Karl Kraus By Night

The views of the author of Karl Kraus' aphorisms about sex, art or any other matter are categorically not the views of The Great Stage, though they are related hypothetically to the views of The Great Stage. . .

"The truly true truths are the ones that can be made up."

"Life is a struggle that would be worthy of a better cause."

"That which is brought against me as an objection is often one of my premisses. For instance the notion that my polemic tears at life's heart."

"Diagnosis is one of the most widespread diseases."

"The aesthetes had divided things among themselves. Dr. Arthur got death, Richard got life, Hugo got the Church of Holy Devotion together with the evening sky, Poldi got the entire collection of the Ambraser Gallery and Felix got all that together and lots more plus the Renaissance."

From: By Night (1919)

Eros

Woman is dazzled by gesture; man has esteem for content. Since neither type exists any more, I have to rely on that pitiful mish-mash that's ended up in pants and capers round me lustily in love and in hate. I'm forever having to withdraw nine tenths of my respect to get to a useful remainder. How little humanity remains in the world, when femininity has evaporated.

Art

That thought is not clothed by language, but something that grows into language, is something the modest creator will never bring the shameless tailors to believe.

I have only mastered the language of others. My own language does with me what it will.

There’s no language it’s so difficult to make oneself understood in as language.

A professor of literature said he thought my aphorisms were nothing more than mechanical inversions of conventional idioms. That’s actually quite right. If only he hadn’t failed to grasp the thought that is the driving force of the mechanism – that more comes of the mechanical inversion of conventional idioms than of their mechanical repetition. Did you know that is the very Secret of Today? It’s something you have to have lived through. Not to mention the fact that a conventional idiom still has more going for it than a professor of literature, whom you get nothing out of if you leave him to repeat himself and just as little out of if you mechanically invert him.

He alone is an artist who can make a riddle out of any solution.

Art which doesn’t speak against the contemporary world seems to me to be art which will be lucky to last till tomorrow. Art sends the times into retreat and is thus the opposite of a way of passing time. The true enemy of the times is the living power left in language, which is in direct communication with the world of spirit - the world of spirit which the times have roused to indignation. That conspiracy between language and spirit known as art may well arise under these conditions. The sense of universal ease which takes from language whatever it needs is something the times indulge; true art by contrast can only come from an act of refusal. From an outcry against the times, not appeasement of them. When called on as a consolation, true art departs the deathbed of mankind with a curse. It attains to perfection by way of disillusionment not self-satisfaction.

Time


The true miracle of technology – that it faithfully sets about wrecking everything it’s a compensation for.

What the papers have printed on any single day of the last 50 years has had more power to damage culture than the complete works of Goethe had to help culture.

If I only have a mobile, won’t I be able to find a forest to walk in when I want?! The only reason you can’t live without a mobile is because mobiles exist. Without forests you’ll never be able to live – even when the forests have ceased to exist long ago. The same applies to humanity as a whole. He who has put all its ideals behind him simply becomes a slave to its needs and will find a substitute for forests sooner than for mobiles. Human imagination has found a surrogate for itself in technology; technology is a surrogate for which there’s no surrogate. Those who carry within them no forests of the imagination but do have the inner being of mobiles will grow poorer when there are no forests left in the external world. The forests have ceased to exist because people have the inner being of mobiles as well as having them attached to their heads half the time in the external world. The logic of it is this: technology is connected with the world of spirit in such a way that an emptiness arises because the new gadgets exist and a vacuum if they're not at hand. What comes to pass within the temporal realm is the most indispensible form of nothingness.

1915

The development of European life took such a turn that religion could get no further: at which point the press turned up on the scene and brought everything to an end. Verily, journalism got closer to the frailties of human nature in order to flatter them than religion had in order to offer them help. In short, journalism can do more to harm human beings than religion can do human beings good. How great that personality would have to be which was capable of remaining itself amid the workings of this powerful means of control - an editor responsible to the whole of humanity! And how strong humanity would have to be to give itself up entirely to his responsibility! Yet this means of control is the means of subsistence for a horde of ethical imbeciles, it is what the frail of spirit could not get by without. The Word that was in the beginning they no longer hear. And so an anti-Christian humanity awaits a New Word - from the Centres of Power and Control.

Between language and war there is the following rough connection: the existence of language that has hardened into cliché also explains the general readiness to trade in substance for a surrogate diction, to confidently find unobjectionable about oneself everything that suffices as a reproach to the next man, just as it explains the rush to indignantly unmask what one rather likes doing oneself, tangle up every doubt in a thicket of bad verbiage and casually brush off every suspicion that things are not in order as if it were a naked act of aggression. These are the prime qualities of a language that today resembles nothing so much as a finished product, the life-goal of whose speakers is to shove it under the nose of the right buyer, a language that shines like a saint’s halo but has the plain soul of the average man – the little man who wouldn’t have time to do anything wrong because he swings to and fro between home and office and when that isn’t enough displays his motives for all to see.

Everything that happens, happens for the sake of those who describe it and those who have no experience of it. An enemy spy being led to the gallows has to go the long way round, so that movie-goers have something really interesting to watch; he’s made to gawp again and again into the camera so that the same movie-goers get the facial expression they’re happy with. We keep our peace. We who lived through it do not describe it. The way of thought that leads to the gallows of mankind is a dark one, I had no desire to travel it as the condemned spy of mankind. Yet I must. And I show mankind my face. For the experience which troubles my heart is a horror of the vacuum represented by those technical devices, the minds of men, when confronted by an indescribable superfluity of events.

By Night


Proverbs only come into being when a language is at a stage where silence is still possible.

The hackneyed language of the everyday originates when they have a bit of a fiddle with Language; when they evade Language like the law, or like an enemy; when they answer questions they’ve not been asked with a thousand circumlocutions. I don’t want to share the company of such language; I want to go the long way round it, it, you, whatever you are, that goes round in my head like a wheel; and at night stalks about like the living dead.

Ornaments and flowers of speech are the favourite dress of an age which has forgotten the sense of such expressive forms; they become all the more favoured the further the age outgrows them, the further, that is, the age’s very substance renders it incapable of creating new ornaments and flowers of speech; and it is thus that the state will “draw its sword”, long after it got used to drawing the pin on the poison gas grenades. Can you imagine something like that ever becoming idiomatic?
Technology can create no new idioms, yet it leaves the spirit of mankind in a position where it is unable to do without its old idioms – now that should give you an idea what technology’s all about. The confusion created when a changed mode of existence drags along past forms of life – this is the very element in which the evil of the world lives and grows. The age does not give shape to idioms, it goes pear-shaped feeding on too many; thus it is that it draws its sword time and again, because it is in incurable conflict with itself. A new turn of events will bring forth no new expressive forms, but to be sure the old forms will bring forth events.

“Conquer the world market.” Because businessmen said it, men of war got busy doing it. In the meantime there’s been quite a lot of conquest, though clearly not of the world market.

(Trans. CS)