Dicta and Contradicta: More Karl Kraus

I’ve noticed that the butterflies are dying out. Or is it just that children are the only ones who see them? When I was ten I associated exclusively with Admiralen in the fields of Weidlingau and I can say it was the proudest company I’ve ever kept in my life. Trauermantel, Tagpfauenauge and Zitronenfalter made for the extra colour of one’s youthful existence. Vanessa Io, Vanessa cardui – oh indulgence of indulgences! When I returned many years later, they had all disappeared. The midday sun blasted away as ever, but not a single flicker of colour was to be spotted. Instead scraps of newspaper were scattered about the meadows. Later I learned that wood from the forests had been requisitioned the production of printing paper. In short, with information in such abundance, the butterflies were considered to be in oversupply. One of our magazine’s well-wishers actually sent in the very last butterfly and a colleague took the opportunity to skewer it on his pen and look into the causes of its fatal isolation. The world (it was found) is in flight from all colour of personality; from which one protects oneself by getting organised. The butterflies were the only ones who’d neglected to organise themselves. And thus it came about that sub-editors, glimmering hacks, sip away at the flowery chalices of old and infuse their prose with the perfume of their experiences. Even the monotonal Kohlweisslinge (cabbage whites) had to give way, though the journos might plausibly have come to some agreement owing to a certain kinship between them. The war to the death with those little flying creatures represents the triumph of newspaper culture. Butterflies and women, beauty and spirit, nature and art get a painful taste of what it means for a Sunday paper to have 150 pages. Mankind hits out against butterflies with fly-swats. And wipes the colourful dust from its fingers, because they have to be clean for printers’ ink.

Prejudice is an indispensable servant who stands at the front door and turns away nasty impressions. The trick though is not to be thrown out by your servant yourself.

My spirit is stirred by my senses, my senses are stirred by the spirit of women. But what of the body? The body I think and feel into non-existence. Experimenta in corpore vili.

Hypocrites are not hateful because they don’t practise what they preach, but because they don’t preach what they practise. A man who condemns moral hypocrisy has to take care not to be mistaken for a friend of morality, which the hypocrites at least betray in private. It is not betrayal of morality that is worthy of condemnation but morality itself. For it is the sum and substance of hypocrisy. The scandal that needs to be exposed is not that they drink wine, but that they preach water. To show up contradictions between theory and practice is always an awkward business. What do the actions of the mass of men mean compared with the thoughts of a single individual? The moralist could well be in earnest in his crusade against a brand of immorality, to which he himself has fallen victim. Now if a man preaches wine, he could even be forgiven for drinking water. Sure – he contradicts himself. Yet he at least brings it about that the world's consumption of wine increases.

God be thanked I have often shot over the target but seldom beside it.

In earlier times I often got amorally indignant. But morality gets the upper hand here, there and everywhere and one gives it up.

A paradox comes into being when knowledge that's ripe before its time collides with the idiocy of the times.

Antitheses seem to be no more than mere mechanical inversions. Yet what a wealth of experience, suffering and knowledge one has to acquire before one may turn a word on its head!

It is almost ten years since I did any waking up to myself. The last time I woke up I founded a magazine in which to go to war against people.

My public and I understand one another very well: it doesn’t hear what say and I don’t say what it'd like to hear.

The masses don’t understand the German language; and I can’t tell it to them in journalese.

You get so little recognition, it's enough to drive you megalo-manic!

I can proudly say that I’ve spent days and nights reading nothing, and that I use every free minute, iron of will, gradually acquiring an encyclopaedic lack of education.

How much material I’d have if there weren’t any events!

He who wants to do no business with the world should let it be known that he intends to reduce his stock of acquaintances and to clear out his experiences at something less than their purchase price.

I've developed over the years into a hectic pursuer of social disadvantages. I keep on the trail of every chance to get rid of an acquaintance or lose an influential connection. Maybe one day I'll pull off one of the top jobs after all!

I was rarely loved, but always hated.

Hold your passions in check but guard against giving reason free reign.

Vanity is the indispensable guardian of a godly gift. It is nonsense to demand that a woman should relinquish her beauty or a man his intellect so as not to rub poverty up the wrong way. And it is foolish to claim that something valuable shouldn't draw attention to itself so as not to betray the worthlessness of another. Someone who accuses me of vanity puts himself under suspicion of envy – which is not as pretty a trait by a long shot. Someone who dares deny me my vanity however puts me under suspicion of impoverishment.

The sensuality of women needs as little of a tangible pretext as the artistic genius of men. The more unlikely the trigger, the more lavishly it unfolds itself. Spirit is bound to no class prejudice and lust is a perspective on life.

