FOR LOTTE VON TOBISCH
Heinrich Fischer, the editor of the new edition of Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität [Morals and Criminality], says in his postscript that no book by Karl Kraus is more relevant today than this one, published almost sixty years ago. This is the pure truth. For all the talk to the contrary, nothing has changed in the fundamental stratum of bourgeois society. It has walled itself off malevolently as though it were indeed eternal and existed by natural law the way its ideology used to assert that it did. It will not be talked out of its hardening of the heart—without which the National Socialists could not have murdered millions of people undisturbed—any more than it will be talked out of the domination of human beings by the exchange principle, which is the basis for that subjective hardening. The need to punish what ought not to be punished becomes flagrant. In Kraus’ diagnosis, the judiciary, with the obduracy of sound popular sentiment, arrogates to itself the right to defend nonexistent rights, even where by this time the majority of the representatives of scholarship and science no longer subscribe to things which in the earlier years of the century only a few psychologists like Freud and William Stern—whom Kraus praised for it at the time—dared to attack. The more adroitly ongoing social injustice conceals itself under the unfree equality of compulsory consumers, the happier it is to bare its teeth in the domain of unsanctioned sexuality and let those who have been successfully homogenized know that the social order is serious about not letting itself be trifled with. Tolerance for outdoor pleasures and a few weeks in a one-piece bikini have if possible only increased the rage that, more unrestrained than the so-called vice it persecutes ever was, has become an end in itself since it has had to do without the theological justification that at times left room for self-reflection and tolerance.
The title Morals and Criminality was originally intended only to separate two domains that Kraus knew could not be completely reduced to one another: the domain of private ethics, in which no human being may judge another, and that of legality, which has to protect property, freedom, and the immature. “We cannot get used to seeing morals and criminality, which we have so long considered conceptual Siamese twins, separated from one another.”1 For “the finest unfolding of my personal ethics can endanger the material, physical, moral wellbeing of my fellow man, can jeopardize a right. The penal law is a protective social device. The more cultured a state is, the more its laws will approach the control of social goods, but the farther they will also move from the control of the individual’s emotional life” (66). A simple distinction between different domains, however, does not do justice to this opposition. It expresses the antagonism of a totality that, as ever, denies reconciliation to both the universal and the particular. Kraus is gradually forced to dialectics by the matter itself, and the advance of the dialectic gives rise to the book’s internal form. According to Kraus, morality—the prevailing, currently accepted morality—produces criminality; it becomes criminal itself. His formulation became famous: “A morals trial is the systematic development of an individual indecency to a general one, against the murky background of which the proven guilt of the accused stands out in brilliant illumination” (173). The emancipation of sexuality from its juristic guardianship hopes to expunge what social pressure has made of sexuality, which lives on in the human psyche in the form of spitefulness, lewdness, sneering, and sordid lasciviousness. The libertinage of the entertainment industry, the quotations marks in which a court reporter sets the word “lady” when he wants to point at her private life, and official indignation all have the same source. Kraus knew all about the role of sexual envy, repression, and projection in taboos. Perhaps he merely rediscovered for himself what a forbearing skepticism had always suggested—and Kraus the parodist is one of the few in history who does not, in the role of a friend of the old ways, chime in with the hue and cry about decadence; quo usque tandem abutere, Cato, patientia nostra? [How long, pray, will you abuse our patience, Cato?] he asked. Kraus, the antipsychological psychologist, always has at his disposal insights of the most recent kind, such as his insight into the irritability of belief when it is no longer sure of itself: “One needs to be familiar with the slight irritability of Catholic sentiment. It flies into a rage when it is not shared by the other. The holiness of a religious attitude does not hold the religious person so tight that he does not have the presence of mind to see whether it holds the other tight as well, and a mob led by vigilant collaborators has become accustomed to put its devotion into practice not so much by taking off its hat as by knocking hats off” (223f.). Kraus condenses that into an aphorism: “The pangs of conscience are the sadistic impulses in Christianity. This is not how He intended it” (249). Kraus perceived not only the connection of taboo with an insecure religious fervor but also its connection with the ideology of the Volk, a link the social psychologists did not confirm until a generation later. When he nonetheless directs his barbs against science, and especially psychology, he is combating not enlightenment’s humanity but its inhumanity, its complicity with prevailing prejudices, its tendency to snoop, to invade the private sphere—which psychoanalysis had at least originally wanted to rescue from social censorship. For Kraus, neither science nor any other isolated category is good or bad in itself. Awareness of the unholy interconnectedness of the whole distinguished Kraus’ position sharply from a tolerance within the disgraceful whole which tolerates that whole as well and in turn, obedient to social interests, forms the complement to Puritanism as its mirror image. Kraus is careful not to naively present freedom as the opposite of the prevailing situation. Despite his incomparable poem on Kant, Kraus had little inclination to philosophy and had discovered on his own the principle of immanent criticism, which Hegel considers the only fruitful kind. He accepts it in his program of a “purely dogmatic analysis of a concept in penal law, an analysis that does not negate but rather interprets the existing legal order” (52, note). With Kraus immanent criticism is more than a method. It determines the choice of the object of his feud with bourgeois commercialism. It is not merely for the sake of a brilliant antithesis that he derides the venality of the press and defends that of prostitution:
