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
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