The Kraus Project

“All of a sudden, here comes a first-magnitude starlet and makes her societal splash at the pinnacle of the ambulatory entreprise…”

How merely changing a tense suffices for an intention like this can be seen in an inspired example in which “not mincing one’s words” corrects itself. An interpenetration of problem and content:

“Be bold in your demands, speak openly, without having minced your words!”

Nestroy’s people speak bombastically when the joke wants to subvert cliché or counteract demagogic emotionality:

“Oh, I want to be a dreadful servant for thee!”

He has every domestic speak Schiller sentences, to sober the emotional life of the principals. Often, however, it’s as if the tragic hero had been standing behind the buffoon, for the emotion seems to side with the joke. Genuine matters of the heart are being treated when an office clerk approaches a milliner as if on his way to Eboli’s room:47

“Your servant’s looking daggers at me—does he know about our former love?”

Joke and high emotion go hand in hand, and if the times haven’t yet stimulated them to engender each other, they still never cancel each other. To be sure, the poet doesn’t elevate his own wit, unaltered, into his own emotion, but he strengthens it with someone else’s. The two of them play and release each other mutually unharmed. When Nestroy makes light of feeling, we can trust him, and when his wit cuts short a love scene, he disposes of and replaces every other love scene that could have occurred in a similar situation. Where, in a German farce, after the engagement of master and mistress, have the necessities between manservant and maidservant ever been accomplished in fewer words:

“Why are you looking at me like that?”—“She’s in the service of my future mistress, I’m in the service of her future master, I just toss that out, as various consequentialities could arise from it.”—“Time will tell.”

And if the aim is to demonstrate, in passages of Nestroyan dialogue, his accelerated method of psychology, where does a scene like this one between a cobbler and a servant stand:

“Congratulations on the secret jackpot, or whatever it was, but honestly, I was flabbergasted.”—“So was the innkeeper, no less! He made an even stupider face than you. I bet you I could be into him for ten francs now and he wouldn’t dare say anything … Yessiree, to ask for change from a ducat, it arouses respect.”—“Strange! (aside) But suspicions, too … Our master has disappeared. A ducat comes to light among the proletariat … Hm … You’re a cobbler?”—“So they say.”—“And I suppose you made good on a long shot?”—“Oh, you’re probably wondering how an honest cobbler came by a ducat?”—“Well, it is extraordinary … I mean, that is to say, interesting…”—“As a stranger, it’s actually none of your business … but, no, to me, anybody I meet in an inn is a kindred soul. (Shaking his hand) You shall know everything.”—(In inquisitive suspense) “Well, so?”—“You see, the thing is, there’s an incident at the bottom of this … a fundamentally horrible incident that no man on earth may ever learn of, and consequently not you, either.”—“Yes, but…”—“So show yourself worthy of my trust and probe no further!”

