, they’ve been placed into a time like temporary tenants, while the plaster was still drying; then they moved out and left things cozier for humanity. For as long as there have been engineers, however, the house has been getting less habitable. God have mercy on the development! Better that He not allow artists to be born than with the consolation that this future of ours will be better for their having lived before us. This world! Let it just try to feel like a posterity, and, at the insinuation that it owes its progress to a detour of the Mind, it will give out a laugh that seems to say: More Dentists Prefer Pepsodent. A laugh based on an idea of Roosevelt’s and orchestrated by Bernhard2 (#) Shaw. It’s the laugh that’s done with everything and is capable of anything. For the technicians have burned the bridges, and the future is: whatever follows automatically.3 (#) This velocity doesn’t realize that its achievement is important only in escaping itself. Present in body, repellent in spirit, perfect just the way they are, these times of ours are hoping to be overtaken by the times ahead, and hoping that the children, spawned by the union of sport and machine and nourished by newspaper, will be able to laugh even better then. There’s no scaring them; if a spirit comes along, the word is: we’ve already got everything we need. Science is set up to guarantee their hermetic isolation from anything from the beyond. Let art chase away their worries about which planet happens to be benefiting from the thoughts of the world anterior to them.4 (#) This thing that calls itself a world because it can tour itself in fifty days is finished as soon as it can do the math.5 (#) To look the question “What then?” resolutely in the eye, it still has the confidence to reckon with whatever doesn’t add up. It’s grateful to the authors who relieve it of the problem, whether by diversion or by dispute. But it has to curse the one—living or dead—whom it encounters as admonisher or spoilsport between business and success. And when cursing no longer suffices—because cursing implies reverence—it’s enough to forget. And the brain has barely an inkling that the day of the great drought has dawned. Then the last organ falls silent, but the last machine goes on humming until even it stands still, because its operator has forgotten the Word.6 (#) For the intellect didn’t understand that, in the absence of spirit, it could grow well enough within its own generation but would lose the ability to reproduce itself.7 (#) If two times two really is four, the way they say it is, it’s owing to the fact that Goethe wrote the poem “Stillness and Sea.” But now people know the product of two times two so exactly that in a hundred years they won’t be able to figure it out. Something that never before existed must have entered the world. An infernal machine of humanity.8 (#) An invention for shattering the Koh-i-noor to make its light accessible to everyone who doesn’t have it.9 (#) For fifty years now it’s been running, the machine into which the Mind is put in the front to emerge at the rear as print, diluting, distributing, destroying. The giver loses, the recipients are impoverished, and the middlemen make a living. A hybrid thing has settled in to subvert the values of life by turning them against each other. In the pestilential miasma of the intellect, art and mankind make their peace … A spirit who’s been dead for fifty years today, and who still isn’t alive, is the first victim of this festival of joy, about which reports by the column have appeared ever since. How it happened that a spirit like this was buried:10 (#) it could only be the enormous content of his satirical thinking, and I believe he continues to create. He, Johann Nestroy, cannot tolerate that everything he found intolerable remained in place. Posterity repeats his text and doesn’t recognize him; it doesn’t laugh with him, it laughs against him, it refutes and confirms his satire through the undying nature of the subject matter.11 (#) Unlike Heine, whose wit agrees with the world, who touched it where it wanted to be tickled, and whom it could always handle—the world won’t vanquish Nestroy the way it did Heine. It will do it the way the coward overcomes the strong man, by running away from him and getting a literary historian to spit on him. People will be ungrateful to Heine, they’ll enforce the laws of fashion against him, they won’t wear him anymore. But they’ll always say that he had wide horizons, that he was an emancipator, that he rubbed shoulders with statesmen and still had the presence of mind to write a love poem now and then. Not so Nestroy. No Kaddish will be said.12 (#) No Friedjung13 (#) will succeed in demonstrating that he had a political outlook, let alone the kind of outlook that turns a political outlook into an outlook in the first place. What mattered to him? So much, and therefore nothing of liberalism.14 (#) While the cobblers outside were fighting for the most ideal of wares, he was having his tailors sing lampoons.15 (#) He limited his partitioning of the world to small businessmen and landlords, to the up-and-coming and the down-and-out, to pensioners and unemployed porters. But that it was the world, not the editorial page, that he partitioned like this; that his wit was forever taking the road from social standing to humanity: conventional wisdom leafs past a chapter as incomprehensible as that.16 (#) Flashes on a narrow horizon—the heavens opening over a grocery store—are not enlightening. Nestroy’s thinking proceeded from social status into the world, Heine’s from the world into the state. And that is more.17 (#) Nestroy remains a joker because his jokes, which shot from the workbench to the stars, came from the workbench and we know nothing of the stars. An earthly politician says more to us than a cosmic buffoon. And since what matters to us is increasing our stores of conventional wisdom, we don’t mind if some earthly buffoons occasionally make Nestroy into a politician and force him to speak the kind of liberal precinct-opinion without which we can no longer conceive of a dead satirist. The phraseurs and riseurs are then happy to admit that he was a mockingbird and a cutup. And nevertheless, he was only cutting them down and blowing off their Calabrian hats.18 (#) And nevertheless, to those who condescend to art and grant it free play between the horizons—that is, from the individual nullity to the social quantity—let it be said with considerable certainty: If art is not what they conceive and condone but instead is the stretch from something seen to something thought—the shortest link from the gutter to the Milky Way—then there has never been a runner under the German sky like Nestroy. Never, it goes without saying, among those who brought the news, with laughing faces, that life is arranged in an ugly way.19 (#) We won’t deny credence to his message because it was a lampoon. Not even because, in his rush, he also sang something for the listener; because, in his contempt for the needs of the audience, he satisfied them, so that his thoughts could soar unhindered. Or because he swaddled his dynamite in cotton and blew up his world only after reinforcing its conviction that it was the best of all possible worlds, and because he laid on the soft soap of congeniality before he started slitting throats, and otherwise didn’t wish to inconvenience anyone. Nor, not being interested in honoring truth before spirit,20 (#) will we think less of him because he often, with the carelessness of an original who has more important things on his mind, took his cue from stagehands. The reproof that was leveled against Nestroy is sillier than any plotline he lifted from a French flunky, sillier than the printed look of any of those quodlibets that he used to toss to the people, who, then as now, won’t give humor a free pass unless they’re also given their hardy-har-har, and who, in those days, weren’t convinced they’d got their money’s worth unless they went home with a cheer for the assembled wedding guests.21 (#) He chose the routine, which had been born as a routine, in order to conceal his substance, which could never be a routine. That even the low theatrical effects here somehow contributed to the deeper meaning, by separating the audience from it—and that, again, there’s deeper meaning even in the fanfare with which the orchestra sends off philosophy—escapes the literary historians, who may well be capable of helping Nestroy to a political conviction, but not to the text that encompasses the immortal part of him.22 (#) He himself hadn’t bargained for this. He wrote on the fly, but he didn’t know the flight would extend beyond the repertoire. Although every Nestroyan line attests that he was capable of it, he didn’t have to withdraw into artistic self-discipline in the face of those who considered him nothing more than a humorist, and the milder jarring of his times denied his response the consciousness of its finality—that blessed incentive to seal revenge on the material in his enjoyment of form.23 (#) If he’d been born later, if he’d been born into these times of journalistic language fraud, he would have conscientiously repaid everything he owed to language. Times that retard the intellectual tempo of the masses incite their satirical counterpart. These times would have left him no time for as casual a prosecution of a bloody feud as the stage permits and insists on, and no orchestra would have been harmonious enough to resolve the dissonance between his nature and the world that grew up after it. His essence was the joke that runs counter to the stage effect, the flat onceness that has to be satisfied with finding a mate for the joke’s material and which, in its rhythmic salvo, hits the target before the thought.24 (#) On the stage, where politeness toward the audience parades around in the negligee of language, Nestroy’s wit could only be coined in the currency of rhetoric, which, far removed from the actor’s tools of characterization, was something again only he could pull off.25 (#) Fragmented times would have driven his essence to concentrate itself in aphorism and glosses, and the world’s more varied screechings would have introduced new cadences to his dialectic in its penetration to the core of the apparatus.26 (#) In his satire, one particular rhythm above all suffices as a winding post for the threads of an observation that is truly of the spirit. But sometimes a Nestroyan climax will look as if the terminologies of class feeling, perorating in succession, had arranged themselves as the steps of a Jacob’s ladder. These lively exponents of their professional point of view are always standing with one foot in their trade and the other in philosophy, and if their face is always changing, it’s really just a mask, because they have Nestroy’s one and only tongue, which has unleashed this sage torrent of words. Whatever else they may be, they are, above all, thinkers and speakers and are always in danger, on the public stage, of shortchanging their thought to save their breath. This utterly language-infatuated humor, in which word and sense capture each other, embrace, and hold each other entwined to the point of inseparability, indeed to the point of indistinguishability, stands above anything that a stage scene can communicate and therefore falls into the prompter’s box, in a way comparable only to Shakespeare, from whom you likewise have to remove Shakespeare before you can produce a theatrical effect—unless the mission of a stage character who begins to drone and rave without regard to anything going on behind him would be assured of applause by the oddness of such behavior. Odder yet, that the verbal and oral wit that he carries into his dialogue doesn’t impede his powers of characterization, of which there’s enough left over to outfit an entire dramatis personae and, even as it’s causing us to think, to fill the theater with concrete mood, gesture, suspense, and action. He borrows foreign subject matter. Where, though, is the German comedy writer who could borrow from him the power to create a character with three words and a milieu with three sentences? He’s all the more creative when he lifts foreign material into his own work. He goes about it differently than the better-known contemporary recaster Hofmannsthal, who strips the hides off honorable cadavers to inter questionable remains in them, and who would no doubt defend his serious professional work against comparison with an author of farces.27 (#) Like all superior readers, Herr von Hofmannsthal reduces the work to its material. Nestroy takes his material from where it was barely more than material, invents what he has found, and his achievement would be considerable even if it consisted only in the reconstruction of plots and in the whirl of reinvented situations—that is, only in the welcome opportunity to entertain the world and not in the voluntary compulsion to observe the world as well. But the higher Nestroy, the one who owes nothing to any foreign idea, is somebody who has only head and no figure, for whom a role is only a pretext for his text,28 (#) and in whom every word attains a fullness that surpasses character, even the one who stands there in the breadth of Scholzian29 (#) humor as the model of a basic type in the satellite theaters of Vienna.30 (#) It wasn’t Nestroy the actor but the costumed advocate of his satirical prerogative, the executor of his attacks, the spokesman for his own eloquence, who might have exerted that mysterious effect which, while its artistic origins have certainly never been understood, has come down to us as the center of a heroic age of theater. The theatrical form of Nestroy’s mind was bound to die out with his body, and the routine of its nimbleness, which we still here and there see popping up with virtuoso poise, is a costume borrowed illegitimately. In his farces, the lead role remains unfilled unless the expert in his greasepaint also happens to come by his satirical spirit. Only the fruitful comedy of his fuller secondary roles has found original successors, such as the actor Oskar Sachs,31 (#) whose style seems, in its vital composure, to descend from the classical Carltheater.32 (#) But as the origin and perfection of a popular type, an actorly creator such as Girardi, who stands on the margins of the empty scene offered by the stagecraft of the past decade, could surpass the theatrical value of Nestroy’s art, which had only to clothe its own fullness of thought.33 (#) This is why even a layman of the stage such as Herr Reinhardt could propose a Nestroy cycle to a Girardi.34 (#) In Girardi, the character thrives on the poverty of its textual support; with Nestroy it shrivels up on the wealth of the words. There’s so much literature in Nestroy that the theater balks, and he has to step in for the actor. He can do it because it’s a written art of acting.35 (#) In this proxyship for the actor, in this embodiment of what easily eludes the actual demands of theater, there lives today a spirit whose affinity with him can now and then be recognized in the very outlines of his personality: Frank Wedekind.36 (#) Here, too, there’s something overproductive, in which what’s organically lacking in the character is made up for with identification, and which mediates personally between confession and credibility.37 (#) The actor wrote for a poet a role with which the poet wouldn’t trust an actor. In Wedekind—leaving aside an example of linguistic-satirical lineage that means more to me personally—we’re presented with a monologuist for whom a seeming conventionality and casualness of scenic form likewise suffices for speaking past it, and singing past it, things that are truly new and essential. The kinship in the cadences of aperçus was pointed out once by the late critic Wilheim.38 (#) Cadence is that superficiality on which thoughts most rely, and there must somewhere be a common standpoint for observing the world when sentences are spoken that could just as well be Nestroy’s as Wedekind’s:
“She’s in her twentieth year now, was married three times, satisfied a colossal lot of lovers—sooner or later, the needs of her heart were bound to register.”39 (#)
A biographical comment like this would also be made, just as it is, by one of the Nestroyan bringers of thought if, with the same vault of antitheses, he could get himself over his beloved’s past. And in Earth Spirit40 (#) somebody could again come close to speaking the wonderful line that occurs in Nestroy:
“I seen an old gray horse once pullin’ a brick wagon. The future’s been weighin’ on my mind ever since.”41 (#)
But here, perhaps, the absolute Shakespearean quality of such a lightning illumination of a mental landscape is sublime beyond any modern comparison. It’s a line by which you’d like to reintroduce to the contemporary reader’s muddled eye what poetry is: a within fetched from a without, a perfect unity. Observed reality taken up in feeling, not massaged until it fits the feeling. It could be used to reveal the method of all poetastery, all feuilleton poetry, which looks around for a handy piece of the external world in order to dispose of a stock mood. The case of Heine breaks open and collapses on a sentence like this, for it offers the dead certainty that an old gray horse would start to muse: How good was my life before / This wagon must I pull today / O happy neighs of yore / You’ve gone, you’ve gone away! / But the wagon said, Don’t frown / It is an old refrain / Once the road starts going down / It never goes up again … And we’d be fully informed about the author’s mood, including the ironic resignation. With Nestroy, who wrote only rough couplet stanzas, you can detect passages in every farce where his purely poetic piloting of thought through the densest of materials—where more than the mind: the mind’s process of assimilation—becomes visible. It’s the advantage over beauty possessed by a face that’s changeable to the point of beauty. The coarser the material, the more penetrating the process. In satire, the linguistic demands are less easily questioned, and fraudulence more difficult, than in the kind of poetry that doesn’t bother earning the stars and for which distance isn’t a road but a rhyme. Satire is thus rightly the poetry of impediment, richly compensated for being the impediment of poetry. And how it has both together: of the ideal, the entire ideal, and distance as well! It is never polemical,42 (#) always creative, while counterfeit poetry is mere yea-saying, a contemptible appeal to the already available world. How satire is true symbolism, inferring a lost beauty from a found ugliness and setting up little images of meaning in place of global concepts! Counterfeit poetry, which takes weighty matters for granted, and counterfeit irony, which rejects weighty matters, have one and the same face, and a single wrinkle separates Heine’s lonely tear from Herr Shaw’s common laughter. But the joke is nasty to the smokestack because the joke affirms the sun. And acid wants the gleam, and the rust says it’s only corrosive.43 (#) Satire can perpetrate a disruption of religion to arrive at reverence. It inclines toward high emotion. Even in places where a given emotion is deployed like just another object from the outside world, so that satire’s contradiction can shimmer through.44 (#) Yes and No mix and multiply, and thought springs forth. A game, as unprincipled as love. The result of this perfect penetration, preservation, and intensification of polar tendencies: a Nestroyan tirade, a melody by Offenbach. Here someone’s rapture at a pastoral play is underscored by the very joke deriding it; there the caricature of someone’s pining moonlight love runs riot over parody and into transcendence. This is true high-spiritedness, for which nothing is profane.
“A real practical fanatic once told me that the dandiest thing is when there’s two lovers and one of them dies first and comes back to the other one as a ghost. I can just see it, when she’s sitting there at her garden window some flowery night, with moonlight playing all over her pearly tears, and it would be getting whiter and whiter behind the bushes, and that whiteness would be yours truly—completely spirit, not one speck of body, but with the bedsheet of eternity over my head all the same, on account of decency—I stretches out my arms to her, I points to a star in the sky, ‘there shall we be united,’ so to speak—she gets the itch for a heavenly rendezvous, and would you believe it, she casts off her earthly shackles and we go amalgamating and waffeting and pendulating into the azure-blue night sky…”
Inverted pathos presupposes emotion, and Nestroy’s wit always has the gravity that knew emotion in its better days. Like the wit of every true satirist, it rolls down the long alley toward where the Muses stand, to strike all nine of them. Nestroy the disputer is the disputatious catalogue of every feeling in the world.45 (#) The buffoon who was banished from the stage, but went on cracking jokes behind the tragic hero as he was leaving, seems fused with the hero for an epoch, amusing himself in a style that reaches into his own heart and, in a strangely suspended tone, almost like Jean Paul’s, sustains the joke that’s being perpetrated here with horror.
FRAU VON ZYPRESSENBURG: Is one’s father a hunter, too?—TITUS: No, he runs a quiet, solitary business in which resting is his only work; he lies fettered by a higher power, and yet he’s free and independent because he’s disposing of himself;—he’s dead.—FRAU VON ZYPRESSENBURG (aside): How profligately he uses twenty lofty words to say what can be said with one syllable. The man obviously has the makings of an author.
And it is the loftiest yet tersest paraphrasing of a monosyllabic condition, the way the words here play around death. This blurred emotionality, which Nestroy breathes into the most modest of his characters’ asides, has led literary historians to think that his wit is aimed at their noble impulses.46 (#) In truth, it’s aimed only at their phrases. Nestroy is the first German satirist in whom language forms thoughts about things. He liberates language from its lockjaw, and for every cliché it turns him a profit in thought. Indicative are such expressions as:
“Good thing I drownded my sorrows, or despair woulda driven me straightaway to drink.”
Or:
“The apples go over here! People got no idea how to organdize. They go mixin’ up apples and oranges like apples and oranges.”
Language is making fun of itself here. The cliché is driven back into the hypocritical convention that created it:
“All right, out with your decision, my sweet”—“But Herr von Lips, I really must first…”—“I understand, there can be no talk of refusing, but to say yes, you think some deliberation is in order.”
The cliché inverts itself into truth:
“I’ve shared adversity with you; it’s now my most sacred duty to stick with you in good times, too!”
Or, debased to neologism, the language of the upper classes is caricatured by language from the mouths of the unrefined:
“All of a sudden, here comes a first-magnitude starlet and makes her societal splash at the pinnacle of the ambulatory entreprise…”
How merely changing a tense suffices for an intention like this can be seen in an inspired example in which “not mincing one’s words” corrects itself. An interpenetration of problem and content:
“Be bold in your demands, speak openly, without having minced your words!”
Nestroy’s people speak bombastically when the joke wants to subvert cliché or counteract demagogic emotionality:
“Oh, I want to be a dreadful servant for thee!”
He has every domestic speak Schiller sentences, to sober the emotional life of the principals. Often, however, it’s as if the tragic hero had been standing behind the buffoon, for the emotion seems to side with the joke. Genuine matters of the heart are being treated when an office clerk approaches a milliner as if on his way to Eboli’s room:47 (#)
“Your servant’s looking daggers at me—does he know about our former love?”
Joke and high emotion go hand in hand, and if the times haven’t yet stimulated them to engender each other, they still never cancel each other. To be sure, the poet doesn’t elevate his own wit, unaltered, into his own emotion, but he strengthens it with someone else’s. The two of them play and release each other mutually unharmed. When Nestroy makes light of feeling, we can trust him, and when his wit cuts short a love scene, he disposes of and replaces every other love scene that could have occurred in a similar situation. Where, in a German farce, after the engagement of master and mistress, have the necessities between manservant and maidservant ever been accomplished in fewer words:
“Why are you looking at me like that?”—“She’s in the service of my future mistress, I’m in the service of her future master, I just toss that out, as various consequentialities could arise from it.”—“Time will tell.”