When we cast off an error, superficial characters continue to accuse us of the error and meticulous ones of inconsistency.

Wise men relent, but only those who got wise through suffering.

The faker doesn’t believe in anything genuine. And if he were to believe he still couldn’t comprehend how anyone can be genuine in an age when nobody has any real need to be genuine.

Look, that’s still not the right sort of loneliness in which to busy yourself with yourself.

The only part of an ideal which ought to be attainable is called martyrdom.

What will torture you are lost possibilities. To be certain something is impossible is already to have gained.

Nationalism – that love which binds me to the numbskulls of my nation, to those who offend my ways and desecrate my language.

It’s not true illumination if the faculty of understanding can't make a will-o’-the-wisp of it.

The philosopher thinks his way into daily life from eternity, the poet into eternity from daily life.

In a well-ordered intellectual household some thorough tidying up needs doing on the threshold of consciousness a few times a year.

If you want a clear-cut estimate of your friends, consult your dreams.

We often have to reflect to discover what we're happy about. But we always know what saddens us.

Karl Kraus: In praise of a perverse way of life

From the German by CS and MM:

In praise of a perverse way of life

I had come all too soon to feel the unhappy effect on body and soul of the “normal” way of life I had been trying for a time. So I resolved before it was too late to begin living unreasonably again. Once more I see the world with a special rosy gaze that not only helps me deal with the reality of earthly misery, but grants me so many exaggerated notions of life’s joys as well. I am a living demonstration of the healthy principle of a perverse way of life within a perverse world-order.

I too was once a master of the art of rising with the sun and going to bed not long after it went down. But the unbearable objectivity with which it shines indiscriminately on all my fellow citizens, on all deformity and ugliness, is not everyone's cup of tea; whoever can spare himself in timely fashion from the peril of seeing the world clearly by day acts wisely, he has the good fortune of being avoided by the very people he flees. For when the day was still divided into morning and evening, it was a pleasure to awaken at cockcrow and go to bed when one heard the night watchman call. But then it all got divided up differently – into the time for the morning paper and the time for the evening paper, and the world began to lie in wait for Events. If one has observed for a while how shamefully the latter debase themselves before human curiosity, how cravenly the course of the world adapts itself to the spiraling lust for information and how time and space finally become nothing more than the modes of experience of journalistic souls, then one turns over in bed and goes on sleeping. “Oh tired eyes, seize this opportunity to close yourselves again to the sight of this shameful earthly abode.”

And so I sleep well into the day. And when I wake, I spread the whole papery disgrace of humanity out in front of me to find out what I’ve missed, and I am happy. Stupidity rises early, and so events are in the habit of happening in the morning. Much can indeed take place before evening, but in general the afternoon lacks the raucous bustle with which human progress wishes to show itself worthy of its good name up till its lunchtime feeding hour. A true miller awakes only when his mill comes to a halt; whoever wishes to have nothing to do with people whose idea of existence is being in on the act - rises late.

I cross the Ringstrasse and watch them prepare for a parade. The racket goes on for four weeks, like an enormous symphonic poem on the theme of money-grubbing. Mankind rigs itself up for a holiday, the carpenters knock up the stands and the price-boards and when I consider I’m never going to see the splendiferous end result, my heart too begins to beat more gladly. If I led a normal way of life, I would have to leave town because of these festivities; now I can stay put and still miss the whole thing. An old king of Shakespeare’s waves his followers away: “Make no noise, make no noise; draw the curtains. So, so, so. We’ll go to supper i’th’morning.” His fool confirms the perversity of this world and adds: “And I’ll go to bed at noon.” But if I have my breakfast in the evening, everything will already be over and I can find out the day’s total number of sunbeams at my leisure in the papers at a later date. 

All important accidents occur in the morning. I know of them only from hearsay and by always arriving too late I maintain my faith in the excellence of human affairs. In the evening papers, it is not only events that are reported, but the names of those involved too, so that one feels one is at a safe distance from the scene of the fire, but still has the opportunity to count the heads of one’s loved ones, of whom not a single one is absent. One turns to one’s advantage the transformation of the cosmos into a local fragment as best one can; one avails oneself of that new technique which turns time into jam and calls the jam jar a newspaper. The world has grown uglier since it began taking a look at itself twice daily in the mirror. So let’s make do with the reflection, and avert our eyes from the original completely. It is uplifting to lose one’s belief in a reality that matches the descriptions in the papers. He who has slept through half the day has gained half of life.

