The Forty-Nine Steps

Kraus’s fundamental experience was acoustic, and it was constantly repeated. Like Hildegarde von Bingen, Angela da Foligno, and many anonymous schizophrenics, he heard voices, but his voices were all the more alarming since they had bodies, circulated in the streets of Vienna, seated themselves in cafés, and even put on affable smiles. The inflections beat on him like waves; their deadly horde provided the most faithful company for his “threefold solitude: that of the coffeehouse where he is alone with his enemy, of the nocturnal room where he is alone with his demon, of the lecture hall where he is alone with his work.”² There, behind a reading desk on a bare stage, Kraus himself became the voice-that-catches-all-voices, while in the darkness other unknown beings were transformed into the Wild Hunt of legend: “Imagine the army of the Wild Hunt in a concert hall, trapped, locked up, and forced to sit still, and then repeatedly summoned to its true nature.” There was a vibration in his voice that sent a quiver through the audience: “Chairs and people seemed to yield under this quivering; I wouldn’t have been surprised if the chairs had bent.”³ These sequences of scorching and magical electric shocks were repeated more than seven hundred times, very often in Vienna. And according to eyewitnesses, the Viennese readings were the most memorable. For Kraus needed that arena, that air, for his hallucinations. Like all true demons, he was bound to a small terrestrial circle, drawn by an invisible pair of compasses. From that soil he derived his powers, and to that soil he returned them.

Kraus’s first public reading in Vienna took place on 3 May 1910. The program offered three perfect texts for performance: the uncharitable but playful Heine und die Folgen (where Kraus claimed to be setting up for once and for all a watershed in the literature of decadence), Die chinesische Mauer, and Die Welt der Platake: essays at once visionary and frivolous—if Monsieur le Bourreau will, for the moment, allow such a thing. Thus they manage to bring together the erotic back room of a Chinatown laundry with the imminent eruption of the planet, all of it then confirmed by the erratic appearance of advertising posters. This, then, was Kraus: an essayist barely arrived at that ripeness that is all and ready to extend the tentacles of an omnivorous and already “armored”⁴ idiom, with its sparkling combinations of syntax, to the new enormities and trifles offered to him every day—and Kraus asked nothing more—by the Neue Freie Presse.

But that was simply his last cover before unveiling the more demoniac substance, more dangerous to touch, of his words. That moment would come a few years later, the day he began to give public readings from his “tragedy in five acts,” The Last Days of Mankind. Outside, there was still the war, and in the darkness of the hall, this tiny man, with “a face so mobile that it couldn’t be pinpointed, penetrating and exotic, like the face of an animal, but a new, a different face, an unfamiliar one,”⁵ rehearsed the war. He rehearsed it as though it were a creaking old play in a provincial theater, while the war was going on. This man, pursued from the start by acoustical hallucinations and believing from the start, with the consistency of an ancient Chinese, that the most evil facts ensued directly from scraps of conversations he had overheard on the streets of Vienna, had finally succeeded, by the most prodigious coup de théâtre of his life, in reversing the situation. And this awesome event, which eluded everyone and hung over everyone, found its hallucinatory replica while it was happening, its acoustical facsimile, at a reading desk on the bare stage of a theater in Vienna. Or rather, from there a voice was raised that called the facts into existence, just as the facts had aroused the voice. And once the war was over, he was to go on adding new scenes to that proliferating text, which had started to grow along with the war and now ended by expanding until it reached a length unsuitable for any theater, but the only suitable and ultimately adequate length for the voice-that-catches-all-voices, for his shamanic gift, which had allowed him to capture all possible prisoners in his net of words, from newsboys to foppish officers, from the famous journalist Alice Schalek to old Biach, from patriotic housewives to court chamberlains, from shopkeepers and poets to the two emperors.

