Karl Kraus
Karl Kraus is a Austrian writer born the April 28th 1874 with Jičín (today in Czech Republic) and dead the June 12th 1936 with Vienna, city in which he lived all his life.
Author of a monumental work which only is very partially translated into French, Dramaturge, Poète, Essayiste, it was also and especially a satirist and a dreaded Pamphlétaire which denounced with greatest virulence, in the pages of Die Fackel , the review that it had founded and of which it has during almost forty years be about exclusive writer, compromisings, the denials of justice and corruption, and in particular the corruption of the language in which it saw the source of the greatest evils of his time and of which it held the press for principal responsable.
Biography
One cannot approach the life and the work of Karl Kraus without replacing them in the particular context in which they were born, i.e. between two announced catastrophes: that which was to mark the end “of a state which, while not being viable, did not finish any dying”, namely the Empire Austro-Hungarian of the Habsbourg, which was to crumble at the end of the First World War, and that announced the advent of the German National-socialisme, which was according to Karl Kraus to complete the ruin of civilized humanity, that remainder, in its capacity as “journalist”, it had not ceased announcing with its readers, with accents of prophet of the Old Testament, decades durant.More precisely still, the life of Karl Kraus is closely related to the capital of the “Cacanie”: Vienna.
Vienna at the time of “the merry Apocalypse”
Vienna of the turning of the century is a genuine crucible of cultures and nationalities: one as well finds there Hungarian, Slovenien , Croatian , Italian , Turks, Juifs, joined together in a city whose general mentality is however characterized by a mixture of narrow-mindedness, of frivolous unconcern (in particular vis-a-vis the scandals political and financial) and of “the lead shade on all that lived the presentiment of an inescapable end”, had with contradictions of an antiquated political structure unable to adapt to the recent socio-economic evolutions. It is this curious mixture of “world of eschatologic operetta” and pessimism which Hermann Broch was to baptize “the merry Apocalypse. ”Within this melting pot, the Jews are largely represented: in 1923, they would be: 200000 in Vienna, is nearly 10% of the population. Industrialization having begun truly in Austria only after their emancipation (in 1848), they launch out in the competition at the same time as the Gentils and, where they succeed, “they become most visible of the new rich person, sporadically gives place to demonstrations of violence, which culminate “in the riots of 1905, when students national-German imagined to prohibit to the Jewish students the access to the university. ”
But Vienna is also a city in which reign a “extreme intellectualisme.
It is in this context that in 1877 small Karl Kraus arrives, in a city that he will say later to scorn and want to flee forever, but that he liked in fact passionately.
Years of training and the first combat (1874-1899)
Karl Kraus was born the April 28th 1874 with Jičín, ninth child of Kraus Jacob, trading and industrial easy Jew, and of Ernestine Kantor. It very early expresses its taste for the dramatic art: its first part, In Der Burgtheater-Kanzlei , is represented with Baden, in August 1891, two months before the death of his/her mother. As of the following year, Karl Kraus starts to publish literary and theatrical in various newspapers and re-examined criticisms (its first publication is a report of the Tisserands of Hauptmann, part prohibited in Austria.) He cherishes the dream to become acteur.Kraus continues in parallel its secondary studies in the Franz-Joseph Gymnasium, before undertaking studies of right (in 1893), then of philosophy and germanistic the following year (Karl Kraus will leave the university in 1898, without to have completed its doctorate.)
He collaborates in the review Die Gesellschaft , of Leipzig, and gives evenings of reading to Bad Ischl, Munich, Berlin, during which he gives especially interpretations of the Tisserands .
In 1896 appears, in the Wiener Rundschau , the first important text of Karl Kraus: demolished Literature , in which it is caught with the literary avant-garde Viennese of it (Hermann Bahr, Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is most known of the writers who are taken there with part) and so that it calls “all the tools of the literature: the absence of talent, early wisdom, installations, megalomania, grisettes of the suburbs, ties, mannerism, false datives, monocles and nerves secret. ”
The publication of this lampoon is worth to him to be attacked by the journalist and writer Felix Salten (the future author of Bambi ), by the way whose Kraus had written that “this parvenu of the MIME which knew to regulate its gestures on those of its neighbors at table with which it owe its essential installations”, “at the time of an annual stock sale of individualities had been able to acquire one of them at low prices. ”
In 1898, Karl Kraus publishes its second important text: a crown for Sion , lampoon against the Zionism of Theodor Herzl. Kraus, in favor of the assimilation of the Jews, denounces what seems to him an objective alliance between the Zionists and the anti-semites. Who more is, it sees in this new ideology a convenient means to divert the proletarians of their interests of class: Those which should suffer from hunger together are separate according to criteria national and used the ones against the others. The faith of its grandfathers does not authorize any more Jewish Tisserand of Lodz to being interdependent of his/her comrades of misery, it must from now on be combined, within a rigid organization, with the Jews of the City, grand boulevards, Tiergarten and Ringstrasse. In 1899, Karl Kraus leaves the community Jew and is declared “without confession”.
The first number of Die Fackel appears on April 1st.
Torch with the Great War (1899-1914)
“One beautiful day, writes the journalist Robert Scheu (a collaborator time of the Fackel ), also far the eye can carry, that red In the streets, the tram, in the municipal park, everyone reading a red book… ”This red book, whose publication does not create sensation only in Vienna, but in the whole of the nations which compose the Empire, is the first number of the review that Karl Kraus, in homage to the review of Henri Rochefort, the Lantern , baptized Die Fackel (“the torch”), and whose each delivery would become “for very many intellectuals, writers (Musil, Canetti, Broch), musicians (Schönberg, Berg), philosophers (Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Adorno) a crucial event of thought. ” During nearly forty years, Kraus “there pourfend without slackening social hypocrisy, denials of justice, doubtful kindnesses, guilty silences, small cowardices and great vanities which weave the public life and intellectual of a country”, without forgetting “to denounce the depreciation of the style, the " culture journalistique" in which he saw the corrosive agent of a disintegration of the spirit, of its faculty of judgment. ”
The financial independence of the review (financed by the father of Kraus for the first number, then by Karl Kraus itself after the death of this last, as by the sales) was to guarantee probity of it. The success of the Fackel , although suitable for important variations, will be considerable: between: 9000 and: 38000 specimens sold by book, when the average pulling of the liberal famous daily newspaper of Vienna, the Neue Freie Presses , was of 55.000 specimens in 1901.
While waiting, the first benefit that Kral Kraus withdraws publication of the first book of its review appear in the form of a new aggression of which it is the victim, organized by representatives of the journalistic medium.