Such values are lost and forgotten. As everywhere in art, and above all in theater, scarcity of time has accustomed audiences to ponderousness.48 Only this would enable the intellect, weary from business, to procure those further pleasures that it has so long regarded as the task of dramatic high art to provide: getting acquainted with the latest advances in psychology, a psychology that is only psychrology,49 the science of coming to terms with mysteries in a rational way, bored amid excitement by instructors, dying amid beauty of boredom, from the French rule de tri to the Nordic integral equation.50 No theatergoer managing to go to bed without the necessary knotty problem. And meanwhile naturalism, which not only met the psychological requirements but satisfied other demands for home use by calling things by their proper names, exhaustively, with nothing left out, while fate hung on the wall like a pendulum clock keeping perfect time. All of this so thoroughly and at such length, until the vengeance of the fettered bourgeois imagination finally vented itself in the psychological operetta.51 In the most out-of-the-way corner of a Nestroyan farce there is more expert feeling for a scene and a better view into the stage-flies of higher worlds than in the repertoire of a German decade. Hauptmann and Wedekind stand as poets, like the pre-Nestroyan Raimund, above considerations of theatrical utility.52 The influence of Anzengruber and his successors is detached at its own risk from the saving grace of dialect.53 Nestroy’s dialect is an artistic tool, not a crutch. You can’t translate his language, but you could reduce the authors of folk plays to their scene value in Standard German. Only a literary historian is capable of discerning an advance over Nestroy in this. But the idea that this man, even if his exploitation for the meaner purposes of theatrical pleasure were to meet with ingratitude, can be so much as mentioned as an intellectual personality in the company of those very things that have Hand and Heart or Faith and Home54 onstage, would be a joke that humorlessness should not permit itself with impunity. There are words on every page of Nestroy that burst open the tomb into which estrangement from art has thrown him, and that go for the throats of the gravediggers. Full of datedness, an ongoing protest against the people who are up to date. A Forty-Eighter’s55 word-barricades against the reign of banality; trains of thought whose action wordplay renders inoffensive to the seriousness of life, the better to outwit it. A lowly genre, as far beneath a historian’s dignity as an earthquake. But what if the joke sensed that it’s intolerable to dignity—that it so fooled dignity in advance that dignity is right to feel insulted. Can you imagine that the professionals of the Ideal would let a phenomenon like Nestroy pass without leaving behind a visible expression of their terror? The self-advertisements of Theodor Vischer, Laube, Kuh, and those other concerned dignitaries56 who came out for Nestroy’s hundredth birthday are as understandable as the judgmental politics of Hebbel, who rejects Nestroy after Nestroy’s wit has grabbed him by his tragic roots, extols Herr Saphir, from whom less painful attacks were to be expected, and also, of course, hates Jean Paul and loves Heine.57 Speidel’s courageous insights interrupt the parade of those who, by inclination or for decency’s sake, had to misread Nestroy. What could be more natural than the resistance of the keepers of the sacred fire to a spirit who kindles it everywhere? A spirit like this couldn’t help having every wind and every worthy of the times against him. He ran into refinement above and banality below. An author who in highly political times busies himself with human lowlinesses, a Carltheater actor whose reflections rule out attending the Concordia Ball.58 He orchestrated the horseplay of the sexes with perceptions and gestures that the warehouse managers of life had to cast, in revenge, as obscenities, and in social matters he never revealed loyalties, only personality. Yes, he took up the profession of politics—the way a constable takes up a pickpocket. And it wasn’t the absurdities within politics that attracted his attention, it was the absurdity of politics. He was a thinker, and so he could think neither liberally nor anti-liberally.59 And the suspicion of anti-liberal convictions may well be more likely to arise where thought transcends the region in which spiritual salvation depends on this kind of evaluation, and where thought turns into joke because it had to get past it. How bewilderingly unprincipled art is: the satirist revealed it in his ability to set off words that exploded the seeming tendency of his plots, leaving the historian uncertain about what to take more seriously, the praised revolution or the ridiculed yokel, the mockery of someone’s fear of the Devil or a fanatical confession of faith. But even the historian can sense that the satirist opposed the affliction of humanity by intellectual sham values, and has no better defense than to explain that Nestroy was afraid of the police. Liberals are forever calling in the police to accuse artists of cowardice. So little does the artist take sides, however, that he sides with the lie of tradition against the truth of the swindle. Nestroy knows where the danger is. He recognizes that knowing means believing nothing. He can already hear the ravens of freedom, which are black with printer’s ink. The imposing sounds of education have already come clattering into his prayers. How open his ears are to the argot whereby jurisprudence browbeats justice! How well he teases out the terminological pretensions with which empty disciplines fill themselves for a knowledge-trusting human race. And instead of blaming religion for priests, he prefers to blame the Enlightenment for journalists and Progress for the scientific paper pushers.60 Just listen to the gibberish spouted by the comet-cobbler in Lumpazivagabundus. After a matchless glance with which he sizes up a skeptical carpentress:

“She don’t believe in the comet, she’s in for an eye-opener…”

he continues:

“I’ve had the thing figured out for quite a while now. The astral fire of the solar ring in the golden number of Urion has left the constellation of the planetary system in the universe of parallaxes and landed, by means of fixed-star quadrants, in the ellipse of the ecliptic; in consequence, according to the diagonals of approximation of the perpendicular rings, the next comet will have to smash into the earth. My calculations are as clear as shoe polish…”