And if the aim is to demonstrate, in passages of Nestroyan dialogue, his accelerated method of psychology, where does a scene like this one between a cobbler and a servant stand:
“Congratulations on the secret jackpot, or whatever it was, but honestly, I was flabbergasted.”—“So was the innkeeper, no less! He made an even stupider face than you. I bet you I could be into him for ten francs now and he wouldn’t dare say anything … Yessiree, to ask for change from a ducat, it arouses respect.”—“Strange! (aside) But suspicions, too … Our master has disappeared. A ducat comes to light among the proletariat … Hm … You’re a cobbler?”—“So they say.”—“And I suppose you made good on a long shot?”—“Oh, you’re probably wondering how an honest cobbler came by a ducat?”—“Well, it is extraordinary … I mean, that is to say, interesting…”—“As a stranger, it’s actually none of your business … but, no, to me, anybody I meet in an inn is a kindred soul. (Shaking his hand) You shall know everything.”—(In inquisitive suspense) “Well, so?”—“You see, the thing is, there’s an incident at the bottom of this … a fundamentally horrible incident that no man on earth may ever learn of, and consequently not you, either.”—“Yes, but…”—“So show yourself worthy of my trust and probe no further!”
Such values are lost and forgotten. As everywhere in art, and above all in theater, scarcity of time has accustomed audiences to ponderousness.48 (#) Only this would enable the intellect, weary from business, to procure those further pleasures that it has so long regarded as the task of dramatic high art to provide: getting acquainted with the latest advances in psychology, a psychology that is only psychrology,49 (#) the science of coming to terms with mysteries in a rational way, bored amid excitement by instructors, dying amid beauty of boredom, from the French rule de tri to the Nordic integral equation.50 (#) No theatergoer managing to go to bed without the necessary knotty problem. And meanwhile naturalism, which not only met the psychological requirements but satisfied other demands for home use by calling things by their proper names, exhaustively, with nothing left out, while fate hung on the wall like a pendulum clock keeping perfect time. All of this so thoroughly and at such length, until the vengeance of the fettered bourgeois imagination finally vented itself in the psychological operetta.51 (#) In the most out-of-the-way corner of a Nestroyan farce there is more expert feeling for a scene and a better view into the stage-flies of higher worlds than in the repertoire of a German decade. Hauptmann and Wedekind stand as poets, like the pre-Nestroyan Raimund, above considerations of theatrical utility.52 (#) The influence of Anzengruber and his successors is detached at its own risk from the saving grace of dialect.53 (#) Nestroy’s dialect is an artistic tool, not a crutch. You can’t translate his language, but you could reduce the authors of folk plays to their scene value in Standard German. Only a literary historian is capable of discerning an advance over Nestroy in this. But the idea that this man, even if his exploitation for the meaner purposes of theatrical pleasure were to meet with ingratitude, can be so much as mentioned as an intellectual personality in the company of those very things that have Hand and Heart or Faith and Home54 (#) onstage, would be a joke that humorlessness should not permit itself with impunity. There are words on every page of Nestroy that burst open the tomb into which estrangement from art has thrown him, and that go for the throats of the gravediggers. Full of datedness, an ongoing protest against the people who are up to date. A Forty-Eighter’s55 (#) word-barricades against the reign of banality; trains of thought whose action wordplay renders inoffensive to the seriousness of life, the better to outwit it. A lowly genre, as far beneath a historian’s dignity as an earthquake. But what if the joke sensed that it’s intolerable to dignity—that it so fooled dignity in advance that dignity is right to feel insulted. Can you imagine that the professionals of the Ideal would let a phenomenon like Nestroy pass without leaving behind a visible expression of their terror? The self-advertisements of Theodor Vischer, Laube, Kuh, and those other concerned dignitaries56 (#) who came out for Nestroy’s hundredth birthday are as understandable as the judgmental politics of Hebbel, who rejects Nestroy after Nestroy’s wit has grabbed him by his tragic roots, extols Herr Saphir, from whom less painful attacks were to be expected, and also, of course, hates Jean Paul and loves Heine.57 (#) Speidel’s courageous insights interrupt the parade of those who, by inclination or for decency’s sake, had to misread Nestroy. What could be more natural than the resistance of the keepers of the sacred fire to a spirit who kindles it everywhere? A spirit like this couldn’t help having every wind and every worthy of the times against him. He ran into refinement above and banality below. An author who in highly political times busies himself with human lowlinesses, a Carltheater actor whose reflections rule out attending the Concordia Ball.58 (#) He orchestrated the horseplay of the sexes with perceptions and gestures that the warehouse managers of life had to cast, in revenge, as obscenities, and in social matters he never revealed loyalties, only personality. Yes, he took up the profession of politics—the way a constable takes up a pickpocket. And it wasn’t the absurdities within politics that attracted his attention, it was the absurdity of politics. He was a thinker, and so he could think neither liberally nor anti-liberally.59 (#) And the suspicion of anti-liberal convictions may well be more likely to arise where thought transcends the region in which spiritual salvation depends on this kind of evaluation, and where thought turns into joke because it had to get past it. How bewilderingly unprincipled art is: the satirist revealed it in his ability to set off words that exploded the seeming tendency of his plots, leaving the historian uncertain about what to take more seriously, the praised revolution or the ridiculed yokel, the mockery of someone’s fear of the Devil or a fanatical confession of faith. But even the historian can sense that the satirist opposed the affliction of humanity by intellectual sham values, and has no better defense than to explain that Nestroy was afraid of the police. Liberals are forever calling in the police to accuse artists of cowardice. So little does the artist take sides, however, that he sides with the lie of tradition against the truth of the swindle. Nestroy knows where the danger is. He recognizes that knowing means believing nothing. He can already hear the ravens of freedom, which are black with printer’s ink. The imposing sounds of education have already come clattering into his prayers. How open his ears are to the argot whereby jurisprudence browbeats justice! How well he teases out the terminological pretensions with which empty disciplines fill themselves for a knowledge-trusting human race. And instead of blaming religion for priests, he prefers to blame the Enlightenment for journalists and Progress for the scientific paper pushers.60 (#) Just listen to the gibberish spouted by the comet-cobbler in Lumpazivagabundus. After a matchless glance with which he sizes up a skeptical carpentress:
“She don’t believe in the comet, she’s in for an eye-opener…”
he continues:
“I’ve had the thing figured out for quite a while now. The astral fire of the solar ring in the golden number of Urion has left the constellation of the planetary system in the universe of parallaxes and landed, by means of fixed-star quadrants, in the ellipse of the ecliptic; in consequence, according to the diagonals of approximation of the perpendicular rings, the next comet will have to smash into the earth. My calculations are as clear as shoe polish…”
And sound as plausible as if Nestroy had studied the problem of the “Grubenhund” at its journalistic source.61 (#) The sentence, just as it is, eighty years later, when the astronomers again personally came hither in a comet’s stead, could have been printed in the Neue Freie Presse.62 (#) I also reserve the right to send it in sometime. But even beyond this kind of applicability in urgent cases, Nestroy won’t become obsolete. For he took such accurate note of human nature’s weakness that posterity could feel observed by him, too, if it hadn’t grown a thick skin in the meantime. No wisdom can get through to it, but it has itself tattooed with enlightenment. And thus it considers itself more beautiful than the Vormärz.63 (#) But since enlightenment comes off with soap, lies have to help out. This present day of ours never ventures out without a protective guard of historians to club down memory for it. What it most wants to hear is that the Vormärz compares to it like a candle hawker to an electricity company. Scientific truth would be better served, however, if the present day were told that the Vormärz is the light and the present day enlightenment. Among the dogmas of its presuppositionlessness is the belief that art indeed used to be gay but life is serious now.64 (#) And our times manage to be vain about even this. For, supposedly, in the theatrical season that constitutes the first half of the nineteenth century, people were interested solely in the affair of Demoiselle Palpiti vulgo Tichatschek, whereas now they’re generally enthusiastic about the affair of Professor Wahrmund and only occasionally about the Treumann affair.65 (#) If this is how things stand, long live the Vormärz! But there’s still another way to grasp the difference. In the age of absolutism, passion for theater was an outgrowth of the artistic feeling aroused by political suppression. In times of universal suffrage, theater gossip is the residue of a culture impoverished by political freedom. Comparing our notorious intellectual life to that of the Vormärz is such an unparalleled affront to the Vormärz that only the moral degeneracy left behind by fifty thousand performances of The Merry Widow can excuse the excess. The grand press alone has the right to look down with contempt on the little coffeehouse that used to spread, by laughably inadequate means, the gossip that people in those days couldn’t live without because politics were forbidden, while today people can’t live without it because politics are allowed. One decade of phraseological enslavement has supplied people’s imaginations with more stage-prop rubbish than a century of absolutist tyranny, with the important difference that intellectual productivity was furthered by prohibitions to the same degree that it’s now being crippled by the editorial page. But one shouldn’t imagine that people let themselves be marched off from the theater into politics so directly. The path of permissible play leads through pinochle. This the liberal educators must concede. How the rhetoric of Progress slips up and speaks the truth can be seen in the delicious comment of a moral historian from the eighties who rejects the roast-chicken era and serves up the fresh-baked seriousness of life as follows:66 (#)
Times have changed since the days of Bäuerle, Meisl and Gleich, and although the old guard of unalloyed Viennese, the respectable families, may still scratch the theatrical itch that they inherited from “Grammerstädter, Biz, Hartriegel and Schwenninger” to the extent that they are wont never to miss a premiere at the Royal Temple of the Muses or a revival of Beiden Grasel at the Josefstadt, the main force of their compatriots has long since been diverted from the road to the theater by the most various of enticements, and devotes its free time to a game of Tapper, a meal at the local vineyard, or a production by a folksinging company that’s currently en vogue—times and people have changed.67 (#)
Later on, life became even more serious, there came the issues, the Gschnas parties,68 (#) the geological discoveries, the American tour of the men’s glee club, and it will be important for even later times to learn: it was not in the Vormärz that the following announcement appeared in Viennese newspapers:
Yesterday’s competition at the “Dumb Fellow” saw the first prize go to Fräulein Luise Kemtner, sister of the well-known Hernals innkeeper Koncel, for the smallest foot (19½), and to Herr Moritz Mayer for the largest bald spot. Prizes will be awarded today for the narrowest lady’s waist and the biggest nose.
This is what Vienna looks like in 1912. Reality is a meaningless exaggeration of all the details that satire left behind fifty years ago.69 (#) But the nose is even bigger, the fellow is even dumber where he believes that he’s progressed, and the contest for the largest bald spot stands alongside the results of the Bauernfeld Prize as the image of a justice that recognizes true merit.70 (#) One glance into the new world as it’s manifested in one issue of the local roundup, one breath of this godless air of omniscience and omnipresence, will force the reproachful question: What does Nestroy have against his contemporaries? Truly, he’s ahead of himself. As if anticipating, he attacks his small environs with an asperity worthy of a later cause. He’s already coming into his satirical inheritance. Dawn is already breaking, here and there, on his gentle scenes, and he scents putrefaction in the morning air. He sees all those things coming up that won’t come up in order to be present, but will be present in order to climb. With what fervor he would have jumped on them if he’d found them fifty years later! The coziness that tolerates this kind of expansion, accommodates this kind of tourist trade, reveals its inner fraudulence in this kind of blending: what a caricature he would have made of the helpless malice of this innocent, cross-eyed face!71 (#) The farce of counterfeit authenticity cozying up to grand trends, rather than falling in line with them, has followed him like an epilogue; the all-blanketing haze of issues, which the times impose on themselves to while away eternity, smokes above his grave. He turned his mankind out of its little garden of paradise, but he doesn’t know yet how it will behave itself outside. He turns back in the face of a posterity that disavows the values of the Spirit, he doesn’t live to see the respectless intelligence that knows that technology is more important than beauty and doesn’t know that technology is at most a way to beauty, and that there can be no thanks at the destination, and that the ends are the means of forgetting the means. He can’t yet see that a time will come where girls take it like a man and their banished sexuality seeks refuge in men to revenge itself on nature.72 (#) Where talent wages a smear campaign against character, and education forgets its good upbringing. Where standards are universally raised and no one meets them. Where everyone has individuality and everyone the same, and hysteria is the glue that holds together the social order. But of all the issues that came after him—issues indispensable to mankind since it lost its legends—he did live to see politics. He was there when the noise got so loud that it raised the dead, which is always a signal that it’s time for the Spirit to go home to bed. This then produces a posterity that can’t be toured in even fifty years. The satirist could seize the great opportunity, but it no longer grasps him. What lives on is misunderstanding. Thanks to its artistic insensibility, Nestroy’s posterity does the same thing as his contemporaries, who were in material agreement with him: the latter took him for a topical jokester, while his posterity says he’s obsolete. He hits posterity and so it doesn’t recognize him. Satire lives between errors, between the one that’s too close to it and the one that it’s too far from. Art is what outlasts its subject matter. But the test of art becomes the test of times as well, and if past times in their succession always managed to experience art in their remoteness from its subject matter, these times of ours experience remoteness from art and hold the subject matter in their hands. For them, anything that isn’t telegraphed is over with. Their reporters replace their imagination. Because times that can’t hear language can judge only information value. They can still laugh at jokes, if they were personally party to the occasion. How are they, whose memory extends no further than their digestion, supposed to make the leap into anything that isn’t explained to them directly? Applying the mind to things that people no longer remember upsets their digestion. They grasp only with their hands. And machines make even hands unnecessary. The organs of these times oppose the calling of all art, which is to enter into the understanding of those who live afterward. There no longer are any people who live afterward, there are only people who live, who express enormous satisfaction that they do, that they live in a present that sees to its own news and conceals nothing from the future. Joyful as the morning paper, they crow upon the civilized dunghill that it’s no longer the concern of art to shape into a world. They have their own talent. If you’re a villain you don’t need honor, if you’re a coward you don’t need to be afraid, and if you have money you don’t need to have respect. Nothing is allowed to survive, immortality is what’s outlived itself. Things stick where they lie. Freaks with deformities balance out good fortune, because they can claim that heroes were hermaphrodites.73 (#) Herr Bernhard Shaw guarantees the superfluity of all that might prove useful between being awake and sleeping. To the irony of his and all shallow minds no depth is unfathomable, to the haughtiness of his and all flat minds no heights are unattainable. There’s earthly laughter everywhere. Satire, however, has the answer to such laughter. For it’s the art that, more than any other art, outlives itself, and this means the dead times, too. The harder the material, the greater the attack. The more desperate the struggle, the stronger the art. The satiric artist stands at the end of a development that renounces art. He is its product and its hopeless antithesis.74 (#) He organizes the Spirit’s flight from mankind, he is the rear guard. After him, the deluge. In the fifty years since Nestroy’s death, his spirit has experienced things that encourage it to go on living. It stands wedged in between the paunches of every profession, delivers monologues, and laughs metaphysically.
AFTERWORD TO “HEINE AND THE CONSEQUENCES” (#)
The deepest confirmation of what was thought in this essay and accomplished by it is what happened to it: it found no readers. A printed thing that’s simultaneously a written thing finds none. Though it may have every outward merit in its favor—content that’s accessible and remains agreeable even under hostile scrutiny, a pleasing format, and even the lowest price1 (#)—the public isn’t fooled, it has the keenest nose against art, and even more surely than it knows its way to kitsch, it steers clear of value. Today only the novel, the work of language outside of language, which even in its most perfect form grants common sense some kind of hold and hope, can earn its author a living. Otherwise the people whose words to the reader abide with thought are in an endlessly difficult position compared with those who deceive him with words. He believes the latter immediately, the former only after a hundred years. And no earthly tear from eyes that see life buried by death will shorten the waiting period. Nothing helps. An age first has to rot past stinking to make the people who are what they can do as beloved as these people here, who can do what they are not. Except that this Today carries the particular curse of doubt: whether the head that survives the machine will also survive its consequences. Never before was the road from art to audience so long; but there has also never existed such an artificial hybrid,2 (#) a thing that writes of its own accord and reads of its own accord, so that, indeed, they all can write and all can understand, and it’s merely social accident that determines who, among this horde of educated Huns who progress against the Spirit, emerges as writer and who as reader. The sole ability that they hold in honor as a trait inherited from nature: regurgitating what they’ve eaten seems welcome to them in the intellectual realm, as a trick through which it might be possible to unite two functions in one person, and it’s only because there are businesses more profitable than writing that so many of them have restrained themselves so far and satisfy themselves with eating what the others have regurgitated. Just as the same person is duplicated at a table of tavern regulars, a cellist, a lawyer, a philosopher, a horse trader, and a painter who are all of one mind and distinguishable to the waiter only by their trades: there’s no difference between author and reader. There’s only one person now, and that’s the feuilletonist. Art backs away from him like a glacier from an alpine hotel guest. There was a time, the guide boasts, when you could put your hands on it. If a reader today can put his hands on a work, the work must have a bad side. The publisher of this magazine is well aware that it owes its reputation mainly to a sensibility that doesn’t shrink from some excellent novelist merely because he’s also rumored to be an artist. He can confidently exploit the indulgence. The publisher of Die Fackel not infrequently has the feeling that he’s freeloading on it. It would be retracted irrevocably should his readers ever discover in what a state of insanity such witty happenstances came to be written, on what powers of self-annihilation such self-assurance lives, and how many hundredweight of suffering the lightest pen can carry. And how gloomy the thing that brightens the idler’s day.3 (#) Their laughter, which doesn’t reach as far as my wit, would die in their mouths. If they could see that the petty material directly in front of them is just a shabby remnant of a thing they cannot touch, they would finally go away. Among those who flatter themselves that they’re my victims, I am not loved; but the people who look on with schadenfreude still give me far more credit than I deserve.4 (#)
Given that Die Fackel finds itself in so many wrong hands: if something I’ve written proceeds to venture into other print, few people will reach for it. With a collection of satires or aphorisms, this would be nothing to complain about.5 (#) Things of that sort are content to find the rare reader for whom textual alteration signifies new work. But the essay “Heine and the Consequences,” which came to the book publisher as a manuscript, has made it clear that there no longer are any readers besides these few.6 (#) And it, of all texts, can’t help feeling pained by this discovery. For its wish is to create readers, and it can’t succeed at this unless it finds readers. It enacts the misery of German-language letters, and it isn’t content to make itself the demonstration of its own truth. And so it treads the path of remorse, which leads from the book back into the magazine; and would that even this exigency might please it, as proof of the perversity of the business of the Spirit in our times. Here, in familiar environs, it will at least make the attempt to speak to more deaf ears than are to be had in the greater German public.
Because it’s not to be thought that they were simply deaf to the subject about which they were being addressed. They’re still happy to hear about Heine, even if they know not what it means.7 (#) If the essay merely rejected the living value of his art, it would surely say nothing new to that contemporary sensibility that doesn’t even let itself be fooled by the collusions of the commentariat. It would surely sooner be brought around to begging for a Heine monument than to a reading of his books. And the hate that developed there, where not love but mere intellectual hypocrisy stands watch over the grave, would be greeted with some bitterness, to be sure, but not with any general interest. This text, meanwhile, as far removed from suspicion of being unfair to Heine as from pretension of being fair to him, is not a literary essay. It doesn’t exhaust the problem of Heine, but it does more than this.8 (#) The most ridiculous reproach—that it holds Heine responsible as an individual culprit for his consequences—can’t touch it. The people who pretend to defend him are defending themselves and revealing the true direction of the attack. They should be held responsible for their existence, and the sputum that German intellectuals immediately coughed up is evidence that they feel themselves to be the responsible consequence. There were individuals severely enough punished by their own poetry or too gravely insulted by their own polemics to have needed to respond in detail. The few who were annoyed and the many who didn’t read have confirmed what was written.9 (#) It wasn’t the danger of experiencing a desecration of Heine, but surely the fear of hearing the most hostile thing that can be said to this age of talents, that prevented the shout from having a stronger echo. It wasn’t an evaluation of Heinean poesy, but a critique of a form of life in which everything uncreative has once and for all found its place and its brilliantly wretched accommodation, that was essayed here. Not a denunciation of the invention of a pestilence, nor even of its importation, but a description of a spiritual condition on which ornaments fester. This offended the pride of the bacteria carriers. Here language is somehow released from everything it was obligated to outwit, and the power to acquire better content is celebrated. Here this very language declares itself a stranger to the calligraphic fraud that admires the beauty mongers from Paris to Palermo for the verve with which, in art and in the hotel bill, a five-note is made into a niner. This they didn’t understand, or recognized as dangerous enough that they didn’t want to hear it.