In 1899 always, it starts a connection with a young actress of theater, Annie Kálmar. The following year occurs the death of the father of Karl Kraus, while this last launched out in a virulent polemic against a liberal Jewish capitalist of Vienna, the baron of the steel Karl Wittgenstein (his/her son, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, will be later an admiror of the editor of the Fackel ), of which it estimates that the philanthropic activities concern pure and simple hypocrisy.
Between 1899 and 1902, the Fackel starts to give an account of the Affaire Dreyfus, which gives to Kraus a new opportunity to be caught some with the Jewish middle-classes and the press of Vienna: the Neue Freie Presses , supporter of Dreyfus, is shown to make propaganda antifrançaise, and thus to compromise itself with militarism habsbourgeois, whereas a business of this kind, in Austria, had immediately been choked by the censure. Worse, according to Kraus, the supporters of Dreyfus harm the cause of the assimilation of the Jews, which remains the creed of the director of the Fackel , and which according to him cannot be enough to “the psychological and social assimilation practiced with much heat by part of the Jews”: it estimates that it must pass conversion and by the mixed marriages. Well far from tending towards this goal, “the dogmatic interest of the clerical Jews”, which “want to see in the Dreyfus business the finger of God pointed against the assimilation”, can according to Kraus only support the rise of the anti-semitism. In September of the same year, it publishes in the Fackel a series of articles of the German social democrat Wilhelm Liebknecht, which estimates that Dreyfus is guilty, and that the anti-semitism, as opposed to what think the supporters of Dreyfus, did not play any part in this business. The articles of Liebknecht, translated into French, will be published in the French Action, and of broad extracts will be taken again by it by other newspapers antidreyfusards (the Gallic, the Free word and the Intransigent.)
Commenting on the position of Kraus, the Austrian Jewish writer Arthur Schnitzler, aggravated him also by the way in which the Neue Freie Presses gives an account of the business, but which therefore did not become antidreyfusard, announced its dislike to the one of its correspondents: of Kraus vis-a-vis the anti-semites is the thing more feeling reluctant which I ever saw. So only it was inspired by perspicacity, by a preoccupation with an equity; but it is in the final analysis only of servility - a little as it with what I assisted one day in the tram, where a Jewish made dead loss was erased in front of Lueger mayor of Vienna and agitator anti-semite while saying: " Please, Herr Doktor" and appeared very filled with wonder that Lueger does not give him a kick with the buttocks. In short, the attitude of small Kraus vis-a-vis the anti-semites is… typically Jewish.
Annie Kalmár dies in 1901 of the Tuberculose. Kraus, which “fought of all its energy to prevent it from leaving which visited him each day in the private hospitals where she failed” is upset. The publication of Die Fackel is a time suspended. He testifies with the lawsuit brought by the mother to the actress to the newspapers which at the time of the death of the latter printed calumnies and lies about it. Thereafter, explains Jacques Bouveresse, Kraus, one of the large combat will be carried out “in order to obtain the reform of a legislation which made it possible the newspapers to too easily escape their responsibilities”, will use “to the maximum the existing possibilities and will not hesitate to frequently require newspapers, by the legal channel, the correction of the inaccurate, tendentious or untrue assertions that they print. ”
A similar will to prevent that is delivered to the public by way of press what belongs to the private life of the individuals led Kraus to engage several polemics, in particular against Maximilien Harden as from 1907, polemic which puts a term at its friendship with the director of a review ( Die Zukunfp - the Future ) which had been used as model with the Fackel . In 1911, in fact the same reasons push Kraus to engage a first polemic against the critic Berliner Alfred Kerr who heard, by publishing in its review Die Kleine Pan a ticket that he had addressed to a married woman, to denounce the hypocrisy of the chief of the police force of Berlin which had prohibited the publication of the notebooks of the East of Gustave Flaubert, considered to be indecent.
Starting from 1902, the Fackel takes a more literary dimension: translations are published, inter alia, of August Strindberg and Oscar Wilde, as well as texts of Frank Wedekind, Otto Stoessl, or Peter Altenberg (then, in 1906, young authors expressionnists: Albert Ehrenstein, Karl Hauer, Otto Soyka and Berthold Viertel.)
Kraus also accommodates in its review, between 1901 and 1902, of the texts of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, which published into 1899 its Fondements of the XIXe century , “synthesis of the racial theories of Gobineau with Wagner, but also Kant and Fichte”, and in which Kraus refuses to see an ideologist anti-semite (because if Chamberlain estimates that the Jews constitute a threat for civilization, he concedes “that some individuals can conceal themselves with the curses of their race: Christ for example would have known to leave the Judaism to become fully Aryan. ”)
Thereafter Die Fackel supports Sigmund Freud (1905), Arnold Schönberg (1909), and especially Adolf Loos, whose architectural designs (the radical separation of art and the craft industry) allured Kraus which took its party as of the first numbers of the Fackel , and which writes on this subject:
Adolf Loos and did not make myself, him literally, me verbally, anything of other but show that there is a difference between a ballot box and a chamberpot and that this difference is a precondition without which the culture could not have latitude. The others however, the positivists, are divided into two groups: those which make ballot box a chamberpot and those which make chamberpot a ballot box.
The two men bind friendship, and it is Loos which convinces Karl Kraus to convert with Catholicism in April 1911 - conversion whose Kraus will make state publicly only in 1923, at the moment when precisely it will leave the bosom of the Catholic church - and who then becomes the godfather of the new convert.
Parallel to its activities of director of review, Kraus publishes a first collection of Aphorisme S in 1909 ( Dits and contradicted ), followed by a second in 1912 ( Pro domo and mundo .) it is also at that time that it begins its weekly evenings of reading, which obtain a great success quickly, and for which Kraus reviews honor not to send invitations to the journalists.
As from December 1911, Karl Kraus only becomes and single writer of the Fackel , for which it decided since October 1904 that its rate/rhythm of publication would be irregular.
In 1913, it meets the baroness Sidonie Nádherny von Borutin, with whom it ties a stormy connection which, in spite of several interruptions, will continue until the death of Karl Kraus. It is in this love that it would have according to Elias Canetti found “the source of the superhuman energy” which was to enable him to write the Last days of humanity .
In August 1914, the war is declared.