Just as the prostitute is morally superior to the person who works in the political economy section, so the procuress is superior to the editor. The procuress has never, as the editor has, pleaded the excuse that she maintains ideals, but the transmitter of opinions, who lives off the intellectual prostitution of his employees, often enough pokes his nose into the procuress’ affairs in her own domain. It is not with puritanical horror that I have remarked now and again on the sexual ads in the Viennese dailies. They are indecent solely in the context of the press’ allegedly ethical mission, precisely as the ads of a league for decency would be objectionable to the highest degree in papers that were fighting for sexual freedom. And as the moralistic impulse on the part of a procuress is not indecent in and of itself but only in the context of her mission. (33)
Kraus’ hatred of the press is the product of his obsession with the demand for discretion. The bourgeois antagonism is manifested even in the latter. The concept of privacy, which Kraus honors without criticism, is fetishized by the bourgeoisie and becomes “my home is my castle.” Nothing, on the other hand, neither what is most holy nor what is most private, is safe from the exchange principle. Once concealed delight in the forbidden provides capital with new opportunities for investment in the media, society never hesitates to put on the market the secrets in whose irrationality its own irrationality is entrenched. Kraus was spared the fraud currently perpetrated under the word “communication,” the scientific value-neutral “airtime” provided for what one person tells the other in order to conceal the fact that central points of concentrated economic power and its administrative henchmen dupe the masses through adjustment to them. The word “communication” creates the pretense that a quid pro quo would be the natural result of discoveries in the field of electricity which it in fact merely misuses for direct or indirect profit. In communications, something Kraus wanted a generation ago to excise from spirit as a tumor on it has become a law of the spirit. It is not commercialism as such that is hateful to him—that would be possible only in social criticism, which Kraus refrained from—but rather commercialism that does not acknowledge itself as such. He is a critic of ideology in the strict sense: he confronts consciousness, and the form of its expression, with the reality it distorts. Up until the great polemics of his mature period against the extortionists, Kraus went on the assumption that the authorities should do what they wanted—only they should admit it. He was guided by the profound, if unconscious, insight that when they are no longer rationalized, evil and destructiveness stop being wholly bad and may attain something like a second innocence through self-knowledge. Kraus’ morality is disputatiousness carried to the point at which it becomes an attack on law itself, the lawyer’s gesture that leaves the lawyers nothing to say. Kraus incorporates juristic thought so rigorously into his casuistry that the injustice of the law becomes visible in the process; the legacy of the persecuted and litigious Jews has become sublimated in him in this form, and through this sublimation the disputatiousness has broken through its walls at the same time. Kraus is a Shylock who pours forth his own heart’s blood, where Shakespeare’s Shylock wanted to cut the guarantor’s heart out. Kraus did not hide what he thought of the administration of justice: “The judge condemned the accused to a week of strict detention. So we have a judge” (337). He took all the more pains with the excursus on the concept of extortion that he inserted into the book, an excursus whose juristic competence the experts had trouble finding fault with. He who despised official scholarship established his qualifications as a scholar. The traces of the juridical extend deep into Kraus’ theory and practice of language: he pleads the case of language against those who speak it, with the pathos of truth opposing subjective reason. The powers that accrue to him thereby are archaic ones. If, as one hypothesis in the sociology of knowledge has it, all categories of knowledge are derived from those of judicial decision-making, then Kraus is disavowing intelligence as a degenerate form of knowledge on account of its stupidity by translating it back into the legal processes it denies when it degenerates into a formal principle. The prevailing legal system is drawn into this process. Kraus states: “Characteristic of the administration of the Austrian penal law is that it makes one uncertain which to deplore more, the correct or the incorrect application of the law” (71). Kraus finally drew the ultimate consequences when he truly took the law into his own hands and, in 1925, in a lecture that no one who heard it will ever forget, drove the owner of Die Stunde, Imre Bekessy, out of his headquarters forever with the words “hinaus mit dem Schuft aus Wien” [“get that scoundrel out of Vienna”]. Since Kierkegaard’s campaign against Christendom, no individual has so incisively safeguarded the interest of the whole against the whole.