But so as not to chastise lack of ability, which is an honest effect of the gifted zeitgeist, more severely than the malice that social possibilities of every age have mobilized against thought, it must be said that a particular suspicion has compelled the author to ask the publisher Albert Langen for the reprint rights to this document. The author’s well-known persecution mania, which has gone so far as to whisper to him that he hasn’t managed to make himself loved in twelve years’ time, led him to believe that the pamphlet was intentionally suppressed.10 (#) He imagined that bugs flushed from Heine’s mattress-grave had sprung into action and settled in precisely on the road they know so well, the one that leads from thinking to commerce. Fear of the press can move mountains and shutter halls; a hint is perhaps not even needed to make a Viennese bookseller tepid in marketing a dangerous pamphlet that generates only paltry profit.11 (#) Especially not one of the ones who are even now still sore with Die Fackel about a civil action that its first printer brought against it. Is it not, then, a most indicative Viennese circumstance that not only will the glances of the strolling city be spared the irritation of my books, but that copies of Die Fackel—one line of which contains more literature than the collective show windows of every downtown bookstore, and on whose least comma more torment and love are expended than on a library of luxury editions by Insel—are compelled to offer themselves amid cigars, lottery tickets, and tabloids to cover the costs of a never-rewarded and never-appreciated labor, while an entire chorus of humor-loving vermin considers the thing lucrative and gloats over the idea of the “double issue.”12 (#) A magazine that avoids like leprosy the most legitimate sponsorship,13 (#) that in its desire to earn its own living makes life harder for itself, and that is book-born like hardly a book in contemporary Germany, has to do without the support of its own industry, which ought to have an obligation to it, and to get a taste, in Austrian exile, of the sort of ignominy that throws the person condemned for a political offense into jail with the pickpockets. The pack of liberals whose cosmic feeling is avarice, and whom you have to beg for the mercy of excusing you as crazy if you fail to make a profit: Does it have any idea how many pleasures it could buy with the money that my work of hate devours before it achieves the form with which a self-glorifier is never satisfied—because only then does it reveal to him the errors that the others don’t notice? But here, in his archive, he takes what he likes and collects what is liked nowhere else. Here nothing can disappoint him. A work that instead of twenty editions didn’t see a second one: here nothing more can happen to it. Its author, whose pleasure it is to reach into the spokes of his own wheel to shut down both himself and the machine when the tiniest point displeases him, will never again lend his assistance to an alien publishing concern.14 (#) He will never again try to win a new audience. For him, Die Fackel is not a platform but a haven. Here the destiny of a work can move him only through the point of its completion, not through its dissemination. What’s being lived here may be resurrected in a book. But it’s recompense enough to be bound to one’s own wheel.15 (#)
BETWEEN TWO STRAINS OF LIFE (#)
FINAL WORD [TO “HEINE AND THE CONSEQUENCES”]
To report the insignificant fact that “Heine and the Consequences” is in its third edition in seven years, after having been circulated in Die Fackel as well, is not the motive for this supplement.1 (#) The wish is to append something else, which likewise, in the guise of a correction, allows the correctness of a deeper observation to be recognized for the first time.2 (#) Everything that’s said here, and in every chapter about the loss of life in contemporary life and the linguistic betrayal of German humanity, has a train of thought leading to the brink of this war, thanks to which my truths now also have the quality of self-evidence. An explanation is needed only at the point where, in my desperation to escape the machine, I said that I preferred an already fully dehumanized zone to that beauty-smitten thing that resisted the relentless march of progress with the leftover wreckage of humankind.3 (#) This antithesis, now broken open by the war, was resolved in later aphorisms in favor of precisely the latter life-form, as the one with a yearning for life and for form, which, on account of just such a yearning, and of a self-preservative instinct as well, was obliged to undertake emergency defense against the tyranny of a valueless utility, according to which life is finished products and culture the trappings. The question “in which hell would the artist prefer to fry” gave way to the urgent verdict that humanity preferred not to fry in this hell, as a result of the corrective insight of the artist himself, who now no longer has the right and no longer the possibility of seeking to securely lock away his inner self, but only the duty of seeing which parties of mankind are struggling, like him, for the preservation of this kind of happiness and against the coercions of a philosophy of life that has squeezed all the motivations out of life, so as to save it solely for the profit motive. But the fact that those were the regions from whose character the disturbance came in peaceful times: to succumb to doubt about this would be wartime treason against the nature that is warding off the machine.4 (#) It does it; and it does it, if need be, with the help of the machine itself, like the artist who isn’t above using the industrial methods of his times to preserve himself from them.5 (#) Faced with the imperfection of life, he affirms the substitute for life; faced with half individuals, he affirms the patented system for avoiding personalities entirely. The person who helps himself to the machine is rewarded to the same extent that the people who help the machine are impoverished. Because the latter doesn’t liberate a person but makes him its slave, it brings him not to himself but under artillery fire. However, the kind of thinking that, unlike power, doesn’t need a “New Orientation”6 (#) to reestablish its command knows that it was merely creating an emergency exit from the chaos of peace, and that what seemed contradictory about the division of values into “German-Romance” was merely the internal contradiction of modern life, which is today being resolved by way of events.7 (#) The frame of reference that seemed unwilling to accept the “lazzarone as a cultural ideal alongside the German constable” thereby affirmed him more than the ones who were willing to accept the ideal—because it promised “picturesqueness”—and who are the real Germans. The phrase “beauty mongers from Paris to Palermo” may now apply to that horde of educated Huns who bear the blame for transforming the values of life into tourist attractions.8 (#) The thinking here about language and human beings is more akin to the type who can laze around in the sun, wallowing in deeper aimlessness, than to the insufferable conqueror of a place in the sun, with whose way of thinking it was of course in keeping to ornamentally dishonor a more colorful existence and thereby beautify its own downfall. In that consecrated state of mind, which desires “basalt-free”9 (#) orderliness and utility truly only for the higher purpose of tending to the castles and marvels of the soul without being disturbed, I had no choice but to prefer the company of commercial scum like that, because they provided the best instruments for securing respite from a noisy world in which, only because they were no longer human beings, they themselves could no longer disturb me. The others did, however, because they were half human.10 (#) This used to be too little for me, and now it has ended up being so much. And this problem—in which, very similarly, the antithesis Berlin-Vienna is settled in favor of Vienna—is further illuminated by the collapse, which reveals that the entire contradiction was situated squarely in the sphere of life’s mechanization. That it’s not a matter simply of “German/Romance” but of “Germany/world” is shown by the colorful world’s insistence on its color.11 (#) America, where things are better, joins forces with the world of antique forms to finish off a higgledy-piggledy that scrapes together functionality from here and beauty from there and keeps hoping to muddle through with its deadly conflation of valuables and values, the frightful application of old emblems to new realities. The Anglo-Saxon defends his ends and the Latin his form against a mishmash that turns means into an end and form into a pretext. Since art here is merely trappings; since, everywhere you look, this literal-mindedness, this orderliness, this miserable facility with instruments reveals the loss of humanity it has cost to win for the populace a life so emptied out; since there are no longer even the superficial values for which all depth of soul and all the sacred value of the German language were sacrificed in the collision of two strains of life; since the German really wasn’t an American at all, but merely an American with basalts—conditions here can no longer serve as a starting point for the imagination. Because they use Mind and God and gas12 (#) to gather gold, the imagination turns away from a dehumanized people and toward a beauty-smitten one, which defends its wreckage against the inexorable fury of the times. In my flight from it, I was compelled to commit an injustice. I’ve never rejected the party of humane values, and now, when, oh, the standpoint has been reached where I’m able to side with it, I owe the world’s Spirit an apology for nothing but the guilt of having been born in times like these, and for the necessity of making my home in the escape from them.
LET NO ONE ASK … (#)
Let no one ask what I’ve been doing since I spoke.
I have nothing to say
and won’t say why.
And there’s stillness since the earth broke.
No word was right;
a man speaks only from his sleep at night.
And dreams of a sun that joked.
It passes; and later
it didn’t matter.
The Word went under when that world awoke.1 (#)
NOTES (#)
Heine and the Consequences (1910)
1 (#). Along with Goethe, Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) was the most famous German literary figure of the nineteenth century. He was known not for his novels (he didn’t write any) or his drama (his plays were never much produced) or his thinking (it was deliberately unsystematic) but for his lyric poetry and for the characteristic wit and irony of his reportage and travel writing and polemics. His countrymen could all quote his witticisms (e.g., “The more I get to know people, the more I like dogs”) and recite his poems (an extraordinary number of them were set to music), and his style and attitudes made him an attractive figure internationally. Although he had some of Norman Mailer’s pugnacity and political ambition and talent for self-advertisement, and some of Mark Twain’s quotability, his posthumous reputation probably bears better comparison with a figure like Bob Dylan than with that of any writer. To his many admirers, especially in France, Heine’s flight in 1831 from German repression to Parisian “exile” was a moment of iconic significance akin to Dylan’s switch to electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Like Dylan, Heine was a Jew who converted to Christianity (for Heine, it was an early and humiliating career exigency), but in the eyes of his readers he remained distinctively a Jew, and the reader of this essay should keep in mind that Karl Kraus’s attempted demolition of Heine’s reputation was not simply an assault on a pop hero of Dylanesque stature but a salvo in the cultural wars of antisemitism and Zionism that were raging in Germany and Austria at the beginning of the twentieth century. The non-German-speaking reader may want to know that “Heine” rhymes with “mynah.” Karl Kraus (1874–1936) was an Austrian satirist and a central figure in fin de siècle Vienna’s famously rich life of the mind. From 1899 until his death, Kraus edited and published the influential magazine Die Fackel (The Torch); from 1911 onward, he was also the magazine’s sole author. Although Kraus would probably have hated blogs, Die Fackel was like a blog that pretty much everybody who mattered in the German-speaking world, from Freud to Kafka to Walter Benjamin, found it necessary to read and have an attitude toward. In Kraus’s many aphorisms, he was no less quotable than Heine—“To be sure, a dog is loyal. But why should that make it an example for us? It’s loyal to man, not to other dogs.”—and at the height of his popularity he drew thousands to his public readings. In later footnotes I’ll recount how I fell under Kraus’s spell and undertook to translate the essay/polemic/satire/manifesto “Heine and the Consequences,” which appeared as a pamphlet in 1910 and in Die Fackel in 1911 and which, like much of Kraus’s best work, has hitherto frightened off English translators. For now, let me just make a small plea for patience with Kraus’s prose. He’s hard to read in German, too—deliberately hard. He was the scourge of throwaway journalism and a stickler for the interpenetration of form and content, and to his followers (he had a cultlike following) his dense and intricately coded style formed an agreeable barrier to entry; it kept the uninitiated out. Kraus himself remarked of the critic and playwright Adolf Bartels, whom he’ll be attacking here, “If he understands one sentence of the essay, I’ll retract the entire thing.” When I first read Kraus, I was baffled by a lot of his sentences. But as I reread him and began to figure out what he was up to, the sentences suddenly popped into clear focus, one after another, until eventually I could understand almost all of them; it was like learning a foreign language. And Kraus is foreign, more so than his better-known contemporaries, because his work was so particularly tied to his own time and place—to long-forgotten controversies, to rivals now obscure, to newspapers and literary works that only scholars read anymore. And yet, paradoxically, 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 himself was well aware of the paradox: he was a farseeing prophet whose work was always focused on what was right in front of him. He was, very consciously, speaking to us; but to be able to hear him we have to know what he was talking about. I’ve therefore mustered a large corps of footnotes to elucidate his topical and literary references, to offer some shortcuts to deciphering his sentences, to give an account of the angry young person I was when I first read him, and to suggest some ways in which his work might matter to the world we live in now.
2 (#). In the dichotomy of “Romance” versus “German,” which runs throughout this essay, “Romance” refers to “Romance language” or “Latin,” particularly French or Italian. Paul Reitter, the distinguished Kraus scholar and the author of the more learned of these footnotes, points out that the line about the “barren window frames” is taken from Schiller’s poem “The Song of the Bell” (“Das Lied von der Glocke”). Kraus is constantly, and without attribution, quoting and echoing texts that would have been familiar to his audience but are mostly not familiar to foreign readers a century later.
3 (#). Kraus’s suspicion of the “melody of life” in France and Italy still has merit. His contention here—that walking down a street in Paris or Rome is an aesthetic experience in itself—is confirmed by the ongoing popularity of France and Italy as vacation destinations and by the “envy me” tone of American Francophiles and Italophiles announcing their travel plans. If you say you’re taking a trip to Germany, you’d better be able to explain what specifically you’re planning to do there, or else people will wonder why you’re not going someplace where life is beautiful. Even now, Germany insists on content over form. If the concept of coolness had existed in Kraus’s time, he might have said that Germany is uncool. This suggests a more contemporary version of Kraus’s dichotomy: Mac versus PC. Isn’t the essence of the Apple product that you achieve coolness simply by virtue of owning it? It doesn’t even matter what you’re creating on your MacBook Air. Simply using a MacBook Air, experiencing the elegant design of its hardware and software, is a pleasure in itself, like walking down a street in Paris. Whereas, when you’re working on some clunky, utilitarian PC, the only thing to enjoy is the quality of your work itself. As Kraus says of Germanic life, the PC “sobers” what you’re doing; it allows you to see it unadorned. This was especially true in the years of DOS operating systems and early Windows. One of the developments that Kraus will decry—the dolling-up of German language and culture with decorative elements imported from Romance language and culture—has a correlative in more recent editions of Windows, which borrow ever more features from Apple but still can’t conceal their essential uncool Windowsness. Worse yet, in chasing after Apple elegance, they betray the old austere beauty of PC functionality. They still don’t work as well as Macs do, and they’re ugly by both cool and utilitarian standards. And yet, to echo Kraus, I’d still rather live among PCs. Any chance that I might have switched to Apple was negated by the famous and long-running series of Apple ads aimed at persuading people like me to switch. The argument—that Macs are pretty, easy to use, free of bugs, unsusceptible to viruses, etc.—was eminently reasonable, but it was delivered by a personified Mac (played by the actor Justin Long) of such insufferable smugness that he made the miseries of Windows attractive by comparison. You wouldn’t want to read a novel about the Mac: what would there be to say except that everything is groovy? Characters in novels need to have actual desires; and the character in the Apple ads who had desires was the PC, played by John Hodgman. His attempts to defend himself and to pass himself off as cool were funny, and he suffered, like a human being. To return to Kraus’s dichotomy, I could easily imagine the PC being played by a German actor and the Mac by a Frenchman, never the other way around. I’d be remiss if I didn’t add that the concept of “cool” has been so fully coopted by the tech industries that some adjacent word like “hip” is needed to describe those online voices who proceeded to hate on Justin Long and deem John Hodgman to be the cool one. The restlessness of who or what is considered hip nowadays may be an artifact of what Marx famously identified as the “restless” nature of capitalism. One of the worst things about the Internet is that it tempts everyone to be a sophisticate—to take positions on what is hip and to consider, under pain of being considered unhip, the positions that everyone else is taking. Kraus may not have cared about hipness per se, but he certainly reveled in taking positions and was keenly attuned to the positions of others. He was a sophisticate, and this is one reason Die Fackel has a bloglike feel. Kraus spent a lot of time reading stuff he hated, so as to be able to hate it with authority.
4 (#). You’re not allowed to say things like this in America nowadays, no matter how much the billion (or is it two billion now?) “individualized” Facebook pages may make you want to say them. Kraus was known, in his day, to his many enemies, as the Great Hater. By most accounts he was a tender and generous man in his private life, with many loyal friends. But once he starts winding the stem of his polemical rhetoric, it carries him into extremely harsh registers. (“Harsh,” incidentally, is a fun word to say with a slacker inflection. To be harsh is to be uncool; and in the world of coolness and uncoolness—the high-school-cafeteria social scene of Gawker takedowns and Twitter popularity contests—the highest register that cultural criticism can safely reach is snark. Snark, indeed, is cool’s twin sibling.) As the essay will make clear, the individualized “blockheads” that Kraus has in mind here aren’t hoi polloi. Although Kraus could sound like an elitist, and although he considered the right-wing antisemites idiotic, he wasn’t in the business of denigrating the masses or lowbrow culture; the calculated difficulty of his writing wasn’t a barricade against the barbarians. It was aimed, instead, at bright and well-educated cultural authorities who embraced a phony kind of individuality—people Kraus believed ought to have known better. It’s not clear that Kraus’s shrill, ex cathedra denunciations were the most effective way to change hearts and minds. But I confess to feeling some version of his disappointment when a novelist who I believe ought to have known better, Salman Rushdie, succumbs to Twitter. Or when a politically committed print magazine that I respect, n+1, denigrates print magazines as terminally “male,” celebrates the Internet as “female,” and somehow neglects to consider the Internet’s accelerating pauperization of freelance writers. Or when good lefty professors who once resisted alienation—who criticized capitalism for its restless assault on every tradition and every community that gets in its way—start calling the corporatized Internet “revolutionary,” happily embrace Apple computers, and persist in gushing about their virtues.
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Jonathan Franzen
A hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and prophetic writers in Europe: a relentless critic of the popular media’s manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumerism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But even though his followers included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely prophet, and few people today are familiar with his work. Thankfully, Jonathan Franzen is one of them.In THE KRAUS PROJECT, Franzen not only presents his definitive new translations of Kraus but annotates them spectacularly, with supplementary notes from the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and the Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann. Kraus was a notoriously cantankerous and difficult author, and in Franzen he has found his match: a novelist unafraid to voice unpopular opinions strongly, a critic capable of untangling Kraus’s often dense arguments.While Kraus lampoons the iconic German writer Heinrich Heine and celebrates his own literary heroes, Franzen’s annotations soar over today’s cultural landscape and then dive down into a deeply personal recollection of his first year out of college, when he fell in love with Kraus.Painstakingly wrought, strikingly original in form, THE KRAUS PROJECT is a feast of thought, passion, and literature.
