The Revolt of the Pendulum (3 page)

Outside the German-speaking lands, Kraus is now known mainly for having been the Viennese cafe´ pundit who brilliantly fulfilled a self-created role as the scourge of loose language.
Serious readers, even if their serious reading does not often include him, know that Kraus, from before the turn of the twentieth century until a couple of years before the Anschluss in 1938, was
the linguistic health inspector who searched through what was said for what was meant, and was particularly scathing about the jingoistic propaganda that helped drive a generation of young men
irretrievably into the mincing machine of the Great War. Kept out of it by his distorted spine, he was the pacifist on the warpath, the libertarian grammarian. Whether in the pages of his magazine
Die Fackel
(The Torch) or by means of his celebrated readings on stage, he constantly pointed out the connection between official bombast and the suffering of the people, between
journalistic mendacity and political duplicity, between fine writing and foul behaviour. Some of those serious readers also know, or think they know, that Kraus finally fell silent because, on his
own admission, Hitler had left him speechless.

Not true. The facts say that Kraus, immediately after confessing that the Nazis left him with nothing to say, went on to say quite a lot. There are thousands of facts like that in Edward
Timms’s biography
Karl Kraus
, a two-tome desk-breaker which can be taken as the instigation of the piece I am writing now, because such a big, factually precise yet historically
approximate biography brings to a focus some of the problems that Kraus’s brilliant career exemplified. Such a biography can also be a problem in itself, if its interpretations come to define
its subject. Something like that, I believe, has happened in this instance, and it might be worth attempting a short historical account of Kraus’s career without wasting space by decorating
the narrative with the usual sprinkle of aphorisms. There are a dozen different anthologies of those, quite apart from the compendia of his writings that Kraus put together himself. What we need,
however, is a picture of the mind behind the fragments. Was that fragmentary too?

Timms’s first volume, with its Margaret Mead-sounding subtitle ‘Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna’, covered the years 1874–1918 and was published to acclaim in
1986. The second volume, ‘The Post-War Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika’, covering the years 1918–1936, came out late in 2005. I had meant to write about it before this, but
first I had to read it. As with its predecessor, ploughing through it took time. Timms has done a lot of reading, and takes a lot of reading in his turn: far more than most non-academic students
will ever give him. It should be said that he makes that demand with good credentials. Though his hulking double whammy of a book is further burdened by an ultra-post-modern vocabulary and by his
apparent conviction that having become an expert on the European politics of the early twentieth century has somehow given him automatic insight into the world politics of the early twenty-first
century as well, he has done a good job of bringing subtlety to the accepted picture of Kraus, the picture we thought was adequate.

It wasn’t. But it wasn’t all that untrue either. Kraus, in the end, might not really have run out of things to say, but he did run out of hope that they might be relevant. His
business had been to criticise high-flown speech that concealed base motives. Now, with the Nazis mouthing off in all media, he was faced with gutter talk that concealed nothing, or else with lies
so blatant that they were clearly weapons in verbal form. There was nothing to uncover. Like Othello’s, his occupation was gone. Although Timms has the smaller facts to say otherwise, the
larger fact remains: Kraus spent a lifetime thinking that euphemistic talk led necessarily to evil, as exemplified by the Great War, which he had thought the most evil thing imaginable. But the
Nazis, who largely said exactly what they meant - and even their euphemisms were meant to be decoded as the threat of murder - brought an evil even worse than that. Though it’s a conclusion
Timms doesn’t reach, his facts reach it for him: Kraus had been wrong from the start.

This, however, is a conclusion we should not reach too early. Today, there is no excuse for failing to see that the avowedly irrational doesn’t yield to reason. Kraus had every excuse,
because total irrationality was not yet in charge of a modern European state. Even before the Great War broke out, Kraus had ample cause to think that he was already dealing with enough madness to
keep him busy. Kraus was a Jew, but if he had not sought baptism in 1911 he would have faced a lot of closed doors. He wanted those doors to be open. He wasn’t against the Austro-Hungarian
social order, he merely wanted it to be less stupid, and indeed it wasn’t until quite late in the war that he began blaming the Empire for having driven its various constituent populations
into a slaughterhouse. Kraus preferred to blame the newspapers. He blamed them no less if they were owned and/or edited by Jews. Indeed he seemed to blame them more, a fact which left us obliged to
deal with the question of Kraus’s anti-Semitism.

