To brandish Karl Kraus’ 1914 essay “In these great times” against our own may seem out of place. And in some sense it is, for the First World War is not ours. Yet Kraus condemns not only the war, but the media and commercial culture that contributed to its advent and which fed it daily with a profitable and malignant patriotism. In this, our times have only degenerated further. The printed press has been supplanted by the radio, television and, of course, more recently, by the virtual diarrhea of hate and fear that floods daily the internet.
Kraus painfully witnessed the debasement of language and of sound judgment brought on by the press, something that could only culminate in a culture of stupidity. But equally, and no less significant, he saw how the expansion of “newspapers” transformed the relation between the events reported and the reports, between reality and its representations, with the written medium now capable of generating its own reality, from which actions follow. “Today the connections between catastrophes and editorial offices are far more profound and hence less clear. For in the age of those who live through it, deeds are stronger than words, but the echo is stronger than the deed. We live on the echo, and in this topsy-turvy world the echo arouses the call.” Or, as he states it more bluntly: “Wire dispatches are instruments of war.” (Karl Kraus, “In these great times”)
In such times as these, those “who now have nothing to say because actions are speaking continue to talk.” Then let “him who has something to say come forward and be silent!”, a silence from which great “and elemental forces must have the strength to cope with evils by themselves”, without “the stimulation and need of a writer.” (Karl Kraus, “In these great times”)
Walter Benjamin would say of Kraus: “To the ever-repeated sensations with which the daily press serves its public he opposes the eternally “news” of the history of creation: the eternally renewed, the uninterrupted lament.” (Walter Benjamin, “Karl Kraus”).
We share below Karl Kraus’ essay, “In these great times”, as it appears in english translation in the volume In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader, Harry Zohn ed., Manchester, U.K., Carcanet Press, 1984.
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In these great times
which I knew when they were this small; which will become small again, provided they have time left for it; and which, because in the realm of organic growth no such transformation is possible, we had better call fat times and, truly, hard limes as well; in these times in which things are happening that could not be imagined and in which what can no longer be imagined must happen, for if one could imagine it, it would not happen; in these serious times which have died laughing at the thought that they might become serious; which, surprised by their own tragedy, are reaching for diversion and, catching themselves red-handed, are groping for words; in these loud limes which boom with the horrible symphony of actions which produce reports and of reports which cause actions: in these times you should not expect any words of my own from me – none but these words which barely manage to prevent silence from being misinterpreted. Respect for the immutability, the subordination of language before this misfortune is too deeply rooted in me. In the realm of poverty of imagination where people die of spiritual famine without feeling spiritual hunger, where pens are dipped in blood and swords in ink, that which is not thought must be done, but that which is only thought is unutterable. Expect no words of my own from me. Nor would I be able to say anything new, for in the room in which one writes there is such noise, and at this time one should not determine whether it comes from animals, from children, or merely from mortars. He who encourages deeds with words desecrates words and deeds and is doubly despicable. This occupation is not extinct. Those who now have nothing to say because actions are speaking continue to talk. Let him who has something to say come forward and be silent! Nor may I bring out old words as long as deeds are committed that are new to us and spectators say that they were not to be expected of them. My words were able to drown out rotary presses, and if these were not brought to a standstill, this is no reflection on my words. Even the greater machine has not managed to do it, and an ear that hears the trumpets of the Last Judgment is by no means closed to the trumpets of the day. All that blood has not made the muck of life congeal in fright, nor has it made printer’s ink blanch. The maw, rather, swallowed up the many swords, and we looked only at the maw and measured greatness only by the maw. And “gold for iron” fell from the altar into the operetta,[1] bombing was a music-hall song, and fifteen thousand prisoners were put in a special edition of the newspaper which a soubrette read from the stage so that a librettist might take a curtain call. For me (the insatiable one who does not have sacrifices enough), the line commanded by fate has not been reached. For me it is war only if only those who are unfit are sent off to it. Otherwise my peace has no peace; I secretly prepare for the great times and think thoughts that I can tell only to the Good Lord and not to the good state which now does not permit me to tell it that it is too tolerant. For if the state does not now have the idea of choking off the so-called freedom of the press, which does not notice a few white spots, then it never will; and if I were to put this into its head, the state would do violence to the idea, and my text would be the only victim. So I shall have to wait, though I am the only Austrian who cannot wait but would like to see the end of the world replaced by a simple auto-da-fe. The idea which I should like to put into the heads of the actual holders of nominal power is only an idée fixe of mine. But an unstable state of ownership, that of a state and of a civilized world, is saved by such fixed ideas. A general is not believed when he talks about the importance of swamps – until one day Europe is viewed only as the surroundings of swamps.[2] Of a terrain I see only the swamps, of their depth I see only the surface, of a situation I see only its manifestations, of these I see only a reflection, and even of that I see only the outlines. And sometimes an intonation or even a hallucination suffices me. Do me the favor, just for fun, of following me to the surface of this problem-deep world which was not created until it became cultured, which revolves around its own axis and wishes the sun revolved around it.
Above that exalted manifesto,[3] that prose poem which initiated a time full of action, the only poem this time has produced till now, above the most humane poster which the street was able to offer our eyes there hangs the head of a vaudeville comedian, larger than life. Next to it a manufacturer of rubber heels desecrates the mystery of creation by saying of a kicking infant that this is the only way a human being ought to come into the world, using this particular brand. If I am of the opinion that, things being the way they are, it would be better if people did not come into the world at all, I am an eccentric. But if I maintain that under such circumstances no one will come into the world in the future and that at a later date boot-heels may come into the world but without the persons to go with them, because they were not able to keep pace with their own development and stayed behind as the last obstacle to their progress – if I maintain this sort of thing, I am a fool who deduces the whole condition from a symptom, the plague from a bubo. If I were not a fool but an educated man, I would draw such bold conclusions from a bacillus and not from a bubo, and people would believe me. How foolish to say that one should confiscate the bubo to rid oneself of the plague! But I am truly of the opinion that in this time, however we may call it or evaluate it, whether it is out of joint or already set right, whether it is accumulating murder and rottenness before the eyes of a Hamlet or is already becoming ripe for the arm of a Fortinbras – that in its condition the root lies at the surface. This sort of thing can be made clear by a great confusion, and what was once paradoxical is now confirmed by the great times. Since I am neither a politician nor his half-brother, an aesthete, I would not dream of denying the necessity of anything that is happening or of complaining that mankind does not know how to die in beauty. I know full well that cathedrals are rightfully bombarded by people if they are rightfully used by people as military posts. “No offence i’ the world,” says Hamlet.[4] But the jaws of hell gape at this question: When will the greater period of the war begin, the war of cathedrals against people? I know very well that at times it is necessary to transform markets into battlefields so that these might turn into markets again. But one cloudy day people will see things more clearly and ask whether it is right to miss not a single step on the direct road away from God, and whether the eternal mystery from which man originates and the mystery into which he enters really encompass only a business secret that gives man superiority over man and even over man’s maker. Someone who wants to expand ownership and someone who merely defends it — both live in a state of ownership, always below and never above ownership. One declares it, the other one explains it.