(#)
Copyright (#)
4th Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2013
Simultaneously published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2013
Copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Franzen
Footnotes by Paul Reitter copyright © 2013 by Paul Reitter Footnotes by Daniel Kehlmann copyright © 2013 by Daniel Kehlmann
Jacket design by Rodrigo Corral
Jacket art by Matt Buck, after the cover for the first issue of Die Fackel
Jonathan Franzen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
The original essays and afterwords in this volume are from Karl Kraus's collection Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie, ed. Christian Wagenknecht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989). "Man frage nicht…" appeared in Die Fackel no. 888, October 1933.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007517435
Ebook Edition © October 2013 ISBN: 9780007517459 Version: 2017-03-28
Praise (#u063d2b6d-6FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
From the reviews of The Kraus Project:
Financial Times Book of the Year
‘An experimental collage of texts, and all the better for it … The Kraus Project is tremendously readable and is refreshingly skeptical of the cult of digital cool. Franzen’s prose has an appealing briskness and a polemical force’
Jason Cowley, Financial Times
‘Engrossing, highly original … Franzen finds in the unduly neglected Kraus a model of how to provoke readers while at the same time getting them to do some work’
Edmund Fawcett, New York Times Book Review
‘It IS worth it, despite, as well as because of, the difficulties, so congratulations all round … thanks to Franzen, more people will remember him’
Nicholas Lezard, Evening Standard
‘A passionate and concerned work … You can understand why Franzen likes him, and sees a dearth of such elegance today’
Jonathan Dean, Sunday Times
TO
DORIS AVERY
AND IN MEMORY OF
GEORGE AVERY
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE (#u063d2b6d-2FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
COPYRIGHT (#)
PRAISE
DEDICATION (#)
HEINE AND THE CONSEQUENCES (1910) (#)
NESTROY AND POSTERITY (1912) (#)
AFTERWORD TO “HEINE AND THE CONSEQUENCES” (1911) (#)
BETWEEN TWO STRAINS OF LIFE: FINAL WORD (1917) (#)
LET NO ONE ASK … (1933) (#)
NOTES (#)
HEING UND DIE FOLGEN (#)
NESTROY UND DIE NACHWELT (#)
NACHWORT ZU „HEINE UND DIE FOLGEN“ (#)
ZWISCHEN DEN LEBENSRICHTUNGEN (#)
MAN FRAGE NICHT … (#)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#)
KEEP READING (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY JONATHAN FRANZEN
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
HEINE AND THE CONSEQUENCES (#)1 (#)
Two strains of intellectual vulgarity: defenselessness against content and defenselessness against form. The one experiences only the material side of art. It is of German origin. The other experiences even the rawest of materials artistically. It is of Romance origin. To the one, art is an instrument; to the other, life is an ornament. In which hell would the artist prefer to fry? He’d surely still rather live among the Germans. For although they’ve strapped art into the Procrustean Folding Bed of their commerce, they’ve also made life sober, and this is a blessing: fantasy thrives, and every man can put his own light in the barren window frames.2 (#) Just spare me the pretty ribbons! Spare me this good taste that over there and down there delights the eye and irritates the imagination. Spare me this melody of life that disturbs my own music, which comes into its own only in the roaring of the German workday.3 (#) Spare me this universal higher level of refinement from which it’s so easy to observe that the newspaper seller in Paris has more charm than the Prussian publisher. Believe me, you color-happy people, in cultures where every blockhead has individuality, individuality becomes a thing for blockheads.4 (#) And spare me this mediocre chicanery in place of one’s own stupidity! Spare me the picturesque moil on the rind of an old Gorgonzola in place of the dependable white monotony of cream cheese! Life is hard to digest both here and there. But the Romance diet beautifies the spoilage; you swallow the bait and go belly-up. The German regimen spoils beauty and puts us to the test: how do we re-create it? Romance culture makes every man a poet. Art’s a piece of cake there. And Heaven a hell.5 (#)
Heinrich Heine, however, has brought the Germans tidings of this Heaven, to which their heart is drawn with a longing that has to rhyme someplace and that leads in subterranean passages directly from the countinghouse to the Blue Grotto. And, on a byway that German men avoid: from chopped liver to the blue flower.6 (#) It was inevitable that the one with their longing and the other with their longings would consider Heinrich Heine the Fulfiller. Tuned by a culture for which the mere material of daily life suffices as a complete artistic experience, Heine provides mood music for a culture whose experience of art begins and ends with the attractions of its content.7 (#) His writing works from the Romance feel for life into the German conception of art.8 (#) In this configuration it offers the utile dulci, it ornaments German functionality with French spirit.9 (#) And so, in this easy-to-read juxtaposition of form and content, in which there is no discord and no unity, it becomes the great legacy from which journalism continues to live to this very day, a dangerous mediator between art and life, a parasite on both, a singer where it should only be a messenger, filing reports where a song would be in order, its eye too fixed on its goal to see the burning color, blinded to all goals by its pleasure in the picturesque, the bane of literary utility, the spirit of utiliterature.10 (#) Instrument made into ornament, and so badly degenerated that even the current mania for decorating consumer goods can scarcely keep up with the progress of applied art in the daily press; because at least we have yet to hear that the Wiener Werkstätte is manufacturing burglary tools.11 (#) And even in the style of the most up-to-the-minute impressionistic journalism the Heinean model does not disavow itself. Without Heine, no feuilleton.12 (#) This is the French disease he smuggled in to us.13 (#) How easy it is to get sick in Paris! How lax the morality of the German feel for language becomes! The French language lets every filou have his way with her. You have to prove yourself a man in full before the German language will give you the time of day, and that’s only the beginning of the trouble you’re in for. With French, though, everything goes smoothly, with that perfect lack of inhibition which is perfection in a woman and a lack in a language. And the Jacob’s ladder that leads to her is a climax you’ll find in the German dictionary: Geschmeichel, Geschmeide, Geschmeidig, Geschmeiß.14 (#) Anybody and everybody can procure her services for the feuilleton. She’s a lazy Susan of the mind. The most well-grounded head isn’t safe from flashes of inspiration when it deals with her. We get everything from languages, because they contain everything that can become thought. Language arouses and stimulates, like a woman, brings joy and, with it, thought.15 (#) The German language, however, is a companion who will think and make poetry only for the man who can give her children. You wouldn’t want to be married like this to any German housewife. And yet the woman of Paris need say nothing except, at the crucial moment, très jolie, and you’ll believe anything of her. Her mind is in her face. And if her partner had beauty in his brain as well, Romance life would not be merely très jolie but fecund, ringed not by bibelots and dainties, but by deeds and monuments.16 (#)
If they say of a German author that he must have learned a lot from the French, this is the highest praise only if it isn’t true. For it means: he’s indebted to the German language for what the French gives to everybody. People here are still being linguistically creative when people over there are already playing with the children, who came blowing in, nobody knows how. But ever since Heinrich Heine imported the trick, it’s been purely an exercise in diligence if a German feuilletonist goes to Paris to fetch himself some talent.17 (#) If somebody nowadays actually goes to Rhodes because people dance better there, he is truly an excessively conscientious swindler. That was still necessary in Heine’s day. You’d been to Rhodes, and back here people believed that you could dance.18 (#) Today they’ll believe that a cripple who has never left Vienna can dance the cancan, and many a person who never had a single good finger now plays the viola.19 (#) The profitable return on distance from the reader should never be underestimated, and foreign milieus continue to be what gets taken for art. People are very talented in the jungle, and talent begins in the East around the time you reach Bucharest.20 (#) The writer who knocks the dust off foreign costumes is getting at the fascination of the material in the most convenient way imaginable. And so a reader with a brain has the strongest distrust imaginable of storytellers who knock about in foreign milieus. The best-case scenario continues to be that they weren’t there; but most of them are unfortunately so constituted that they actually have to take a trip in order to tell a story. Of course, to have spent two years in Paris isn’t merely the advantage of such Habakkuks, it’s their definition.21 (#) They strew the drifting sand of French, which finds its way into the pockets of every dolt, into the eyes of German readers. And let the inverse of an epigram of Nestroy,22 (#) this true satirical thinker, apply to them: things go well enough from Paris to St. Pölten, but from there to Vienna the road gets very long!23 (#) (If the local swindlers don’t make a killing of their own along this stretch.)24 (#) Now, with Paris, not only the content was acquired but the form as well. The form, though—this form that is only an envelope for the content, not the content itself; that is merely dress for the body, not flesh to the spirit—this form only had to be discovered once for it to be there for all time. Heinrich Heine took care of that, and thanks to him our gentlemen no longer need betake themselves to Paris. You can write feuilletons today without having personally sniffed your way to the Champs Élysées. The great trick of linguistic fraud, which in Germany pays far better than the greatest achievement of linguistic creativity, keeps working in generation after generation of newspapers, furnishing casual readers everywhere with the most agreeable of excuses for avoiding literature.25 (#) Talent flutters aimlessly in the world and gives sweet nourishment to the philistine’s hatred of genius. Writing feuilletons means twining curls on a bald head; but these curls please the public better than a lion’s mane of thoughts. Esprit and charm, which presumably were necessary in developing the trick and becoming adept at it, are now passed on by it automatically. With an easy hand, Heine pushed open the door to this dreadful development, and the magician who brought talent within reach of the unendowed surely himself doesn’t stand all that far above the development.26 (#)
The trick keeps working. Paralleling the kitschification of practical life via ornament, as traced by the good American Adolf Loos, is an interlarding of journalism with intellectual elements, but here the resulting confusion is even more catastrophic.27 (#) Instead of draining the press intellectually and restoring to literature the juices that were “extracted” from it—extorted from it—the progressive world proceeds ever afresh with the renovation of its intellectual decorations. The literary ornament doesn’t get demolished, it gets modernized in the Wiener Werkstätten of the mind. Feuilleton, mood reporting, fluff pieces—the motto “Feather Thy Nest”28 (#) brings the poetic flourish, too, into the homes of the masses. And nothing is more important to journalism than restoring the gloss, again and again, to the glaze of corruption. The more it adds to the profiteer’s intellectual and material wealth, the greater its need to cloak its ill intentions pleasingly. In this, the Mind itself lends a hand, sacrificing itself, as does the spirit that was stolen from the Mind. A Sunday edition’s catch can no longer take place without dangling the highest of literary values as bait, the Economist no longer goes in for robbery unless the surviving representatives of culture act as fences.29 (#) But far more disgraceful than literature’s marching in the triumph of this pillage, far more dangerous than this attachement of intellectual authority to the villainy, is the villainy’s interlarding, its gilding, with the Mind, which it has siphoned off from literature and which it drags along through the local pages and all the other latrines of public opinion. The press as a social institution—since it’s simply unavoidable that the dearth of imagination get filled up with facts—would have its place in the progressive order. But what does the news that it rained in Hong Kong have to do with the Mind? And why does an arranged stock-market catastrophe or a small extortion or even just the unpaid suppression of a fact demand the entire grand apparatus, in which academics don’t shy from collaborating and for which even aesthetes will hustle so hard that their feet sweat? That train stations or public toilets, works of utility and necessity, are cluttered up with decorative junk is tolerable. But why are thieves’ dens fitted out by van de Velde?30 (#) Only because their purpose would otherwise be obvious at a glance, and passersby would not willingly have their pockets turned inside out twice a day.31 (#) Curiosity is always stronger than caution, and so the chicanery dolls itself up in tassels and lace.
It owes its best advantage to that Heinrich Heine who so loosened the corset on the German language that today every salesclerk can finger her breasts. What’s ghastly about the spectacle is the sameness of these talents, which are all as alike as rotten eggs. Today’s impressionistic errand boys no longer report the breaking of a leg without the mood and no burning of a building without the personal note that they all have in common. When the one describes the German kaiser, he does it exactly the same way the other describes the mayor of Vienna, and the other can’t think of anything to say about wrestlers except what the one has to say about swimming in a river. Everything suits everything always,32 (#) and the inability to find old words counts as subtlety when the new words already suit everything. This type is either an observer who in opulent adjectives amply compensates for what Nature denied him in nouns, or an aesthete who makes himself conspicuous with his love of color and his sense of nuance and still manages to perceive things in the world around him as deeply as dirt goes under a fingernail.33 (#) And they all have a tone of discovery, as if the world had only just now been created, when God made the Sunday feuilleton and saw that it was good.34 (#) The first time these young people go to a public bath is when they’re sent in as reporters. This may be an experience. But they generalize it. The method for depicting a Livingston in darkest Leopoldstadt35 (#) is obviously of great help to the impoverished Viennese imagination. For it cannot imagine the breaking of a leg unless the leg is described to it. In Berlin, despite foul ambitions, the situation is not so grave. If a streetcar accident occurs there, the Berlin reporters describe the accident. They single out what is exceptional about this streetcar accident and spare the reader what is common to all streetcar accidents. If a streetcar mishap occurs in Vienna, the gentlemen write about the nature of streetcars, about the nature of streetcar mishaps, and about the nature of mishaps in general, with the perspective: What is man?… As to the number killed, which might possibly still interest us, opinions differ unless a news agency settles the question. But the mood—all of them capture the mood; and the reporter, who could make himself useful as a rubbish collector for the world of facts, always comes running with a shred of poesy that he grabbed somewhere in the crowd. This one sees green, that one sees yellow—every one of them sees color.36 (#)
Ultimately, all amalgamation of the intellectual with the informational, this axiom of journalism, this pretext for its plans, this excuse for its dangers, is and was thoroughly Heinean—be it now also, thanks to the more recent Frenchmen and to the friendly agency of Herr Bahr, somewhat psychologically inclined and garnished with yet a bit more “meditativeness.”37 (#) Only once was there a pause in this development—its name was Ludwig Speidel.38 (#) In him, the art of language was a guest at the greasiest dives of the Mind. The press may feel that Speidel’s life was an episode that cut disruptively into the game begun by Heine. And yet he seemed to side with the incarnate spirit of language, summoning it on holidays to the filthiest entertainment places, so that it could see the goings-on. Never was a colleague more dubious than this one. They could parade the living man around, all right. But how long they resisted giving the dead man the honor of a book! How they sensed that a complete edition here could bring that humiliation which they once imbibed by the spoonful as pride. When they finally decided to let the “associate” into literature, Herr Schmock had the cheek to undertake the commentary, and the hand of the editor, making things cute and topical, saved for the Viennese viewpoint as much as could be saved by a grouping of Speidelian prose around the Viennese viewpoint.39 (#) An artist wrote these feuilletons, a feuilletonist compiled these works of art—the distance between Mind and press becomes doubly appreciable thereby. The journalists were right to hesitate so long. They weren’t idle in the meantime. People yearned for Speidel’s books—the journalists invoked his modesty and gave us their own books.40 (#) For it is the evil mark of this crisis: journalism, which drives great minds into its stable, is meanwhile overrunning their pasture. It has plundered literature—it is generous and gives its own literature to literature. There appear feuilleton collections about which there’s nothing so remarkable as that the work hasn’t fallen apart in the bookbinder’s hands. Bread is being made out of bread crumbs. What is it that gives them hope of enduring? The enduring interest in the subjects they select. If one of them chatters about eternity, shouldn’t he be heard for as long as eternity lasts? Journalism lives on this fallacy. It always has the grandest themes, and in its hands eternity can become timely; but it gets old just as easily. The artist gives form to the day, the hour, the minute. No matter how limited and conditional in time and location his inspiration may have been, his work grows the more limitlessly and freely the further it’s removed from its inspiration. It goes confidently out of date in a heartbeat: it grows fresh again over decades. What lives on material dies before it does. What lives in language lives on with it.41 (#) How easy it was to read the chitchat every Sunday, and now that we can check it out of the library we can barely get through it. How hard it was to read the sentences in Die Fackel, even when we were helped by the incident they referred to.42 (#) No, because we were helped by it! The further we’re removed from the incident, the better we understand what was said about it. How does this happen? The incident was close and the perspective was broad. It was all forewritten. It was veiled so that the inquisitive day couldn’t get at it. Now the veils are rising …43 (#)
But Heinrich Heine—even the aesthetes who are rescuing his immortality in an island publishing house44 (#) (these gloriously impractical minds whose cerebral wrinkles trail away into ornament) have nothing more impressive to say about him than that his reports from Paris “have become the still-vital masterwork of modern journalism”; and these Robinsons of literary seclusion take Heine’s artistic word for it that his articles “would be very useful in developing a style for popular themes.” Here again you can sense the kinship of those who reside equally far from the Mind: those who live in form and those who live in content; who think in the line and who think in the surface; the aesthetes and the journalists. In the problem of Heine they collide. They live on off him and he in them. So it’s by no means urgent to talk about his work. What is increasingly urgent is to talk about his influence, and about the fact that his work isn’t capable of bearing up under an influence that German intellectual life will little by little cast off as unbearable. This is the way it will play out: each follower of Heine takes one tile from the mosaic of his work until no more remain. The original fades because the repellent glare of the copy opens our eyes. Here’s an original that loses what it lends to others. And can you even call something an original when its imitators are better? Naturally, to appreciate an invention that has since perfected itself into a modern machine, you have to apply historical justice. But in making an absolute judgment, don’t you have to concede that Heinrich Heine’s prose has now been surpassed by the observationally inclined technicians, the style boys, and the swindlers of charm? That this prose, which signifies wit without perspective and perspectives without wit, was quite certainly surpassed by those feuilletonists who not only read Heine but took extra pains to go to the source of sources—to Paris? And that there have since appeared imitators of his poetry who manage the feelings and the newsman’s wrinkle of disdain no less glibly, and who in particular are no less deft in making the little joke of the little melancholy, which the hurdy-gurdy verse helps so nimbly to its feet. Because, after all, nothing is easier to outfit with every modern convenience than a lyrical arrangement. It’s true that nobody would dare compare himself to Heine in the extent of his output and the scope of his intellectual interests. But today every Itzak Wisecrack45 (#) can probably outdo him when it comes to making an aesthetic anesthetic46 (#) and using rhyme and rhythm to turn candied husks of thought into cherry bombs.
Heinrich Heine the poet lives only as a canned youthful sweetheart. None is in greater need of reassessment than this one. Youth soaks up everything, and it’s cruel to take many things away from it later. How easily the soul of youth is impregnated, how easily things that are easy and slack attach themselves to it: how worthless a thing has to be for its memory not to be made precious by the time and circumstances of its acquisition! You’re not critical, you’re pious when you love Heine. You’re not critical, you’re blasphemous when you try to talk somebody who grew up with Heine out of his Heine. An assault on Heine is an invasion of the everyman’s private life. It injures reverence for youth, respect for boyhood, veneration of childhood. To presume to judge firstborn impressions according to their merit is worse than presumptuous. And Heine had a talent for being embraced by young souls and thus associated with young experiences.47 (#) Like rating the melody of a hurdy-gurdy, to which I was unstoppably drawn, above Beethoven’s Ninth, owing to a subjective urge. This is why grown-ups don’t have to put up with anyone who wants to dispute their belief that Heine is a greater poet than Goethe. Yes, it’s on the luck of association that Heinrich Heine lives. Am I so relentlessly objective as to say to someone: go, look, the peach tree in the garden of your childhood is quite a bit smaller than it used to be. He had the measles, he had Heine, and he gets hot in recollecting every fever of youth. Criticism should stay quiet here. No author needs reassessment as badly as Heine, no one bears up under it so poorly, no one is so protected from it by every fond illusion. But I have the courage to recommend it only because I’m hardly in need of it myself, because I failed to experience Heine at a time when I would have had to overrate him. There comes a day where it’s no concern of mine that a gentleman who has long since become a banker once crept to his beloved under the strains of “You have diamonds and pearls.”48 (#) And where you become rude at the sight of old brains still being affected by the charm with which this tearful materiality once captivated young hearts, and the syrup of sentimental moods adheres to literary judgments. When you get right down to it, the hankerings of youth could also have been satisfied by Herr Hugo Salus.49 (#) I don’t fancy myself guiltless of giving a bit of culture the benefit of the situation in which I experienced it, or of confusing it with the attendant mood. I retain a warm glow from Heine’s Berlin letters, for example, because the melody “We wind for you a bridal wreath,” which Heine makes fun of there, is congenial to me. But only in my nerves. In my judgment, I am mature and willing to distinguish merits. The memory of how the garden smelled when your first love walked through it is of general concern to the culture only if you’re a poet. You’re free to overvalue the occasion if you’re capable of making a poem out of it. When, once, in a booth at the Prater,50 (#) I saw a lady in tights floating in the air (which I now know was done with mirrors), and a hurdy-gurdy was accompanying her with “Last Rose,” my eyes were opened to beauty and my ears to music, and I would have ripped to shreds the man who told me that the lady was writhing around on a plank and the tune was by Flotow.51 (#) In criticism, though, unless you’re speaking to children, you have to be allowed to call Heine by his true name.