The title and fabula docet of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, which are cited in full preceding the introductory essay in Morals and Criminality, are canonic for the immanent critic. As an artist, Kraus is nourished by the Goethean tradition according to which something that speaks for itself has incomparably greater power than does an appended opinion or reflection. The sensibility of “Bilde, Künstler, rede nicht” [“Don’t talk, artist, make a picture”] is refined until it becomes discomfort with artistic creation in the traditional sense. Even in sublime aesthetic fiction Kraus suspects ornamentation in the bad sense. Faced with the horror of the naked, unembellished thing, even poetic language stoops to beautification. For Kraus the amorphous thing becomes the goal of artistic form, an art so heightened that it can scarcely tolerate itself any longer. His prose, which was conceived as primarily aesthetic, is thereby assimilated to knowledge. Like knowledge, it cannot depict any state of affairs that is the way it ought to be without that state of affairs necessarily dragging along with it the ignominy of the false state of affairs from which it was extrapolated. Kraus’ desperate longing would rather resign itself to a past whose own horrors seem reconciled by their transience than advocate an “invasion by a traditionless horde”; with good reason, he “occasionally deserted a good cause out of revulsion against those who fought for it” (12). A halfhearted and anxious apology for freedom is even more hateful to him than the open expression of reactionary views. An actress “excused herself to the court on the basis of the freer ways of theater people.” Kraus criticizes her: “Her insincerity consisted in thinking that she had to appeal to a convention, the convention of freedom” (157). So free was Kraus, even with respect to freedom, that when she wrote her memoirs, he wrote a devastating essay about the same Frau von Hervay that he had protected from the Leobener judges. Not only because she broke a binding promise: the unfortunate woman had begun to write, and Kraus’ solidarity with persecuted guilt stopped short at something in print. The ethical declamations of this lady writer revealed her to be of the same ilk as her tormenters. There must have been few experiences so bitter for Kraus as learning that women, the permanent victims of patriarchal barbarism, have incorporated that barbarism and proclaim it even in defending themselves: “But even the protocols of the young women—one sees how true to life protocols are—contained, in all imaginable variations, the explanation: ‘I didn’t get any money for it’” (241). One can guess how the advocates of women’s rights come out by this criterion—the same as they do with Frank Wedekind, who was a friend of Kraus: “And the advocates of women’s rights? Instead of fighting for the woman’s natural rights, they get all fired up about the woman’s obligation to behave unnaturally” (252). Kraus’ truly emancipated intelligence brings to awareness a conflict that has been building since women’s vocational emancipation, which has only oppressed them all the more thoroughly as sexual beings. Something Kraus was the first to revolt against, by defining it as an antinomy, was fought out among the Saint Simonists, between Bazard and Enfantin, with the naiveté of points of view asserted dogmatically. This kind of ambiguity of progress is universal. Sometimes it causes Kraus to demand a strengthening rather than a relaxation of the penal laws. The kinds of things that motivate him to do so continue to be encountered in stereotypical form by anyone who reads the court reports in the newspaper with the sharp look to which kindness, now as then, contracts:
Before a jury in Galicia, a woman who has beaten her child to death is acquitted of the charge of murder, or manslaughter, as the case may be, and reprimanded for “overstepping the right to domestic punishment.” “Defendant, you have killed your child. Don’t let me see something like this again!”…And we don’t even find out whether the defendant has a second child handy on which to demonstrate her ability to improve. (328f.)
These are the true anthropological invariants, not some eternal image of man. “Complete intoxication” too continues to be a favorite extenuating circumstance among those who are otherwise only too happy to set an example. Kraus had to learn that personally after he had been mistreated by an anti-Semitic boor (cf. 211f.)