And sound as plausible as if Nestroy had studied the problem of the “Grubenhund” at its journalistic source.61 The sentence, just as it is, eighty years later, when the astronomers again personally came hither in a comet’s stead, could have been printed in the Neue Freie Presse.62 I also reserve the right to send it in sometime. But even beyond this kind of applicability in urgent cases, Nestroy won’t become obsolete. For he took such accurate note of human nature’s weakness that posterity could feel observed by him, too, if it hadn’t grown a thick skin in the meantime. No wisdom can get through to it, but it has itself tattooed with enlightenment. And thus it considers itself more beautiful than the Vormärz.63 But since enlightenment comes off with soap, lies have to help out. This present day of ours never ventures out without a protective guard of historians to club down memory for it. What it most wants to hear is that the Vormärz compares to it like a candle hawker to an electricity company. Scientific truth would be better served, however, if the present day were told that the Vormärz is the light and the present day enlightenment. Among the dogmas of its presuppositionlessness is the belief that art indeed used to be gay but life is serious now.64 And our times manage to be vain about even this. For, supposedly, in the theatrical season that constitutes the first half of the nineteenth century, people were interested solely in the affair of Demoiselle Palpiti vulgo Tichatschek, whereas now they’re generally enthusiastic about the affair of Professor Wahrmund and only occasionally about the Treumann affair.65 If this is how things stand, long live the Vormärz! But there’s still another way to grasp the difference. In the age of absolutism, passion for theater was an outgrowth of the artistic feeling aroused by political suppression. In times of universal suffrage, theater gossip is the residue of a culture impoverished by political freedom. Comparing our notorious intellectual life to that of the Vormärz is such an unparalleled affront to the Vormärz that only the moral degeneracy left behind by fifty thousand performances of The Merry Widow can excuse the excess. The grand press alone has the right to look down with contempt on the little coffeehouse that used to spread, by laughably inadequate means, the gossip that people in those days couldn’t live without because politics were forbidden, while today people can’t live without it because politics are allowed. One decade of phraseological enslavement has supplied people’s imaginations with more stage-prop rubbish than a century of absolutist tyranny, with the important difference that intellectual productivity was furthered by prohibitions to the same degree that it’s now being crippled by the editorial page. But one shouldn’t imagine that people let themselves be marched off from the theater into politics so directly. The path of permissible play leads through pinochle. This the liberal educators must concede. How the rhetoric of Progress slips up and speaks the truth can be seen in the delicious comment of a moral historian from the eighties who rejects the roast-chicken era and serves up the fresh-baked seriousness of life as follows:66

Times have changed since the days of Bäuerle, Meisl and Gleich, and although the old guard of unalloyed Viennese, the respectable families, may still scratch the theatrical itch that they inherited from “Grammerstädter, Biz, Hartriegel and Schwenninger” to the extent that they are wont never to miss a premiere at the Royal Temple of the Muses or a revival of Beiden Grasel at the Josefstadt, the main force of their compatriots has long since been diverted from the road to the theater by the most various of enticements, and devotes its free time to a game of Tapper, a meal at the local vineyard, or a production by a folksinging company that’s currently en vogue—times and people have changed.67

Later on, life became even more serious, there came the issues, the Gschnas parties,68 the geological discoveries, the American tour of the men’s glee club, and it will be important for even later times to learn: it was not in the Vormärz that the following announcement appeared in Viennese newspapers:

Yesterday’s competition at the “Dumb Fellow” saw the first prize go to Fräulein Luise Kemtner, sister of the well-known Hernals innkeeper Koncel, for the smallest foot (19½), and to Herr Moritz Mayer for the largest bald spot. Prizes will be awarded today for the narrowest lady’s waist and the biggest nose.