[5] Are we not afraid of something superior to ownership when unparalleled human victims have been seen and suffered, and when behind the language of spiritual uplift, after the intoxicating music has died away, this confession breaks through between earthly and heavenly hosts one grey morning: “What the travelling salesmen must do now is keep putting out their feelers and feeling out their customers!”[6] Mankind consists of customers. Behind flags and flames, heroes and helpers, behind all fatherlands an altar has been erected at which pious science wrings its hands: God created the consumer! Yet God did not create the consumer that he might prosper on earth but for something higher: that the dealer might prosper on earth, for the consumer was created naked and becomes a dealer only when he sells clothes. The necessity to eat in order to live cannot be disputed philosophically, though the public nature of this function evidences an ineradicable lack of modesty. Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence.[7] Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former. This is the ideal that progress serves, and to this ideal it supplies its armaments. Progress lives to eat, and at times supplies proof that, it can even die to eat. It endures hardship so that it may prosper. It applies pathos to the premises. The utmost affirmation of progress has long since decreed that demand be governed by supply, that we eat so that another person might get his fill, and that a peddler interrupt even our thinking when he offers us what we do not happen to need. Progress, under whose feet the grass mourns and the forest turns into paper from which newspaper plants grow,[8] 8 has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts for our tools. The tooth of time is hollow; for when it was sound, there came the hand that lives on fillings. Where all energy has been expended to make life frictionless, nothing remains that still needs such care. In such a region individuality can live, but can no longer be born. With its emotional desires it may be a guest where it will be surrounded by automata pushing past and forward in comfort and prosperity without face and greeting. As a referee between natural values it will make a different decision. It will certainly not opt for this country’s supineness, which has saved its intellectual life for the promotion of its merchandise, has surrendered to a romanticization of foodstuffs, and has placed “art in the service of the businessman.” The decision is between spiritual power and horsepower. After the hustle and bustle of business no breed will realize its full potential; at best it will be fit for pleasure. The tyranny of necessity grants its slaves three kinds of freedom; opinion free from intellect, entertainment free from art, and orgies free from love. Thank God there are still goods that get stuck when freight is supposed to be constantly rolling. For in the final analysis, civilization does live on culture. If the horrible voice[9] which these days is allowed to outshout the commands urges travelling salesmen in the language of its obtrusive phantasm to put out their feelers and feel out their customers through the gunsmoke; if in the face of unheard-of things it brings itself to make the heroic decision to claim the battlefields for the hyenas, then it possesses some of that dreary sincerity with which the Zeitgeist grins at its martyrs. All right, we are sacrificing ourselves for ready-made goods; we are consumers and live in such a way that the means may consume the end. AII right, if a torpedo is useful to us, let it be more permissible to curse God than to curse a torpedo! And necessities which a world gone astray in the labyrinth of economics has set for itself demand their martyrs; and the ghastly editorial writer of passions, the registering Jewish plutocrat, the man who sits at the cash register of world history collects victories and daily records the turnover in blood.[10] The tenor of his couplings and headlines which shriek with greed for profit is such that he claims the number of dead and wounded and prisoners as assets; sometimes he confuses mine and thine with mines and tines;[11] but gently underlining his modesty and perhaps in keeping with impressions gleaned from circles in the know, and without abandoning his power of imagination, he permits himself to make a strategic distinction between “laymen’s questions and laymen’s answers.” And if he then ventures to pronounce a blessing on the so very gratifying upsurge of heroic feelings, to send his greetings and best wishes to the army and to cheer up his “good soldiers” in the jargon of efficiency as though it were the end of a satisfying day at the stock exchange, there is allegedly “only one voice” which takes umbrage at it, truly only one that is uttering it today – but what good is it when there is just this one voice whose echo ought to be nothing less than a storm of the elements rebelling at the spectacle of a time which has the courage to call itself great and does not issue an ultimatum to such a champion!
The surface is at the root and sticks to it. The subjugation of mankind to the economy has left it only the freedom of hostility; and if progress sharpened its weapons, it created for mankind the most murderous weapon of all, one that relieved it, beyond its sacred necessity, of its last concern about its spiritual salvation: the press. Progress, which also has logic at its disposal, replies that the press is nothing but one of the professional associations that subsist on an existing need. But if this is as true as it is correct, and if the press is nothing other than an imprint of life, then I know what the score is, for I know what this life is like. And then it happens to occur to me, it becomes clear to me on a cloudy day, that life is only an imprint of the press. If I learned to underestimate life in the days of progress, I was bound to overestimate the press. What is it? Just a messenger? One who also bothers us with his opinion? Who torments us with his impressions? Who brings the mental image along with the fact? Who tortures us almost to death with his detailed reports about the atmosphere or with his perceptions of observations of minute details, and with his constant repetition of the whole? Who drags behind himself a train of informed, knowledgeable, sophisticated, outstanding personalities who are supposed to accredit him and agree with him – important parasites on the superfluous? Is the press a messenger? No, it is the event itself. A speech? No, life itself. It not only lays claim to the real events being its news about the events; it also creates this uncanny identity which always makes it seem that actions are reported before they are performed, often the mere possibility of an action, and in any case it produces a situation in which war correspondents are not permitted to observe, but warriors are turned into reporters. In this sense I do not mind if people say that all my life I have overestimated the press. It is not a messenger (how could a messenger demand and receive so much?); it is the event itself. Once again the instrument has got the better of us. We have raised the person whose job it is to announce a conflagration – and who probably ought to play the most subordinate role in the state – above the world, above the fire and above the house, above reality and above our imagination. But we, like Cleopatra, curious and disappointed, ought to beat the messenger for his message. The man who informs her of a hated marriage and who embellishes his report she holds responsible for the marriage. “Ram through thy fruitful tidings in mine ears that long time have been barren. . . . The most infectious pestilence upon thee! . . . What say you? Hence, horrible villain! or I’ll spurn thine eyes like balls before me; I’II unhair thy head. Thou shalt be whipt with wire, and stew’d in brine, smarting in lingering pickle.” – “Gracious madam, I that do bring the news made not the match.”