Kraus, himself a Jew, is accused of anti-Semitism. The restorationist postwar German society deceitfully tries to rid itself of Kraus, the intransigent critic, by appealing to that accusation. What one finds in Morals and Criminality is the extreme opposite of that:
And is not the cretinism that ascribes advocacy for someone who is mistreated to “Jewish solidarity” assured of success in provoking laughter? I myself could easily count up a hundred “Aryans”—the stupid word should no longer be used without quotation marks—who gave their horror at every sentence spoken in Leoben during and after the days of the trial an almost ecstatic expression. (118)
In many places the book attacks Jewish judges, lawyers, and experts; but not because they are Jews but rather because out of assimilatory zeal those whom Kraus incriminates have made themselves equivalent to those for whom German has the generic name Pachulke, boor; Kraus, an Austrian, calls them Kasmader. A polemic that distinguished between its objects by attacking Christians and sparing Jews would by doing so already have adopted the anti-Semitic criterion of an essential distinction between the two groups. What Kraus did not forgive the Jews for, what he attacked in his writings, was that they had ceded spirit to the sphere of circulation capital; the betrayal that they committed—they who were burdened by opprobrium and secretly selected to be victims—by acting in accordance with a principle that intended injustice to them as a general principle and ultimately led to their extermination. Anyone who suppresses this aspect of Kraus’ abhorrence of the liberal press portrays him falsely in order that the status quo, whose physiognomist Kraus was as no one else, may pursue its business undisturbed. For those who want both to reintroduce the death penalty and exonerate the torturers of Auschwitz, it would be only too welcome if they, anti-Semites at heart, could render Kraus harmless by making him an anti-Semite. In Morals and Criminality he leaves no doubt about why he denounced the Viennese Jewish press before the nationalist and völkische [populist, as in Volk, people] press: “That has to be said with regard to the ravings of an anti-Semitic press, which does not need any more stringent control because—in comparison with the Jewish press—it owes its lesser degree of dangerousness to its higher degree of talentlessness” (116f.) The only thing one can object to in Kraus is that he deceived himself about the extent of the danger, as did, presumably, most intellectuals of his time. He could not foresee that the very sub-kitsch apocryphal quality that characterizes a name like the Völkischer Beobachter as much as it does Streicher’s Stürmer ultimately contributed to the ubiquity of an effect whose provincialism Kraus equated with spatial boundaries. Kraus’ spirit, which cast its spell all around it, was itself enthralled: bewitched by spirit. Only by casting his own spell could he free himself from that spell while in the middle of its entanglement. He anticipated everything, had premonitions of every foul deed perpetrated through spirit. But he could not conceive of a world in which spirit is simply disempowered in favor of a power to which it had formerly at least been able to sell itself. This is the truth of something Kraus said in the last years of his life: that he couldn’t think of anything to say about Hitler.
Bourgeois society teaches the distinction between the public and professional life on the one hand and the private life on the other and promises protection for the individual as the nucleus of its economy. Kraus’ method actually asks, with ironic modesty, nothing more than to what extent society is applying this principle in the practice of its criminal justice, to what extent it accords the individual the promised protection and does not on the contrary stand ready to pounce on the individual in the name of threadbare ideals as soon as the individual really makes use of the promised freedom. Using blinders as a lens, Kraus persists with this one question. Through it the state of society as a whole is rendered suspect. The defense of the individual’s private freedom acquires a paradoxical priority over that of a political freedom that Kraus despises as largely ideological because of its inability to realize itself in the private sphere. Because he is concerned with freedom as a whole and not with a particular freedom, he takes up the cause of the particular freedom of the most neglected individuals. He was not a reliable ally for sworn progressives. In connection with the affair of Princess Coburg he wrote:
What weight—even for a Dreyfus partisan—does the injustice of the “affair,” bewailed with a world-lament, have next to the case of Mattassich? What weight does the victim of the interests of the state carry alongside the national martyrdom of private revenge! The hypocritical meanness that assailed the noses of decent people from every “measure” taken against the uncomfortable couple has given the concept of the “functionary” a penetrating significance for all time, more immutable than the certificate of a psychiatric commission or the verdict of a military court. (86f.)