The tragic carnival and cranium stuffers (1914-1918)
Karl Kraus is exempted of service for physical inaptitude (a deformation of the spinal column) and, during all the duration of what it calls the “tragic carnival”, it does not cease denouncing the way in which the intellectuals and the press - who have in his eyes a responsibility crushing in release for the hostilities - transform into “cranium stuffers” warmongers. It on this subject creates a new heading in the Fackel : “At the cranium stuffers. Small review of the large press to the use of the future historians”, and it is in the same will of construction of the generations to come as for the fixed prices from these “traitors to humanity” that Kraus puts in building site what will remain like its major work: a “apocalyptic play of eight hundred pages”, is 209 scenes divided into five acts, made up with height of a third of quotations of the propaganda of the daily press: Last days of humanity .In this “well structured gigantic cacophony but nevertheless”, Karl Kraus does not judge its time: the goal of its company, as remainder that of Die Fackel , is to be satisfied to record the speech that this one holds on itself. It is only a question “of transforming the justification of the time by itself into what it is really, namely a form of irrefutable self-accusation which does not leave any doubt about what can be the verdict. ”
The part, written between 1915 and 1917, appears in special booklets of the Fackel in 1919 (the previous year, “the last night”, epilog of the Derniers days… , had appeared in the review of Kraus.)
During all the duration of the war, Karl Kraus, which also makes appear a first collection of poems, Worste in Versen I , in 1916, writes texts and gives conferences in favor of peace. Several numbers of the Fackel are seized, and itself is continued for “defeatism”. But “the official investigation trailed so a long time that the empire had crumbled before its culpability could be established. ”
In red Vienna it (1918-1933)
In 1918, the Empire disintegrates into six State-nations of which none suffers as cruelly as Austria, which finds itself “with a capital of 2 million townsmen to direct a country of 7 million inhabitants. ” In this context, where Vienna is in prey with unemployment and the famine (like with the epidemic of Spanish Grippe, which “makes thousands of victims among which the girl of Freud, Sophie, and the painter Egon Schiele” is one of the rare intellectuals of foreground to publicly take party for the new mode. With those which denounce contradictions of its political attitude, it rétorque which it acts at his place of an interior evolution, moved by the fact that it really learned something from the events, and not, as at much of its contradictors, of the fruit of an opportunist step.Commenting on the disorders to which place the defeat in Germany gives, and in particular the exactions nationalist, it makes in January 1921 this report prophetic: “In Germany, where swastika rises above the ruins of the flashover of the world, the legitimate right is announced in the payment, which makes hot in the middle, of the students of all faculties of the murder. ”
Kraus continues its evenings of reading, which always know as many sucès, that the public is middle-class or workman (it gives a first meeting of reading in front of a public of proletarians in 1920, and it will give of it thereafter a certain number of others.) But with In, in February 1920, at the time of the reading of a passage of the Last days of humanity , this one is disturbed by German nationalists. The press anti-semite is delighted by what the public reacted vis-a-vis “calumnies of the Jew Viennese Karl Kraus” and succeeds in obtaining police force initially the prohibition of the second meeting of reading prévue.
The following year, a Bavarian journale of extreme-right-hand side, the Miesbacher Anzerger , calls some explicitly with the murder of “anti-Aryan” ( Anti-arisch ) Kraus.
Two years later, with Prague this time, another meeting of reading is stopped by militants pangermanists.
The anti-semitism also develops in Austria where for the official census of 1923, the coalition between Christian-social and pangermanists succeed in introducing racial a membership category: the goal is to discredit the Republic, considered as “Jewish. ” Kraux leaves this box in white on the form which it fills, and excuses some ironically in the Fackel : “With regard to the question of the race, I unfortunately could not answer it, since the only thing that I know with certainty is that I do not form part of those in the intellectuality of which it finds its origin. ”
In this same year 1923, Kraus leaves the Catholic church and what it calls “the great lie of its world theater”, to become again, as after 1899, “without confession. ”
In 1925, then in 1927, Kraus gives conference series to Paris, with the Sorbonne. He is proposed by two professors of the French university (of which Charles Schweitzer the grandfather of Jean-Paul Sartre) for the Nobel Prize of literature in 1926. It acts primarily, for these two ex- “stuffers of cranium”, to prevent that the Nobel is not allotted to a German (in fact, Thomas Mann.) The request is renewed in 1926 and 1928, always in vain: “it appeared impossible to us to regard the production of this publicity agent as a " durable monument" German literature and very often even, it is hardly if it appeared understandable to us”, explains in 1930 Per Hallström, rapporteur of the commission of the Nobel Prize to justify the refusal of this one. Hallström does not hide besides its dislike opposite a man who, writes it, “during the war behaved as pacifist faded of blood which after the war pronounced a rigorously destroying verdict against the national structures threatened by the disaster and which tried to survive. ”
Karl Kraus, on its side, at the time is engaged in other engagements: nauseated of what Alfred Kerr can do of the lecture tours in England, in the United States and in France in order to promote peace, whereas it, under the pseudonym of Gottlieb, of the poems warmongers and patriotic during the hostilities, Kraus signed proposes to republish these poems in Die Fackel and asks for to the new apostle peace of “transfer the fees of its conferences to the widows and the orphans of the war. ” Kerr manages to obtain in 1928 a legal decision prohibiting Kraus from publishing the poems in question. This last then publishes part of the minutes of the lawsuit under the title: “largest couard of all the country. ”
Another violent polemic opposes Karl Kraus to the prefect of police of Vienna Johann Schober (1874 - 1932), following the riots of July 15th 1927, during which the demonstrators take by storm and set fire to the Law courts. The police force opens fire, making more than 80 died and 600 wounded among the demonstrators. Kraus placards itself on the walls of Vienna the following text:
With the prefect of police of Vienna, Johann Schober.
I summon you démissionner.
Karl Kraus, editor of the Fackel .
Elias Canetti, which is present in Vienna at that time, will point out later that Kraus “was the only public personality to act thus and, while the other celebrities refused to expose themselves or to perhaps make themselves ridiculous, only found courage to him to say its indignation. ” Neither this text, nor those which appear in Die Fackel manage to push Schobert with the resignation. Thereafter, Kral Kraus takes more and more its distances with the social democrats, with whom the rupture is consumed in 1932, by the publication of the test Hüben und drüden . Kraus preserves nevertheless defenders within the left opposition inside the party, and it approaches a time the Austrian Communist party.
The following year, Adolf Hitler reaches the capacity in Germany.
The last night of humanity (1933-1936)
In October 1933 appears number 888 of the Fackel . One expected to find there the standpoint of Karl Kraus on the events of Germany. But the review, whose exit was differed from several months, does not contain, in addition to the text of the speech made by Karl Kraus on the tomb of Adolf Loos, deceased in August of the same year, which a poem of ten worms:- That one does not ask me for
- what I did all this time
- I would remain dumb
- And would not say why.
- And silence makes that the ground trembles.
- No word was appropriate;
- One speaks only in his sleep
- And one dreams of a merry sun.
- the word passes,
- Then it proves to have been vain.
- the word died out when this time woke up.