All exceptional stupidities occur in the morning; a good citizen should only wake after the Close of Business. After his evening breakfast, he will step out into life’s stream when it is free of politics. Admittedly he won’t be able to learn from the evening papers that all assassinations occur in the morning; for most of them are missed by the dozy-eyed correspondents too. There was once a newspaper that sent one correspondent after another to Paris to report presidential assassinations as they happened; would you believe it - one president after another met his end and each time the death of the president had its mirror image in the sleep of the correspondent. When the German princes sojourned in our city, I knew nothing of it. But this occurrence had no adverse effects either - the worst was that I didn’t get my regular beefsteak for breakfast and so had to renounce a cherished habit with which I had given demonstration up till then of my affiliation with the city I live in. The waiter apologised and told me in a consoling tone of the consolidation of the Triple Entente – the true step forward taken that day and one that put local interests in the shade.

When a theologian fights his way through to disbelief in the immaculate conception, it occurs in the morning; when a nuncio disgraces himself, it occurs in the morning; and it is surely better still that the noise of farmers storming universities or the cries of “Away with universal suffrage!” disturb our morning sleep rather than the peace of afternoon. I can only remember one minister ever resigning after lunch. By chance I was on my way past. How very messy the afternoon version of the resignation-business was. At 3 the police were handing out fines to the crowd that had been calling for the honourable minister Badeni to walk. By 3.15 they were already telling them to pack it in “’cause Badeni packed it in a while back himself!”

And what of justice? She is blind only in the morning, and if by exception a judicial murder ever occurs at a more advanced hour, it's bound to be someone exceptional who’s being executed. What sometimes happens in Germany is that the details of some sexual escapade are on the march, sometimes for 25 years in fact, and then, to be sure, truth needs the aid of the afternoon hours. To let an event like that escape one’s notice it’s no use withdrawing to your bedroom – it being a well-known fact that the bedroom has proved the least secure of refuges from the lust for truth.

Though sleeping through the operations of government bureaucracy is indeed one of the pleasures of life, I'm sorry to have to say that there is one area of my policy where I've no luck at all, and this is the realm of art. For it has been established that most opening-night flops occur precisely in the evening. One’s compensation is that at night there’s complete calm across all general fields of public activity. Nothing stirs. There is nothing new. The rubbish van alone makes its way through the streets, like the symbol of a perverse world-order, and spreads the dust that the day has left behind, and when it rains the hosing truck moves along behind it. Otherwise, all is quiet. Stupidity is asleep, and so I go to work. In the distance, I think I hear the noise of printing presses: stupidity is snoring. And I steal up to all that stupidity and take pleasure in harbouring murderous intentions. And when the first morning paper appears on the eastern horizon of the cultural world, I go to sleep . . . Those roughly are the advantages of a perverse way of life.

Vienna, 19 June, 1908

Kraus, Kraus, Kraus: Pro Domo et Mundo

Chance Events, Chance Thoughts

I’d like to strictly distinguish my existence [Dasein] from their attendance [Dabeisein]. I live, they just turned up.

The little stations between the major stations are proud of the fact that express trains have to pass them by.

The type of mind that can say what everything is but not what anything seems to be.

Hatred has to make you productive. Or else it’s more sensible to find love in your heart.

The silly sausage who calls a pig a pig commits the supreme act of ingratitude.

Medical proverb: The fathers’ trousers, worn and done, are the neuroses of the son.

Scepticism has progressed from: Que sais-je? to: Do I know?

The modern father: My son’s doing the wrong thing. He’s a mystic.

There’s room enough in the tiniest hut, but not in the same city, for a couple who are blissfully in love.

I’m not in favour of women, just against men.

I once knew a Don Juan of chastity whose Leporello was not even capable of compiling a list of all the ice maidens in town.

A slap-stick threw a toothpick behind a curtain – there was a huge crash. Then he threw a needle – another huge crash. Then he threw a piece of paper – again, a huge crash. Next he took a feather, raised his hand and – yet again, a huge crash. But he hadn’t even thrown it – so he went Woot! and congratulated himself on having put one over the causal nexus. The essence of this kind of humour is the notion that the echo of human action is louder than its call and that one best demonstrates to echoes how impertinent they are by not answering them with any further call.

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.

Pro Domo et Mundo

Woe betide the age in which art doesn’t make the earth less sure of itself, in which the artist rather than man faints before the abyss separating the two of them!

Art brings life into disorder. Time and again, what mankind’s poets do is re-establish chaos.

Culture comes to an end when the barbarians break free from its midst.

The modern demise of the world will come to pass when the machine enters the phase of perfection and human beings are proven broke and unfixable. The point at which the automobile will no longer succeed in bringing the driver into forwards motion.

Progress celebrates Pyrrhic victories over Nature.

When a culture senses that its end has come it calls in the priest.