This is what Vienna looks like in 1912. Reality is a meaningless exaggeration of all the details that satire left behind fifty years ago.69 But the nose is even bigger, the fellow is even dumber where he believes that he’s progressed, and the contest for the largest bald spot stands alongside the results of the Bauernfeld Prize as the image of a justice that recognizes true merit.70 One glance into the new world as it’s manifested in one issue of the local roundup, one breath of this godless air of omniscience and omnipresence, will force the reproachful question: What does Nestroy have against his contemporaries? Truly, he’s ahead of himself. As if anticipating, he attacks his small environs with an asperity worthy of a later cause. He’s already coming into his satirical inheritance. Dawn is already breaking, here and there, on his gentle scenes, and he scents putrefaction in the morning air. He sees all those things coming up that won’t come up in order to be present, but will be present in order to climb. With what fervor he would have jumped on them if he’d found them fifty years later! The coziness that tolerates this kind of expansion, accommodates this kind of tourist trade, reveals its inner fraudulence in this kind of blending: what a caricature he would have made of the helpless malice of this innocent, cross-eyed face!71 The farce of counterfeit authenticity cozying up to grand trends, rather than falling in line with them, has followed him like an epilogue; the all-blanketing haze of issues, which the times impose on themselves to while away eternity, smokes above his grave. He turned his mankind out of its little garden of paradise, but he doesn’t know yet how it will behave itself outside. He turns back in the face of a posterity that disavows the values of the Spirit, he doesn’t live to see the respectless intelligence that knows that technology is more important than beauty and doesn’t know that technology is at most a way to beauty, and that there can be no thanks at the destination, and that the ends are the means of forgetting the means. He can’t yet see that a time will come where girls take it like a man and their banished sexuality seeks refuge in men to revenge itself on nature.72 Where talent wages a smear campaign against character, and education forgets its good upbringing. Where standards are universally raised and no one meets them. Where everyone has individuality and everyone the same, and hysteria is the glue that holds together the social order. But of all the issues that came after him—issues indispensable to mankind since it lost its legends—he did live to see politics. He was there when the noise got so loud that it raised the dead, which is always a signal that it’s time for the Spirit to go home to bed. This then produces a posterity that can’t be toured in even fifty years. The satirist could seize the great opportunity, but it no longer grasps him. What lives on is misunderstanding. Thanks to its artistic insensibility, Nestroy’s posterity does the same thing as his contemporaries, who were in material agreement with him: the latter took him for a topical jokester, while his posterity says he’s obsolete. He hits posterity and so it doesn’t recognize him. Satire lives between errors, between the one that’s too close to it and the one that it’s too far from. Art is what outlasts its subject matter. But the test of art becomes the test of times as well, and if past times in their succession always managed to experience art in their remoteness from its subject matter, these times of ours experience remoteness from art and hold the subject matter in their hands. For them, anything that isn’t telegraphed is over with. Their reporters replace their imagination. Because times that can’t hear language can judge only information value. They can still laugh at jokes, if they were personally party to the occasion. How are they, whose memory extends no further than their digestion, supposed to make the leap into anything that isn’t explained to them directly? Applying the mind to things that people no longer remember upsets their digestion. They grasp only with their hands. And machines make even hands unnecessary. The organs of these times oppose the calling of all art, which is to enter into the understanding of those who live afterward. There no longer are any people who live afterward, there are only people who live, who express enormous satisfaction that they do, that they live in a present that sees to its own news and conceals nothing from the future. Joyful as the morning paper, they crow upon the civilized dunghill that it’s no longer the concern of art to shape into a world. They have their own talent. If you’re a villain you don’t need honor, if you’re a coward you don’t need to be afraid, and if you have money you don’t need to have respect. Nothing is allowed to survive, immortality is what’s outlived itself. Things stick where they lie. Freaks with deformities balance out good fortune, because they can claim that heroes were hermaphrodites.73 Herr Bernhard Shaw guarantees the superfluity of all that might prove useful between being awake and sleeping. To the irony of his and all shallow minds no depth is unfathomable, to the haughtiness of his and all flat minds no heights are unattainable. There’s earthly laughter everywhere. Satire, however, has the answer to such laughter. For it’s the art that, more than any other art, outlives itself, and this means the dead times, too. The harder the material, the greater the attack. The more desperate the struggle, the stronger the art. The satiric artist stands at the end of a development that renounces art. He is its product and its hopeless antithesis.74 He organizes the Spirit’s flight from mankind, he is the rear guard. After him, the deluge. In the fifty years since Nestroy’s death, his spirit has experienced things that encourage it to go on living. It stands wedged in between the paunches of every profession, delivers monologues, and laughs metaphysically.