- what I did all this time
In particular, more than in any other of its writings, the Jewish question is mentioned, Kraus assisting jellyfish so that he had believed unthinkable: “anti-semitism become one of the basic elements of a political program which started to be applied in the facts, without causing a serious reaction on behalf of the population concernée.
At the last time, Kraus decides not to publish this text, so in particular not endangering the life of those which in Germany could have been regarded as belonging to its close relations or its disciples. It delivers of them however broad extracts in the book from January-February 1934 of the Fackel .
In this same book, Kraus gives an opinion vis-a-vis the takeover by force of the chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss who, in February 1934, puts the democratic institutions low in order to found “the Austrofascisme”, and makes repress in blood the attempt at general strike launched to be opposed to it. With surprised and the consternation of good number of its readers, Karl Kraus approves the takeover by force: Austrian nationalism seems to him being the only force able to make stopping with the nationalists pangermanists and their will to annex Austria with the Third German Reich, more especially as the social democrats themselves remained, in spite of the accession of Hitler to the capacity, in favor of the Anschluss. “All rather than Hitler” is its explicit watchword.
After the assassination of Dollfuss and the missed attempt at putsch of the Austrian Nazis (July 25th, 1934), Karl Kraus turns over in the semi-retirement which was his after its rupture with the social democrats. It prepares four volumes of adaptations of dramas of Shakespeare and devotes the remainder of its time to its evenings of public readings, whose last proceeds on November 22nd 1935: one has just detected at his place a cardiac disease, and an traffic accident (it is reversed by a cyclist in a street of Vienna) worsens still considerably its state of santé.
Karl Kraus gives its 700e and last evening of reading, in deprived, on April 2nd 1936. Two months earlier appeared the ultimate book of the Fackel (n°917-922.)
Falls ill ten days before, it dies on June 12th, 1936. One reports that one of his last words would have been, in answer to an observation of a friend, Helene Kann, who reproached him for being unjust towards her doctor: “Towards which I thus ever made an injustice? ”
After the death of Karl Kraus, Helene Kann puts safe from Switzerland part of the files of the writer. All that remains in Vienna (various books, manuscripts, letters and documents) is plundered and destroyed after the Anschluss.
The large combat: against the press, for the language
Situation of Karl Kraus
Karl Kraus approached its large combat in a “position of isolated combatant and without hope. ” This insulation is due according to Lucien Goldmann to the fact that Kraus was at the bottom a reactionary, who judged his time with the ell of completed ideals, those of the “ Bildungsiedal ” of a Goethe or a Schiller, a “individualistic ideal of the entirely and harmoniously developed man from the spiritual and moral point of view. ” It would be “this position of the last paladin of an ideology which does not represent any more any social class of its time. ”On this question of the situation of Karl Kraus in the ideological field, Jacques Bouveresse arrived as for him at a conclusion appreciably different from that to which Goldmann arrived: opposing the case of Kraus to that of Oswald Spengler, presented like a paragon of the preserving thought, Bouveresse notes that with the difference in this last, Karl Kraus never analyzes the concept of decline of civilization like a weakening of the Will for power, but like the constraint of the finality of the existence by means of living. “Progress, wrote Kraus, saw to eat and shows time with other which it can even die to eat. ” The progress of the technique in particular would continue while having lost of sight its finality (to ensure the man a minimum of autonomy, safety and effectiveness compared to reality which surrounds it) to be reduced to a process of warlike gasoline of domination of nature which puts in danger the survival even of humanity. Jacques Bouveresse thus estimates that the politico-philosophical posture of Karl Kraus would be similar to that which Nietzsche analyzed as being that of Schopenhauer: “reaction like progress. ”
At all events, according to the majority of its commentators, the “wars” of Karl Kraus would preserve all their topicality, and his work, could be seen, according to Pierre Bourdieu, like a “kind of handbook of the perfect combatant against the domination symbolic system. ”
Of all its engagements, that which Kraus most durably carried out and with the most pugnacity was that which opposed it to the press and with the journalists.
The formatting of information
So as regards press, Karl Kraus “has, in the certain way, known worst (a press which had not never been and will be undoubtedly never again at the same time also powerful and also irresponsible)”, the fight against the corruption of the newspapers and of the journalists, whom it will have carried out without respite, only the most anecdotic aspect of its combat constitutes. For him, the journalistic lie holds in the structure even of the newspaper, whose preset calibration and the regular publication oblige to make pass information by a deforming prism, which equalizes in the same format the important one and the accessory, the historical event and the anecdotic news item. “The basic principle of the possibility of intellectual entry for all that is daily printed, written Kraus, is: all is equal and that will be always rather true. ”This is why, contrary to the other newspapers, Die Fackel , which was initially to appear three times per month, had an irregular publication, and which its pagination could be of three pages (for example, number 888, of October 1933) like three hundred pages (the book n° 890-905 of July 1934.).
Capacity and irresponsibility
In spite of the exorbitant capacity of the press, whose “baron” like Moritz Benedikt, owner of the Neue Freie Presses , and privileged target of Karl Kraus, could be described in The Times as having had an influence “which was as powerful with its way as that of the late emperor François-Joseph itself”, this one would not intend to assume its crushing responsibilities. Its front attitude, during, and after the First World War is in this respect, with the eyes of Kraus, revealing: “the warriors of the press, writing Jacques Bouveresse, who unchained hysteria warmonger, maintained during all these years enthusiasm cocardière and lied in a systematic way on appalling reality of the war, knew that nothing of what can arrive to the military chiefs or to the political officials can arrive to them at them. ” They have, like writes it Karl Kraus, “played without setting” (the way in which a Alfred Kerr could pass from warmongering to pacifism took value of symbol consequently), and this is why Kraus had proposed after the war that the journalists are delivered to the enemy as a tribute, or then translated in front of an international court.But this capacity that the following day would have the journalists to forget what they made the day before does not appear only in these extraordinary circumstances; it is related it also to the nature of their activity: the topicality changes the every day, and even if what is true one day is supposed the being also the next day, “the truth of today is not that of yesterday and does not even have inevitably a bond of implication or unspecified coherence with it. ” Also, “that which can forget and to make forget the following day what he wrote the day before will not have obviously never to give an account of nothing and to recognize faults of unspecified nature”, in what it would simply consist in giving to the journalists total impunity “to shout since the roofs of the printed thing any polissonnerie which in the normal exchanges would be equipped with a muzzle. ”
Taking into consideration these element, Karl Kraus estimates that with final the benefits brought by freedom of the press are lower than the misdeeds than it involves, for this reason “that the right to inform cannot be dissociated of the correlative obligation to make it honestly and that one has any average reality to make respect this one, since the newspapers show at every moment that they can be unaware of it in all impunity. ”
The sentence against imagination
All these criticisms remain nevertheless little of weight vis-a-vis the major charge formulated by Karl Kraus, namely that it is the press which should be regarded as principal the person in charge of the two major catastrophes which struck Europe of first half of the 20th century: the Great War and the Nazism, because it was the principal craftsman of the corruption of the language, of what Kraus names “the catastrophe of the setting in sentences” ( die Katastrophe der Phrasen .)