If I’m supposed to believe in something that can’t be seen I’d sooner believe in miracles than in microscopic creepy crawlies.

The legalist declares the responsible party guilty as well as those who know no better.
The humanitarian declares the responsible party guilty and those that know no better innocent.
The anarchist declares both innocent.
The man of culture declares those who know no better guilty and those who did know better innocent.

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

Injustice is necessary or else we would never have done.

My glosses need commentaries. Otherwise they’re too easily understood.

Is it my fault that M actually exists? Didn’t I make him up all the same? If he were a general object of mockery, I’d choose someone better. If he makes a claim for damages because he has been insulted by satire then he insults the satirist.

I’m not sure whether the philistine represents a sort of cosmic vacuum or whether he is simply the wall which is separated from the life of the spirit by Toricellian empty space. But whether he's vacuous or just limited, it's clear he's compelled to react to culture with enmity on principle. For what culture does is to make him conscious [gibt ihm ein Bewußtsein] without making him any the more existent [ohne ihm ein Sein zu geben], driving him to a desperation whose logical form is cogito ergo non sum. It would drive him to suicide were it not so cruel as to force him to prove his own non-existence while still alive. Whether it’s a painting being painted or a witticism being made, the philistine is fighting a battle for his very life when he shuts his eyes or stops up his ears.

Many a man I’ve had dealings with in this my many-sided life has something against me or knows something about me. They will all be able to prove something against me – even if it is only that I had dealings with them.


Do I advise you to kick out of home the error that you gave birth to and substitute it with a more veracious adoptee?

Ask your neighbour about what you yourself are already better informed about. His counsel will then be valuable.

What another doesn’t know I decide autocratically. But I’m glad to ask him about what I already know.

The weakling has doubts before the moment of decision, the strong man after it.

It’s no bad thing to think of most things as being of no significance, but of everything as significant.

Only in the ecstasy of linguistic conception do worlds come to be out of chaos.

By night, at my desk, pen in hand, in an advanced state of writerly ecstasy, I’d find the presence of a woman more disturbing than a Germanist interfering in the bedroom.

I don’t relish sticking my nose into my own private business.

I refer to the topic by talking about myself. They stick to the topic but refer to themselves.

I ask no one for a light. I don’t want to be in anyone’s debt. Neither in life, love or literature. And yet I’m definitely a smoker.

When I demonstrate that the world has lost its way by pointing to symptoms of its decline, one of the lost ones always comes and asks me what the symptoms are supposed to do about themselves. They do what they do because they have to – they don't enjoy it. – Alas, I don’t enjoy it either, though I have to too.

The truly true truths are the ones that can be made up. [C.f. Se non e’ vero, e’ ben trovato]

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

The external world is a tiresome side-effect of a sustained condition of uneasiness.

Karl Kraus: Of The Artist

The signs of true artistry – to fashion for oneself a problem out of what is taken for granted and thereby solve the problems of others; to make good their ignorance with one’s own knowledge and doubt oneself down into the depths of hell; to put a question to a servant and give the answer to a master.

Why does the public behave so hatefully towards literature? Because it has a command of language. People would venture forth against the other arts in the same way if singing to each other were as good a means of communicating, or smearing each other with paint or spattering each other with plaster. The unfortunate thing is that Literary Art works with material the rabble handles on a daily basis. This is why literature is beyond help. The public claims for itself the verbal material of literature all the more impudently the further literature distances itself from general comprehensibility. The best thing would be to keep literature a secret from the public until a law came into existence which banned everyday language altogether, or perhaps allowed the general public the use of sign-language in case of emergencies. Before such a law sees the light of day however, it is to be hoped they might have learnt to respond to the famous aria “How’s business, mate?” with a still-life.

Journalism, which has driven the true writers into its own stall, has in the meantime taken command of their pastures. The hacks would like to be authors in their own right. Selections of occasional pieces appear. One is stunned that the book-binders don’t find them going to pieces in their hands during production. Bread is baked out of crumbs. What is it though that makes the hack hope for attention from posterity? Continued interest in the material that he “selects”. When a man blabs on about eternal themes shouldn’t he merit being heard for all eternity? This fallacy is journalism’s living element. It always has big ideas within its reach. In its hands eternity itself becomes topical, though it just as easily becomes an anachronism too. The artist gives shape to daily events, to the very hour and minute. The occasion for his work may be as limited and conditioned as you like by time and place, his artwork is all the more limitless and free the further it bears itself beyond that occasion. Let it age confidently in the present; it rejuvenates itself over decades.

Creative men can afford to shut out the impression of others' creativity. Which is why they often turn their backs on the world, even though they regularly perceive its imperfections.