In the end he sided with Dolfuss, who he believed could have stopped Hitler, rather than with the Social Democrats, whom he did not think capable of it. The perspective of a social order in which one chased a pretty girl through the streets with a shaved head for polluting the race was simply intolerable to him. As a polemicist Kraus takes the standpoint of the feudal knight, obedient to the simplest, and therefore forgotten, self-evident truth, namely that someone well brought up, with a good childhood, respects the norms of a good upbringing in the world for which that upbringing is to prepare him and with whose norms it nevertheless necessarily clashes. In Kraus that ripened into unbounded masculine gratitude for the happiness woman provides, the sensuous happiness that consoles spirit in its abandonment and neediness. That is tacitly motivated by the fact that the accessibility of happiness is a condition for the proper way of life; the intelligible sphere emerges when it opens onto sensuous fulfillment and not renunciation. This kind of gratitude raises Kraus’ idiosyncratic discreetness to the level of a moral principle: “There is a feeling of taking part in something inexpressibly disgraceful when day after day one sees possibilities and opportunities, the kind and intensity of a love relationship discussed with the matter-of-factness of a political discussion” (140). For Kraus, the heaviest guilt “with which a man and a doctor can burden his conscience is the violation of the duty to confidentiality vis-à-vis a woman” (173). As a gentleman he wants to compensate, in the bourgeois era, for the ways in which the patriarchal order—in virtually any political system—violates women. To see in him a contradiction between emancipatory consciousness and aristocratic sympathies is to confuse participation in the bleating of the ubiquitous herd with autonomous judgment and to fail to see that it is still easier for a feudal knight to will that the freedom of his own way of life be a general maxim than it is for a bourgeois dedicated to the exchange principle, who begrudges anyone else enjoyment because he begrudges himself enjoyment. Kraus convicts men of the bestiality that is most aberrant when they act in the name of an honor they have devised for women, an honor in which the oppression of women only perpetuates itself in ideological form. Kraus wants to restore the integrity of spirit—the spirit that, as the principle of the domination of nature, violated women. In hoping to shield a woman’s private life from the public eye—even when she for her part leads her life for the sake of publicity—Kraus has an intimation of the complicity between a seething Volk-soul and rule by force, between the plebiscitarian and the totalitarian principles. The man for whom judges were hangmen trembles at the terror that the nonsense of “people’s justice” [Volksjustiz] must inspire even in its most liberal defenders (cf. 41).
Kraus does not confront society with morality—only its own morality. The medium in which this morality convicts itself is stupidity. For Kraus, the empirical proof of that stupidity is Kant’s pure practical reason, following the Socratic teaching that sees virtue and insight as identical and culminates in the theorem that the moral law, the categorical imperative, is nothing but reason as such, freed of heteronomous restrictions. Kraus uses stupidity to demonstrate how little society has been able to realize in its members the concept of the autonomous and mature individual it presupposes. Kraus’ critique of liberalism—in the years when this was written he was still conservative—is a critique of its narrow-mindedness [Borniertheit]. This word occurs in the wonderful sketches for Capital that Marx omitted from the final version, probably as too philosophical, replacing them with strictly economic argumentation. According to Marx, capitalism’s false consciousness distorts the knowledge it could have; free competition is “nothing more than free development on a narrow-minded [borniert] basis—the basis of the rule of capital.”2 Kraus, who would hardly have been familiar with Marx’ formulation, talked about narrow-mindedness where it hurts: with regard to the concrete bourgeois consciousness that thinks itself wonderfully enlightened. He skewers the unreflective intelligence that is at one with its situation. It contradicts its own claim to a capacity for judgment and experience of the world. It adapts conformistically to a state of affairs before whose convenus it halts and which it regurgitates ceaselessly. Hofmannsthal, who annoyed Kraus, remarks in his Buch der Freunde [Book of Friends], no doubt an insight of his own: “The most dangerous kind of stupidity is a keen understanding.”3 This is not to be taken completely literally: subtlety and the power of logical thought are indispensable moments of spirit, and Kraus was certainly not lacking in them. At the same time, there is more to the aperçu than irrationalist resentment. Stupidity is not an injury done to the intelligence from the outside, especially not the Viennese kind that both Hofmannsthal and his adversary were irritated by. Instrumental reason, which has come to be considered self-evident, turns into stupidity through its own logic, formal thought that owes its own universality and thereby its applicability to goals of any kind whatsoever to its abdication of specificity attained through content, through its objects. Foolish cleverness has at its disposal the universality of the logical apparatus—a specialty ready to be put into action. It was the advance of this kind of intelligence