The language indeed represents for Karl Kraus well another thing that simple communications tools. It is it from what one thinks: “it is it which guides the thought by opening its possibilities; it is in it which the word makes conspicuous in all semantic fidelity so that it authorizes; it is it which obliges by laying out the framework of any responsibility for truth and ethics. is what states the condition of the free thought. ”
From this point of view, the language, requirement of the thought and ethics, are not an instrument of which one would be used for oneself to represent the world. It must rather be seen as a mistress that one is useful, in order to be able to activate the expressive potentialities of them. And what must awake “what in it is alive and not mechanics, inspired and not with instrumental provision. ” The language vivified by the imagination, which only is ready to produce thought, is incarnated exemplairement in the literature, and more particularly in the poem because in him, “the language works world and direction by imagination”, it preserves its unit, which on the other hand is broken when it is fixed with the representation of reality: “since the language trusts the objective and intentional contents which it conveys, it is let contaminate by the attacks of the externality with all its attributes - dominant values, agreed and obliged speeches, forced commercial of the Press, ideology. ” When it “becomes exhausted in the duplication of a built and conventional objectivity”, the language, become “mechanical and available, indefinitely réitérable”, are called by Kraus: the phraseology .
This reduction of the language to a devitalized instrument of communication is precisely what Karl Kraus reproaches journalism for having achieved. And it is this mortification of the language, the impoverishment of imagination that at the same time it generates and that it implies (what thus amounts impoverishing the thought), which was according to him to find its achievement in the rhetoric of propaganda warmonger like in that of the Nazism: National-socialisme did not destroy the press, but the press produced national-socialisme. Seemingly only, like reaction, actually like achievement. It is not the fact that the press put moving the machines of dead - but the fact that it emptied our heart so much so that we are not any more able to conceive how it would be: here is its war crime.
The ethics of the satire
This ethical design of the relationship of the man with the language, in addition to which she recalls much the theories that Ludwig Wittgenstein develops, large admiror of Karl Kraus, is also comparison by Jacques Bouveresse with the analyzes on LTI ( Lingua Tertii Imperii ) developed by Victor Klemperer to give an account of the way in which the ideas Nazis had penetrated in the spirits: “The Nazism penetrated in the flesh and in the blood of the great number through isolated expressions, syntactic turnings, forms which were essential on million specimens and which were adopted in a mechanical and unconscious way”, in his newspaper the philologist allemand.wrote One finds sights close, if not similar, at a George Orwell, which notes in its test of 1946 on the policy and the English language that it seemed to him that “the languages German, Russian and Italian are, under the action of the dictatorships, all degraded during the ten or fifteen last years. ” But where Orwell sees in the corruption of the language an effect of the political circumstances, Kraus tends to reverse the report/ratio of causality, and to consider that, being given the intimate connection which exists between the thought and its linguistic expression, passed a certain stage, the process of degradation of the language cannot be stopped any more: the thought, connected with the corrupted language, does not lay out any more “a critical distance and of capacity of reaction necessary to stop the process of decline and deterioration of the language. ”
From this point of view, the work of the satirist consists in making hear with its readers (and, during the evenings of reading, with its listeners) this corruption of the language, to make them become aware of the abyss which separates the language from Goethe of that of Goebbels where they perceive between the two no solution of continuity: “The man would be helped if one could open to him, if not the eye for the writing of others, at least the ear for its own language, and to make him live the significances again that, without the knowledge, it carries daily to his mouth”, writes it. One of the privileged weapons of Kraus to achieve this goal is the quotation. This one is indeed, according to the description that Pierre Bourdieu gave some, “a quotation of combat: it takes a piece and it returns it to the figure of that which produced it. ” It is especially, in a world in which reality became at this point caricatural that it exceeds all the satires which could be made about it, the last plausible weapon of which can use the satirist, as well as the Kraus writing in an article devoted to with the “report”: The report is reality and this is why the satire cannot not be, it also, exceeded by far by the report. Its stylistic service highest is typographical arrangement. The inventive satire does not have anything any more to seek ici-bas. There is nothing to invent. What is not yet there will come tomorrow. Let us wait!
Karl Kraus vis-a-vis its contemporaries
Writers
To carry Georg Trakl towards “the tops where reign the calm one”
Georg Trakl meets Karl Kraus in 1912, with which it binds soon friendship. It writes the following year a poem entitled Karl Kraus , short and lyric description of the writer of the Fackel : White high priest of the truth,Crystalline voice, inhabited icy breath of God,
Courroucé magician,
Under its blazing coat cliquète the blue harness of the guerrier.
(Georg Trakl, Karl Kraus , 1913, translation of Gerald Stieg.) Thereafter, Kraus launches calls to subscription to help with the publication of poetic works of Trakl, and it is indirectly thanks to him if Trakl receives them: 20000 crowns allowing him to solve its financial problems: it is indeed about part of the sum that Ludwig Wittgenstein had taken on its heritage in order to distribute it between writers and artists “deserving and needy. ” Wittgenstein, which admired Karl Kraus, had entrusted to the care of Ludwig von Ficker, editor of the review Der Brenner , the care to distribute this sum between the people of its choice, because this last had the confidence of Kraus.
After the untimely death of Georg Trakl in 1914, Karl Kraus on several occasions pays homage in its review to that which he regards as one of the largest poets of German language, placing it “on the tops where reign the calm one”, at the side inter alia Goethe and Hölderlin.
The case of Georg Trakl is far from being insulated, as pointed out it Jacques Bouveresse in Schmock, or the triumph of journalism , the work which it devoted to Karl Kraus: One often calls upon against Kraus the fact that it would have been able to only criticize and to disparage. But, actually, nothing is false any more: it rented also much. It was not satisfied, as it sometimes is believed, to ridicule false glories and to destroy usurped reputations, it also published, defended, promoted and supported (morally and sometimes also materially) a good number of writers and artists who particularly deserved to be helped and had the greatest need for it. Among these artists and writers that Karl Kraus supported, one can quote the names of August Strindberg, Else Lasker-Schüler, Peter Altenberg, Frank Wedekind, Adolf Loos, or Arnold Schönberg.