That which has its living element in the material dies before the material. That which has its living element in language lives as long as the language.

The thoughtless man thinks that one only has a thought by having it and clothing it with words. He fails to comprehend that one actually only has it when one has words into which the thought grows.

The sense [Der Sinn (masc)] took hold of the form [die Form (fem)], there was a struggle and she succumbed. A thought was given birth to which had the traits of both.

Language is the mother not the maid of thought.

A reader is incapable of surmising from the mere spoken or written thought that its form existed prior to the material it gives form to, nor should he. But one can show him that it was so by trying to raise up a thought that has slipped below the threshold of consciousness. To produce free associations, as distantly connected as you like from the material of the thought, will be a vain exercise. It simply doesn’t help that the man who has the thought and the other he is trying to induce to see it draw closer to one another by material groping. For instance the thought that one “can’t see the wood for the trees” would never be flushed up by a chance sighting of a wood, nor by that of the trees that veil the wood from sight. It might well present itself though on the path via which it first came into being. Try repeating the tone of voice or the gesture with which one said it to oneself, soon enough a certain something that in some way expresses missing the point or parts instead of wholes will start to shimmer before you and – there you have it, you see the wood that you couldn’t see for the trees. To think in the medium of language means coming into superfluity via superficiality. As last night’s dream comes back to you when you brush a hand against the bed-sheets.

Language is the divining-rod that discovers the well-springs of thought.

I fasten onto the thought by the word and it comes to me.

How many thoughts do I have that failed to occur to me and that I couldn’t fix with particular words, but that I whipped up out of language as a whole.

The thought is out there but it doesn’t occur to anyone. The prism of material life has diffused it, it lies scattered about in its linguistic elements: - the artist binds them together into the thought.

There are people who imitate originality before the fact. When two people have a thought, it doesn’t belong to the one who had it first but to the one who had it better.

In art too the poor man isn't allowed to take anything from the rich man, though the rich man may take everything from the poor man.

Mr. M was reprimanded for having put an ugly sentence to paper. And rightly so. For it came to light that the sentence was actually one of Jean Paul’s and a good one.

If a thought can successfully live in two different forms, it doesn’t have it anywhere near as good as two thoughts that live in a single form.

Art has to be content with itself in an age that knows itself superior to eternity.

The journalist is actually turned on by deadlines. He writes worse when he has time at his disposal.

Heinrich Heine got so far undoing the blouse of the German language that nowadays all the louts can go the grope on her.

The imitator is often better than the innovator.

The book page men plunder Nature’s household in order to dress up their moods. When they write about blowing their noses it comes out sounding like rolling thunder – otherwise, who’d understand what they meant? “That’s just like when …” they say, thinking they do the cosmos a great honour letting the events of the natural world trot alongside their stupendous sentiments and checking if Nature measures up. This is what they call using similes or making comparisons. In fact the most they succeed in doing is every so often shedding light on the means of comparison with the aid of the object of comparison. At any rate it’s a matter of being cultured. The you know what something’s like when it’s like something else. When Heine is full of yearning, that’s like when a fir tree – hopefully there’s a fir tree there which can play along … Let me say once and for all – a poet’s most elementary experiences are something which take place in the depths of his soul and what occurs within occurs in the world outside him as well - in this unique moment of congruity there is no disparity between the image and its meaning, no separation between illustration and text. Shakespeare’s experience of the ingratitude of daughters is born with the image of that ingratitude – the hedge-sparrow feeds the cuckoo so long that it has its head bit off by its young. Heine would first have to discover the meaning of the motif of ingratitude in Nature so that Nature’s way of proceeding could then be compared with the given human situation. The book page men drag themselves into the wider world in order to be able to express themselves in the first place; once they’ve reduced something noble to their own level they discover that it’s actually similar to themselves; once they’ve decked themselves out in others’ finery they recognise themselves. The poet is already a part of Nature; if he is to give expression to Nature, it will be in accordance with her will. Poetry does not depend any sort of fortunate fact involving fir trees having dreams. It is not the egotistical pretension that Nature beholds the poet and is there to do his bidding. On the contrary it is founded on mutual understanding which brings tears to the eyes of the poet too. The facile notion that something apt follows from every movement of the soul has seduced the German ear and brought unspeakable misery upon art! Art has been made a means of killing time and thereby kills off eternity itself. Nature wears a pleasing aspect because we find in her the pretty things that our favourite writers have crammed into her by uttering the words: That’s as if . . . They have snipped life down into a series of ornaments which now decorate our nullity. The fir tree no longer sprouts fresh green needles but has dreams. Oh, it’s much more poetic that way, as well as testifying to the yearning of the poet, which we'd otherwise still need to see some evidence of. Nowadays the poet says quite simply: If the fir tree felt as I did, then I’d feel like the fir tree, viz. dreamy.