that made the triumph of positivist science possible, and presumably the triumph of the system of rational law as well. Men of keen intellect not only assure their own self-preservation by being aggressively right; above and beyond that, they also perform what Marx called, with utmost irony, socially useful labor. But because they exclude the qualitative aspects of things through a logic of subsumption, their organs of experience atrophy. The more their thinking mechanism, undisturbed by interruptions, establishes itself across from what is to be thought, the more it distances itself from the matter at hand, naively replacing it with a detached, fetishized method. Those who orient themselves, even in their own responses, by that method gradually act accordingly. They attain realization as the clever calf for whom the how, the mode of finding something out and organizing it in terms of pre-established categories, suppresses any and all interest in the mater itself, even when access to it occurs through subjectivity. Ultimately their judgments and their arrangements become as irrelevant as the accumulated facts that are compatible with methodology. The latter is neutralized by its lack of relationship to the matter at hand. Illumination no longer comes to it; there is no longer anything in which self-satisfied cleverness can infer that what is ought to be otherwise. The intellectual defect immediately becomes a moral defect; the prevailing baseness to which thought and language accommodate eats at their content, and they collaborate unawarely on the web of total injustice. Kraus is freed from the need to moralize. He can point to the way any and every perfidy wins out in the form of the foolishness of decent, even intelligent people, thereby becoming the index of its own untruth. Hence his jokes; they confront the prevailing spirit with its stupidity so unexpectedly that it loses its capacity to argue and confesses itself for what it is. Beyond all discussion, the joke sits in judgment. If anyone has ever seduced people to the truth, as Kierkegaard, Kraus’ patron saint, wanted to do, then it is Kraus, through jokes. The best are scattered throughout the essay “Die Kinderfreunde” [“Friends of Children”], a central piece in the book, written after a trial in which a professor at the University of Vienna had been accused of “informing, in his photographic studio, two boys, the sons of two lawyers, about sexual matters, encouraging them to masturbate, and ‘touching them indecently’” (164 note). The essay does not defend the accused but rather accuses the plaintiffs, the co-plaintiffs, and the experts. Of the key witness, one of the boys, Kraus says:
This child—no angel is so pure, but none is so fearful either—speaks of the dangers that threaten his youth, in much the same way the buffoon speaks of the seven years’ war he is about to go off to. And to remain in the perverse milieu of the trial: These little historians are really backwards-looking prophets…. (178)
Kraus’ most powerful means of judging the judges, however, is the punitive quotation of current evidence for any accusation whatsoever. The chapter “An Austrian Murder Trial” gives four pages, word for word and without commentary, of passages from the proceedings against a woman charged with homicide. They surpass all invective. As early as 1906, Kraus’ sensorium must have sensed that subjective testimony fails before the massiveness of the inhumane world it bears witness against: as does the belief that the facts speak against themselves in an overall state of affairs in which the organs of living experience have died out. Kraus handled the dilemma brilliantly. His linguistic technique created a space in which he gave structure to blind, intentionless, chaotic material without adding anything, the way a magnet structures the iron refuse that happens to come near it. Only someone who read the original red issues of Kraus’ Die Fackel [The Torch] could fully gauge Kraus’ capacity for this, for which there is hardly any other term than the awkward word “demonic.”4 Something of that capacity is preserved in this book. Today, when language in its modesty sees itself forced to the montage technique in literary depiction when confronted with a horror that surpasses everything Kraus had prophesied on the basis of trivial figures of speech, it is groping toward the implications of what Kraus had already succeeded in doing. He is not rendered obsolete by the worse things that came after him because he had already recognized the worst in the moderately bad and had revealed it by reflecting it. Since then the average has revealed itself to be the worst, the ordinary citizen to be Eichmann, the teacher who toughens up youth to be Boger. The element in Kraus that alienates those who would like to defend themselves from him, not because he has no contemporary relevance but because he has too much, is connected with his irresistible quality. Like Kafka, he makes the reader a potential guilty party—if he has not read every word of Kraus. For only the totality of Kraus’ words create the space in which he speaks through silence. But the person who does not have the courage to plunge into the hellishness succumbs without mercy to the spell that emanates from it. Only the person who surrenders without force to Kraus’ violence can attain freedom from him. What ethical mediocrity accuses him of, calling it lack of compassion, is the lack of compassion of a society which, now as then, talks its way out of something by appealing to human understanding, when in fact humaneness decrees that understanding stop.