Bertolt Brecht and the “honest ignoramus”
It is at the time of a controversy started in 1929 by the poet and critical Alfred Kerr against Bertolt Brecht, that the first showed plagiarism, and during which Kraus gave an opinion in favor of Brecht, that the relations tied between the writer Viennese and the German playwright. The two men appreciated their reciprocal works, and in 1933, whereas Karl Kraus was highly attacked to have explained in a poem why, following the advent of Hitler and of the Nazi party in Germany, the publication of Die Fackel had become without object, Brecht wrote a poem to justify the position of Kraus:On a certain level of horreur
The examples do not have any more a sens
Fixed prices multiplient
And complaints taisent.
Crimes in the street bruyamment pavanent
Defying all description.
When the eloquent man excusa
Of what the voice him manquait
Silence appeared with the barre
The cloth removed which it masquait
And declared: I am témoin.
(Bertolt Brecht, “On the direction of the poem of ten worms of Kraus, published in Die Fackel October 1933”)
This poem is published in comes via friends from Brecht, at the time of the sixtieth birthday of the birth of Kraus. But, meanwhile, the writer of the Fackel took makes and causes for the chancellor Dollfuss against the workmen, whose resistance to its takeover by force had been repressed in blood. And this, Kraus adds, although “by nature”, it should have been as regards workman, and that it does not have anything commun run with the Austrian line, put separately makes it share its sights on the needs which are essential then on Austria.
Bertolt Brecht could not answer this standpoint, more especially as its poem in defense of Kraus, appearing after the introduction of the dictatorship and the subsequent standpoint of the editor of the Fackel , could be regarded as a guarantee brought by the German playwright to these last. He thus writes another poem, “On the fast fall of the honest ignoramus”, whom he forwarded in Karl Kraus:
When we had excused the eloquent man of sound silence
Between the drafting of the praise and its arrival écoula
A small amount of time. At this point in time it parla.
But it carried testimony against those which one had done taire
Condemned those which one had condemned to mort
Glorifia the assassins and charged the assassinés.
It showed ainsi
That kindness counts well little when connaissances
is missed
That the desire to proclaim truth is without effet
When one does not know what is vrai.
(Bertolt Brecht, “On the fast fall of the honest ignoramus”)
Nevertheless, note Kurt Krolop, Brecht always preserved regard for Kraus, at the same time as a playwright having invented the principle of the “documentary theater”, and as being that “which fought against the oppression and the degradation of the man”, which summarizes this formula of Bertolt Brecht in connection with the writer of the Fackel : “When the century raised the hand on oneself, Kraus was this hand. ”
The “wound Karl Kraus” of Elias Canetti
Happier than Karl Kraus from this point of view, Elias Canetti is seen giving the Nobel Prize of literature in 1981. At the time of its speech of reception, he states to receive this price in the name of “four men from which does not manage to separate”: the first of them is Karl Kraus.It is in 1924, whereas it recently arrived at Vienna that the future author of Auto-da-fé discovers Karl Kraus, at the time of one of the evenings of reading which gives, in front of a public as many as fanatic, the writer of Die Fackel . Very quickly, the young man is allured and enters, as he will write it later, “as student at the university Karl Kraus. ” What allures Canetti at Kraus, it is the ethical requirement, total engagement, radical indignation, such as they are expressed with the most glare in a text like the Last days of humanity : … he always sees side by side those which the war degraded and those that it inflated: disabled ex-serviceman and war profiteers; the blind soldier and the officer who wants to be greeted by him; the noble face of hung and the grimace mafflue of its torturer; it is not there, at his place, of these things to which the cinema has accustomed us by its easy contrasts; they all are still in charge of a fear that nothing will be able to alleviate. Admiration is moulted soon in a veneration which reaches with its paroxysm after July 15th 1927, when Kraus is the only one to denounce the massacre of the workmen Viennese: “With the immense protective spirit, the only judge of Vienna! I thank you for all my heart, all my body and all my heart for your action! ”, written Elias Canetti with the writer of the Fackel .
Also the disappointment of Canetti is it with the measurement of its former enthusiasm when he learns that, vis-a-vis repression by Dollfuss of the working rising of February 1934, Karl Kraus defends the first against the seconds. In a letter addressed to his/her brother, Elias Canetti expresses all its indignation opposite the attitude of Kraus: it has shame to be influenced by “this Thersite”, this “Goebbels of the spirit”, this “kind of Hitler of the intellectuals” for which “Germany alone represents the devil, all the others are angels”, primarily because it was impressed by “the threat which weighs on the sexual relationships between Juifs and Aryan. ”
As much of its former admirors, Canetti considers that Karl Kraus is, symbolically, died in 1934. Moreover, when it goes last once to a reading of Kraus to tear in front of him a specimen of the Fackel , Canetti notices that in front of this gesture, the face of Kraus resembles a death mask.
Nevertheless, note Gerald Stieg, Canetti quickly understood that “Kraus had been right from a historical point of view”, including on this question of the sexual relationships between Juifs and Aryan, in connection with whom it found absurd that Kraus insisted, whereas it was well “an indicator of very first importance of the horrors to come. ” But until in the last years of its life, Elias Canetti will remain marked by “the wound Karl Kraus”, which did not open in 1934, but a few years earlier, when Canetti became aware of the “dictatorship” that the influence of Kraus exerted on him, and of the true nature of this one: “It was necessary decades so that I understood that Karl Kraus had managed to form a " mass ameutée" composed of intellectuals: a mass which gathered with each meeting of reading to exist in an acute state until the victim was cut down. ”
Starting from this reflection on the seduction exerted by the Rhetoric krausienne, Canetti returns from there to the comparison which it made in 1934, putting in parallel the effects of this seduction with those of the Nazism:
me also I have my " juifs" ; beings of which I was diverted when I met them in the coffees or the street; that I did not honor with a glance; whose fate did not relate to me; who for me were put at the round of applause and rejected; whose contact would have soiled me; that, very seriously, I did not count any more with the row of humanity: victims and enemies of Karl Kraus.