[12] But the reporter does make the match, sets the house on fire, and turns the horrors that he fabricates into truth. Through decades of practice he has produced in mankind that degree of unimaginativeness which enables it to wage a war of extermination against itself. Since the unlimited promptness of his machinery has made it unnecessary for mankind to have any ability to experience and to extend experience intellectually, the reporter can only just manage to instil into it that death-defying courage with which mankind is rushing into this war. He has the reflected glory of heroic qualities at his disposal, and his misused language beautifies a misused life – as though eternity had saved its apex for the age in which the reporter lives. But do people have any idea what life the newspaper expresses? A life that has long been an expression of it! Do people realize just what half a century owes to this loosed intelligence in the way of murdered intellect, plundered nobility, and desecrated holiness? Does anyone know what vital resources the Sunday belly of such a rotary beast has swallowed up before it can appear 250 pages thick? Do people stop to think how much had to be systematically spent on telegrams, telephones, and photographs to teach a society which was still open to inner possibilities that broad astonishment at the tiniest fact which finds its clichés in the horrid language of these messengers when “groups formed” somewhere or the public began to “mass”? Since all of modern life has been subsumed under a quantity which is no longer measured but has always been attained – a quantity that finally will have no other recourse but to swallow itself – since the self-evident record leaves no more room for doubt and the painful completeness makes any further calculation unnecessary, the consequence is that, exhausted by this multiplicity, we no longer have any use for the result. Accordingly, at a time when twice a day and in twenty repetitions we are served up impressions of the impressions of all externals, the great quantity breaks down into individual fates which only the individuals perceive, so that suddenly the unbegrudged hero’s death, even in the vanguard, is declared a cruel fate. But some day people might find out what a trifling matter such a world war was as compared to the intellectual self-mutilation of mankind by means of its press and how at bottom it constituted only one of the press’s emanations. A few decades ago, Bismarck, who also overestimated the press, was still able to recognize that “what the sword has gained for us Germans is spoiled by the press” and impute to the press the blame for three wars. Today the connections between catastrophes and editorial offices are far more profound and hence less clear. For in the age of those who live through it, deeds are stronger than words, but the echo is stronger than the deed. We live on the echo, and in this topsy-turvy world the echo arouses the call. In the organization of the echo, weakness is capable of a wondrous transformation. The state can use it, but the world derives no benefit from it. At a time when progress was still in its infancy and did not as yet crawl through culture on rubber heels, Bismarck sensed it. “In the long run and at some time,” he said, “every country is responsible for the windows broken by its press.” Further: “The press in Vienna is worse than I had imagined; in fact, it is worse and has a more deleterious effect than the Prussian press.” He came right out and said that in order to avoid the reproach of not having good connections, a correspondent printed either his own fabrications or those of his embassy. Certainly, all of us are primarily dependent on the interests of this one business. If one reads a newspaper only for information, one does not learn the truth, not even the truth about the paper. The truth is that the newspaper is not a statement of contents but the contents themselves; and more than that, it is an instigator. If it prints lies about horrors, these turn into horrors. There is more injustice in the world because there is a press which fabricated it and deplores it! It is not nations that strike one another; rather, it is the international disgrace, the profession which rules the world not despite its irresponsibility but by virtue of it, that deals wounds, tortures prisoners, baits foreigners, and turns gentlemen into rowdies. Its only authority is its unprincipledness, which, in association with a rascally will, can change printer’s ink directly into blood. 0h last, unholy wonder of the times! At first everything was a lie, and they always lied so that lies might be told only elsewhere; but now, thrown into the neurasthenia of hatred, everything is true. There are various nations, but there is only one press. The newspaper dispatch is an instrument of war like a grenade, which has no consideration for circumstances either. You believe, but they know better, and you have to pay dearly for your belief. The heroes of obtrusiveness, people with whom no soldier would lie down in the trenches, though he has to submit to being interviewed by them, break into recently abandoned royal castles so that they can report, “We got there first!” It would be far less shameful to be paid for committing atrocities than for fabricating them. The bravoes of this sphere of activity sit at home, unless they have the good fortune to tell anecdotes in the correspondents’ quarters or be pushy right up to the front, and they teach fear to the nations day after day until these have some justification really to feel fear. Of the quantity which is the substance of this time each of us gets a share that he processes emotionally, and the telegraph wires and the cinema screen make what we have in common so graphic to us that we go home contented.
But if the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies. His imagination is the crudest substitute for the imagination we once had. For if one side claims that the other side kills women and children, both sides believe it and do it. Don’t people yet feel that the word of an undisciplined creature, usable in the days of military discipline, carries farther than a mortar and that the spiritual fortresses of these times are structures that will collapse in an emergency? If the states had the discernment to settle for universal conscription and do without wire dispatches, a world war, truly, would be milder. And if before the outbreak of such a war they had the courage to drive the representatives of the other trade together at an internationally agreed upon carrion-pit, who knows – the nations might be spared it. But before journalists and the diplomats they use disarm, human beings have to pay the price. “Some of the things printed in newspapers are true after all,” said Bismarck. There is, after all, something in the cultural section, and that is where our fine feuilletonists work. I say prayers in battles for a fee, kiss confederates on the mouth, praise the wonderful “tumult” of our days, admire order as they once adored Gemullichkeit, compare a fortress with a beautiful woman or vice versa (it depends), and in general behave in a manner worthy of the great times. Under the heading “Days of Terror” an alien serially described his experiences in a capital city which he had been obliged to leave.[13] The greatest terror was that he was urged to leave town, offered only 1200 francs for 1000 marks, and especially that no taxicab was to be had – something that is said to happen in other traffic centers even before a general mobilization. For the rest – one can hardly believe one’s eyes – he cannot heap sufficient praise on the calm, considerateness, and even compassion of the local population. And yet dispatches led us to believe that these people had behaved like freed panthers and wolves from a menagerie damaged in a railway accident. In short, the situation there before the war was something like the situation elsewhere after a concert. Wire dispatches are instruments of war. Feuilletons are not monitored that closely; the truth may slip through there. But by the time a feuilleton appears, it may be untrue again, because in the meantime wire reports have appeared and done their share to confirm other wire reports and to correct reality. Or does anyone think that this Nordau glossed over things because he was already trying to assure himself of being able to return to that place in peacetime? In that case journalism manipulates life, depending on whether it seeks only its advantage or also the disadvantage of others. In general it can be said that in wartime there are, in addition to the work done by solid weapons, the accomplishments of words and opportunities. Atrocities perpetrated by the population of enemy countries are of low or very base – that is, cultured – provenance. The mob and the press are above national interests; the former pillages and the latter wires. When the latter wires, the former feels encouraged, and nations repay and atone for what editorial offices have decided. “Reprisals” is what the press is answered with.[14] It exaggerates the condition of the world after it has created it. It would be terrible enough if it were only the expression of this condition; but it is its creator. In Austria it invented and preserved the sterile pastime of “strife among the nationalities” in order to promote the business activities of its shameful intellect unobserved. Once it has reached the desired goal, it puts its patriotism out to board for future profit. It buys up securities that are collapsing – a Phoenix colorfully rising from someone else’s ashes. Let me overestimate the press! But if I wrongly maintain, if it is not true that in an epoch which is so prone to regard the special edition as the event and which with inflamed nerves lets itself he misled from fabrications to facts, more blood has flown from wire dispatches than they claimed to contain, then let this blood be on my hands!
