Stefan George and Karl Kraus
The range of knowledge for comparative purposes was more than a formal principle. As these various recollections indicate, I actually acquired a considerable amount of knowledge for such comparative purposes through the study of the works of Max Weber, later of Alfred Weber, Eduard Meyer, Spengler, and Toynbee. This acquisition of knowledge was very importantly favored in those years by the influence of the so-called Stefan-George-Kreis. Stefan George is today chiefly remembered as the great German poet in the period of Symbolism, and as such he undoubtedly also had an influence on me. Through him I became aware of Symbolist lyrics and began to study with some attention such French poets as Stéphane Mallarmé and later Paul Valéry.
The importance of George, however, at that time lay chiefly in his influence on a considerable number of his adherents and his immediate friends and pupils who became scholars in their own right and determined the climate of the German universities for the intellectually more alert younger generation. Of the men whose works I absorbed intensely at the time, and whose volumes in first editions are still part of my library, I mention Friedrich Gundolf, especially his Goethe, History of Caesar’s Fame, and Shakespeare und der Deutsche Geist; as well as Max Kommerell’s Jean-Paul and his volume on the German Classic and Romantic literature, Der Dichter als Führer; Ernst Bertram’s Nietzsche; Wilhelm Stein’s Rafael; and Ernst Kantorowicz’s Kaiser Friedrich II. Then, of course, there is the work of the classical scholars belonging to the circle of Stefan George, extending over the twenties, beginning with the work of Heinrich Friedemann (who was killed in World War I) on Plato, which was continued by Paul Friedländer’s and Kurt Hildebrandt’s work on Plato that became fundamental for my own studies, which were continued in their spirit.
A further influence of the first magnitude began to develop rather early in the twenties, became very intense after my return from America and France in 1927, and lasted until the death of Karl Kraus in 1937. Kraus was the great publicist who published Die Fackel [The Torch], which appeared at irregular intervals and, as well as his other literary work, was read by everybody among the younger people whom I knew. It was the intellectual and moraliste background that gave all of us a critical understanding of politics and especially of the function of the press in the disintegration of German and Austrian society, preparing the way for National Socialism. The fundamental position of Karl Kraus was that of the great artist of language who would defend the standards of language against its corruption in the current literature and especially through the journalists.
His work, like that of Stefan George, must be understood in the context of the fantastic destruction of the German language during the imperial period of Germany after 1870. We have no precisely comparable phenomenon in England, France, or, for that matter, in America at the time. Regaining language was a matter of deliberate effort on the part of the younger generation. The influence on my schooling by the style of the Stefan-George-Kreis can still be discerned by anybody who cares to pay attention to such matters in my first books, in Über die Form des amerikanischen Geistes and especially in Die Rassenidee in der Geistesgeschichte von Ray bis Carus.1 Regaining language meant recovering the subject matter to be expressed by language, and that meant getting out of what today one would call the false consciousness of the petty bourgeois (including under this head positivists and Marxists), whose literary representatives dominated the scene. Hence, this concern with language was part of the resistance against ideologies, which destroy language inasmuch as the ideological thinker has lost contact with reality and develops symbols for expressing not reality but his state of alienation from it. To penetrate this phony language and restore reality through the restoration of language was the work of Karl Kraus as much as of Stefan George and his friends at the time.
Particularly influential in the work of Karl Kraus was his great drama of the First World War, Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit, with its superb sensitivity to the melody and vocabulary of phoniness in politics, war patriotism, denigration of enemies, and ochlocratic name-calling. Kraus’s critical work, with its first climax in Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit, was continued throughout the 1920s in his criticism of the literary and journalistic language of the Weimar Republic in Austria and Germany. It increased in importance with the gradual emergence of National Socialism to dominance on the public scene. The second of his great works dealing with the major catastrophes of the twentieth century was his Dritte Walpurgisnacht, treating the phenomenon of Hitler and National Socialism. A restrained version of this work was published in the last year of his life in Die Fackel. The restraint was due to his fear that the full exposition of the swinish catastrophe could hurt people who were potential victims of the man in power. The complete and unrestrained text of the Dritte Walpurgisnacht was published only after the war by the Kösel-Verlag in Munich as volume 1 of the Werke, which run into sixteen volumes. I should say that a serious study of National Socialism is impossible without recourse to the Dritte Walpurgisnacht and to the years of criticism in Die Fackel, because here the intellectual morass that must be understood as the background against which a Hitler could rise to power becomes visible.
The phenomenon of Hitler is not exhausted by his person. His success must be understood in the context of an intellectually or morally ruined society in which personalities who otherwise would be grotesque, marginal figures can come to public power because they superbly represent the people who admire them. This internal destruction of a society was not finished with the Allied victory over the German armies in World War II but still goes on. I should say that the contemporary destruction of German intellectual life, and especially the destruction of the universities, is the aftermath of the destruction that brought Hitler to power and of the destruction worked under his regime. There is yet no end in sight so far as the disintegration of society is concerned, and consequences that may surprise are possible. The study of this period by Karl Kraus, and especially his astute analysis of the dirty detail (that part of it that Hannah Arendt has called the “banality of evil”), is still of the greatest importance because the parallel phenomena are to be found in our Western society, though fortunately not yet with the destructive effect that led to the German catastrophe.
1. Translated as On the Form of the American Mind and The History of the Race Idea from Ray to Carus, CW, vols. 1 and 3, respectively.