Let me warn you about reprints. The living element of what I write is my writing: reproduce it and it will suffocate. For everything depends on the air a phrase breathes and in bad air even a phrase of Shakespeare’s is guaranteed to croak.

A curse upon journalism, it has the Midas touch in reverse; every foreign thought it comes into contact it with it transforms into an opinion! How is one to reclaim stolen gold when the thief manifestly only has a bit of miserable small change in his pocket?

Opinions are of no consequence to art, she sends them on to the journos to use as they see fit and is in danger precisely when the journos declare her to be in the right.

I don’t have any deep reason for disliking novels, for it seems apt to me that something that doesn’t interest me is said in a roundabout way.

They place in his way the obstacles he wanted to free them from.

Varieté. Slap-stick is the only brand of humour with a Weltanschauung nowadays. Because there's a deeper reason to it, it appears to be as much without rhyme or reason as the situations it sets before us. The laughter it provokes in our region of the earth is indeed without rhyme or reason. A human being who suddenly gets down on all fours makes for a primitive contrast which the simplest minds will find irresistible. A scene in which an MC in tails falls to the floor like a sack presupposes somewhat more sophisticated powers of comprehension. What could it be but the ad absurdum of dignity, of the sense of formality, of a thoroughly decorative mode of life? Middle European culture supplies one with all the prerequisites needed to understand this type of humour. The humour of clowning cannot take root here. Between the two there can be no comparison. When two clowns jump up and down on each others’ stomachs the only thing that tickles us is when they suddenly swap spots, the comedy of the unforseen agony. American humour on the other hand is the ad absurdum of the life of man become machine. The action takes place without anything getting in the way, making it plausible for a man to fly into the room via the window only then to be thrown out the door – which he takes with him under his arm as he goes. Life gets tremendously simplified. Because comfort is the highest principle of all, it goes without saying that you can get yourself a beer by using a human being as a beer tap and holding a glass underneath any one of his outlets. People bash each others’ skulls with hatchets and tenderly enquire – did you notice anything? Machines carry out a continuous slaughter, but without shedding a drop of blood. Why all the violence? It's a test of the strength of our comfortable ways. One presses a button and the servant boy cops it in the neck. If something’s a nuisance it is wiped out of existence. Wooden beams bend at will, everything goes swimmingly, there are no idle hands. But then a slip of paper won’t do what it’s told. It refuses to lie there where one has put it for comfort’s sake, it drifts up into the air again and again. How irritating. One sees oneself forced to give it a thumping with a hammer. It’s still twitching. One gets ready to shoot it maybe, one blows it up with dynamite. An outrageous piece of machinery is produced in order to calm the slip of paper down. Life has become terribly complicated. In the end everything goes bottom up because something or other doesn’t want to fit into the system . . . maybe a scrap of sentimentality that a fraud has brought over from Europe.

Karl Kraus: Journalists, Aesthetes, Politicians, Psychologists, Academics and Others. . .

From: Pro Domo et Mundo
Of Society

I divide the people I don’t say hello to into four groups. There are those I don’t say hello to so that I don’t compromise myself – the simplest case. Then there are those I don’t say hello to so that they aren’t compromised – a case requiring some delicacy. Next are those I don’t say hello to so that I don't do damage to their image of me. They’re even harder to handle. Lastly there are those I don’t say hello to so that I don't do damage to my image of me. There I have to really be on the look-out. And yet I’ve got together a rough routine. My way of not saying hi to people is such that I know how to bring out each of these nuances so that no one is done an injustice.

Middle class society is made up of those who have already had their appendix out and those who already have so little ready money that they wouldn’t even be in the running for the Imperial Order of Franz Josef.

One couldn’t make head or tail of him, because he was something. He didn’t have that adroitness which is better than what one is because it draws to oneself what one isn’t.

They will sooner forgive you the low trick they played on you than the good deed you did them.

There have been so many times when someone who shared my opinion kept the better half for himself. Now I’ve wised up and only ever offer the public my thoughts.