Salvos of silence against Robert Musil
Karl Kraus and Robert Musil are of the same generation (Musil was born in 1880, Kraus in 1874), they lived both in Vienna, attending same the coffees, and divided, on a certain number of political and ethical subjects, similar sights. Nevertheless, explains Stephan Gödicke, “Kraus and Musil superbly was unaware of throughout their career, observing one towards the other a frozen silence”: the name of Kraus is practically never quoted in the work published of Robert Musil, and that of Robert Musil is it never in that of Kraus.One finds however in the newspapers of Musil several judgments on Karl Kraus, generally negative: Musil is perplexed vis-a-vis the effectiveness of the fight which Kraus for moraliser carries out the public life and intellectual insulation in which the director of the Fackel takes pleasure, whose influence would become exhausted vainly enters, on the one hand, an unproductive veneration on behalf of its admirors, and on the other hand an opposition quite as sterile on behalf of its detractors. Especially, Musil arranges Kraus among the “dictators of the spirit”, at the sides of the psychoanalysis and the Nazism. “This bringing together, notes Stephan Gödicke, surprising with the first access, is articulated around two characteristics common to the three phenomena: a quasi dictatorial authority exerted by a charismatic personality, and a Weltanschauung dogmatic, therefore simplifying. ”
As for the presence of the name of Kraus in the work published of Musil, one hardly finds it but in his articles of newspapers, at the time of several controversies: in 1911, at the time of the first polemic of Kraus against Alfred Kerr (the first to have discovered Musil in 1906), Musil takes the feather to support the critic Berliner against the attacks of the satirist Viennese. In 1922, at the time of the representation of parts of Johann Nestroy, that Kraus admires, whereas Musil publishes in their subject a report poorly eulogistic. Lastly, in May 1924, when Musil publishes in the Prager Close a not very flattering report of the demonstrations organized at the time of the sixtieth birthday of the writer of the Fackel .
If it published in the Fackel an answer to criticisms of the parts of Nestroy (without quoting the name of Robert Musil), Karl Kraus kept silence on the other articles of its compatriot in whom his name was mentioned. The fact is surprising, especially concerning the article of 1924: The Fackel publishes indeed, continuations with the demonstrations organized in the honor of Karl Kraus, of the rights of reply until December 1924, in which he is answered the articles which are devoted to him until in Polish newspapers, Hebrew and American. All leaves think that the criticism of Musil was voluntarily omitted, which was undoubtedly “the most capable tactics to wound its self-esteem, him which suffered all its life from the lack of attention carried to its writings”, and which is revealing in a certain manner that had Karl Kraus to choose its adversaries:
One touches here with the one of the essential problems of the work of Karl Kraus: one has sometimes the impression that it built a whole part of this one against enemies who were not worth the sorrow of it, neglecting on the contrary some of its most famous contemporaries and most intelligent. Of course, one can distinguish the combat carried out in the name of principles against institutions or practices - in which case, the people with whom it is caught some import little - and the combat AD hominem - in which case, one is obliged to recognize that Kraus was especially confronted with the secondary figures of its time.
Evenings of reading
At its 700 meetings of public readings of works, which they are as of his or those of William Shakespeare, Johann Nestroy or Jacques Offenbach, Kraus fascinated its listeners by the power of its interprétations.Elias Canetti thus told in the Torch in the ear how he discovered Karl Kraus in Vienna at the time of his three hundredth conference, which for the occasion proceeded in the big room in the concerts. It evokes the applause, “more vigorous in avai never heard, even in the concerts”, which greeted its arrival on scene, as well as the surprise which its voice caused him when it heard it for the first time: “it had something of not very natural, of vibrating, like a slowed down croaking. ” But very quickly, the voice changed intonation and of intensity, and “one was filled with wonder soon at the multiple nuances of which it was able. ”
Kurt Tucholsky, in a report published at the time of the twenty years of the Fackel wrote as for him into 1920 that, “when it makes readings, Kraus produced a very strong impression. It almost never raises the eyes. It really reads - sometimes, only, its strange fine fingers describe a half-circle, or draw a gesture by exaggerating it…”
The effect produced by these readings on the public was extraordinary: the vibration of the voice of Kraus “was transmitted to the very whole room”, which vibrated in unison, transforming the individuals isolated into a compact crowd, in a mass .
Elias Canetti explained later why this fascination that Kraus exerted on its listeners took its origin in a power oratory without equivalent: It will never be repeated enough: this Kraus in flesh and in bone which tore off you with your torpor, tormented you, crushed you, this Kraus one was not able any more to do, which touched you and shook you so that it took you years to gather your forces and to affirm you against him, it was the speaker . There was never, since I was born, a speaker as him in any linguistic spaces which I know.
Karl Kraus against the psychoanalysis
In an article of 1913 entitled Psychology not - authorized , Karl Kraus written in connection with the Psychoanalysis whose its compatriot and contemporary Sigmund Freud is then establishing the theory and the practice: The psychoanalysts, this reject of humanity, this profession whose only name seems to associate psyché and the anus, are divided into several groups of which each one publishes its own review to present its particular manner of blasphémer to it, of outrager nature and to explain Article. Kraus, nevertheless, did not always have a position also violently hostile about the psychoanalysis. Quite to the contrary, in 1899, in the first book of the Fackel , it takes party for “very new psychology” that Sigmund Freud is then working out ( the interpretation of the dreams is published in the end of the same year.) It on several occasions quotes in its review the name of Freud whose work joins one of its combat of the time against the penalization of the Homosexualité, and in a more general way in order to dissociate the sexuality of the statute of exception where relegated middle-class morals, and it goes until attending the courses given by the founder of the psychoanalysis to the university of Vienna in the years 1905-1906. On its side, Freud is not far from seeing in the young writer an ally within a “small minority” which must “tighten the elbows. ”
However, as from 1907, the position of Kraus starts to evolve to an increasingly marked hostility, hostility which still could worsen the conference holding on “the neurosis of the Fackel” given in 1910 by a former collaborator of the review, Fritz Wittels, scrambled with Karl Kraus for reasons of a nature undoubtedly personal and which, in addition to this analysis, makes appear with the end same year a satirical novel and anti-semite ( Ezechiel provincial the ), in which Kraus is caricatured. This last however does not seem to have confused the attacks of Wittels with its theoretical hostility with the psychoanalysis, of which it deploys criticism in several successive directions, which have jointly to examine the consequences of the application of the theory rather than to call in question the veracity of the latter.
The first criticism of Karl Kraus relates to work of analysts who intend to explain artistic creation starting from the Pathologie S that they detect in the creators, and who multiply during second half of the first decade of the century. According to Kraus indeed, this attempt at elucidation fails to give an account of the singularity of the work of art: if it brings some lightings on the origin of the intimate material from which the artist draws, the question of working of this material is retracted. If the Oedipus complex is sufficient to explain the direction and the genesis of the Dutch stealing of Wagner, why all those which are afflicted with the same complex didn't compose of equivalent work?