The moment of mythic irresistibility arouses resistance to Kraus as emphatically as it did thirty years ago, when he was still alive; and with less embarrassment, because he has died. Those who criticize him with snide superiority no longer have to be afraid of reading their words in Die Fackel. As always, the resistances have a basis in his work. Repetitions mar Morals and Criminality. Myth and repetition stand in a constellation with one another, the constellation of the coercive invariance of the natural context, from which there is no exit.5 To the extent to which Kraus diagnoses society as a perpetuation of a vile natural history, the repetitions are required of him by his guilty subject matter, the stereotypical situations that cannot be addressed in language. Kraus had no illusions about that; he also repeats the idea that as long as the language of criticism has not abolished it one has to repeat what language alone is not capable of abolishing. “Again and again, it is as though one were saying it for the first time: The aggressiveness of a system of justice that tries to regulate the relations between the sexes has always produced the worst immorality; burdening the sexual drive with criminality is a contribution to crime on the part of the state” (180). Still, it is astonishing that a writer whom none of his German or Austrian contemporaries surpassed when it came to the linguistic force of individual formulations, the precision of detail, or the richness of syntactic form should be relatively indifferent when it came to what might be called, in analogy to music, the large-scale form of prose. If need be, that can be explained by the method of immanent criticism and the juristic stance. Kraus’ genius becomes inspired where language has fixed rules that are then violated by unprincipled journalists, who are in turn echoed by whole nations. Even the points where Kraus’ prose revolts in support of works that are revolutionary but incompatible with the rules as strictly defined are achieved without losing touch with the rules. Dialectics is the ether in which Kraus’ autonomous linguistic art thrived, like a galaxy of secret counterexamples. But large-scale prose forms have no canon comparable to the norms of grammar and syntax; decisions about what is right and wrong in the construction of extended prose pieces or even books take place only in the laws the work prescribes for itself out of immanent necessity. This was where Kraus had his blind spot, the same blind spot as in his—not, granted, inexorable—aversion to Expressionism, and perhaps also the same as in his relation to any music that made strenuous demands. When Kraus fails to follow good advice and repeats jokes, he reaps disaster; he incurs a penalty like the one Proust says we suffer: we do not commit acts of tactlessness, Proust says, they wait to be committed. So intrusive, at the expense of their own effectiveness, are jokes; Freud, who studied them as he did parapraxes, would not have been at a loss for a theoretical explanation. In jokes, language crystallizes suddenly, against its own intention. Jokes are already present within the design of language, and the one who makes the joke is their executor. He calls language to the stand to bear witness against itself. Linguistic jokes are preestablished, and their variety is not infinite. This is why they are so readily duplicated; they occur to different authors, unbeknownst to one another. The squeamishness that is pained by Kraus’ repetitions may find compensation in the inexhaustible abundance of new things that occur to him in between the repetitions.
This quality—in music it is called Gestaltenreichtum [wealth of form]—is imparted to large-scale prose forms as the art of transitions. At the end of a paragraph from “Kinderfreunde,” Kraus writes, in quotation marks, “ ‘A condemnation of two adults for homosexual relations is something to be regretted; a man who has misused boys who have not yet reached the legal age ought to be condemned’” (183). The next paragraph begins: “But the fathers should not be the ones to turn him in” (183). The comic force, the equivalent of a joke, is hardly due solely to the argument, which in applying the general principle previously stated to the specific case causes the generality of the principle to totter and ridicules it. Rather, the locus of the vis comica is the hiatus. Poker-faced, it arouses the illusion of a new beginning. The sheer form of the hiatus is the punch line, a punch line of oral delivery. At such moments Kraus’ charm as a speaker—he was gentle with his monsters—created an infectious laughter. In such moments the operetta was born of the spirit of prose. Operettas should be like this; music should win out in them, the way Kraus’ jokes win out when he refrains from joking. The book as a whole sheds light on Kraus’ relationship to the operetta; pieces like the one about the accusers and the victims in the Beer case, or the one about the trial of Riehl, the brothelkeeper, are almost textbooks of Viennese Offenbachiades; in Vienna, the imported Budapest version had robbed them of the possibility of being written and produced. Kraus rescued the exiled operetta. In its nonsense, which he adored, the nonsense of the world, which Kraus denounced relentlessly in the worldly context, experiences an unworldly transfiguration. A model of what an operetta would need to look like to restore to the genre what a rationalized commerce in nonsense has taken from it might look something like this:
Hence in the future some court will have to decide the question of whether a woman can accept the “Schandgewerbe” [wages of sin]. Let us be happy that public stultification in sexual matters has taken this crystalline form in which even the fool recognizes it. And that the “proof of complete moral depravity” must be furnished. A scene in a commissariat: “Yes, what do you want to report?” “I would like to notify you of a Schendgewerbe!” “Yes, can you”—switching to High German—“furnish the proof of complete moral depravity?” (embarrassedly) “No.” “Next time be careful to get farther!—Such a slob!” A humane commissioner, one who can be talked to, will advise the party to engage in a little prohibited prostitution first. But isn’t that what’s against the law? Naturally it’s against the law! But it has to be proved in order to provide the right to its “perpetration.” Naturally intercession is helpful here too, and the proof of complete moral depravity can sometimes be considered to have been furnished when one can prove afterwards that there is still something in the petitioner to be depraved. On the other hand, strict care is taken that no case of “clandestine prostitution” elude official knowledge, even when it is not a question of it providing an indication of the capacity to perpetrate the Schandgewerbe. Giving out the little book, however, is a kind of prize for turning oneself in for secret prostitution. (262f.)