The prospect of a city whose every extra seems to occupy centre-stage is definitely enough to drive one mad. In Vienna you find your way into a street blocked by the garbage man, you have time to observe his features till he's taken the can round the corner. There’s nothing in the street except the garbage man, he grows to gigantic proportions and stands between you and life itself. Or maybe it’s a local police guard. You see him on a daily basis, you take part in his story, you say to yourself - he’ll be grey soon, like me. Isn’t it tragic to spend your time waiting to die being the involuntary spectator of all this banality? . . . In this city the extras have taken over the film. The head of each sardine comes to have an individualisable visage of its own and threatens to devour the man whose plate it's on. Life here traces itself out without any hint of perspective; its figures are like those of a bad cartoon. They remain frozen when they should be on the move. They move in order to show off the boots they’re wearing. Horses hang in the air, their front legs extended. A man tells a joke, opens his mouth to laugh and will never again shut it. A flower-girl is petrified between takes of the self-same scene. A cab-driver points to his horses and hopes, by assuring the passer-by that he has a cab to go with it, to bring the latter to convince himself that he does indeed have one. The young gallant today is badly shaven.

I've found a thought, but then I have to look for $10. I lose the thought, but I find the $10. The thought is again nearby; I just have to look for it. The person behind the counter is waiting; I have to find change - a $2 coin. I have it already! No, it’s a button. The folks roundabout are getting interested. Then it’s gone again, that thought. The official personage behind the counter is still there. I’m supposed to hand over a $2 coin, but all I’ve got is the $10 note. My coat’s open, the weather's cold and damp, I’m standing in a draft. I’m going to catch flu and then – goodbye work. I have to make a decision: should I go to get change or should I concentrate on the thought? If I go for change, I know what will happen. A dirty-looking hand will reach out to mine, press some gold coins into it and then strew stupid shrapnel on top. I close my coat. Now the thought will be there again soon. The person behind the desk turns away contemptuously and makes a tooting noise. Oh thought, now you’re gone.

There is only one way of rescuing yourself from the machine – by using it. In effect, you only arrive at yourself by car.

The greatest ill in the world is the compulsion to fritter away one's inner vitality on material things that are supposed to serve that inner vitality.

The way people defend themselves against me demonstrates that my attacks on them are so justified that I always regret not having foreknowledge of their defensiveness – which I would otherwise have made a major theme of the attack itself. An academic philosopher, unmasked by me as a militarist, put it this way – Kraus went on the attack against me because I didn’t want to contribute to his magazine; as a lecturer he would supposedly have had to reject such an unreasonable demand. – Now admittedly I don’t remember having invited him to contribute to the magazine. If I did so, it must have been before he got his PhD, and what he really meant was that he had to decline because he wanted to become a lecturer. If I'm aware of something like that, it speeds up the process of getting to know the man and his mindset and I integrate it into the judgment I pass on him. For my attacks present their motives for all to see. By attributing my attack to vengefulness, this man is lying in a way that makes him guilty of worse motives than my supposed vengefulness. Apart from that, he’s going about it illogically, for it remains an open question how it’s possible I myself didn’t become an academic long ago if I’m that egotistical and calculating and make such a pretence of intellectual effort. If I were what they say I am I would have long ago become what they are now! Whenever someone I’ve called a bad apple retorts in this way, all I have to say is that I would never have thought he was such a bad apple!

I imagine an ugly woman who looks in the mirror could believe the mirror image ugly, not she herself. Thus it is that society sees its nastiness and crudity in my mirror and stupidly believes that I’m nasty and crude.

If you’re getting panicky in the slaughterhouse of middle-class life, maybe you should grasp the opportunity and desert to the war.

Journalists, Aesthetes, Politicians, Psychologists, Academics and Other Numbskulls

The distance between art and the general public was never so great as it is today; however there has never before been that art-like artificial hotchpotch, the sort of thing that seems to write itself and almost reads itself. Today everyone writes and everyone understands and it’s just a matter of chance who remains a reader and who steps forth as writer from out of this horde of educated Huns striding forth against culture.

The sociability of the theatregoer is the shabby remainder of an epoch that's already kicked the bucket. Life, having got in a tangle, once got free of itself on the stage – from which location the devil once took it; from which spot the knacker now will.

In hatching the idea of teaching journalism at universities, mainstream culture has really come up with a funny one. Anyone with any social responsibility would demand it be made part of the MBA.

The idea behind all sorts of education is to make life into a charmless business, either by telling you how life is or telling you it amounts to nothing. We’re confused by this continual to-ing and fro-ing, one minute enlightened, the next endarkened.

Space and time get written about as if they were things for which no practical application had yet been found.

I’d give my life to know what the majority of human beings is meant to do with these much touted wider horizons.

Psychoanalysis unmasks the poet at first glance, you can’t put a single one over it – it knows exactly what Des Knaben Wunderhorn means. So be it - though now I'd say it’s high time for a psychological method that can see through the man who seems to be talking about sex but who’s secretly actually talking about art. For this return journey on the highways of symbolism I gladly offer my services as chauffeur! Though I’d also be pleased if a man who thought he was talking about psychology could be proven to have a subconscious that was actually talking about something else.