“May it be the last time,” cried Bismarck, “that the achievements of Prussian arms are given away with an open hand to satisfy the insatiable demands of a phantom which under the phony name of Zeitgeist or public opinion stuns the good sense of princes and peoples with its screaming until everyone is afraid of everyone else’s shadow and all forget that under the lion’s skin of the specter there is an entity that may be noisy but is not very terrifying.” He said this in 1849. What terrifying dimensions this harmless entity has assumed in sixty-five years! The fact that it does not grow silent in the face of deeds it has instigated shows for whom it hopes these have been done. The machines have declared war on God, and between the performances that I have always believed them capable of they still are at no loss for words, while the times measure themselves and are astonished at how great they have become overnight. But they have probably always been great, and I simply did not notice it. Thus it was an optical fault of mine to perceive them as small. However, to clean up “evils” that are rampant on the surface behind which there is something great would be too small a task for me, and I would not be up to it. The other day someone asked me where I was and begged me, with a view to the new times, to rid us of the old filth. I can’t. Great and elemental forces must have the strength to cope with evils by themselves and do not need the stimulation and help of a writer. But though the gleam of these great and elemental forces was already dazzling everyone’s eyes, they still have not managed it. What do we see? The greatness has concomitants. If the future is on their level, then heaven help us! The great forces have not destroyed the concomitants overnight. That bombs are dropped with jokes and dives announce a 42-Mortar Program shows us how conservative and up-to-date we are. The revealing thing is not the occurrence as such but the anaesthesia that makes it possible and tolerates it. We know how the humor ingrained in us accommodates itself to the excess of blood. But what about the intellect? How do our poets and thinkers feel about it? And even if the world stands on its head, it won’t be able to think of anything better! Even if the world tears itself to pieces, no intellect will emerge. Nor will it appear later, for it should now have gone into hiding and expressed itself through discreet dignity. But all around us in the cultural sphere we see only the spectacle of the intellect latching onto a catchword when a personality does not have the strength to keep silent and draw on its own resources. The volunteering of the poets for military service is their entry into journalism. We find Hauptmann and Messrs. Dehmel and Hofmannsthal[15] in the front lines with a claim to a decoration, and behind them fights rampant dilettantism. Never before has there been such a rush to join up with banality, and the sacrifice of the leading intellects is so rapid as to give rise to the suspicion that they had no self to sacrifice but acted on the heroic desire to save themselves where it is now safest: in clichéland. But the really sad thing is that literature does not feel its obtrusiveness nor the superiority of the common man who finds in clichés the experience that is his due. To seek rhymes, and bad ones, to express the enthusiasm of others, to welcome troops with whoops, confirm that a mob will rob, and condemn those who pillage a village is surely the paltriest achievement that society can expect of its intellects in hard times. The unarticulated sounds that have reached us from enemy poets at least evidence individual feelings of excitement which reduce an artist to a private person with national limitations. At least they were the poem that the uproar of actualities made of the poets. The reproach of barbarism in wartime was false information. But the barbarism in peacetime which is ready to rhyme when things get serious and which turns someone else’s experience into an editorial is an inexpungible disgrace. And after all, a Hodler who is wrong can still pass muster next to a dozen Haeckels who are right.[16] And in the final analysis, an outburst of rage is more cultural than an inquiry which is kind enough to decide the question whether it is all right to perform Shakespeare in his favor. Modern Germany’s greatest poet, Detlev von Lilieneron,[17] 17 a war poet, a victim of that cultural development that came from victory, probably would not have had the heart to attach himself to the still-smoking actualities with an opinion, and it remains to be seen whether among those who have experienced this war and those who as poets can experience, there will be someone who can fashion an artistic unity out of the substance and the word. What will be shown is whether something organic can grow from the quantity, to which there no longer is a bridge from the spiritual life because this bridge has been blown up. Intellects that nimbly and comfortably bed down in the split in their personalities when danger threatens will be a dime a dozen.
Perhaps even the smallest war has always been an action that cleansed the surface and had an effect on the inside. What effect does this great war have which is great by virtue of the forces against which the greatest war ought to be waged? Is it a redemption or only the end? Or is it only a continuation? May the consequences of this extensive affair be no worse than its concomitants which it did not have the strength to kick away! May it never happen that emptiness throws its weight around even more than before as it refers to the hardships it has endured; that idleness gains glory; that pettiness appeals to the world-historical background; and that the hand that reaches into our pocket first shows us its scars! How was it possible that in the world war a world newspaper could celebrate its anniversary? That a stock-exchange burglar could place himself before a battle of millions and in thunderous headlines demand (and receive) attention for the fiftieth anniversary of his infamous trade?[18] That banks, being in a moratorium, could not serve their customers but did pay that man far more than 400 crowns for each of the hundred advertisements in his anniversary issue? That the homage of news vendors could be heard over the roar of the cannons and the procession of well-wishers marched for weeks like a casualty list of culture? How was it possible that in days when clichés were already bleeding and surrendering their last life to death they were still able to serve as window decoration at a bawdyhouse of liberalism? That flags were raised by writers when they were already in the field and that an account clerk and a freebooter of culture had himself celebrated by a highly placed group of lackeys as “chief of the general staff of culture”?
May the times grow great enough not to fall prey to a victor who places his heel on the intellect and the economy, great enough to overcome the nightmare of the opportunity to have a victory redound to the credit of those uninvolved in it, the opportunity for wrongheaded chasers after decorations in peacetime to divest themselves of what honor they have left, for utter stupidity to discard foreign words and names of dishes, and for slaves whose ultimate goal all their lives has been the “mastery” of languages henceforth to desire to get around in the world with the ability not to master languages! What do you who are in the war know about the war?! You are fighting! You have not remained behind! Even those who have sacrificed their ideals to life will someday have the privilege of sacrificing life itself. May the times grow so great that they measure up to these sacrifices and never so great that they transcend their memory as they grow into life!
“In dieser grossen Zeit” (1914)
[1] People were urged to aid the war effort by surrendering objects made of gold, jewelry, and other valuables in return for rings and other items made of various lesser metals, including iron.
[2] A reference to Paul von Hindenburg, whose idée fixe, the strategic importance of the Masurian swamps in East Prussia, was derided. Important battles were subsequently fought at the Masurian Lakes.
[3]An meine Völker (To My People), Franz Josef’s proclamation of 1914. This was the solitary apex of Kraus’ appreciation of the Austrian emperor whom he henceforth lampooned as “the Hapsburg demon incarnate”.
[5] Kraus’ terms are fatieren, which means to declare something for purposes of taxation, and erklären, which means both “declare” in the above sense and “explain”. The two words can be used synonymously, and Kraus probably used them to indicate – from within and from without, as it were – the essential sameness of the political idea of imperialism (for which Kraus employs the metaphor Besitzstand, or ownership).
[6] The term Reisende – “traveller” or “travelling salesman” – here seems to be equated with war correspondents, and the unidentified quotation may be an editor’s instruction to reporters to turn themselves into commercial travellers and examine battlefields for their suitability as markets.
[7] Kraus’ pun envolves Lebensmittel (foodstuffs) and Lebenszweck.
[8] “… der Wald zu Papier wird, aus dem die Blätter waschen” – Kraus plays on the dual meaning of Blätter: “leaves” and “newspapers” (or “sheets” in both English senses). In his prose and poetry he repeatedly deplores the defilement of nature by the transformation of trees into newsprint.
[9] Presumably the voice of commerce, here equated with the voice of a press in league with it, which in the midst of the carnage urges its salesmen (or correspondents) to go out in search of new markets.
[10] Probably a reference to Moriz Benedikt, the editor of the Neue Freie Presse, whom Kraus excoriated as the “Lord of the Hyenas”.
[11] The pun in the original is “mein und dein und Stein und Bein”.
[12] Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, act 2, sc. 5.
[13] The reference is to Max Nordau (1849-1923), a physician, writer, and longtime associate of Theodor Herzel in the leadership of the Zionist movement, and his writings in the Neue Freie Presse (“Through the Neue Freie Presse he had the ear of Europe. … His annual summary of events was eagerly awaited.” – Anna and Max Nordau, Max Nordau: A Biography, New York, 1943, p. 209). In September of 1914, Nordau, an Austrian national, had to leave France and took refuge in Spain. He did not return to Paris, where he had settled in 1880, until 1920. Kraus repeatedly commented on Nordau – “Die Feinde Goethe and Heine” (Die Fackel no. 406, 5 October 1915), for example, about Nordau’s defence of Heinrich Heine when Goethe and Heine were maligned in wartime France.
[14] Kraus plays with the words Repressalien and Presse.
[15] Like most German and Austrian men of on letters, Gerhart Hauptmann, Richard Dehmel, and Hugo Hofmannsthal actively and avidly supported the war effort.
[16] The reference is to the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918), on whom Kraus commented favorably elsewhere, and to the German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), an agnostic and rightist with a strong pan-German orientation. Hodler condemned the the shelling of the cathedral of Rheims by German artillery, and Kraus disagrees with him in the early part of this address. Haeckel advocated the continued performance of Shakespeare in wartime Germany.
[17] Kraus liked (and overrated) Lilieneron, whose poetry he read on the same evening on which he delivered this address.