His charm, according to his grown-up defenders, is a musical one. To which I reply: to be responsive to literature, you don’t need to be responsive to music; all you need from music to create a mood is the melody, the rhythm.52 (#) I don’t need a mood when I’m doing literary work; I create a mood in myself by working. To get the juices flowing, I use a tone from a miniature spinet that is actually a cigar box and which, if pressed on, emits a few old Viennese notes that have been locked inside it for a hundred years. I’m not musical; Wagner would disturb me in this situation.53 (#) And if I sought the same kitschy stimulus of melody in literature, I could produce no literature on such a night. Heine’s music may, by the same token, suffice for musicians who require more significant disclosures from their own art than his little bit of euphony affords. What, then, is poetry in the Heinean style, what is that German taste in art into whose prettinesses and wittinesses the wild hunt of Liliencron’s language burst, as the avant-gardist Gottfried August Bürger’s once had?54 (#) Heine’s poetry: it is mood or opinion with the Hark! hark! of jingling bells. This poetry is melody—so much so that it demands to be set to music. And it owes more to this music than its own for its success with the philistines. Simplicissimus once poked fun at the kind of German who crosses himself to ward off Heine, only to sing his “Lorelei” later on, blissfully drunk on emotion, “nevertheless.”55 (#) Two images: but the contrast isn’t as glaring as it may seem at first glance. For the philistines who curse Heine don’t rise to the true philistine confession until the second image, when they sing him. When a popular song is made out of a poem, is it insight into the poem’s literary value that makes the song popular?56 (#) How many German philistines would know what Heine means if Herr Silcher hadn’t set “I know not what it means”57 (#) to music? But is it an argument for the poet that this clientele would have clamored for his undifficult poetry even if it hadn’t been delivered to them on wings of song?58 (#) Oh, this narrow-minded hatred of Heine, which targets the Jew, tolerates the poet, and bleats along with a sentimental melody with or without a musician’s later help. Art brings life into disorder. The poets of humanity restore chaos again and again; the poets of society do their singing and lamenting, their blessing and cursing, within a well-ordered world. All those for whom a poem amounts to an agreement between themselves and the poet, sealed with rhyme, flee to Heine. All those who wish to join the poet in his pursuit of urbane allegories and his establishment of relations with the outside world will consider Heine a greater poet than Goethe. But those who consider a poem to be the revelation of a poet lost in his observation of Nature, not of a Nature lost in the observations of the poet, will be satisfied to reckon Heine a technician skilled at pleasure and sorrow, a speedy outfitter of stock moods. When Goethe shares in—and shares with us—the “silence on every peak,” he does it with such intensely felt kinship that the silence can be heard as an intimation.59 (#) But if a pine tree in the North stands on a barren peak and dreams of a palm tree in the Orient, it is an exceptional courtesy of Nature to oblige Heine’s yearning allegorically. Seeing an artful fake like this in the show window of a confectioner or a feuilletonist might put you in a good mood if you’re an artist yourself. But does that make its manufacturer one?60 (#) Even the plain outline of a perception of Nature, from which barely visible threads spin themselves out toward the soul, seems to me more lyrical than the dressing-up of ready-made moods, because it presupposes empathy. In this sense, Goethe’s “Stillness and Sea” is lyric poetry, as are Liliencron’s lines: “A river babbles its happy way across the land, a field of ripe rye gathers in the west, then Nature leans her head upon her hand and, weary from her work, takes rest.” Deeper moods arise from a reflecting heathscape on a summer morning than from reflective palms and pine trees; for here Nature rests her head upon her hand, while there Heinrich Heine pressed his hand to his cheek … You’re ashamed that between fears and tears there ever existed such slick intercourse that went by the name of poetry; you’re almost ashamed of the polemics. But you should open the Book of Songs and try reading the right-hand and the left-hand pages higgledy-piggledy, interchanging the lines. You won’t be disappointed, if you’re not disappointed with Heine. And those who are already disappointed will, for the first time, not be. “The little birds, they chirped so fine / Glad lovesongs did my heart entwine.” That can stand right or left. “In those darling little eyes of thine”: this need not simply rhyme with “My dear darling’s mouth as red as wine” and “blue little violets of thine eyes sublime” or, again, with “thine little red-rosy cheeks divine”; at every point the plea could stand: “Dear little darling, rest thy little hand upon this heart of mine,” and nowhere in this dear little chamber of poesy would the transposition of mine and thine be felt as a disturbance. On the other hand, Heine’s entire “Lorelei,” say, could not be substituted for Goethe’s “Fisher,” even though the only seeming difference is that the Lorelei influences the boatman from above, whereas the watery woman influences the fisher from below. Truly, Heinean verse is operetta lyrics, which even good music isn’t ruined by. Meilhac and Halévy’s lines wouldn’t be out of place in the Book of Songs:
I am thine
Thou art mine
What heavenly luck is ours
A pair of doves
So much in love
Cannot be found beneath the stars.
This is exactly the sort of shallowness that, in combination with Offenbach’s music, generates genuine emotive value or takes on deeper satirical significance.61 (#) Offenbach is music, but Heine is merely the words for it. And I don’t believe that a real poet wrote the lines:
And when I wailed to you about my pain,
You all just yawned in mute disdain;
Yet when I set it out in lyrical phrases,
You couldn’t wait to sing my praises.
But it’s an epigram; and it perfectly captures the mass appeal of Heine’s love poetry, in which the little songs are merely the ornament of big sorrows, not their naturally inevitable expression. The same mass appeal by which the poet Heine feels so rewarded. This is a poet who writes, in one of his prefaces, that his publishers have shown the most gratifying faith in his genius by means of the large first printings they’re wont to make of his work, and who points proudly to the account books in which the popularity of his poetry stands registered. This pride is as little surprising as that popularity. How, indeed, could lyrical work in which ideas are candied, rather than crystallized, fail to be greeted with universal satisfaction? At no point before, say, his deathbed poetry did verse become for Heine such a creative necessity that it had to be verse; and these rhymes are papillotes, not butterflies: paper ruffles often folded for no other reason than to demonstrate a fold. “I could have said all of that very well in good prose,” an amazed Heine writes after setting a preface in verse, and he continues: “But when one reads through the old poems again to polish them up with a view to republication, one is unexpectedly surprised by the jingling routine of the rhyme and meter…” It is indeed nothing but a journalism that scans: that keeps the reader minutely informed about his moods. Heine is always and overplainly informative. Sometimes he says it with blue flowers from someone else’s garden, sometimes directly. If the factual poem “The Holy Three Kings” had been written by a poet, it would be a poem. “The little ox bellowed, the little child screamed, and the three holy kings did sing.” This would be the mood of factuality. In Heine’s hands, though, it’s merely a dispatch. This becomes quite clear in a passage of the “Vitzliputzli”:62 (#)
One hundred sixty Spaniards
Met their death that day;
More than eighty others
Were taken by the Indians.
Seriously wounded, too, were many
Who only later died.
Nearly a dozen horses were lost,
Some killed, some captured.
According to our local correspondent. And, as with the factuality, so with the feeling, so with the irony: nothing immediate, everything utterly graspable with that second hand that can grasp nothing but the material. In the petting of mood, in the tickling of wit.
But the gates made my darling
Slip silent to a rendezvous;
A fool is always willing
When a foolish girl is too.
This joke isn’t made by any real cynic whose love has given him the slip. And no poet calls these words to a girl who is moved by the sunset she is watching:
My girl, now don’t you frown,
This happens all the time;
In front here it goes down
And comes back up from behind.
Not out of respect for the girl; out of respect for the sunset.63 (#) Heine’s cynicism is at the same level as the girl’s sentimentality. And as his own sentimentality. And when, greatly moved, he says of himself, “there I wove my tender Rhymes out of Balm and Moonlight,” you may well want to be as cynical as he is and ask him—Herr Heine, now, don’t you frown—whether he didn’t perhaps mean to write “there I wove my tender Rhymes for Balm & Moonlight,” and whether this might not be the very publishing house to whose account books he was just referring.64 (#) Poetry and satire—the phenomenon of their alliance becomes comprehensible: neither of them is there, they meet on the surface, not in the depths. This tear has no salt, and this salt doesn’t salt. When Heine—what is the phrase?—“punctures the mood with a joke,” I have the impression that he wants to sprinkle salt on the tail of the pretty bird: an old experiment; the bird still flutters away.65 (#) With Heine, the illusion succeeds, if not the experiment. You can prove the contrary to him; to him, but not to his credulous audience. He wasn’t simply taken along through life as an early accompanist of everyday lyrical experiences, he was also always, by virtue of his intellectualism, passed along by people’s youthful idiocy to their more enlightened selves. And they want to be enlightened about everything, just not about Heine, and even if they awaken from his dreams they still have his wit.
This wit, however, in verse and prose, is an asthmatic cur. Heine isn’t capable of driving his humor to the height of pathos and chasing it down from there. He trots it out, but he can’t make it jump. “Just Wait!” is the title of a poem.
Because I flash with such success
You think at thundering I can’t excel!
But you’re all wrong, for I possess
A talent for thundering as well.
Dreadful it will stand the test,
When come the proper day and hour;
You shall hear my voice at last,
The thunderous word, the weather’s power.
The wild storm on that day will cleave
Full many an oak tree tall,
Full many a palace wall will heave
And many a steeple fall!
These are empty promises. After all, what does Heine say about Platen?
In words, a splendid deed
That you intend to do someday!—
How well I know this breed
Who borrow time but do not pay.
Here is Rhodes, now come and show
Your art, this is your chance!
Or hold your tongue and go,
If today you cannot dance.
“A talent for thundering as well”—that sounds like journalism, doesn’t it? But from thunder not a sound and from the lightning only a twinkle. Only glimmerings, only the heat lightning of thoughts that went down somewhere or will sometime.
For just as an original thought need not always be new, so the person who has a new thought can easily have got it from someone else. This will remain a paradox for everyone except those who believe that thoughts are preformed, and that the creative individual is merely a chosen vessel, and that thoughts and poems existed before thinkers and poets—those who believe in the metaphysical way of thought, which is a miasma, whereas opinion is contagious, that is, it requires direct contact in order to be caught, in order to spread. Thus a creative head may say originally what somebody else has already said, and someone else may already be imitating a thought that won’t occur to the creative head until later. And it’s only in the rapture of linguistic conception that a world grows out of chaos. The subtlest illumination or shading of a thought, the tinting, the toning: only work like this goes truly unlost; no matter how pedantic, laughable, and meaningless it may seem at the time, it will eventually come to benefit the general public and yield, in the end, as a well-deserved harvest, those opinions that today are sold unripe with wanton greed. Everything that’s created remains as it was before it was created. The artist fetches it down from the heavens as a finished thing. Eternity has no beginning. Poetry or a joke: the act of creation lies between what’s self-evident and what is permanent.66 (#) Let there be light, again and again. It was already there and can reassemble itself from the spectrum. Science is spectral analysis: art is the synthesis of light. Thought is in the world, but it isn’t had. It’s refracted by the prism of material experience into elements of language; the artist binds them into a thought. A thought is a discovered thing, a recovered thing. And whoever goes looking for it is an honest finder; it belongs to him even if somebody before him has already found it.
In this and only in this way did Heine anticipate Nietzsche with the idea of a Nazarene type.67 (#) He demonstrates, with every word of his polemic against Platen, how far removed he was from the world of Eros and Christianity, which nevertheless shows up in his poem “Psyche” with such neat serendipity. In the transformations of Eros, Heine was able to see only the goal of experience, not the way of it; he applied ethical and aesthetic norms to it, and here, where we arrive at the border between the demonstrably true and the demonstrably silly, he anticipated not Nietzsche but the late Herr Maximilian Harden.68 (#) In the famous Platen polemic—which owes its fame solely to our pulp interest in the persons involved and to the even pulpier pleasure we get from the part under attack, and which would have to have destroyed Heine’s reputation if there existed in Germany a feeling for true polemical power instead of the mere carping of meanness—in this document, Heine chooses to make his erotic confession with the words:69 (#)
The one likes to eat onions, the other has more of a feeling for warm friendship, and I as an honest man must frankly confess that I like to eat onions, and a crooked female cook is dearer to me than the most beautiful friend of beauty.70 (#)
This isn’t gentlemanly, but it isn’t profound, either. He apparently had no concept of the diversity of sexual love, which confirms itself even in the things it rejects, and he crammed this wide world into the crude schema of man and woman, normal and abnormal. Indeed, even on his deathbed, the image that comes to hand is of the milkmaid who “kisses with thick lips and strongly smells of cow chips,” although here she’s only supposed to be more warming than fame, not warm friendship.71 (#) The person who understands the soul this way is a feuilletonist! Heine’s polemic is feuilletonistic in the disconnectedness with which opinion and wit run alongside each other. The outlook can reach no further than the humor can. A person who makes fun of his adversary’s sex life is incapable of rising to polemical power. And a person who ridicules his adversary’s poverty can make no better joke than this: Platen’s Oedipus would “not have been so biting if its author had had more to bite on.” Bad opinions can only make bad jokes. The play of wit and word, which compresses whole worlds of contrast onto the tiniest of surfaces and can therefore be the most valuable kind of play, must, in Heine’s hands, as in the hands of the dismal Saphir, become a slack pun, because there are no moral funds to underwrite it.72 (#) I believe he twice makes awful reference to somebody having a bad case of “melancolic.” Such coinages—as also, for example, his quotations from the “sownets” of Platen or his avowal that he and Rothschild have been on “famillionaire” terms—he naturally then blames on Hirsch-Hyacinth.73 (#) This from a polemicist who talks about his trusty Protestant kitchen hatchet! A hatchet that can’t even trim a sentence! The structural backbone of his attack on Börne consists of direct quotations from Börne, and every time he brings Börne out to speak you can detect quite precisely the point at which Börne stops and Heine’s own yakking takes over.74 (#) He does it in the heavy-handed porcelain story.75 (#) At every step, you want to revise, condense, deepen. “In addition to the passage of the Polish soldiers, I have characterized the occurrences in Rhenisch Bavaria as the next lever which, following the July Revolution, gave rise to the agitation in Germany and had the most profound influence even on our countrymen in Paris” is not a sentence I would have let stand. The parts without a frame; the whole without composition; that short-windedness that has to keep catching itself in a new paragraph, as if to say “So, and now let’s talk about something else.”76 (#) Had Heine been capable of aphorism (for which, indeed, the longest wind is needed), he could have made it through even a hundred pages of polemic. Of Börne, the ethically and intellectually rejected person who towers over the writer attacking him, he says, “In the end, all of his hostilities were nothing more than the petty jealousies that the little drummer boy feels for the great drum major—he envies me for the big plume that struts so boldly in the wind, and for my richly embroidered uniform, on which there’s more silver than he, the little drummer boy, could buy with his entire life savings, and for the skill with which I twirl my big baton, etc.” The skill is undeniable; and the drum major is also dead-on. Heine sees in Börne’s household “an immorality that disgusts” him; his “soul’s entire feeling for purity” bristles “at the thought of coming in the slightest contact with Börne’s immediate surroundings.” He has also wondered for the longest time whether Madame Wohl is Börne’s lover “or merely his wife.”77 (#) This perfectly fine joke is characteristic of the rootlessness78 (#) of Heine’s wit, for it pays off with the opposite of Heine’s notion of sexual morality. Heine would have to have been curious, in a straightforward bourgeois way, as to whether Madame Wohl was Börne’s wife or merely his lover. Indeed, on his deathbed he still sets great store by his avowal that he never touched a woman he knew was married. But there are yet more embarrassing contradictions in this piece. Jean Paul, for example, is called “the muddled polymath of Bayreuth,” while Heine says, of himself, that he has “planted in the literature of Europe monuments redounding to the eternal credit of the German Mind.”79 (#) The German Mind, however, would mainly like to escape with its life; and it will rise again only when the intellectual flood of filth in Germany has run its course: when people again begin to appreciate the mental labor of linguistically creative manliness80 (#) and to distinguish it from the learnable manual labor of linguistic ticklings. And will there then be anything left of Heine but his death?
The deathbed poetry, parts of Romancero, Lamentations, Lazarus: here he no doubt had the best of all helpers in raising his form to the level of genuine figuration. It took the experience of dying to make Heine a poet. It was a dictate: sing, bird, or die. Death is an even better helper than Paris; death in Paris, pain and homesickness, they do finally accomplish something authentic.
I hear the trot, the hooves beat near,
The dark rider comes to fetch me here—
He tears me away, from Mathilde I must part,
Oh, the thought will burst my heart!
This is a different poetry from the one whose success is proven in the account books. For Heine’s influence derives from the Book of Songs, not the Romancero, and if you want to judge the accomplishments by the man, you have to open the former, not the latter. Death concentrates, death clears away the trifling underworld-weariness81 (#) and lends pathos to the cynicism. Heine’s witticisms, so often just the dissonance of an unlyrical perspective, produce a higher harmony here. Compressed by its extinction, his wit finds more powerful fusions; and tasteless items such as “Get thee to a nunnery, dear child, or get thee a shave” become rarer.82 (#) The mot traditionally ascribed to him, “Dieu me pardonnera, c’est son métier,”83 (#) is perhaps, in its much-admired triteness, an invention of those who wanted Heine to remain true to his style to the end. But it suits the whole not badly. Both in belief and unbelief, Heine can’t rid himself of the imagery of commerce. Love itself says to the god of songs that “it demands guarantees,” and the god asks how many kisses Love will advance him against his golden lyre. And meanwhile Heine’s cynicism, this stale potpie of wit and woe, has become rather pleasing to the German palate, though the palate may not want to admit it. Compared with Offenbach, in whose orchestra the thousand-year misery is ringed by a dance of eternal delight, this ridiculer of misery looks like a trained Asra next to a born Bluebeard—to the kind that kills when it loves.84 (#)
… What does the lonely tear want?85 (#) What does a humor want which smiles through tears because both the strength to cry and the strength to laugh are lacking? But the “brilliance of language” isn’t lacking, and it runs in the family. And it’s uncanny how few people notice that it comes from chopped liver, and how many have spread it all over their household bread. Their noses are stuffed, their eyes are blind, but their ears are wide open to every hit song.86 (#) And so, thanks to Heine, the feuilleton has evolved to the highest level of perfection. There’s nothing to be done with an original, but copies can always be improved. When the imitators of Heine began to fear that somebody would expose them, all they had to do was become forgers of Heine, and they could go into mass production under his name. They take up a lot of space in the literature of Heine. But the experts who succeeded in exposing the fraud aren’t expert enough to realize that to expose the thief is to have exposed the owner.87 (#) He himself broke into the house with a skeleton key, leaving the door open behind him. He set a bad example for his successors. He taught them the trick. And the farther the trick spread, the more delicious it became. Thus the pieties of journalism demand that every editorial masthead today include at least a bedbug from Heine’s “mattress grave.” Every Sunday it creeps flatly through the columns and stinks the art out of our noses! But to be tricked out of a real life in this way is entertaining to us. In times that had time, art gave us one to resolve. In times that have the Times, form and content are split apart for faster understanding. Because we have no time, writers are obliged to say in many words what could have been succinctly put. So Heine really is the forerunner of modern nervous systems, praised by artists who fail to notice that the philistines have tolerated him a lot better than he tolerated philistines. For the philistines relent in their hatred of Heine when they take his poetry into account, while the artists take Heine’s hatred of philistines into account in order to rescue his personality. And so, eternally relevant because of a misunderstanding, he vindicates the pretty coinage “cosmopolite,” in which the cosmos reconciled itself to politics. Detlev von Liliencron had a merely provincial outlook. But it seems to me that he was more cosmic in Schleswig-Holstein than Heine was in the cosmos. In the end, the people who never came out of their province will go farther than the people who never came into one.88 (#)
What attracted Nietzsche to Heine—he had delusions of smallness when, in Ecce Homo, he wrote that his and Heine’s names would go down together through the centuries—must have been that hatred of Germany which embraces every ally it can find. But when you hold up the lazzarone as a cultural ideal alongside the German constable, there certainly seems to be nothing more German than such idealism, which takes a plagiarizing romanticism for something to be aspired to.89 (#) The intellectual problem of Heine, this refresher of German air, certainly should not be overlooked alongside the artistic problem of Heine: indeed, it runs alongside. And yet here, once, some oxygen was let into the room of Germany, and after a momentary improvement it tainted the air. That someone with nothing to say is better off saying it understandably: this perception was the relief for which Germany thanks its Heine after those difficult times when the people with something to say were all incomprehensible. And this undeniable piece of social progress has been attributed to art, since Germans are unshakable in their opinion that language is the means of expression common to both writers and speakers. With all due respect to Heine’s enlightening achievement, he wasn’t so great a satirist as to be deemed unworthy of a monument.90 (#) In fact, he was such a small satirist that the stupidity of his times has descended on posterity. Granted, this posterity builds itself the monument that it refuses to give him. But truly it also builds itself the one it wants for him. And if it doesn’t follow through with its monument, it at least leaves its calling card on Heine’s grave and reassures itself of its piety in the newspaper. As long as the secret balloting about his immortality continues, his immortality will continue, and when a nation of fraternity brothers has a problem, it won’t be making an end of it so soon. But the cultural subcommittee is manned by the Karpeleses and the Bartelses, and whichever way the decision finally falls, it won’t prove anything for the Mind.91 (#) The squalid all-in-due-courseness of this debate, the perennial timeliness of antiquated perspectives, is the perfect emblem for a literary phenomenon in which nothing is eternal but the personality type, which runs through time from nowhere. This type, who amazes his contemporaries by having more talent on their level than they do, has inflicted grievous damage on the art of language, which everyone who speaks believes he can understand.92 (#) We no longer recognize the personalities, and the personalities envy the technicians.93 (#) If Nietzsche admires Heine’s technique, then he is given the lie by every sentence he himself ever wrote. Except one: “You have attained mastery when you neither err nor hesitate in the execution.”94 (#) The converse of this shallow insight is the artist’s business. His achievement is scruples. He seizes, but, after seizing, he hesitates. Heine was a go-getter of the language; never did he cast his eyes down before her. Here is how his credo reads: “The axiom that we may know the character of an author from his style is not unconditionally correct; it is applicable merely to that mass of authors who depend upon momentary inspirations to guide their pens, and who obey the word more than they command it. With artistes, this axiom is inadmissible, for these are masters of the word, they manipulate it to whatever end they please, coin it according to their whim, write objectively, and their character does not betray itself in their style.” And that’s what he was: a talent, because no character; except he confused the artistes with the journalists.95 (#) As for the mass of authors who obey the word, they are unfortunately very few. These are the artists. Talent is what the others have: for it is a character defect. Here Heine utters his unconditional truth; he needs it against Börne. But since he writes objectively and, as a master of the word, manipulates it to whatever end he pleases, the opposite suits him against Platen. In Platen, “unlike the true poet, the language has never become master”; he has, “rather, become a master in the language, or, rather, on the language, like a virtuoso on an instrument.” Heine is objective. Against Börne: “The deeds of an author consist in words.” Against Platen: he calls his achievement “in words, a splendid deed”—“so entirely unfamiliar with the essence of poesy that he doesn’t even know that the word is a deed only for a rhetorician, whereas for a true poet the word is an event.”