Timms deals with it in torrential detail, but seems to be in two minds when dismissing the usual accusation against Kraus
of judische Selbst-Hass,
Jewish self-hatred. Timms can only
partly dismiss it, because Kraus really did seem to reserve a special virulence for Jewish artists he didn’t admire – the list went back to Heine, on whose grave Kraus regularly danced
– and really did seem to go out of his way to accuse the Jewish bourgeoisie of money-grubbing, especially if they had taken baptism in order to increase their opportunities. (Kraus found it
convenient to forget that he himself was living on an unearned income: it flowed copiously from the family firm in Czechoslovakia, a source that made it inflation-proof.) The question was already
omnipresent in Timms’s first volume, and in the second volume, which takes up the Kraus story from the end of the First World War, through the disintegration of the old Empire and on into the
various phases of the new Austrian republic, the question attains something worse than mere omnipresence: a focused virulence that takes it out of culture and society and puts it into the heart of
politics.

Timms might have reached an answer on the subject more easily if he had realised, going in, that it was Hitler who gave the question new life – or, rather, new potential for death. Before
being Jewish became unequivocally an issue of race rather than of religion, any Jew who vilified another might indeed have been aiding and abetting an institutionalised prejudice. But he
wasn’t complicit in mass murder. Very few Jews, no matter how clever, even dreamed that such a day could ever come. At the turn of the century, Theodor Herzl had guessed it, but most Jews
thought he was just a nut. The playwright Arthur Schnitzler had half guessed it, but most Jews thought he was just a playwright. Freud, the master of dreams, never dreamed of it. Kraus, whom Freud
admired for his insight, never dreamed of it either. The multi-zero deaths of the First World War were racially unspecific. That there might ever be, in modern Europe, such a thing as a racially
specific extermination was unthinkable.

It should be said, however, that Kraus sometimes sounded as if he might be trying to think of it. In 1916 Kraus wrote a poem naming ‘Israel’ as the ‘cosmic enemy’. You
can strain to believe that he was using ‘Israel’ as a symbolic analogy for ‘Germany’, but it seems more plausible to take it that by ‘Israel’ he meant the Jews.
And in 1918 Schnitzler was surely right to complain that Kraus, when denouncing the war-profiteers, seemed only to notice them when they were of Jewish origin. The fact awkwardly remains, though,
that a Jew could as yet flirt with anti-Semitism and still convince himself that he was being merely rhetorical.

For a man nominally at war with rhetoric, this was a strange flirtation to indulge, but no doubt the causes went deep. It could have been that like so many Jewish rentier intellectuals living on
incomes they had never had to work for, Kraus just despised the bourgeoisie for their materialism, and that the bourgeois people he knew most about were Jews. In Germany during the thirties, the
same lofty distaste for his personal provenance drove Walter Benjamin to become a Marxist, even as the Nazis were busy proving all around him that their own views on the Jewish question were free
of class bias, in no way theoretical, and immediately effective.

In post-war Austria there were all kinds of contending views among the Jewish population about who they actually were, how they fitted into the state, and what kind of state they should favour.
There were even Jews who backed the idea of Austria’s joining itself to Germany (Anschluss) as soon as possible. Kraus never really made his mind up on the subject of what the state should
be. Even as he lost faith in the ability of the old social order to revive, and began to favour socialism, he still wasn’t sure, under his crisp air of certitude, that democracy could bring
about a reasonable society. Like young radicals almost fifty years later, he began to nurse a fantasy about China. In his case there was no sweet smoke involved, but it was the same pipe-dream. In
a letter to his great love, Sidonie Nadherny, he said ‘but really there remains only China.’ It scarcely needs saying that he had no idea of what China had been like, was like then, and
might be like in the future. He just wanted a cloud-cuckoo land to console him from the stress of living in his actual surroundings. Sidonie had already gone a long way towards providing him with
that.