Karl Kraus: In these great times … and in our times
To brandish Karl Kraus’ 1914 essay “In these great times” against our own may seem out of place. And in some sense it is, for the First World War is not ours. Yet Kraus condemns not only the war, but the media and commercial culture that contributed to its advent and which fed it daily with a profitable and malignant patriotism. In this, our times have only degenerated further. The printed press has been supplanted by the radio, television and, of course, more recently, by the virtual diarrhea of hate and fear that floods daily the internet.
Kraus painfully witnessed the debasement of language and of sound judgment brought on by the press, something that could only culminate in a culture of stupidity. But equally, and no less significant, he saw how the expansion of “newspapers” transformed the relation between the events reported and the reports, between reality and its representations, with the written medium now capable of generating its own reality, from which actions follow. “Today the connections between catastrophes and editorial offices are far more profound and hence less clear. For in the age of those who live through it, deeds are stronger than words, but the echo is stronger than the deed. We live on the echo, and in this topsy-turvy world the echo arouses the call.” Or, as he states it more bluntly: “Wire dispatches are instruments of war.” (Karl Kraus, “In these great times”)
In such times as these, those “who now have nothing to say because actions are speaking continue to talk.” Then let “him who has something to say come forward and be silent!”, a silence from which great “and elemental forces must have the strength to cope with evils by themselves”, without “the stimulation and need of a writer.” (Karl Kraus, “In these great times”)
Walter Benjamin would say of Kraus: “To the ever-repeated sensations with which the daily press serves its public he opposes the eternally “news” of the history of creation: the eternally renewed, the uninterrupted lament.” (Walter Benjamin, “Karl Kraus”).
We share below Karl Kraus’ essay, “In these great times”, as it appears in english translation in the volume In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader, Harry Zohn ed., Manchester, U.K., Carcanet Press, 1984.
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In these great times
which I knew when they were this small; which will become small again, provided they have time left for it; and which, because in the realm of organic growth no such transformation is possible, we had better call fat times and, truly, hard limes as well; in these times in which things are happening that could not be imagined and in which what can no longer be imagined must happen, for if one could imagine it, it would not happen; in these serious times which have died laughing at the thought that they might become serious; which, surprised by their own tragedy, are reaching for diversion and, catching themselves red-handed, are groping for words; in these loud limes which boom with the horrible symphony of actions which produce reports and of reports which cause actions: in these times you should not expect any words of my own from me – none but these words which barely manage to prevent silence from being misinterpreted. Respect for the immutability, the subordination of language before this misfortune is too deeply rooted in me. In the realm of poverty of imagination where people die of spiritual famine without feeling spiritual hunger, where pens are dipped in blood and swords in ink, that which is not thought must be done, but that which is only thought is unutterable. Expect no words of my own from me. Nor would I be able to say anything new, for in the room in which one writes there is such noise, and at this time one should not determine whether it comes from animals, from children, or merely from mortars. He who encourages deeds with words desecrates words and deeds and is doubly despicable. This occupation is not extinct. Those who now have nothing to say because actions are speaking continue to talk. Let him who has something to say come forward and be silent! Nor may I bring out old words as long as deeds are committed that are new to us and spectators say that they were not to be expected of them. My words were able to drown out rotary presses, and if these were not brought to a standstill, this is no reflection on my words. Even the greater machine has not managed to do it, and an ear that hears the trumpets of the Last Judgment is by no means closed to the trumpets of the day. All that blood has not made the muck of life congeal in fright, nor has it made printer’s ink blanch. The maw, rather, swallowed up the many swords, and we looked only at the maw and measured greatness only by the maw. And “gold for iron” fell from the altar into the operetta,[1] bombing was a music-hall song, and fifteen thousand prisoners were put in a special edition of the newspaper which a soubrette read from the stage so that a librettist might take a curtain call. For me (the insatiable one who does not have sacrifices enough), the line commanded by fate has not been reached. For me it is war only if only those who are unfit are sent off to it. Otherwise my peace has no peace; I secretly prepare for the great times and think thoughts that I can tell only to the Good Lord and not to the good state which now does not permit me to tell it that it is too tolerant. For if the state does not now have the idea of choking off the so-called freedom of the press, which does not notice a few white spots, then it never will; and if I were to put this into its head, the state would do violence to the idea, and my text would be the only victim. So I shall have to wait, though I am the only Austrian who cannot wait but would like to see the end of the world replaced by a simple auto-da-fe. The idea which I should like to put into the heads of the actual holders of nominal power is only an idée fixe of mine. But an unstable state of ownership, that of a state and of a civilized world, is saved by such fixed ideas. A general is not believed when he talks about the importance of swamps – until one day Europe is viewed only as the surroundings of swamps.[2] Of a terrain I see only the swamps, of their depth I see only the surface, of a situation I see only its manifestations, of these I see only a reflection, and even of that I see only the outlines. And sometimes an intonation or even a hallucination suffices me. Do me the favor, just for fun, of following me to the surface of this problem-deep world which was not created until it became cultured, which revolves around its own axis and wishes the sun revolved around it.
Above that exalted manifesto,[3] that prose poem which initiated a time full of action, the only poem this time has produced till now, above the most humane poster which the street was able to offer our eyes there hangs the head of a vaudeville comedian, larger than life. Next to it a manufacturer of rubber heels desecrates the mystery of creation by saying of a kicking infant that this is the only way a human being ought to come into the world, using this particular brand. If I am of the opinion that, things being the way they are, it would be better if people did not come into the world at all, I am an eccentric. But if I maintain that under such circumstances no one will come into the world in the future and that at a later date boot-heels may come into the world but without the persons to go with them, because they were not able to keep pace with their own development and stayed behind as the last obstacle to their progress – if I maintain this sort of thing, I am a fool who deduces the whole condition from a symptom, the plague from a bubo. If I were not a fool but an educated man, I would draw such bold conclusions from a bacillus and not from a bubo, and people would believe me. How foolish to say that one should confiscate the bubo to rid oneself of the plague! But I am truly of the opinion that in this time, however we may call it or evaluate it, whether it is out of joint or already set right, whether it is accumulating murder and rottenness before the eyes of a Hamlet or is already becoming ripe for the arm of a Fortinbras – that in its condition the root lies at the surface. This sort of thing can be made clear by a great confusion, and what was once paradoxical is now confirmed by the great times. Since I am neither a politician nor his half-brother, an aesthete, I would not dream of denying the necessity of anything that is happening or of complaining that mankind does not know how to die in beauty. I know full well that cathedrals are rightfully bombarded by people if they are rightfully used by people as military posts. “No offence i’ the world,” says Hamlet.