Which was it for Heine? Neither deed nor event but intention or accident. Heine was a Moses who tapped his staff on the rocks of the German language. But speed isn’t sorcery, the water didn’t flow from the rock, he simply brought it up with his other hand; and it was eau de cologne.96 (#) Heine turned the miracle of linguistic creation into a magic act. He achieved as much as can be achieved with language; greater still is what can be created out of language. He could write a hundred pages, but he couldn’t shape the language of the hundred pages that weren’t written. When Iphigenie97 (#) begs for a kind parting word and the king says to her, “Farewell!” it’s as though leave were being taken for the first time in the world, and a “Farewell!” like this outweighs the Book of Songs and a hundred pages of Heine’s prose. The mystery of the birth of the old word was foreign to him.98 (#) The language was at his command. Yet never did she reduce him to silent ecstasy. Never did her favor force him to his knees. Never did he follow paths invisible to the profane reader’s eye, approaching the place where love first begins. Oh, the marrow-burning rapture of experiences in language! The danger of the word is the delight of thought. What turned the corner there? Not even seen and already loved! I plunge into this adventure.
NESTROY (#)1 (#)AND POSTERITY (#)
ON THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS DEATH
We cannot celebrate his memory the way a posterity ought to, by acknowledging a debt we’re called upon to honor, and so we want to celebrate his memory by confessing to a bankruptcy that dishonors us, we inhabitants of a time that has lost the capacity to be a posterity … How could the eternal Builder fail to learn from the experiences of this century? For as long as there have been geniuses, they’ve been placed into a time like temporary tenants, while the plaster was still drying; then they moved out and left things cozier for humanity. For as long as there have been engineers, however, the house has been getting less habitable. God have mercy on the development! Better that He not allow artists to be born than with the consolation that this future of ours will be better for their having lived before us. This world! Let it just try to feel like a posterity, and, at the insinuation that it owes its progress to a detour of the Mind, it will give out a laugh that seems to say: More Dentists Prefer Pepsodent. A laugh based on an idea of Roosevelt’s and orchestrated by Bernhard2 (#) Shaw. It’s the laugh that’s done with everything and is capable of anything. For the technicians have burned the bridges, and the future is: whatever follows automatically.3 (#) This velocity doesn’t realize that its achievement is important only in escaping itself. Present in body, repellent in spirit, perfect just the way they are, these times of ours are hoping to be overtaken by the times ahead, and hoping that the children, spawned by the union of sport and machine and nourished by newspaper, will be able to laugh even better then. There’s no scaring them; if a spirit comes along, the word is: we’ve already got everything we need. Science is set up to guarantee their hermetic isolation from anything from the beyond. Let art chase away their worries about which planet happens to be benefiting from the thoughts of the world anterior to them.4 (#) This thing that calls itself a world because it can tour itself in fifty days is finished as soon as it can do the math.5 (#) To look the question “What then?” resolutely in the eye, it still has the confidence to reckon with whatever doesn’t add up. It’s grateful to the authors who relieve it of the problem, whether by diversion or by dispute. But it has to curse the one—living or dead—whom it encounters as admonisher or spoilsport between business and success. And when cursing no longer suffices—because cursing implies reverence—it’s enough to forget. And the brain has barely an inkling that the day of the great drought has dawned. Then the last organ falls silent, but the last machine goes on humming until even it stands still, because its operator has forgotten the Word.6 (#) For the intellect didn’t understand that, in the absence of spirit, it could grow well enough within its own generation but would lose the ability to reproduce itself.7 (#) If two times two really is four, the way they say it is, it’s owing to the fact that Goethe wrote the poem “Stillness and Sea.” But now people know the product of two times two so exactly that in a hundred years they won’t be able to figure it out. Something that never before existed must have entered the world. An infernal machine of humanity.8 (#) An invention for shattering the Koh-i-noor to make its light accessible to everyone who doesn’t have it.9 (#) For fifty years now it’s been running, the machine into which the Mind is put in the front to emerge at the rear as print, diluting, distributing, destroying. The giver loses, the recipients are impoverished, and the middlemen make a living. A hybrid thing has settled in to subvert the values of life by turning them against each other. In the pestilential miasma of the intellect, art and mankind make their peace … A spirit who’s been dead for fifty years today, and who still isn’t alive, is the first victim of this festival of joy, about which reports by the column have appeared ever since. How it happened that a spirit like this was buried:10 (#) it could only be the enormous content of his satirical thinking, and I believe he continues to create. He, Johann Nestroy, cannot tolerate that everything he found intolerable remained in place. Posterity repeats his text and doesn’t recognize him; it doesn’t laugh with him, it laughs against him, it refutes and confirms his satire through the undying nature of the subject matter.11 (#) Unlike Heine, whose wit agrees with the world, who touched it where it wanted to be tickled, and whom it could always handle—the world won’t vanquish Nestroy the way it did Heine. It will do it the way the coward overcomes the strong man, by running away from him and getting a literary historian to spit on him. People will be ungrateful to Heine, they’ll enforce the laws of fashion against him, they won’t wear him anymore. But they’ll always say that he had wide horizons, that he was an emancipator, that he rubbed shoulders with statesmen and still had the presence of mind to write a love poem now and then. Not so Nestroy. No Kaddish will be said.12 (#) No Friedjung13 (#) will succeed in demonstrating that he had a political outlook, let alone the kind of outlook that turns a political outlook into an outlook in the first place. What mattered to him? So much, and therefore nothing of liberalism.14 (#) While the cobblers outside were fighting for the most ideal of wares, he was having his tailors sing lampoons.15 (#) He limited his partitioning of the world to small businessmen and landlords, to the up-and-coming and the down-and-out, to pensioners and unemployed porters. But that it was the world, not the editorial page, that he partitioned like this; that his wit was forever taking the road from social standing to humanity: conventional wisdom leafs past a chapter as incomprehensible as that.16 (#) Flashes on a narrow horizon—the heavens opening over a grocery store—are not enlightening. Nestroy’s thinking proceeded from social status into the world, Heine’s from the world into the state. And that is more.17 (#) Nestroy remains a joker because his jokes, which shot from the workbench to the stars, came from the workbench and we know nothing of the stars. An earthly politician says more to us than a cosmic buffoon. And since what matters to us is increasing our stores of conventional wisdom, we don’t mind if some earthly buffoons occasionally make Nestroy into a politician and force him to speak the kind of liberal precinct-opinion without which we can no longer conceive of a dead satirist. The phraseurs and riseurs are then happy to admit that he was a mockingbird and a cutup. And nevertheless, he was only cutting them down and blowing off their Calabrian hats.18 (#) And nevertheless, to those who condescend to art and grant it free play between the horizons—that is, from the individual nullity to the social quantity—let it be said with considerable certainty: If art is not what they conceive and condone but instead is the stretch from something seen to something thought—the shortest link from the gutter to the Milky Way—then there has never been a runner under the German sky like Nestroy. Never, it goes without saying, among those who brought the news, with laughing faces, that life is arranged in an ugly way.19 (#) We won’t deny credence to his message because it was a lampoon. Not even because, in his rush, he also sang something for the listener; because, in his contempt for the needs of the audience, he satisfied them, so that his thoughts could soar unhindered. Or because he swaddled his dynamite in cotton and blew up his world only after reinforcing its conviction that it was the best of all possible worlds, and because he laid on the soft soap of congeniality before he started slitting throats, and otherwise didn’t wish to inconvenience anyone. Nor, not being interested in honoring truth before spirit,20 (#) will we think less of him because he often, with the carelessness of an original who has more important things on his mind, took his cue from stagehands. The reproof that was leveled against Nestroy is sillier than any plotline he lifted from a French flunky, sillier than the printed look of any of those quodlibets that he used to toss to the people, who, then as now, won’t give humor a free pass unless they’re also given their hardy-har-har, and who, in those days, weren’t convinced they’d got their money’s worth unless they went home with a cheer for the assembled wedding guests.21 (#) He chose the routine, which had been born as a routine, in order to conceal his substance, which could never be a routine. That even the low theatrical effects here somehow contributed to the deeper meaning, by separating the audience from it—and that, again, there’s deeper meaning even in the fanfare with which the orchestra sends off philosophy—escapes the literary historians, who may well be capable of helping Nestroy to a political conviction, but not to the text that encompasses the immortal part of him.22 (#) He himself hadn’t bargained for this. He wrote on the fly, but he didn’t know the flight would extend beyond the repertoire. Although every Nestroyan line attests that he was capable of it, he didn’t have to withdraw into artistic self-discipline in the face of those who considered him nothing more than a humorist, and the milder jarring of his times denied his response the consciousness of its finality—that blessed incentive to seal revenge on the material in his enjoyment of form.23 (#) If he’d been born later, if he’d been born into these times of journalistic language fraud, he would have conscientiously repaid everything he owed to language. Times that retard the intellectual tempo of the masses incite their satirical counterpart. These times would have left him no time for as casual a prosecution of a bloody feud as the stage permits and insists on, and no orchestra would have been harmonious enough to resolve the dissonance between his nature and the world that grew up after it. His essence was the joke that runs counter to the stage effect, the flat onceness that has to be satisfied with finding a mate for the joke’s material and which, in its rhythmic salvo, hits the target before the thought.24 (#) On the stage, where politeness toward the audience parades around in the negligee of language, Nestroy’s wit could only be coined in the currency of rhetoric, which, far removed from the actor’s tools of characterization, was something again only he could pull off.25 (#) Fragmented times would have driven his essence to concentrate itself in aphorism and glosses, and the world’s more varied screechings would have introduced new cadences to his dialectic in its penetration to the core of the apparatus.26 (#) In his satire, one particular rhythm above all suffices as a winding post for the threads of an observation that is truly of the spirit. But sometimes a Nestroyan climax will look as if the terminologies of class feeling, perorating in succession, had arranged themselves as the steps of a Jacob’s ladder. These lively exponents of their professional point of view are always standing with one foot in their trade and the other in philosophy, and if their face is always changing, it’s really just a mask, because they have Nestroy’s one and only tongue, which has unleashed this sage torrent of words. Whatever else they may be, they are, above all, thinkers and speakers and are always in danger, on the public stage, of shortchanging their thought to save their breath. This utterly language-infatuated humor, in which word and sense capture each other, embrace, and hold each other entwined to the point of inseparability, indeed to the point of indistinguishability, stands above anything that a stage scene can communicate and therefore falls into the prompter’s box, in a way comparable only to Shakespeare, from whom you likewise have to remove Shakespeare before you can produce a theatrical effect—unless the mission of a stage character who begins to drone and rave without regard to anything going on behind him would be assured of applause by the oddness of such behavior. Odder yet, that the verbal and oral wit that he carries into his dialogue doesn’t impede his powers of characterization, of which there’s enough left over to outfit an entire dramatis personae and, even as it’s causing us to think, to fill the theater with concrete mood, gesture, suspense, and action. He borrows foreign subject matter. Where, though, is the German comedy writer who could borrow from him the power to create a character with three words and a milieu with three sentences? He’s all the more creative when he lifts foreign material into his own work. He goes about it differently than the better-known contemporary recaster Hofmannsthal, who strips the hides off honorable cadavers to inter questionable remains in them, and who would no doubt defend his serious professional work against comparison with an author of farces.27 (#) Like all superior readers, Herr von Hofmannsthal reduces the work to its material. Nestroy takes his material from where it was barely more than material, invents what he has found, and his achievement would be considerable even if it consisted only in the reconstruction of plots and in the whirl of reinvented situations—that is, only in the welcome opportunity to entertain the world and not in the voluntary compulsion to observe the world as well. But the higher Nestroy, the one who owes nothing to any foreign idea, is somebody who has only head and no figure, for whom a role is only a pretext for his text,28 (#) and in whom every word attains a fullness that surpasses character, even the one who stands there in the breadth of Scholzian29 (#) humor as the model of a basic type in the satellite theaters of Vienna.30 (#) It wasn’t Nestroy the actor but the costumed advocate of his satirical prerogative, the executor of his attacks, the spokesman for his own eloquence, who might have exerted that mysterious effect which, while its artistic origins have certainly never been understood, has come down to us as the center of a heroic age of theater. The theatrical form of Nestroy’s mind was bound to die out with his body, and the routine of its nimbleness, which we still here and there see popping up with virtuoso poise, is a costume borrowed illegitimately. In his farces, the lead role remains unfilled unless the expert in his greasepaint also happens to come by his satirical spirit. Only the fruitful comedy of his fuller secondary roles has found original successors, such as the actor Oskar Sachs,31 (#) whose style seems, in its vital composure, to descend from the classical Carltheater.32 (#) But as the origin and perfection of a popular type, an actorly creator such as Girardi, who stands on the margins of the empty scene offered by the stagecraft of the past decade, could surpass the theatrical value of Nestroy’s art, which had only to clothe its own fullness of thought.33 (#) This is why even a layman of the stage such as Herr Reinhardt could propose a Nestroy cycle to a Girardi.34 (#) In Girardi, the character thrives on the poverty of its textual support; with Nestroy it shrivels up on the wealth of the words. There’s so much literature in Nestroy that the theater balks, and he has to step in for the actor. He can do it because it’s a written art of acting.35 (#) In this proxyship for the actor, in this embodiment of what easily eludes the actual demands of theater, there lives today a spirit whose affinity with him can now and then be recognized in the very outlines of his personality: Frank Wedekind.36 (#) Here, too, there’s something overproductive, in which what’s organically lacking in the character is made up for with identification, and which mediates personally between confession and credibility.37 (#) The actor wrote for a poet a role with which the poet wouldn’t trust an actor. In Wedekind—leaving aside an example of linguistic-satirical lineage that means more to me personally—we’re presented with a monologuist for whom a seeming conventionality and casualness of scenic form likewise suffices for speaking past it, and singing past it, things that are truly new and essential. The kinship in the cadences of aperçus was pointed out once by the late critic Wilheim.38 (#) Cadence is that superficiality on which thoughts most rely, and there must somewhere be a common standpoint for observing the world when sentences are spoken that could just as well be Nestroy’s as Wedekind’s:
“She’s in her twentieth year now, was married three times, satisfied a colossal lot of lovers—sooner or later, the needs of her heart were bound to register.”39 (#)
A biographical comment like this would also be made, just as it is, by one of the Nestroyan bringers of thought if, with the same vault of antitheses, he could get himself over his beloved’s past. And in Earth Spirit40 (#) somebody could again come close to speaking the wonderful line that occurs in Nestroy:
“I seen an old gray horse once pullin’ a brick wagon. The future’s been weighin’ on my mind ever since.”41 (#)
But here, perhaps, the absolute Shakespearean quality of such a lightning illumination of a mental landscape is sublime beyond any modern comparison. It’s a line by which you’d like to reintroduce to the contemporary reader’s muddled eye what poetry is: a within fetched from a without, a perfect unity. Observed reality taken up in feeling, not massaged until it fits the feeling. It could be used to reveal the method of all poetastery, all feuilleton poetry, which looks around for a handy piece of the external world in order to dispose of a stock mood. The case of Heine breaks open and collapses on a sentence like this, for it offers the dead certainty that an old gray horse would start to muse: How good was my life before / This wagon must I pull today / O happy neighs of yore / You’ve gone, you’ve gone away! / But the wagon said, Don’t frown / It is an old refrain / Once the road starts going down / It never goes up again … And we’d be fully informed about the author’s mood, including the ironic resignation. With Nestroy, who wrote only rough couplet stanzas, you can detect passages in every farce where his purely poetic piloting of thought through the densest of materials—where more than the mind: the mind’s process of assimilation—becomes visible. It’s the advantage over beauty possessed by a face that’s changeable to the point of beauty. The coarser the material, the more penetrating the process. In satire, the linguistic demands are less easily questioned, and fraudulence more difficult, than in the kind of poetry that doesn’t bother earning the stars and for which distance isn’t a road but a rhyme. Satire is thus rightly the poetry of impediment, richly compensated for being the impediment of poetry. And how it has both together: of the ideal, the entire ideal, and distance as well! It is never polemical,42 (#) always creative, while counterfeit poetry is mere yea-saying, a contemptible appeal to the already available world. How satire is true symbolism, inferring a lost beauty from a found ugliness and setting up little images of meaning in place of global concepts! Counterfeit poetry, which takes weighty matters for granted, and counterfeit irony, which rejects weighty matters, have one and the same face, and a single wrinkle separates Heine’s lonely tear from Herr Shaw’s common laughter. But the joke is nasty to the smokestack because the joke affirms the sun. And acid wants the gleam, and the rust says it’s only corrosive.43 (#) Satire can perpetrate a disruption of religion to arrive at reverence. It inclines toward high emotion. Even in places where a given emotion is deployed like just another object from the outside world, so that satire’s contradiction can shimmer through.44 (#) Yes and No mix and multiply, and thought springs forth. A game, as unprincipled as love. The result of this perfect penetration, preservation, and intensification of polar tendencies: a Nestroyan tirade, a melody by Offenbach. Here someone’s rapture at a pastoral play is underscored by the very joke deriding it; there the caricature of someone’s pining moonlight love runs riot over parody and into transcendence. This is true high-spiritedness, for which nothing is profane.
“A real practical fanatic once told me that the dandiest thing is when there’s two lovers and one of them dies first and comes back to the other one as a ghost. I can just see it, when she’s sitting there at her garden window some flowery night, with moonlight playing all over her pearly tears, and it would be getting whiter and whiter behind the bushes, and that whiteness would be yours truly—completely spirit, not one speck of body, but with the bedsheet of eternity over my head all the same, on account of decency—I stretches out my arms to her, I points to a star in the sky, ‘there shall we be united,’ so to speak—she gets the itch for a heavenly rendezvous, and would you believe it, she casts off her earthly shackles and we go amalgamating and waffeting and pendulating into the azure-blue night sky…”
Inverted pathos presupposes emotion, and Nestroy’s wit always has the gravity that knew emotion in its better days. Like the wit of every true satirist, it rolls down the long alley toward where the Muses stand, to strike all nine of them. Nestroy the disputer is the disputatious catalogue of every feeling in the world.45 (#) The buffoon who was banished from the stage, but went on cracking jokes behind the tragic hero as he was leaving, seems fused with the hero for an epoch, amusing himself in a style that reaches into his own heart and, in a strangely suspended tone, almost like Jean Paul’s, sustains the joke that’s being perpetrated here with horror.
FRAU VON ZYPRESSENBURG: Is one’s father a hunter, too?—TITUS: No, he runs a quiet, solitary business in which resting is his only work; he lies fettered by a higher power, and yet he’s free and independent because he’s disposing of himself;—he’s dead.—FRAU VON ZYPRESSENBURG (aside): How profligately he uses twenty lofty words to say what can be said with one syllable. The man obviously has the makings of an author.