If we keep clearly in mind this incongruous image of a shaman wearing a starched collar and little oval spectacles, we can see how fully The Last Days of Mankind departs from every literary genre. It is not an early example of “documentary theater” or “epic theater” or “political theater” or “theater of the absurd,” to cite the paltry labels that people have sought to apply to this work (and it is not hard to apply them, at the cost, of course, of losing the essential), but a magical practice. A remote and chilling magic, in which breath and blood mingle, in which every name is already bewitched and expression is given over, without any modesty or restraint, to the “whim of the surroundings,” as Kraus himself once called it with fierce understatement, adding, “It is its flood and throng of names and manners, voices and faces, apparitions and memories, quotations and posters, newspapers and rumors, rubbish and circumstances that accidentally gives me the signal for attack—and every letter of the alphabet can become a sign of fate.”⁶

Kraus demonstrates that a new astral body, composed of fragments of sentences, the shells of roving images, and splinters of accents, has formed in the world. It covers the earth like a motionless hood. And every movement of language is first of all a gasping effort to breathe under that mantle while trying in the end to rend it. For some years, this new leaden sky had covered up a reality that had been making heedless headway through the streets of Vienna. Kraus had already been intent on showing that those phantoms out of humorous gazettes, when closely examined, revealed hellish features and turned out to be so many attendants of disaster. But now the background of these minor facts had been uncovered, like the wings of a stage suddenly lit up by floodlights, and it was slaughter. To write The Last Days of Mankind, Kraus had almost no need to enlarge or alter his perspective, as far his local chronicles were concerned. He gathered his usual materials and let fly against a new backdrop. The “wall of fire” on which his hallucinations were projected in the silence of his room (“The experiences I need, I have them before me on the wall of fire I see from my desk”)⁷ had merely become a “barrier of flames,” the backdrop of any theater of war. There his loquacious characters now appeared, along with countless soldiers “fallen for the resumption of tourism.”⁸ There appeared their shadows, to be ever more swiftly devoured, until the “barrier of flames” became a cosmic stage curtain enveloping the blazing planet.

The Last Days of Mankind has only one literary precedent, one that Kraus could not have known and that we ourselves can scarcely know, since part of the material is still unpublished: the “second part” of Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, known as the copie, that mass of quotations, collected in eight bound volumes, each comprising about three hundred sheets, which reposes today in the Municipal Library in Rouen. It is the peacetime equivalent of what the 792 pages of The Last Days of Mankind, about half of which consist of quotations, were in wartime. The two texts could be seamlessly joined, and the whole thing would form that Great Hybrid within which we live and where every distinction between wartime and peacetime has become a joke. Even though all agree that war is ever more inconceivable, the slaughter only increases.

If one were to choose the symbolic and juridical act marking the beginning of this “glorious era” of experiment, it would not be so much some overworked episode of the French Revolution as a simple and effective bureaucratic invention that came somewhat later, one that the Convention had already introduced as a “blood tax” but that Bonaparte, by the law of 28 Floréal of the year X (28 May 1802), ratified as the normal method for army recruitment: compulsory conscription. Since then, humanity has become more and more obviously “human material,” as the walk-ons with their placards in The Last Days of Mankind proudly and tirelessly repeat. Just when humanity was proclaiming the reign of the subject at the top of its lungs, it was getting ready to count its members as so many items available for the operations of an ulterior subject, which was then society itself.

Throughout the nineteenth century, this new truth seeps slowly (what else is Benjamin Constant’s De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation about?) and sluggishly into perception and declares itself in reality. But the moment in which it emerges in all its oppressive pomp is 1914. Then, in a few months, the first thing to go to pieces once and for all, is that conception of European equilibrium that since the Peace of Westphalia, that is, for a little less than three centuries, had been the impossible dream of those who still thought that to engage in politics meant to control something. But this is almost a modest corollary to the most important theorem demonstrated by the war: that the murderous impulse of events would seem to be autonomous, or else guided by an invisible experimenter who surprises and mocks the very leaders who are convinced they caused these events. Now everything goes beyond all expectations and intentions and yet obeys a consistency of its own while acting directly on the bodies and souls of the victims. It is too late to contain an enterprise that is already preparing new surprises, and no war can be allowed to end without laying the foundations for the concentration camps that will bloom in the next one. War is, in short, a spirit of industry wholly devoid of ideological prejudices: Lenin’s goatee or Wilhelm II’s curled mustaches are all the same to it, and above all useful. Thus we come to the age that bangs perpetually under the sign of these “last days of mankind,” which are endless, and also to the culmination of that peculiar phenomenon by which the more complex events become, the more irrelevant do those claiming to guide them turn out to be. The Great Politician of the new age puts a little plaster Napoleon on the mantelpiece and locks himself in his office to work on a crossword puzzle. But there are always a few squares he cannot fill. Meanwhile, the continuity of life is assured by lazily shifting the massacres from one square to another on the planet.