[4] But the jaws of hell gape at this question: When will the greater period of the war begin, the war of cathedrals against people? I know very well that at times it is necessary to transform markets into battlefields so that these might turn into markets again. But one cloudy day people will see things more clearly and ask whether it is right to miss not a single step on the direct road away from God, and whether the eternal mystery from which man originates and the mystery into which he enters really encompass only a business secret that gives man superiority over man and even over man’s maker. Someone who wants to expand ownership and someone who merely defends it — both live in a state of ownership, always below and never above ownership. One declares it, the other one explains it.[5] Are we not afraid of something superior to ownership when unparalleled human victims have been seen and suffered, and when behind the language of spiritual uplift, after the intoxicating music has died away, this confession breaks through between earthly and heavenly hosts one grey morning: “What the travelling salesmen must do now is keep putting out their feelers and feeling out their customers!”[6] Mankind consists of customers. Behind flags and flames, heroes and helpers, behind all fatherlands an altar has been erected at which pious science wrings its hands: God created the consumer! Yet God did not create the consumer that he might prosper on earth but for something higher: that the dealer might prosper on earth, for the consumer was created naked and becomes a dealer only when he sells clothes. The necessity to eat in order to live cannot be disputed philosophically, though the public nature of this function evidences an ineradicable lack of modesty. Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence.[7] Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former. This is the ideal that progress serves, and to this ideal it supplies its armaments. Progress lives to eat, and at times supplies proof that, it can even die to eat. It endures hardship so that it may prosper. It applies pathos to the premises. The utmost affirmation of progress has long since decreed that demand be governed by supply, that we eat so that another person might get his fill, and that a peddler interrupt even our thinking when he offers us what we do not happen to need. Progress, under whose feet the grass mourns and the forest turns into paper from which newspaper plants grow,[8] 8 has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts for our tools. The tooth of time is hollow; for when it was sound, there came the hand that lives on fillings. Where all energy has been expended to make life frictionless, nothing remains that still needs such care. In such a region individuality can live, but can no longer be born. With its emotional desires it may be a guest where it will be surrounded by automata pushing past and forward in comfort and prosperity without face and greeting. As a referee between natural values it will make a different decision. It will certainly not opt for this country’s supineness, which has saved its intellectual life for the promotion of its merchandise, has surrendered to a romanticization of foodstuffs, and has placed “art in the service of the businessman.” The decision is between spiritual power and horsepower. After the hustle and bustle of business no breed will realize its full potential; at best it will be fit for pleasure. The tyranny of necessity grants its slaves three kinds of freedom; opinion free from intellect, entertainment free from art, and orgies free from love. Thank God there are still goods that get stuck when freight is supposed to be constantly rolling. For in the final analysis, civilization does live on culture. If the horrible voice[9] which these days is allowed to outshout the commands urges travelling salesmen in the language of its obtrusive phantasm to put out their feelers and feel out their customers through the gunsmoke; if in the face of unheard-of things it brings itself to make the heroic decision to claim the battlefields for the hyenas, then it possesses some of that dreary sincerity with which the Zeitgeist grins at its martyrs. All right, we are sacrificing ourselves for ready-made goods; we are consumers and live in such a way that the means may consume the end. AII right, if a torpedo is useful to us, let it be more permissible to curse God than to curse a torpedo! And necessities which a world gone astray in the labyrinth of economics has set for itself demand their martyrs; and the ghastly editorial writer of passions, the registering Jewish plutocrat, the man who sits at the cash register of world history collects victories and daily records the turnover in blood.[10] The tenor of his couplings and headlines which shriek with greed for profit is such that he claims the number of dead and wounded and prisoners as assets; sometimes he confuses mine and thine with mines and tines;[11] but gently underlining his modesty and perhaps in keeping with impressions gleaned from circles in the know, and without abandoning his power of imagination, he permits himself to make a strategic distinction between “laymen’s questions and laymen’s answers.” And if he then ventures to pronounce a blessing on the so very gratifying upsurge of heroic feelings, to send his greetings and best wishes to the army and to cheer up his “good soldiers” in the jargon of efficiency as though it were the end of a satisfying day at the stock exchange, there is allegedly “only one voice” which takes umbrage at it, truly only one that is uttering it today – but what good is it when there is just this one voice whose echo ought to be nothing less than a storm of the elements rebelling at the spectacle of a time which has the courage to call itself great and does not issue an ultimatum to such a champion!
The surface is at the root and sticks to it. The subjugation of mankind to the economy has left it only the freedom of hostility; and if progress sharpened its weapons, it created for mankind the most murderous weapon of all, one that relieved it, beyond its sacred necessity, of its last concern about its spiritual salvation: the press. Progress, which also has logic at its disposal, replies that the press is nothing but one of the professional associations that subsist on an existing need. But if this is as true as it is correct, and if the press is nothing other than an imprint of life, then I know what the score is, for I know what this life is like. And then it happens to occur to me, it becomes clear to me on a cloudy day, that life is only an imprint of the press. If I learned to underestimate life in the days of progress, I was bound to overestimate the press. What is it? Just a messenger? One who also bothers us with his opinion? Who torments us with his impressions? Who brings the mental image along with the fact? Who tortures us almost to death with his detailed reports about the atmosphere or with his perceptions of observations of minute details, and with his constant repetition of the whole? Who drags behind himself a train of informed, knowledgeable, sophisticated, outstanding personalities who are supposed to accredit him and agree with him – important parasites on the superfluous? Is the press a messenger? No, it is the event itself. A speech? No, life itself. It not only lays claim to the real events being its news about the events; it also creates this uncanny identity which always makes it seem that actions are reported before they are performed, often the mere possibility of an action, and in any case it produces a situation in which war correspondents are not permitted to observe, but warriors are turned into reporters. In this sense I do not mind if people say that all my life I have overestimated the press. It is not a messenger (how could a messenger demand and receive so much?); it is the event itself. Once again the instrument has got the better of us. We have raised the person whose job it is to announce a conflagration – and who probably ought to play the most subordinate role in the state – above the world, above the fire and above the house, above reality and above our imagination. But we, like Cleopatra, curious and disappointed, ought to beat the messenger for his message. The man who informs her of a hated marriage and who embellishes his report she holds responsible for the marriage. “Ram through thy fruitful tidings in mine ears that long time have been barren. . . . The most infectious pestilence upon thee! . . . What say you? Hence, horrible villain! or I’ll spurn thine eyes like balls before me; I’II unhair thy head. Thou shalt be whipt with wire, and stew’d in brine, smarting in lingering pickle.” – “Gracious madam, I that do bring the news made not the match.”