Neither jurists nor doctors seem to be aware that in matters erotic there are neither certain truths nor objective facts; that no expert report can convince us of the worth of an object we cannot love and no diagnosis of its flaws disappoint us once it has awakened our love; that we love totally in spite of realistic considerations, gratifying ourselves if need be in spite of the true state of the world. In short what they are oblivious to is that it’s high time to hound jurists and medicos out of a world that belongs to thinkers and poets.

They have the press, they have the stock-market, now they have the unconscious!

If someone steals something from you, don’t bother going to the police, who won’t be interested. Don't go to a psychoanalyst either, who will only be interested in one thing, that it is actually you who have stolen something.

Fine views are worthless. It all depends who has them.

Satires which the censor understands deserve to be banned.

The fool who can’t pass by a single one of the riddles of the world without restating the riddle as if it were nothing but his humble opinion wins a reputation for modesty. The artist who turns his thoughts ecstatically to something as inconspicuous as a trellis or a cobblestone is considered arrogant.

What is education? That which most are given, many pass on and few possess.

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)

The art of having something to say: Part 4 - Kraus

Seeing that the fifth of the four reader comments that The Great Stage has elicited so far was spoken in praise of the Karl Kraus quote at the top of last month’s big VCA piece, here, mid-week, are some more Kraus translations, with the promise of reams more if someone can find me a publisher:

The aphorism never coves itself with truth, it is either half true, or one-and-a-half times true.

Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of a solution.

Why does many a man write? Because he does not possess enough character not to write.

Ethics is running up against the limits of language.

Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.

The world has been defeaned by deadly intonation. It is my conviction that events no longer come to pass, that instead clichés do the entire work of their own accord. Or if events are supposed to come to pass all the same, without being scared off by clichés, then they will cease once the clichés are shattered. The matter is befouled by the language. Our time stinks of its phraseology.

Progress, under whose feet the grass mourns and the forest turns into paper, from which newspaper plants grow, has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts of our machines.

Where will I find the time not to read so much? . . .

Nationalism – that love which binds me to the numbskulls of my nation, to those that p*ss upon my ways and desecrate my language.

For the first time in the world SHE wants it all and HE wants nothing but her, the gulf between the sexes widens, making room for a whole lot of misery and moralism.

There are metaphors in the language of love too. Those who are illiterate call them perversions and abhor poetry.

Sex can be brought into connection with everything in heaven and earth, with holy religion and sweaty armpits, with the music of the spheres and hurdy-gurdies, with prohibitions and lumpy skin, with the soul and with corsetry. One gives these linkages the name perversions. They have this to be said for them – that they put you in possession of the whole thing when you only have part at your disposal.

The greatest ill in the world is the force impelling one to fritter away one’s inner vitality on material things that are supposed to serve that inner vitality.

If you’re getting panicky in the slaughterhouse of middle-class life, maybe you should grasp the opportunity and desert to the war.

If someone steals something from you, don’t bother going to the police, who won’t be interested, nor to a psychoanalyst, who will only be interested in one thing, that it is actually you who have stolen something.

The egghead who can’t pass by a single one of the riddles of the world without re-stating the riddle as if it were nothing but his humble opinion wins a reputation for modesty. The artist who turns his thoughts ecstatically to something as inconspicuous as a trellis or a cobblestone is considered a smartarse.

The report’s distortion of reality is the truly faithful report on reality.

Journalism, which has driven Spirit into its own stall, has in the meantime taken command of its pastures. The hack would like to be a full-blown published author. Selections of occasional pieces appear. One is stunned that the book-binders don’t find them going to pieces in their hands during production. Bread is baked out of crumbs. What is it though that makes the hack hope for attention from posterity? Continued interest in the material he “selects”. When a man blabs on about eternal themes shouldn’t he merit being heard for all eternity? This fallacy is journalism’s living element. It always has big ideas within its reach; in its hands eternity itself becomes topical; if it weren’t that eternity just as easily becomes an anachronism too if you let a journalist near it. The artist gives shape to daily events, to the very hour and minute. The occasion for his work may be as limited and conditioned as you like by time and place, his artwork is all the more limitless and free the further it bears itself beyond that occasion. It ages confidently in the present; it rejuvenates itself over decades.

Language is the divining-rod that discovers the well-springs of thought.

The thought is out there but it doesn’t occur to anyone. The prism of material life has diffused it, it lies scattered about in its linguistic elements: - the artist binds them together in the thought.

Woe betide an age in which art doesn’t make the earth less cocksure of itself, in which the artist and not mankind faints before the abyss separating the artist from mankind!

Culture comes to an end when barbarians erupt out of its midst.