AFTERWORD TO “HEINE AND THE CONSEQUENCES”

The deepest confirmation of what was thought in this essay and accomplished by it is what happened to it: it found no readers. A printed thing that’s simultaneously a written thing finds none. Though it may have every outward merit in its favor—content that’s accessible and remains agreeable even under hostile scrutiny, a pleasing format, and even the lowest price1—the public isn’t fooled, it has the keenest nose against art, and even more surely than it knows its way to kitsch, it steers clear of value. Today only the novel, the work of language outside of language, which even in its most perfect form grants common sense some kind of hold and hope, can earn its author a living. Otherwise the people whose words to the reader abide with thought are in an endlessly difficult position compared with those who deceive him with words. He believes the latter immediately, the former only after a hundred years. And no earthly tear from eyes that see life buried by death will shorten the waiting period. Nothing helps. An age first has to rot past stinking to make the people who are what they can do as beloved as these people here, who can do what they are not. Except that this Today carries the particular curse of doubt: whether the head that survives the machine will also survive its consequences. Never before was the road from art to audience so long; but there has also never existed such an artificial hybrid,2 a thing that writes of its own accord and reads of its own accord, so that, indeed, they all can write and all can understand, and it’s merely social accident that determines who, among this horde of educated Huns who progress against the Spirit, emerges as writer and who as reader. The sole ability that they hold in honor as a trait inherited from nature: regurgitating what they’ve eaten seems welcome to them in the intellectual realm, as a trick through which it might be possible to unite two functions in one person, and it’s only because there are businesses more profitable than writing that so many of them have restrained themselves so far and satisfy themselves with eating what the others have regurgitated. Just as the same person is duplicated at a table of tavern regulars, a cellist, a lawyer, a philosopher, a horse trader, and a painter who are all of one mind and distinguishable to the waiter only by their trades: there’s no difference between author and reader. There’s only one person now, and that’s the feuilletonist. Art backs away from him like a glacier from an alpine hotel guest. There was a time, the guide boasts, when you could put your hands on it. If a reader today can put his hands on a work, the work must have a bad side. The publisher of this magazine is well aware that it owes its reputation mainly to a sensibility that doesn’t shrink from some excellent novelist merely because he’s also rumored to be an artist. He can confidently exploit the indulgence. The publisher of Die Fackel not infrequently has the feeling that he’s freeloading on it. It would be retracted irrevocably should his readers ever discover in what a state of insanity such witty happenstances came to be written, on what powers of self-annihilation such self-assurance lives, and how many hundredweight of suffering the lightest pen can carry. And how gloomy the thing that brightens the idler’s day.3 Their laughter, which doesn’t reach as far as my wit, would die in their mouths. If they could see that the petty material directly in front of them is just a shabby remnant of a thing they cannot touch, they would finally go away. Among those who flatter themselves that they’re my victims, I am not loved; but the people who look on with schadenfreude still give me far more credit than I deserve.4

Given that Die Fackel finds itself in so many wrong hands: if something I’ve written proceeds to venture into other print, few people will reach for it. With a collection of satires or aphorisms, this would be nothing to complain about.5 Things of that sort are content to find the rare reader for whom textual alteration signifies new work. But the essay “Heine and the Consequences,” which came to the book publisher as a manuscript, has made it clear that there no longer are any readers besides these few.6 And it, of all texts, can’t help feeling pained by this discovery. For its wish is to create readers, and it can’t succeed at this unless it finds readers. It enacts the misery of German-language letters, and it isn’t content to make itself the demonstration of its own truth. And so it treads the path of remorse, which leads from the book back into the magazine; and would that even this exigency might please it, as proof of the perversity of the business of the Spirit in our times. Here, in familiar environs, it will at least make the attempt to speak to more deaf ears than are to be had in the greater German public.