[12] But the reporter does make the match, sets the house on fire, and turns the horrors that he fabricates into truth. Through decades of practice he has produced in mankind that degree of unimaginativeness which enables it to wage a war of extermination against itself. Since the unlimited promptness of his machinery has made it unnecessary for mankind to have any ability to experience and to extend experience intellectually, the reporter can only just manage to instil into it that death-defying courage with which mankind is rushing into this war. He has the reflected glory of heroic qualities at his disposal, and his misused language beautifies a misused life – as though eternity had saved its apex for the age in which the reporter lives. But do people have any idea what life the newspaper expresses? A life that has long been an expression of it! Do people realize just what half a century owes to this loosed intelligence in the way of murdered intellect, plundered nobility, and desecrated holiness? Does anyone know what vital resources the Sunday belly of such a rotary beast has swallowed up before it can appear 250 pages thick? Do people stop to think how much had to be systematically spent on telegrams, telephones, and photographs to teach a society which was still open to inner possibilities that broad astonishment at the tiniest fact which finds its clichés in the horrid language of these messengers when “groups formed” somewhere or the public began to “mass”? Since all of modern life has been subsumed under a quantity which is no longer measured but has always been attained – a quantity that finally will have no other recourse but to swallow itself – since the self-evident record leaves no more room for doubt and the painful completeness makes any further calculation unnecessary, the consequence is that, exhausted by this multiplicity, we no longer have any use for the result. Accordingly, at a time when twice a day and in twenty repetitions we are served up impressions of the impressions of all externals, the great quantity breaks down into individual fates which only the individuals perceive, so that suddenly the unbegrudged hero’s death, even in the vanguard, is declared a cruel fate. But some day people might find out what a trifling matter such a world war was as compared to the intellectual self-mutilation of mankind by means of its press and how at bottom it constituted only one of the press’s emanations. A few decades ago, Bismarck, who also overestimated the press, was still able to recognize that “what the sword has gained for us Germans is spoiled by the press” and impute to the press the blame for three wars. Today the connections between catastrophes and editorial offices are far more profound and hence less clear. For in the age of those who live through it, deeds are stronger than words, but the echo is stronger than the deed. We live on the echo, and in this topsy-turvy world the echo arouses the call. In the organization of the echo, weakness is capable of a wondrous transformation. The state can use it, but the world derives no benefit from it. At a time when progress was still in its infancy and did not as yet crawl through culture on rubber heels, Bismarck sensed it. “In the long run and at some time,” he said, “every country is responsible for the windows broken by its press.” Further: “The press in Vienna is worse than I had imagined; in fact, it is worse and has a more deleterious effect than the Prussian press.” He came right out and said that in order to avoid the reproach of not having good connections, a correspondent printed either his own fabrications or those of his embassy. Certainly, all of us are primarily dependent on the interests of this one business. If one reads a newspaper only for information, one does not learn the truth, not even the truth about the paper. The truth is that the newspaper is not a statement of contents but the contents themselves; and more than that, it is an instigator. If it prints lies about horrors, these turn into horrors. There is more injustice in the world because there is a press which fabricated it and deplores it! It is not nations that strike one another; rather, it is the international disgrace, the profession which rules the world not despite its irresponsibility but by virtue of it, that deals wounds, tortures prisoners, baits foreigners, and turns gentlemen into rowdies. Its only authority is its unprincipledness, which, in association with a rascally will, can change printer’s ink directly into blood. 0h last, unholy wonder of the times! At first everything was a lie, and they always lied so that lies might be told only elsewhere; but now, thrown into the neurasthenia of hatred, everything is true. There are various nations, but there is only one press. The newspaper dispatch is an instrument of war like a grenade, which has no consideration for circumstances either. You believe, but they know better, and you have to pay dearly for your belief. The heroes of obtrusiveness, people with whom no soldier would lie down in the trenches, though he has to submit to being interviewed by them, break into recently abandoned royal castles so that they can report, “We got there first!” It would be far less shameful to be paid for committing atrocities than for fabricating them. The bravoes of this sphere of activity sit at home, unless they have the good fortune to tell anecdotes in the correspondents’ quarters or be pushy right up to the front, and they teach fear to the nations day after day until these have some justification really to feel fear. Of the quantity which is the substance of this time each of us gets a share that he processes emotionally, and the telegraph wires and the cinema screen make what we have in common so graphic to us that we go home contented.
But if the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies. His imagination is the crudest substitute for the imagination we once had. For if one side claims that the other side kills women and children, both sides believe it and do it. Don’t people yet feel that the word of an undisciplined creature, usable in the days of military discipline, carries farther than a mortar and that the spiritual fortresses of these times are structures that will collapse in an emergency? If the states had the discernment to settle for universal conscription and do without wire dispatches, a world war, truly, would be milder. And if before the outbreak of such a war they had the courage to drive the representatives of the other trade together at an internationally agreed upon carrion-pit, who knows – the nations might be spared it. But before journalists and the diplomats they use disarm, human beings have to pay the price. “Some of the things printed in newspapers are true after all,” said Bismarck. There is, after all, something in the cultural section, and that is where our fine feuilletonists work. I say prayers in battles for a fee, kiss confederates on the mouth, praise the wonderful “tumult” of our days, admire order as they once adored Gemullichkeit, compare a fortress with a beautiful woman or vice versa (it depends), and in general behave in a manner worthy of the great times. Under the heading “Days of Terror” an alien serially described his experiences in a capital city which he had been obliged to leave.[13] The greatest terror was that he was urged to leave town, offered only 1200 francs for 1000 marks, and especially that no taxicab was to be had – something that is said to happen in other traffic centers even before a general mobilization. For the rest – one can hardly believe one’s eyes – he cannot heap sufficient praise on the calm, considerateness, and even compassion of the local population. And yet dispatches led us to believe that these people had behaved like freed panthers and wolves from a menagerie damaged in a railway accident. In short, the situation there before the war was something like the situation elsewhere after a concert. Wire dispatches are instruments of war. Feuilletons are not monitored that closely; the truth may slip through there. But by the time a feuilleton appears, it may be untrue again, because in the meantime wire reports have appeared and done their share to confirm other wire reports and to correct reality. Or does anyone think that this Nordau glossed over things because he was already trying to assure himself of being able to return to that place in peacetime? In that case journalism manipulates life, depending on whether it seeks only its advantage or also the disadvantage of others. In general it can be said that in wartime there are, in addition to the work done by solid weapons, the accomplishments of words and opportunities. Atrocities perpetrated by the population of enemy countries are of low or very base – that is, cultured – provenance. The mob and the press are above national interests; the former pillages and the latter wires. When the latter wires, the former feels encouraged, and nations repay and atone for what editorial offices have decided. “Reprisals” is what the press is answered with.[14] It exaggerates the condition of the world after it has created it. It would be terrible enough if it were only the expression of this condition; but it is its creator. In Austria it invented and preserved the sterile pastime of “strife among the nationalities” in order to promote the business activities of its shameful intellect unobserved. Once it has reached the desired goal, it puts its patriotism out to board for future profit. It buys up securities that are collapsing – a Phoenix colorfully rising from someone else’s ashes. Let me overestimate the press! But if I wrongly maintain, if it is not true that in an epoch which is so prone to regard the special edition as the event and which with inflamed nerves lets itself he misled from fabrications to facts, more blood has flown from wire dispatches than they claimed to contain, then let this blood be on my hands!