The Baroness Sidonie Nadherny von Borutin was elegant, sexy, clever, and loaded. Her country seat, Schloss Janowitz in Bohemia, was the full arcadian dream. Kraus was no hick – several
great ladies had been among his mistresses – but he was still pleased by such lavish access to gracious living at top level, whereas Sidonie, with the delightful charm of a Euro-aristo
bluestocking whose malapropisms came in three languages, enjoyed having her grammar corrected by the man who could make her laugh. In private, Kraus had a sweet nature to ameliorate the biting
sarcasm he deployed in public, and he had the key element of a way with women: he found them interesting. Under the style and gloss, the baroness had a wanton nature and Kraus knew how to set it
loose on the overnight train from Vienna to Trieste. Well aware that he was a great man, Sidonie was as flattered by his attentions as he by hers. Timms began to tell the story of their long,
on-and-off romance in the first volume, but in the second he could have told us more about how it petered out. In a work whose chief characteristic is to tell us more than the doctor ordered on
almost every topic, this is an annoying deficiency, because the romance between Kraus and Sidonie was something much bigger than a love affair: it was a meeting of history running at two different
speeds.

Sidonie stood for inheritance, for noblesse oblige, for a longstanding social tradition that contained all its contending forces in a recognised balance, if not a universal harmony. Kraus stood
for intellectual merit, which, in a rapidly developing political explosion, was only one of the contending forces, and possibly among the weakest. Even if the crisis had never come, the two lovers
would have been star-crossed enough. Sidonie was one of the rulers of a Bohemia with a capital B. Kraus was a different kind of bohemian: no capital letter. However brilliantly, he lived outside
the walls she owned. There have always been liaisons between the two realms but it works best if the participants respect each other’s individuality even when their physical union is intense.
Sidonie quite liked his possessiveness, but the day came when she found herself gasping for air.

Kraus somehow overdid it. He got all the love she had to give but wanted more. The dynamics of the breakdown are hard to specify because his half of their correspondence is missing. But we
should be careful not to underrate the significance of the part played by Rilke, who warned Sidonie, at a time when she might have been considering marriage to Kraus, that Kraus was essentially a
stranger. Possibly Rilke, a schmoozer
de grand luxe
, had his eye on a solo guest spot at Janowitz: his talent for scoring free board and lodging from titled women was up there with his
talent for poetry. But there can be no doubt what Rilke meant by his warning word ‘
fremd
’. He meant that Kraus was a Jew. Timms is well aware of this, but doesn’t make much
of it. And possibly it doesn’t tell you much about Kraus and Sidonie, who, after all, went on being loving friends. But it does tell you an awful lot about Rilke.

And Sidonie’s tolerance for what Rilke said tells you an awful lot about the insidious prevalence of anti-Semitism even among the enlightened international
beau monde
. There is no
reason to think that mass murder would ever have got started anywhere in Europe if the Nazis hadn’t come to power in Germany. But the Nazis, on their way up, had a lot of prejudice to draw
upon, and it doesn’t need a very big minority to look like a majority when it comes parading down the street. Military force transferred to civilian life was the revolutionary new element
that would eventually paralyse conventional political expression and Kraus’s critique along with it. After the war, Kraus realised almost as soon as Hitler did that if the war’s
unfettered violence were to be unleashed in peacetime politics, private armies could enforce a new and criminal legality. Unlike Hitler, however, he had little idea of what to do about it. He can
scarcely be blamed for that. Apart from the psychopaths, hardly anybody had. Sticking with the old legality looked like the only civilized option. The realisation that the civilised option, even
with a professional army at its command, had little hope of prevailing against the uncivilised one was slow to dawn. By the time it did, the sun had set. Comprehension came after the fact.

Kraus saw the menace, however, and should be respected for his insight. From 1923 onwards he had no doubts that the Nazis were out to wreck everything. He just had trouble believing that they
could. On the eve of the First World War, Kraus had said ‘violence is no subject for polemic, madness no subject for satire.’ Here was a new and madder violence, a reign of terror. When
it came to power in Germany, in 1933, Kraus was faced more acutely than ever with the question of what form of government in Austria might stave it off. His Social Democrat admirers were horrified
when he failed to condemn the authoritarianism of Dollfuss, but Kraus was choosing the lesser of two evils: a choice that evil always demands we make, revealing itself in the demand.