The voice of the living Kraus has been immortalized in his prose; it gives the prose its mimic quality. Kraus’ power as a writer is close to that of the actor. That and the juristic aspect of his work unite in its forensic aspect. The restrained pathos of oral speech, the older Burg-theater style that Kraus defended against the alinguistic, visually oriented theater of the neoromantic regisseurs disappeared from the stage not only, as Kraus thought, because it lacked a linguistic culture, but also because the voice of the mimic no longer carries. The condemned voice found a refuge in the written word, in precisely the objectified and constructed language that for its part humiliated the mimetic moment and, before Kraus, was its enemy. He protected pathos from declamation, however, by removing it from an aesthetic illusion that formed a contrast to a reality without pathos and turning it toward the reality that no longer stops at anything and for that reason can be called by name only by pathos, the pathos it makes fun of. The rising curve of the book coincides with the advance of Kraus’ pathos. In the archaic quality of his rolling periods and far-flung hypotaxes there echo those of the actor. The sympathy that Kraus showed many dialect writers and comedians, in preference to so-called high literature and in protest against it, is inspired by complicity with the undomesticated mimetic moment. It is also the root of Kraus’ jokes: in them language imitates the gestures of language the way the grimaces of the comedian imitate the face of the person he parodies. For all its rationality and its force, the thoroughgoing constructivism of Kraus’ language is its translation back into gesture, into a medium that is older than that of judgment. Confronted with it, argumentation easily turns into impotent rationalization. This is the source in Kraus of what the bleating sophisticates take up arms against, futilely, asserting that it is old-fashioned. With Kraus, immanent critique is always the revenge of the old on what it has turned into, standing in for something better that does not exist yet. This is why these passages through which Kraus’ voice thunders are as fresh as the day they were written. In his essay “A Fiend,” about Johann Feigl, privy councilor and vice-president of the Vienna Landesgericht, one paragraph closes with these words: “When, at some point in the future, Herr Feigl ends his eventful life, which will have encompassed about ten thousand years, the rest of them passed in prison, a confession of his worst sin may be wrung from him in a dark hour, before a higher court makes its decision: ‘I spent my whole life administering the Austrian penal law’” (45).
The closing paragraphs of an article entitled “All Pursue ‘Good Uncles,’” which appeared in the neighborhood news section of a major daily newspaper in 1964, eliminate the need for any lengthy proofs of the contemporary relevance of Morals and Criminality. Certainly the reporter is not under suspicion of having plagiarized from Kraus, but motifs that Kraus invented for polemical purposes in the operetta passages of the essay about “children’s friends” recur here, word for word and wholly without irony:
How knowledgeable children have become was recently demonstrated by a twelve-year-old boy. After visiting the children’s theater in the zoo with friends, he was strolling through the zoo. In a corner of the monkey house a man suddenly exhibited himself in front of him, a man who had already approached the child earlier. When the stranger tried to entice the child into indecent acts, the boy responded, “You must be a sex offender!” At which point the fiend quickly fled the scene. The boys’ parents informed the criminal police. The child recognized the perpetrator, who had the appropriate criminal record, on a card in the photo album of criminals at the police headquarters. The man was arrested at his place of work on the same day and confessed.—Recently a thirty-five-year-old typesetter fell into a trap that a schoolboy only twelve years old had set for him at the train station. The homosexual had sat next to the boy in the newsreel and given him an ice cream cone. The boy took the gift out of fear of the stranger and immediately discarded it unobtrusively under his seat. Later, at the man’s urgings, the schoolboy agreed to a rendezvous for the next morning. There the criminologists took delivery of him.
In view of the danger which its presumptive victims have come to represent, those whom the language of post-Hitlerian Germany, which has advanced beyond the one Kraus criticized so harshly, has declared sex offenders will have no choice but to organize among themselves and increase the danger for their victims again, in a vicious circle. Above and beyond the involuntarily imitated quotations of quotations in Die Fackel, a number of the sentences in the book are applicable to events in contemporary Germany. In 1905 Kraus summarized the case of Vera Brühne as follows: “And behold, the lack of evidence that Frau Klein had committed murder found abundant competition in the excess of evidence for her immoral mode of life” (160). In the meantime, of course, the experts have become more farsighted. If they are no longer permeated with the human justice of the statutes, they have learned all the better to exclude from public life those to whom those statutes—which were directed to private life—refer, participating in the syndrome of an administered Germany’s total desire to keep out, through formal-legal reflection and procedural thinking, anything which would be better in terms of its content, without thereby coming into conflict with the abstract rules of the game of democracy—which should, according to this view, be conceived juristically. “Will the new penal code make such victories impossible?” (315).