“May it be the last time,” cried Bismarck, “that the achievements of Prussian arms are given away with an open hand to satisfy the insatiable demands of a phantom which under the phony name of Zeitgeist or public opinion stuns the good sense of princes and peoples with its screaming until everyone is afraid of everyone else’s shadow and all forget that under the lion’s skin of the specter there is an entity that may be noisy but is not very terrifying.” He said this in 1849. What terrifying dimensions this harmless entity has assumed in sixty-five years! The fact that it does not grow silent in the face of deeds it has instigated shows for whom it hopes these have been done. The machines have declared war on God, and between the performances that I have always believed them capable of they still are at no loss for words, while the times measure themselves and are astonished at how great they have become overnight. But they have probably always been great, and I simply did not notice it. Thus it was an optical fault of mine to perceive them as small. However, to clean up “evils” that are rampant on the surface behind which there is something great would be too small a task for me, and I would not be up to it. The other day someone asked me where I was and begged me, with a view to the new times, to rid us of the old filth. I can’t. Great and elemental forces must have the strength to cope with evils by themselves and do not need the stimulation and help of a writer. But though the gleam of these great and elemental forces was already dazzling everyone’s eyes, they still have not managed it. What do we see? The greatness has concomitants. If the future is on their level, then heaven help us! The great forces have not destroyed the concomitants overnight. That bombs are dropped with jokes and dives announce a 42-Mortar Program shows us how conservative and up-to-date we are. The revealing thing is not the occurrence as such but the anaesthesia that makes it possible and tolerates it. We know how the humor ingrained in us accommodates itself to the excess of blood. But what about the intellect? How do our poets and thinkers feel about it? And even if the world stands on its head, it won’t be able to think of anything better! Even if the world tears itself to pieces, no intellect will emerge. Nor will it appear later, for it should now have gone into hiding and expressed itself through discreet dignity. But all around us in the cultural sphere we see only the spectacle of the intellect latching onto a catchword when a personality does not have the strength to keep silent and draw on its own resources. The volunteering of the poets for military service is their entry into journalism. We find Hauptmann and Messrs. Dehmel and Hofmannsthal[15] in the front lines with a claim to a decoration, and behind them fights rampant dilettantism. Never before has there been such a rush to join up with banality, and the sacrifice of the leading intellects is so rapid as to give rise to the suspicion that they had no self to sacrifice but acted on the heroic desire to save themselves where it is now safest: in clichéland. But the really sad thing is that literature does not feel its obtrusiveness nor the superiority of the common man who finds in clichés the experience that is his due. To seek rhymes, and bad ones, to express the enthusiasm of others, to welcome troops with whoops, confirm that a mob will rob, and condemn those who pillage a village is surely the paltriest achievement that society can expect of its intellects in hard times. The unarticulated sounds that have reached us from enemy poets at least evidence individual feelings of excitement which reduce an artist to a private person with national limitations. At least they were the poem that the uproar of actualities made of the poets. The reproach of barbarism in wartime was false information. But the barbarism in peacetime which is ready to rhyme when things get serious and which turns someone else’s experience into an editorial is an inexpungible disgrace. And after all, a Hodler who is wrong can still pass muster next to a dozen Haeckels who are right.[16] And in the final analysis, an outburst of rage is more cultural than an inquiry which is kind enough to decide the question whether it is all right to perform Shakespeare in his favor. Modern Germany’s greatest poet, Detlev von Lilieneron,[17] 17 a war poet, a victim of that cultural development that came from victory, probably would not have had the heart to attach himself to the still-smoking actualities with an opinion, and it remains to be seen whether among those who have experienced this war and those who as poets can experience, there will be someone who can fashion an artistic unity out of the substance and the word. What will be shown is whether something organic can grow from the quantity, to which there no longer is a bridge from the spiritual life because this bridge has been blown up. Intellects that nimbly and comfortably bed down in the split in their personalities when danger threatens will be a dime a dozen.
Perhaps even the smallest war has always been an action that cleansed the surface and had an effect on the inside. What effect does this great war have which is great by virtue of the forces against which the greatest war ought to be waged? Is it a redemption or only the end? Or is it only a continuation? May the consequences of this extensive affair be no worse than its concomitants which it did not have the strength to kick away! May it never happen that emptiness throws its weight around even more than before as it refers to the hardships it has endured; that idleness gains glory; that pettiness appeals to the world-historical background; and that the hand that reaches into our pocket first shows us its scars! How was it possible that in the world war a world newspaper could celebrate its anniversary? That a stock-exchange burglar could place himself before a battle of millions and in thunderous headlines demand (and receive) attention for the fiftieth anniversary of his infamous trade?[18] That banks, being in a moratorium, could not serve their customers but did pay that man far more than 400 crowns for each of the hundred advertisements in his anniversary issue? That the homage of news vendors could be heard over the roar of the cannons and the procession of well-wishers marched for weeks like a casualty list of culture? How was it possible that in days when clichés were already bleeding and surrendering their last life to death they were still able to serve as window decoration at a bawdyhouse of liberalism? That flags were raised by writers when they were already in the field and that an account clerk and a freebooter of culture had himself celebrated by a highly placed group of lackeys as “chief of the general staff of culture”?
May the times grow great enough not to fall prey to a victor who places his heel on the intellect and the economy, great enough to overcome the nightmare of the opportunity to have a victory redound to the credit of those uninvolved in it, the opportunity for wrongheaded chasers after decorations in peacetime to divest themselves of what honor they have left, for utter stupidity to discard foreign words and names of dishes, and for slaves whose ultimate goal all their lives has been the “mastery” of languages henceforth to desire to get around in the world with the ability not to master languages! What do you who are in the war know about the war?! You are fighting! You have not remained behind! Even those who have sacrificed their ideals to life will someday have the privilege of sacrificing life itself. May the times grow so great that they measure up to these sacrifices and never so great that they transcend their memory as they grow into life!
“In dieser grossen Zeit” (1914)
[1] People were urged to aid the war effort by surrendering objects made of gold, jewelry, and other valuables in return for rings and other items made of various lesser metals, including iron.
[2] A reference to Paul von Hindenburg, whose idée fixe, the strategic importance of the Masurian swamps in East Prussia, was derided. Important battles were subsequently fought at the Masurian Lakes.
[3] An meine Völker (To My People), Franz Josef’s proclamation of 1914. This was the solitary apex of Kraus’ appreciation of the Austrian emperor whom he henceforth lampooned as “the Hapsburg demon incarnate”.
[4] Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 3, sc. 2.
[5] Kraus’ terms are fatieren, which means to declare something for purposes of taxation, and erklären, which means both “declare” in the above sense and “explain”. The two words can be used synonymously, and Kraus probably used them to indicate – from within and from without, as it were – the essential sameness of the political idea of imperialism (for which Kraus employs the metaphor Besitzstand, or ownership).
[6] The term Reisende – “traveller” or “travelling salesman” – here seems to be equated with war correspondents, and the unidentified quotation may be an editor’s instruction to reporters to turn themselves into commercial travellers and examine battlefields for their suitability as markets.
[7] Kraus’ pun envolves Lebensmittel (foodstuffs) and Lebenszweck.
[8] “… der Wald zu Papier wird, aus dem die Blätter waschen” – Kraus plays on the dual meaning of Blätter: “leaves” and “newspapers” (or “sheets” in both English senses). In his prose and poetry he repeatedly deplores the defilement of nature by the transformation of trees into newsprint.
[9] Presumably the voice of commerce, here equated with the voice of a press in league with it, which in the midst of the carnage urges its salesmen (or correspondents) to go out in search of new markets.
[10] Probably a reference to Moriz Benedikt, the editor of the Neue Freie Presse, whom Kraus excoriated as the “Lord of the Hyenas”.
[11] The pun in the original is “mein und dein und Stein und Bein”.
[12] Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, act 2, sc. 5.
[13] The reference is to Max Nordau (1849-1923), a physician, writer, and longtime associate of Theodor Herzel in the leadership of the Zionist movement, and his writings in the Neue Freie Presse (“Through the Neue Freie Presse he had the ear of Europe. … His annual summary of events was eagerly awaited.” – Anna and Max Nordau, Max Nordau: A Biography, New York, 1943, p. 209). In September of 1914, Nordau, an Austrian national, had to leave France and took refuge in Spain. He did not return to Paris, where he had settled in 1880, until 1920. Kraus repeatedly commented on Nordau – “Die Feinde Goethe and Heine” (Die Fackel no. 406, 5 October 1915), for example, about Nordau’s defence of Heinrich Heine when Goethe and Heine were maligned in wartime France.
[14] Kraus plays with the words Repressalien and Presse.
[15] Like most German and Austrian men of on letters, Gerhart Hauptmann, Richard Dehmel, and Hugo Hofmannsthal actively and avidly supported the war effort.
[16] The reference is to the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918), on whom Kraus commented favorably elsewhere, and to the German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), an agnostic and rightist with a strong pan-German orientation. Hodler condemned the the shelling of the cathedral of Rheims by German artillery, and Kraus disagrees with him in the early part of this address. Haeckel advocated the continued performance of Shakespeare in wartime Germany.
[17] Kraus liked (and overrated) Lilieneron, whose poetry he read on the same evening on which he delivered this address.
[18] The Neue Freie Presse was founded in 1864.