And it is the loftiest yet tersest paraphrasing of a monosyllabic condition, the way the words here play around death. This blurred emotionality, which Nestroy breathes into the most modest of his characters’ asides, has led literary historians to think that his wit is aimed at their noble impulses.46 (#) In truth, it’s aimed only at their phrases. Nestroy is the first German satirist in whom language forms thoughts about things. He liberates language from its lockjaw, and for every cliché it turns him a profit in thought. Indicative are such expressions as:
“Good thing I drownded my sorrows, or despair woulda driven me straightaway to drink.”
Or:
“The apples go over here! People got no idea how to organdize. They go mixin’ up apples and oranges like apples and oranges.”
Language is making fun of itself here. The cliché is driven back into the hypocritical convention that created it:
“All right, out with your decision, my sweet”—“But Herr von Lips, I really must first…”—“I understand, there can be no talk of refusing, but to say yes, you think some deliberation is in order.”
The cliché inverts itself into truth:
“I’ve shared adversity with you; it’s now my most sacred duty to stick with you in good times, too!”
Or, debased to neologism, the language of the upper classes is caricatured by language from the mouths of the unrefined:
“All of a sudden, here comes a first-magnitude starlet and makes her societal splash at the pinnacle of the ambulatory entreprise…”
How merely changing a tense suffices for an intention like this can be seen in an inspired example in which “not mincing one’s words” corrects itself. An interpenetration of problem and content:
“Be bold in your demands, speak openly, without having minced your words!”
Nestroy’s people speak bombastically when the joke wants to subvert cliché or counteract demagogic emotionality:
“Oh, I want to be a dreadful servant for thee!”
He has every domestic speak Schiller sentences, to sober the emotional life of the principals. Often, however, it’s as if the tragic hero had been standing behind the buffoon, for the emotion seems to side with the joke. Genuine matters of the heart are being treated when an office clerk approaches a milliner as if on his way to Eboli’s room:47 (#)
“Your servant’s looking daggers at me—does he know about our former love?”
Joke and high emotion go hand in hand, and if the times haven’t yet stimulated them to engender each other, they still never cancel each other. To be sure, the poet doesn’t elevate his own wit, unaltered, into his own emotion, but he strengthens it with someone else’s. The two of them play and release each other mutually unharmed. When Nestroy makes light of feeling, we can trust him, and when his wit cuts short a love scene, he disposes of and replaces every other love scene that could have occurred in a similar situation. Where, in a German farce, after the engagement of master and mistress, have the necessities between manservant and maidservant ever been accomplished in fewer words:
“Why are you looking at me like that?”—“She’s in the service of my future mistress, I’m in the service of her future master, I just toss that out, as various consequentialities could arise from it.”—“Time will tell.”
And if the aim is to demonstrate, in passages of Nestroyan dialogue, his accelerated method of psychology, where does a scene like this one between a cobbler and a servant stand:
“Congratulations on the secret jackpot, or whatever it was, but honestly, I was flabbergasted.”—“So was the innkeeper, no less! He made an even stupider face than you. I bet you I could be into him for ten francs now and he wouldn’t dare say anything … Yessiree, to ask for change from a ducat, it arouses respect.”—“Strange! (aside) But suspicions, too … Our master has disappeared. A ducat comes to light among the proletariat … Hm … You’re a cobbler?”—“So they say.”—“And I suppose you made good on a long shot?”—“Oh, you’re probably wondering how an honest cobbler came by a ducat?”—“Well, it is extraordinary … I mean, that is to say, interesting…”—“As a stranger, it’s actually none of your business … but, no, to me, anybody I meet in an inn is a kindred soul. (Shaking his hand) You shall know everything.”—(In inquisitive suspense) “Well, so?”—“You see, the thing is, there’s an incident at the bottom of this … a fundamentally horrible incident that no man on earth may ever learn of, and consequently not you, either.”—“Yes, but…”—“So show yourself worthy of my trust and probe no further!”
Such values are lost and forgotten. As everywhere in art, and above all in theater, scarcity of time has accustomed audiences to ponderousness.48 (#) Only this would enable the intellect, weary from business, to procure those further pleasures that it has so long regarded as the task of dramatic high art to provide: getting acquainted with the latest advances in psychology, a psychology that is only psychrology,49 (#) the science of coming to terms with mysteries in a rational way, bored amid excitement by instructors, dying amid beauty of boredom, from the French rule de tri to the Nordic integral equation.50 (#) No theatergoer managing to go to bed without the necessary knotty problem. And meanwhile naturalism, which not only met the psychological requirements but satisfied other demands for home use by calling things by their proper names, exhaustively, with nothing left out, while fate hung on the wall like a pendulum clock keeping perfect time. All of this so thoroughly and at such length, until the vengeance of the fettered bourgeois imagination finally vented itself in the psychological operetta.51 (#) In the most out-of-the-way corner of a Nestroyan farce there is more expert feeling for a scene and a better view into the stage-flies of higher worlds than in the repertoire of a German decade. Hauptmann and Wedekind stand as poets, like the pre-Nestroyan Raimund, above considerations of theatrical utility.52 (#) The influence of Anzengruber and his successors is detached at its own risk from the saving grace of dialect.53 (#) Nestroy’s dialect is an artistic tool, not a crutch. You can’t translate his language, but you could reduce the authors of folk plays to their scene value in Standard German. Only a literary historian is capable of discerning an advance over Nestroy in this. But the idea that this man, even if his exploitation for the meaner purposes of theatrical pleasure were to meet with ingratitude, can be so much as mentioned as an intellectual personality in the company of those very things that have Hand and Heart or Faith and Home54 (#) onstage, would be a joke that humorlessness should not permit itself with impunity. There are words on every page of Nestroy that burst open the tomb into which estrangement from art has thrown him, and that go for the throats of the gravediggers. Full of datedness, an ongoing protest against the people who are up to date. A Forty-Eighter’s55 (#) word-barricades against the reign of banality; trains of thought whose action wordplay renders inoffensive to the seriousness of life, the better to outwit it. A lowly genre, as far beneath a historian’s dignity as an earthquake. But what if the joke sensed that it’s intolerable to dignity—that it so fooled dignity in advance that dignity is right to feel insulted. Can you imagine that the professionals of the Ideal would let a phenomenon like Nestroy pass without leaving behind a visible expression of their terror? The self-advertisements of Theodor Vischer, Laube, Kuh, and those other concerned dignitaries56 (#) who came out for Nestroy’s hundredth birthday are as understandable as the judgmental politics of Hebbel, who rejects Nestroy after Nestroy’s wit has grabbed him by his tragic roots, extols Herr Saphir, from whom less painful attacks were to be expected, and also, of course, hates Jean Paul and loves Heine.57 (#) Speidel’s courageous insights interrupt the parade of those who, by inclination or for decency’s sake, had to misread Nestroy. What could be more natural than the resistance of the keepers of the sacred fire to a spirit who kindles it everywhere? A spirit like this couldn’t help having every wind and every worthy of the times against him. He ran into refinement above and banality below. An author who in highly political times busies himself with human lowlinesses, a Carltheater actor whose reflections rule out attending the Concordia Ball.58 (#) He orchestrated the horseplay of the sexes with perceptions and gestures that the warehouse managers of life had to cast, in revenge, as obscenities, and in social matters he never revealed loyalties, only personality. Yes, he took up the profession of politics—the way a constable takes up a pickpocket. And it wasn’t the absurdities within politics that attracted his attention, it was the absurdity of politics. He was a thinker, and so he could think neither liberally nor anti-liberally.59 (#) And the suspicion of anti-liberal convictions may well be more likely to arise where thought transcends the region in which spiritual salvation depends on this kind of evaluation, and where thought turns into joke because it had to get past it. How bewilderingly unprincipled art is: the satirist revealed it in his ability to set off words that exploded the seeming tendency of his plots, leaving the historian uncertain about what to take more seriously, the praised revolution or the ridiculed yokel, the mockery of someone’s fear of the Devil or a fanatical confession of faith. But even the historian can sense that the satirist opposed the affliction of humanity by intellectual sham values, and has no better defense than to explain that Nestroy was afraid of the police. Liberals are forever calling in the police to accuse artists of cowardice. So little does the artist take sides, however, that he sides with the lie of tradition against the truth of the swindle. Nestroy knows where the danger is. He recognizes that knowing means believing nothing. He can already hear the ravens of freedom, which are black with printer’s ink. The imposing sounds of education have already come clattering into his prayers. How open his ears are to the argot whereby jurisprudence browbeats justice! How well he teases out the terminological pretensions with which empty disciplines fill themselves for a knowledge-trusting human race. And instead of blaming religion for priests, he prefers to blame the Enlightenment for journalists and Progress for the scientific paper pushers.60 (#) Just listen to the gibberish spouted by the comet-cobbler in Lumpazivagabundus. After a matchless glance with which he sizes up a skeptical carpentress:
“She don’t believe in the comet, she’s in for an eye-opener…”
he continues:
“I’ve had the thing figured out for quite a while now. The astral fire of the solar ring in the golden number of Urion has left the constellation of the planetary system in the universe of parallaxes and landed, by means of fixed-star quadrants, in the ellipse of the ecliptic; in consequence, according to the diagonals of approximation of the perpendicular rings, the next comet will have to smash into the earth. My calculations are as clear as shoe polish…”
And sound as plausible as if Nestroy had studied the problem of the “Grubenhund” at its journalistic source.61 (#) The sentence, just as it is, eighty years later, when the astronomers again personally came hither in a comet’s stead, could have been printed in the Neue Freie Presse.62 (#) I also reserve the right to send it in sometime. But even beyond this kind of applicability in urgent cases, Nestroy won’t become obsolete. For he took such accurate note of human nature’s weakness that posterity could feel observed by him, too, if it hadn’t grown a thick skin in the meantime. No wisdom can get through to it, but it has itself tattooed with enlightenment. And thus it considers itself more beautiful than the Vormärz.63 (#) But since enlightenment comes off with soap, lies have to help out. This present day of ours never ventures out without a protective guard of historians to club down memory for it. What it most wants to hear is that the Vormärz compares to it like a candle hawker to an electricity company. Scientific truth would be better served, however, if the present day were told that the Vormärz is the light and the present day enlightenment. Among the dogmas of its presuppositionlessness is the belief that art indeed used to be gay but life is serious now.64 (#) And our times manage to be vain about even this. For, supposedly, in the theatrical season that constitutes the first half of the nineteenth century, people were interested solely in the affair of Demoiselle Palpiti vulgo Tichatschek, whereas now they’re generally enthusiastic about the affair of Professor Wahrmund and only occasionally about the Treumann affair.65 (#) If this is how things stand, long live the Vormärz! But there’s still another way to grasp the difference. In the age of absolutism, passion for theater was an outgrowth of the artistic feeling aroused by political suppression. In times of universal suffrage, theater gossip is the residue of a culture impoverished by political freedom. Comparing our notorious intellectual life to that of the Vormärz is such an unparalleled affront to the Vormärz that only the moral degeneracy left behind by fifty thousand performances of The Merry Widow can excuse the excess. The grand press alone has the right to look down with contempt on the little coffeehouse that used to spread, by laughably inadequate means, the gossip that people in those days couldn’t live without because politics were forbidden, while today people can’t live without it because politics are allowed. One decade of phraseological enslavement has supplied people’s imaginations with more stage-prop rubbish than a century of absolutist tyranny, with the important difference that intellectual productivity was furthered by prohibitions to the same degree that it’s now being crippled by the editorial page. But one shouldn’t imagine that people let themselves be marched off from the theater into politics so directly. The path of permissible play leads through pinochle. This the liberal educators must concede. How the rhetoric of Progress slips up and speaks the truth can be seen in the delicious comment of a moral historian from the eighties who rejects the roast-chicken era and serves up the fresh-baked seriousness of life as follows:66 (#)
Times have changed since the days of Bäuerle, Meisl and Gleich, and although the old guard of unalloyed Viennese, the respectable families, may still scratch the theatrical itch that they inherited from “Grammerstädter, Biz, Hartriegel and Schwenninger” to the extent that they are wont never to miss a premiere at the Royal Temple of the Muses or a revival of Beiden Grasel at the Josefstadt, the main force of their compatriots has long since been diverted from the road to the theater by the most various of enticements, and devotes its free time to a game of Tapper, a meal at the local vineyard, or a production by a folksinging company that’s currently en vogue—times and people have changed.67 (#)
Later on, life became even more serious, there came the issues, the Gschnas parties,68 (#) the geological discoveries, the American tour of the men’s glee club, and it will be important for even later times to learn: it was not in the Vormärz that the following announcement appeared in Viennese newspapers:
Yesterday’s competition at the “Dumb Fellow” saw the first prize go to Fräulein Luise Kemtner, sister of the well-known Hernals innkeeper Koncel, for the smallest foot (19½), and to Herr Moritz Mayer for the largest bald spot. Prizes will be awarded today for the narrowest lady’s waist and the biggest nose.
This is what Vienna looks like in 1912. Reality is a meaningless exaggeration of all the details that satire left behind fifty years ago.69 (#) But the nose is even bigger, the fellow is even dumber where he believes that he’s progressed, and the contest for the largest bald spot stands alongside the results of the Bauernfeld Prize as the image of a justice that recognizes true merit.70 (#) One glance into the new world as it’s manifested in one issue of the local roundup, one breath of this godless air of omniscience and omnipresence, will force the reproachful question: What does Nestroy have against his contemporaries? Truly, he’s ahead of himself. As if anticipating, he attacks his small environs with an asperity worthy of a later cause. He’s already coming into his satirical inheritance. Dawn is already breaking, here and there, on his gentle scenes, and he scents putrefaction in the morning air. He sees all those things coming up that won’t come up in order to be present, but will be present in order to climb. With what fervor he would have jumped on them if he’d found them fifty years later! The coziness that tolerates this kind of expansion, accommodates this kind of tourist trade, reveals its inner fraudulence in this kind of blending: what a caricature he would have made of the helpless malice of this innocent, cross-eyed face!71 (#) The farce of counterfeit authenticity cozying up to grand trends, rather than falling in line with them, has followed him like an epilogue; the all-blanketing haze of issues, which the times impose on themselves to while away eternity, smokes above his grave. He turned his mankind out of its little garden of paradise, but he doesn’t know yet how it will behave itself outside. He turns back in the face of a posterity that disavows the values of the Spirit, he doesn’t live to see the respectless intelligence that knows that technology is more important than beauty and doesn’t know that technology is at most a way to beauty, and that there can be no thanks at the destination, and that the ends are the means of forgetting the means. He can’t yet see that a time will come where girls take it like a man and their banished sexuality seeks refuge in men to revenge itself on nature.72 (#) Where talent wages a smear campaign against character, and education forgets its good upbringing. Where standards are universally raised and no one meets them. Where everyone has individuality and everyone the same, and hysteria is the glue that holds together the social order. But of all the issues that came after him—issues indispensable to mankind since it lost its legends—he did live to see politics. He was there when the noise got so loud that it raised the dead, which is always a signal that it’s time for the Spirit to go home to bed. This then produces a posterity that can’t be toured in even fifty years. The satirist could seize the great opportunity, but it no longer grasps him. What lives on is misunderstanding. Thanks to its artistic insensibility, Nestroy’s posterity does the same thing as his contemporaries, who were in material agreement with him: the latter took him for a topical jokester, while his posterity says he’s obsolete. He hits posterity and so it doesn’t recognize him. Satire lives between errors, between the one that’s too close to it and the one that it’s too far from. Art is what outlasts its subject matter. But the test of art becomes the test of times as well, and if past times in their succession always managed to experience art in their remoteness from its subject matter, these times of ours experience remoteness from art and hold the subject matter in their hands. For them, anything that isn’t telegraphed is over with. Their reporters replace their imagination. Because times that can’t hear language can judge only information value. They can still laugh at jokes, if they were personally party to the occasion. How are they, whose memory extends no further than their digestion, supposed to make the leap into anything that isn’t explained to them directly? Applying the mind to things that people no longer remember upsets their digestion. They grasp only with their hands. And machines make even hands unnecessary. The organs of these times oppose the calling of all art, which is to enter into the understanding of those who live afterward. There no longer are any people who live afterward, there are only people who live, who express enormous satisfaction that they do, that they live in a present that sees to its own news and conceals nothing from the future. Joyful as the morning paper, they crow upon the civilized dunghill that it’s no longer the concern of art to shape into a world. They have their own talent. If you’re a villain you don’t need honor, if you’re a coward you don’t need to be afraid, and if you have money you don’t need to have respect. Nothing is allowed to survive, immortality is what’s outlived itself. Things stick where they lie. Freaks with deformities balance out good fortune, because they can claim that heroes were hermaphrodites.73 (#) Herr Bernhard Shaw guarantees the superfluity of all that might prove useful between being awake and sleeping. To the irony of his and all shallow minds no depth is unfathomable, to the haughtiness of his and all flat minds no heights are unattainable. There’s earthly laughter everywhere. Satire, however, has the answer to such laughter. For it’s the art that, more than any other art, outlives itself, and this means the dead times, too. The harder the material, the greater the attack. The more desperate the struggle, the stronger the art. The satiric artist stands at the end of a development that renounces art. He is its product and its hopeless antithesis.74 (#) He organizes the Spirit’s flight from mankind, he is the rear guard. After him, the deluge. In the fifty years since Nestroy’s death, his spirit has experienced things that encourage it to go on living. It stands wedged in between the paunches of every profession, delivers monologues, and laughs metaphysically.
AFTERWORD TO “HEINE AND THE CONSEQUENCES” (#)
The deepest confirmation of what was thought in this essay and accomplished by it is what happened to it: it found no readers. A printed thing that’s simultaneously a written thing finds none. Though it may have every outward merit in its favor—content that’s accessible and remains agreeable even under hostile scrutiny, a pleasing format, and even the lowest price1 (#)—the public isn’t fooled, it has the keenest nose against art, and even more surely than it knows its way to kitsch, it steers clear of value. Today only the novel, the work of language outside of language, which even in its most perfect form grants common sense some kind of hold and hope, can earn its author a living. Otherwise the people whose words to the reader abide with thought are in an endlessly difficult position compared with those who deceive him with words. He believes the latter immediately, the former only after a hundred years. And no earthly tear from eyes that see life buried by death will shorten the waiting period. Nothing helps. An age first has to rot past stinking to make the people who are what they can do as beloved as these people here, who can do what they are not. Except that this Today carries the particular curse of doubt: whether the head that survives the machine will also survive its consequences. Never before was the road from art to audience so long; but there has also never existed such an artificial hybrid,2 (#) a thing that writes of its own accord and reads of its own accord, so that, indeed, they all can write and all can understand, and it’s merely social accident that determines who, among this horde of educated Huns who progress against the Spirit, emerges as writer and who as reader. The sole ability that they hold in honor as a trait inherited from nature: regurgitating what they’ve eaten seems welcome to them in the intellectual realm, as a trick through which it might be possible to unite two functions in one person, and it’s only because there are businesses more profitable than writing that so many of them have restrained themselves so far and satisfy themselves with eating what the others have regurgitated. Just as the same person is duplicated at a table of tavern regulars, a cellist, a lawyer, a philosopher, a horse trader, and a painter who are all of one mind and distinguishable to the waiter only by their trades: there’s no difference between author and reader. There’s only one person now, and that’s the feuilletonist. Art backs away from him like a glacier from an alpine hotel guest. There was a time, the guide boasts, when you could put your hands on it. If a reader today can put his hands on a work, the work must have a bad side. The publisher of this magazine is well aware that it owes its reputation mainly to a sensibility that doesn’t shrink from some excellent novelist merely because he’s also rumored to be an artist. He can confidently exploit the indulgence. The publisher of Die Fackel not infrequently has the feeling that he’s freeloading on it. It would be retracted irrevocably should his readers ever discover in what a state of insanity such witty happenstances came to be written, on what powers of self-annihilation such self-assurance lives, and how many hundredweight of suffering the lightest pen can carry. And how gloomy the thing that brightens the idler’s day.3 (#) Their laughter, which doesn’t reach as far as my wit, would die in their mouths. If they could see that the petty material directly in front of them is just a shabby remnant of a thing they cannot touch, they would finally go away. Among those who flatter themselves that they’re my victims, I am not loved; but the people who look on with schadenfreude still give me far more credit than I deserve.4 (#)
Given that Die Fackel finds itself in so many wrong hands: if something I’ve written proceeds to venture into other print, few people will reach for it. With a collection of satires or aphorisms, this would be nothing to complain about.5 (#) Things of that sort are content to find the rare reader for whom textual alteration signifies new work. But the essay “Heine and the Consequences,” which came to the book publisher as a manuscript, has made it clear that there no longer are any readers besides these few.6 (#) And it, of all texts, can’t help feeling pained by this discovery. For its wish is to create readers, and it can’t succeed at this unless it finds readers. It enacts the misery of German-language letters, and it isn’t content to make itself the demonstration of its own truth. And so it treads the path of remorse, which leads from the book back into the magazine; and would that even this exigency might please it, as proof of the perversity of the business of the Spirit in our times. Here, in familiar environs, it will at least make the attempt to speak to more deaf ears than are to be had in the greater German public.