In addition to being the worldwide proclamation of the fatal news that had already been circulating for some time throughout Europe, to giving us entry into a world where the further we advance the less we know, and finally to welcoming the seeds of chaos that had long been lurking on the threshold of our psychical and social life, the war of 1914–18 signified the pulverizing of experience. Strictly speaking, all that can be said of that event is contained in a sentence of Walter Benjamin’s: “A generation that had still gone to school in a public carriage found itself under the open sky in a landscape where nothing but the clouds remained unchanged, and in the middle, at the center of a field of forces where explosions and devastating currents clashed, was the tiny, fragile body of man.” Anything that goes beyond this sentence is in a way pointless and redundant. But the fact, hostile and opaque, that results from it still remains before us: that men returned from the front “struck dumb, not richer but poorer in communicable experience.”¹⁰ All the psychological forces were set against that realization, for had it been accepted, the whole war would have had to end, destroying the zeal that emerged because no one was able to recognize the “bloodthirsty look” of peace, especially on that Viennese innkeeper’s face where “mildness reigns.”¹¹ At first, young Germans had been allowed to depart for the “tempests of steel” as described by Ernst Jünger: “Having grown up in a period of security, we all felt a desire for the unusual, for great danger. And so the war seized on us like drunkenness. We left for the front under a rain of flowers, in an air intoxicated with roses and blood. The war was supposed to offer us, finally, great, strong, solemn things.”¹² Thomas Mann’s attitude, though more fearful and mean-spirited, was not much different: He hoped that war meant the repudiation of the laxities of peace and a restoration of the Germanic essence, which had been trampled on by malign commercial nations. They expected a grander experience, and they witnessed the disintegration of experience. Today “experience” can only refer to a past. Otherwise it is synonymous with “horror.”

As Jünger himself was to observe ten years later, in 1930, the real experience of the war would turn out to be not far from factory work, from the “precise work rhythm of a turbine fueled by blood.”¹³ He thereby introduced the category that designates the secret aspect of the availability of “human material”: total mobilization. Under the sign of this category, the final assimilation of peace and war was in place as preparation for a chronic civil war as a future possibility. Having left for the front with the ardor of a young Germanic warrior, Jünger in the end thus specified with admirable detachment the peculiar sense in which the war of 1914–18 seemed “different from other wars whose history has been handed down to us.” In that “great catastrophe,” first of all, “the genius of war had been permeated with the spirit of progress.” And the first fruit of that amorous encounter had been the rapid absorption of the “image of war as an armed action into the vaster image of a gigantic working process.” Not only did the war serve industry, but the war itself was already an advanced form of industry. War based on total mobilization was “an act by means of which the current of modern life, with its whole vast network of ramifications, is channeled, thanks to a single move on the command dial, into the great current of wartime energy.” And so what the young warriors, who went to the front dreaming of aristocratic tournaments, found there was primarily “the democracy of death.”¹⁴

Kraus never theorized about the war or, strictly speaking, about anything else. Ensnared at every moment by his voices, he completely lacked speculative detachment. During the war, these voices multiplied and splintered, but—and this was his most astonishing feat—“There was not one voice that he did not hear, he was possessed with every specific timbre of the war and rendered it compellingly.”¹⁵ But behind these shamanic journeys lay concealed from the start, clear and steadfast, those same two implications later to be formulated by such dissimilar writers as Benjamin and Jünger: on the one hand, the pulverizing of experience; on the other, total mobilization as the main procedure of the new era. And to arrive at this conclusion, Kraus never needed to abandon himself to the “air intoxicated with roses and blood.”