The second criticism of Kraus falls under a more general reflection on the respective statutes of the scientist and the artist. Karl Kraus fits here in the line of Goethe to affirm the superiority of art on science in the field of knowledge: according to him, “the sexuality, of which he recognizes the importance in addition - of explanation it cannot be the ultimate principle is not driven back sexuality, commune with all the individuals, but well the “creative will” individual which must be put at the day - that of which only art is able. ”
Lastly, the argumentation of Kraus places on the ethical level, more precisely on the plan of that of the psychoanalysts: the money which is requested from the patients in order to obtain their cure seems him charlatanism quite simply. Who more is, being based on the analyzes nietzschéennes Ressentiment, Kraus sees in the psychoanalyst an individual who “likes and hates his object, envies his freedom to him or its force and brings back them to its own deficiencies”, proposal which it develops in his test Psychologie not - authorized (1913), its most violent load against the psychoanalytical movement, in which the strong influence of the theses of Otto Weininger is felt, and whose rhetoric is not stripped of Misogynie and of Antisémitisme: “the psychoanalyst is put here in bond with the female principle, the Judaism, cupidity; he appears in the text like a harmful parasite with noble works. Nevertheless, it could not exonerate Freud of its responsibility for founder of a discipline of which it does not cease denouncing the devastations and the dangers, under the terms of the principle which it had stated in 1908 in his test Heine and the consequences : if Heinrich Heine must be condemned to have introduced in Germany (from France) prose journalistico-arts person of the “serial”, and thus to have opened the door with the invention of modern journalism, Sigmund Freud was to be condemned in a similar way as a person in charge of the drifts and imprudences of its disciples to which it opened the way. Thus in the number of July 1934 of the Fackel , “Why the Fackel does not appear”, Kraus puts Freud at the sides of Heine (as well as Marx and of Nietzsche) among the propagators of these “infantile diseases” whose harmful “consequences” appear during the crisis periods.
Karl Kraus and Judaism
Karl Kraus, which highly criticized the Sionisme of Theodor Herzl, and which left the community Jew in 1899, did not hesitate in its review to be caught some, often violently, with the capitalists and the press Jews. By doing this, Jacques Bouveresse in his test noticed on Karl Kraus entitled Schmock or the triumph of journalism (2001), it sometimes happens to him to yield to temptation to pass from “the purely factual observation that the press, which tendentious and is corrupted, is, in good number of cases, Jewish, with the suggestion that it is tendentious and corrupted because it is Jewish. ” Gerald Stieg notes for its part that “there is in the work of Kraus the phenomenon of the Jewish Antisémitisme”, while for Jacques To wrinkle It some of the positions of Karl Kraus in connection with the Jews resemble to mistake there, at least until the end of the First World War, with those of the racist anti-semitism.According to certain commentators, Kraus would be actually a typical case of “hatred of oneself Jewish. ” Besides, when it forges this concept in 1930, in a test entitled, precisely, DER jüdische Selbsthass , the writer and German philosopher Theodor Lessing (1872 - 1933) already sees in Kraus “the brightest example” of this phenomenon.
The case of Karl Kraus would be far from being isolated in Vienna from the time when, as Manès Sperber notes it, “at the same time as was born the political Zionism worked by Theodor Herzl, to Vienna a Jewish anti-semitism of esthetic and metaphysical appearance emerges” whose most eminent representative was Otto Weininger (the major work of Weininger, Sexe and character , had strongly influenced Kraus at the time of its publication in 1903.) The development of this particular form of the “hatred of oneself” would find its origin in the recrudescence of the anti-semitism in Austria of the end of the XIXe century: the young generation of the “comparable” Jews would have been “driven back to give evidence of its authentic assilmilation”, and would have instinctively sought “to dissociate sociocultural roles too " typically juifs" , by being diverted in particular trades directly related to the money: bank, industry, trade. ” This phenomenon had in its time analyzed by Stefan Zweig: It is not a chance if a Lord Rotschild is ornithologist, Warburg historian of art, philosophical Cassirer, Sassoon poet: they have all obeyed with the same unconscious tendency to release itself of what narrowed the Judaism, the cold will to earn money, and perhaps that by there is expressed the secret aspiration to escape, by the escape in the spiritual one, with what is specifically Jewish to be melted in universal humanity. At Kraus, this “unconscious tendency”, starting point of the route which can lead to the hatred of oneself, and which would have actually led it there, would have appeared in particular “in the assertion insolente nonlucrative character of '' Fackel '' (of possible benefit will be versed with organization charitable), which allowed him " racheter" morally the fact that only the paternal capital made possible this ideal of independence material. ”
Reacting to the theories of Theodor Lessing, Karl Kraus was for its part to indicate that its “critic of the Judaism does not betray the least element of this " hatred of soi" that now even a historian of the culture maintains and whose fable since was always used as compensation to the gotten rid of hawkers of the literature. ”
Hannah Arendt also estimated it that the “hatred of oneself Jewish” is a concept which could not be applied to Karl Kraus, not more than with a Walter Benjamin or a Franz Kafka: according to it, their attitude with regard to the Jewish question should not be explained “like pure and simple reaction to the ambient anti-semitism and thus like the expression of a hatred of oneself”, but as an attitude of rejection of the Jewish middle-class “to which intelligentsia was not identified at all. ”
In addition, noting the rise to power of the anti-semitism, Kraus would have removed more and more of its work “all that could be regarded as features antijuifs, mainly in its conferences. ”
The question of the jüdische Selbsthaas of Karl Kraus remains however discussed: Jacques To wrinkle It, in an article of 1988 entitled “Karl Kraus or the torn Jewish identity”, estimates that one did not take all the measurement of this one yet, and of the major influence which it could exert on its life and its work: thus of the relation between Kraus and Sidonie Nadherny von Borutin, who would have combined with the unrealizable dream to be allowed in the aristocratic mediums (the baroness refusing to marry with a Jew), love for a woman who did not hide her convictions anti-semites. As for the combat without slackening and passionately carried out for the safeguarding of the language, it is analyzed as being “the conspiracy of the jüdischer Selbsthaas by the writing. The thousands of pages of Die Fackel then seem a wall of China drawn up against the crowd of the attackers anti-semites always ready to dispute the membership of Karl Kraus to the literature and the German language . ”
Sigurd Paul Scheichl, which also studied this question of the anti-semitism and the hatred of oneself Jewish at Karl Kraus, arrives from there as for him at a notably different conclusion, to which Jacques Bouveresse joined finally, which exposes it in its test on the Third night of Walpurgis , “And Satan leads the ball… Kraus, Hitler and Nazism” (2004). According to Scheichl, the writer of the Fackel would have on this subject failed in his principles and succumbed to the facility of the “setting in sentences” which he denounced with such an amount of strength in the journalists: underestimating until towards 1920 possible recoveries by the anti-semites of its remarks, it “would have been victim of a certain lack of imagination or a certain idleness of the imagination which prevented it during a time to appreciate correctly the danger of the speech anti-semite, insofar as it appeared unthinkable to him that it succeeds in one day being really transformed into action. ”
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