Because it’s not to be thought that they were simply deaf to the subject about which they were being addressed. They’re still happy to hear about Heine, even if they know not what it means.7 (#) If the essay merely rejected the living value of his art, it would surely say nothing new to that contemporary sensibility that doesn’t even let itself be fooled by the collusions of the commentariat. It would surely sooner be brought around to begging for a Heine monument than to a reading of his books. And the hate that developed there, where not love but mere intellectual hypocrisy stands watch over the grave, would be greeted with some bitterness, to be sure, but not with any general interest. This text, meanwhile, as far removed from suspicion of being unfair to Heine as from pretension of being fair to him, is not a literary essay. It doesn’t exhaust the problem of Heine, but it does more than this.8 (#) The most ridiculous reproach—that it holds Heine responsible as an individual culprit for his consequences—can’t touch it. The people who pretend to defend him are defending themselves and revealing the true direction of the attack. They should be held responsible for their existence, and the sputum that German intellectuals immediately coughed up is evidence that they feel themselves to be the responsible consequence. There were individuals severely enough punished by their own poetry or too gravely insulted by their own polemics to have needed to respond in detail. The few who were annoyed and the many who didn’t read have confirmed what was written.9 (#) It wasn’t the danger of experiencing a desecration of Heine, but surely the fear of hearing the most hostile thing that can be said to this age of talents, that prevented the shout from having a stronger echo. It wasn’t an evaluation of Heinean poesy, but a critique of a form of life in which everything uncreative has once and for all found its place and its brilliantly wretched accommodation, that was essayed here. Not a denunciation of the invention of a pestilence, nor even of its importation, but a description of a spiritual condition on which ornaments fester. This offended the pride of the bacteria carriers. Here language is somehow released from everything it was obligated to outwit, and the power to acquire better content is celebrated. Here this very language declares itself a stranger to the calligraphic fraud that admires the beauty mongers from Paris to Palermo for the verve with which, in art and in the hotel bill, a five-note is made into a niner. This they didn’t understand, or recognized as dangerous enough that they didn’t want to hear it.
But so as not to chastise lack of ability, which is an honest effect of the gifted zeitgeist, more severely than the malice that social possibilities of every age have mobilized against thought, it must be said that a particular suspicion has compelled the author to ask the publisher Albert Langen for the reprint rights to this document. The author’s well-known persecution mania, which has gone so far as to whisper to him that he hasn’t managed to make himself loved in twelve years’ time, led him to believe that the pamphlet was intentionally suppressed.10 (#) He imagined that bugs flushed from Heine’s mattress-grave had sprung into action and settled in precisely on the road they know so well, the one that leads from thinking to commerce. Fear of the press can move mountains and shutter halls; a hint is perhaps not even needed to make a Viennese bookseller tepid in marketing a dangerous pamphlet that generates only paltry profit.11 (#) Especially not one of the ones who are even now still sore with Die Fackel about a civil action that its first printer brought against it. Is it not, then, a most indicative Viennese circumstance that not only will the glances of the strolling city be spared the irritation of my books, but that copies of Die Fackel—one line of which contains more literature than the collective show windows of every downtown bookstore, and on whose least comma more torment and love are expended than on a library of luxury editions by Insel—are compelled to offer themselves amid cigars, lottery tickets, and tabloids to cover the costs of a never-rewarded and never-appreciated labor, while an entire chorus of humor-loving vermin considers the thing lucrative and gloats over the idea of the “double issue.”12 (#) A magazine that avoids like leprosy the most legitimate sponsorship,13 (#) that in its desire to earn its own living makes life harder for itself, and that is book-born like hardly a book in contemporary Germany, has to do without the support of its own industry, which ought to have an obligation to it, and to get a taste, in Austrian exile, of the sort of ignominy that throws the person condemned for a political offense into jail with the pickpockets. The pack of liberals whose cosmic feeling is avarice, and whom you have to beg for the mercy of excusing you as crazy if you fail to make a profit: Does it have any idea how many pleasures it could buy with the money that my work of hate devours before it achieves the form with which a self-glorifier is never satisfied—because only then does it reveal to him the errors that the others don’t notice? But here, in his archive, he takes what he likes and collects what is liked nowhere else. Here nothing can disappoint him. A work that instead of twenty editions didn’t see a second one: here nothing more can happen to it. Its author, whose pleasure it is to reach into the spokes of his own wheel to shut down both himself and the machine when the tiniest point displeases him, will never again lend his assistance to an alien publishing concern.14 (#) He will never again try to win a new audience. For him, Die Fackel is not a platform but a haven. Here the destiny of a work can move him only through the point of its completion, not through its dissemination. What’s being lived here may be resurrected in a book. But it’s recompense enough to be bound to one’s own wheel.15 (#)
BETWEEN TWO STRAINS OF LIFE (#)
FINAL WORD [TO “HEINE AND THE CONSEQUENCES”]
To report the insignificant fact that “Heine and the Consequences” is in its third edition in seven years, after having been circulated in Die Fackel as well, is not the motive for this supplement.1 (#) The wish is to append something else, which likewise, in the guise of a correction, allows the correctness of a deeper observation to be recognized for the first time.2 (#) Everything that’s said here, and in every chapter about the loss of life in contemporary life and the linguistic betrayal of German humanity, has a train of thought leading to the brink of this war, thanks to which my truths now also have the quality of self-evidence. An explanation is needed only at the point where, in my desperation to escape the machine, I said that I preferred an already fully dehumanized zone to that beauty-smitten thing that resisted the relentless march of progress with the leftover wreckage of humankind.3 (#) This antithesis, now broken open by the war, was resolved in later aphorisms in favor of precisely the latter life-form, as the one with a yearning for life and for form, which, on account of just such a yearning, and of a self-preservative instinct as well, was obliged to undertake emergency defense against the tyranny of a valueless utility, according to which life is finished products and culture the trappings. The question “in which hell would the artist prefer to fry” gave way to the urgent verdict that humanity preferred not to fry in this hell, as a result of the corrective insight of the artist himself, who now no longer has the right and no longer the possibility of seeking to securely lock away his inner self, but only the duty of seeing which parties of mankind are struggling, like him, for the preservation of this kind of happiness and against the coercions of a philosophy of life that has squeezed all the motivations out of life, so as to save it solely for the profit motive. But the fact that those were the regions from whose character the disturbance came in peaceful times: to succumb to doubt about this would be wartime treason against the nature that is warding off the machine.4 (#) It does it; and it does it, if need be, with the help of the machine itself, like the artist who isn’t above using the industrial methods of his times to preserve himself from them.5 (#) Faced with the imperfection of life, he affirms the substitute for life; faced with half individuals, he affirms the patented system for avoiding personalities entirely. The person who helps himself to the machine is rewarded to the same extent that the people who help the machine are impoverished. Because the latter doesn’t liberate a person but makes him its slave, it brings him not to himself but under artillery fire. However, the kind of thinking that, unlike power, doesn’t need a “New Orientation”6 (#) to reestablish its command knows that it was merely creating an emergency exit from the chaos of peace, and that what seemed contradictory about the division of values into “German-Romance” was merely the internal contradiction of modern life, which is today being resolved by way of events.7 (#) The frame of reference that seemed unwilling to accept the “lazzarone as a cultural ideal alongside the German constable” thereby affirmed him more than the ones who were willing to accept the ideal—because it promised “picturesqueness”—and who are the real Germans. The phrase “beauty mongers from Paris to Palermo” may now apply to that horde of educated Huns who bear the blame for transforming the values of life into tourist attractions.8 (#) The thinking here about language and human beings is more akin to the type who can laze around in the sun, wallowing in deeper aimlessness, than to the insufferable conqueror of a place in the sun, with whose way of thinking it was of course in keeping to ornamentally dishonor a more colorful existence and thereby beautify its own downfall. In that consecrated state of mind, which desires “basalt-free”9 (#) orderliness and utility truly only for the higher purpose of tending to the castles and marvels of the soul without being disturbed, I had no choice but to prefer the company of commercial scum like that, because they provided the best instruments for securing respite from a noisy world in which, only because they were no longer human beings, they themselves could no longer disturb me. The others did, however, because they were half human.10 (#) This used to be too little for me, and now it has ended up being so much. And this problem—in which, very similarly, the antithesis Berlin-Vienna is settled in favor of Vienna—is further illuminated by the collapse, which reveals that the entire contradiction was situated squarely in the sphere of life’s mechanization. That it’s not a matter simply of “German/Romance” but of “Germany/world” is shown by the colorful world’s insistence on its color.11 (#) America, where things are better, joins forces with the world of antique forms to finish off a higgledy-piggledy that scrapes together functionality from here and beauty from there and keeps hoping to muddle through with its deadly conflation of valuables and values, the frightful application of old emblems to new realities. The Anglo-Saxon defends his ends and the Latin his form against a mishmash that turns means into an end and form into a pretext. Since art here is merely trappings; since, everywhere you look, this literal-mindedness, this orderliness, this miserable facility with instruments reveals the loss of humanity it has cost to win for the populace a life so emptied out; since there are no longer even the superficial values for which all depth of soul and all the sacred value of the German language were sacrificed in the collision of two strains of life; since the German really wasn’t an American at all, but merely an American with basalts—conditions here can no longer serve as a starting point for the imagination. Because they use Mind and God and gas12 (#) to gather gold, the imagination turns away from a dehumanized people and toward a beauty-smitten one, which defends its wreckage against the inexorable fury of the times. In my flight from it, I was compelled to commit an injustice. I’ve never rejected the party of humane values, and now, when, oh, the standpoint has been reached where I’m able to side with it, I owe the world’s Spirit an apology for nothing but the guilt of having been born in times like these, and for the necessity of making my home in the escape from them.
LET NO ONE ASK … (#)
Let no one ask what I’ve been doing since I spoke.
I have nothing to say
and won’t say why.
And there’s stillness since the earth broke.
No word was right;
a man speaks only from his sleep at night.
And dreams of a sun that joked.
It passes; and later
it didn’t matter.
The Word went under when that world awoke.1 (#)
NOTES (#)
Heine and the Consequences (1910)
1 (#). Along with Goethe, Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) was the most famous German literary figure of the nineteenth century. He was known not for his novels (he didn’t write any) or his drama (his plays were never much produced) or his thinking (it was deliberately unsystematic) but for his lyric poetry and for the characteristic wit and irony of his reportage and travel writing and polemics. His countrymen could all quote his witticisms (e.g., “The more I get to know people, the more I like dogs”) and recite his poems (an extraordinary number of them were set to music), and his style and attitudes made him an attractive figure internationally. Although he had some of Norman Mailer’s pugnacity and political ambition and talent for self-advertisement, and some of Mark Twain’s quotability, his posthumous reputation probably bears better comparison with a figure like Bob Dylan than with that of any writer. To his many admirers, especially in France, Heine’s flight in 1831 from German repression to Parisian “exile” was a moment of iconic significance akin to Dylan’s switch to electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Like Dylan, Heine was a Jew who converted to Christianity (for Heine, it was an early and humiliating career exigency), but in the eyes of his readers he remained distinctively a Jew, and the reader of this essay should keep in mind that Karl Kraus’s attempted demolition of Heine’s reputation was not simply an assault on a pop hero of Dylanesque stature but a salvo in the cultural wars of antisemitism and Zionism that were raging in Germany and Austria at the beginning of the twentieth century. The non-German-speaking reader may want to know that “Heine” rhymes with “mynah.” Karl Kraus (1874–1936) was an Austrian satirist and a central figure in fin de siècle Vienna’s famously rich life of the mind. From 1899 until his death, Kraus edited and published the influential magazine Die Fackel (The Torch); from 1911 onward, he was also the magazine’s sole author. Although Kraus would probably have hated blogs, Die Fackel was like a blog that pretty much everybody who mattered in the German-speaking world, from Freud to Kafka to Walter Benjamin, found it necessary to read and have an attitude toward. In Kraus’s many aphorisms, he was no less quotable than Heine—“To be sure, a dog is loyal. But why should that make it an example for us? It’s loyal to man, not to other dogs.”—and at the height of his popularity he drew thousands to his public readings. In later footnotes I’ll recount how I fell under Kraus’s spell and undertook to translate the essay/polemic/satire/manifesto “Heine and the Consequences,” which appeared as a pamphlet in 1910 and in Die Fackel in 1911 and which, like much of Kraus’s best work, has hitherto frightened off English translators. For now, let me just make a small plea for patience with Kraus’s prose. He’s hard to read in German, too—deliberately hard. He was the scourge of throwaway journalism and a stickler for the interpenetration of form and content, and to his followers (he had a cultlike following) his dense and intricately coded style formed an agreeable barrier to entry; it kept the uninitiated out. Kraus himself remarked of the critic and playwright Adolf Bartels, whom he’ll be attacking here, “If he understands one sentence of the essay, I’ll retract the entire thing.” When I first read Kraus, I was baffled by a lot of his sentences. But as I reread him and began to figure out what he was up to, the sentences suddenly popped into clear focus, one after another, until eventually I could understand almost all of them; it was like learning a foreign language. And Kraus is foreign, more so than his better-known contemporaries, because his work was so particularly tied to his own time and place—to long-forgotten controversies, to rivals now obscure, to newspapers and literary works that only scholars read anymore. And yet, paradoxically, 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 himself was well aware of the paradox: he was a farseeing prophet whose work was always focused on what was right in front of him. He was, very consciously, speaking to us; but to be able to hear him we have to know what he was talking about. I’ve therefore mustered a large corps of footnotes to elucidate his topical and literary references, to offer some shortcuts to deciphering his sentences, to give an account of the angry young person I was when I first read him, and to suggest some ways in which his work might matter to the world we live in now.
2 (#). In the dichotomy of “Romance” versus “German,” which runs throughout this essay, “Romance” refers to “Romance language” or “Latin,” particularly French or Italian. Paul Reitter, the distinguished Kraus scholar and the author of the more learned of these footnotes, points out that the line about the “barren window frames” is taken from Schiller’s poem “The Song of the Bell” (“Das Lied von der Glocke”). Kraus is constantly, and without attribution, quoting and echoing texts that would have been familiar to his audience but are mostly not familiar to foreign readers a century later.
3 (#). Kraus’s suspicion of the “melody of life” in France and Italy still has merit. His contention here—that walking down a street in Paris or Rome is an aesthetic experience in itself—is confirmed by the ongoing popularity of France and Italy as vacation destinations and by the “envy me” tone of American Francophiles and Italophiles announcing their travel plans. If you say you’re taking a trip to Germany, you’d better be able to explain what specifically you’re planning to do there, or else people will wonder why you’re not going someplace where life is beautiful. Even now, Germany insists on content over form. If the concept of coolness had existed in Kraus’s time, he might have said that Germany is uncool. This suggests a more contemporary version of Kraus’s dichotomy: Mac versus PC. Isn’t the essence of the Apple product that you achieve coolness simply by virtue of owning it? It doesn’t even matter what you’re creating on your MacBook Air. Simply using a MacBook Air, experiencing the elegant design of its hardware and software, is a pleasure in itself, like walking down a street in Paris. Whereas, when you’re working on some clunky, utilitarian PC, the only thing to enjoy is the quality of your work itself. As Kraus says of Germanic life, the PC “sobers” what you’re doing; it allows you to see it unadorned. This was especially true in the years of DOS operating systems and early Windows. One of the developments that Kraus will decry—the dolling-up of German language and culture with decorative elements imported from Romance language and culture—has a correlative in more recent editions of Windows, which borrow ever more features from Apple but still can’t conceal their essential uncool Windowsness. Worse yet, in chasing after Apple elegance, they betray the old austere beauty of PC functionality. They still don’t work as well as Macs do, and they’re ugly by both cool and utilitarian standards. And yet, to echo Kraus, I’d still rather live among PCs. Any chance that I might have switched to Apple was negated by the famous and long-running series of Apple ads aimed at persuading people like me to switch. The argument—that Macs are pretty, easy to use, free of bugs, unsusceptible to viruses, etc.—was eminently reasonable, but it was delivered by a personified Mac (played by the actor Justin Long) of such insufferable smugness that he made the miseries of Windows attractive by comparison. You wouldn’t want to read a novel about the Mac: what would there be to say except that everything is groovy? Characters in novels need to have actual desires; and the character in the Apple ads who had desires was the PC, played by John Hodgman. His attempts to defend himself and to pass himself off as cool were funny, and he suffered, like a human being. To return to Kraus’s dichotomy, I could easily imagine the PC being played by a German actor and the Mac by a Frenchman, never the other way around. I’d be remiss if I didn’t add that the concept of “cool” has been so fully coopted by the tech industries that some adjacent word like “hip” is needed to describe those online voices who proceeded to hate on Justin Long and deem John Hodgman to be the cool one. The restlessness of who or what is considered hip nowadays may be an artifact of what Marx famously identified as the “restless” nature of capitalism. One of the worst things about the Internet is that it tempts everyone to be a sophisticate—to take positions on what is hip and to consider, under pain of being considered unhip, the positions that everyone else is taking. Kraus may not have cared about hipness per se, but he certainly reveled in taking positions and was keenly attuned to the positions of others. He was a sophisticate, and this is one reason Die Fackel has a bloglike feel. Kraus spent a lot of time reading stuff he hated, so as to be able to hate it with authority.
4 (#). You’re not allowed to say things like this in America nowadays, no matter how much the billion (or is it two billion now?) “individualized” Facebook pages may make you want to say them. Kraus was known, in his day, to his many enemies, as the Great Hater. By most accounts he was a tender and generous man in his private life, with many loyal friends. But once he starts winding the stem of his polemical rhetoric, it carries him into extremely harsh registers. (“Harsh,” incidentally, is a fun word to say with a slacker inflection. To be harsh is to be uncool; and in the world of coolness and uncoolness—the high-school-cafeteria social scene of Gawker takedowns and Twitter popularity contests—the highest register that cultural criticism can safely reach is snark. Snark, indeed, is cool’s twin sibling.) As the essay will make clear, the individualized “blockheads” that Kraus has in mind here aren’t hoi polloi. Although Kraus could sound like an elitist, and although he considered the right-wing antisemites idiotic, he wasn’t in the business of denigrating the masses or lowbrow culture; the calculated difficulty of his writing wasn’t a barricade against the barbarians. It was aimed, instead, at bright and well-educated cultural authorities who embraced a phony kind of individuality—people Kraus believed ought to have known better. It’s not clear that Kraus’s shrill, ex cathedra denunciations were the most effective way to change hearts and minds. But I confess to feeling some version of his disappointment when a novelist who I believe ought to have known better, Salman Rushdie, succumbs to Twitter. Or when a politically committed print magazine that I respect, n+1, denigrates print magazines as terminally “male,” celebrates the Internet as “female,” and somehow neglects to consider the Internet’s accelerating pauperization of freelance writers. Or when good lefty professors who once resisted alienation—who criticized capitalism for its restless assault on every tradition and every community that gets in its way—start calling the corporatized Internet “revolutionary,” happily embrace Apple computers, and persist in gushing about their virtues.
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Джонатан Франзен
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Сборники
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The Kraus Project, электронная книга автора Джонатан Франзен на английском языке, в жанре сборники