What is the most terrible sentence, the faithful echo of horror, in The Last Days of Mankind? “Clusters form.” These two little words discreetly accompany us in the stage directions from the very first page, the second line to be exact. They swell like poisonous clouds for hundreds of pages and strike us at the end, when their unique significance is finally revealed in scene 4, 29,¹⁶ where they are spoken by the Faultfinder to designate the throng of bystanders who want to have their picture taken alongside the corpse of the hanged Battisti, while the jovial hangman looks on. Groups are not an expression of democratic spontaneity. Their origin is much older. Groups always form around a corpse. When there is no corpse, that empty place evokes the many corpses that have been there and the many yet to appear. It is the last rite that holds civil society together. The group is a “crowd crystal.”¹⁷ Those who form it obey a calling, suddenly revealing their adherence to a vast sect: devotees of an officially innocuous, essentially persecutory power: Opinion. They throng together and jostle each other without realizing it; they all converge toward one point, which is the empty circle at the center of the group. There, as René Girard has pointed out, they were once able to see the mangled body of the victim of the original lynching.

Respect for Kraus as a modern exponent of satire that “is not only critical and negative but in the highest sense becomes the guardian of values”¹⁸ has kept many from accurately perceiving the nature of his work, and especially of The Last Days of Mankind. The title is well known, the text much less so. If Kraus had filled 792 pages just to say that war is a bad thing—as many have believed and insist on believing—he would have been not the author of his play but one of the characters flayed in it. In the café, among friends, in the office or restaurant, there is no harm in speaking out against the “madness of war.” And how many people have we seen going into raptures over that dreadful peace dove that Picasso presented to Stalin? Kraus said something quite different: He said that peace is founded on slaughter and that war is the charity ball at which humanity stages what it normally does, but does not like to talk about, so that the public will get excited and make enough small offerings to allow the slaughter to continue. Unlike many, Kraus did not depict the horrors of the war. He only brought the news that peace in the end was impossible:

The most effective of Kraus’s magical practices is quotation (“putting my times between quotation marks”).²⁰ But we are not dealing with a declaration of principle, ready to be carried away by a burst of supposedly autonomous creativity. Kraus is never autonomous, not even in relation to the posters he glimpses in the street. When at the very outset of Last Days, he warns that here “the rawest inventions are quotations,”²¹ we must once again take him literally. Indeed—except for the marvelous typographical utterances that flow from the Faultfinder’s mouth (and they are farewell gestures of insult by the character Kraus toward the world in whose company he perishes) and except for the portions in verse, which serve to extend the limits of an enormous range of sound at whose extremes stand Goethe and Offenbach—Kraus tampered as little as possible with the raw materials offered to him from time to time by the world scene. Whereas perhaps one-sixth of Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death—the only play that can be called political in a sense similar to Kraus’s—consists of quotations, the quoted texts in Last Days make up almost half of the whole. To give a few concrete examples of what might seem to be the most unlikely scenes: scene 2, 19 (Schalek with the laughing Serbian women) repeats the situation and some quips from an article by Schalek herself; scene 3,19 (in the mosque) is derived, again by extracting small blocks of words, from an article in the Süddeutsche Monatshefte; scene 3, 20 (Alfred Kerr’s “Rumanian song”) reproduces word for word the poem published by Kerr under the pseudonym “Gottlieb” in Der Tag; scene 3, 21 (the doctor who warns against smoking) is taken from a letter by Professor Molenaar of Darmstadt that had been printed in Die Fackel; scene 3, 31 (letter to Otto Ernst) is composed of quotations from letters by Ernst’s enthusiastic readers; scene 3, 33 (Schalek speaks) is woven entirely out of quotations from a news report by Schalek, quoted more fully in Die Fackel; in scene 4, 7, the psychiatrist’s grandiose speech on the food situation in Germany orchestrates topics presented dryly in a bulletin from the Wolff Agency; in scene 4, 22, the contents and price of the “Hero’s Pillow” are repeated verbatim from an advertisement; in scene 4, 25, remarks by Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff are mostly taken from an interview with them by the journalist Paul Goldmann; scene 4, 37 (Wilhelm II and his men at General Headquarters) is based on testimony by Rear Admiral Persius, which Kraus had found in his book on the war at sea. And one could go on and on. Finally, even the Faultfinder’s speeches are woven out of quotations from Kraus. Aphorisms, bits from essays written in peacetime, articles from Die Fackel published while he was writing Last Days—all this is swept into that ultimate vortex of words whereby Kraus presents himself just as he does the other historical characters, that is, as a picturesque and raving solitary in the picturesque Vienna of the war, who is dubbed the “Fackelkraus” and pointed out in the street by the members of factious groups. But at the same time, since his name is hidden behind the figure of a comic character (the Faultfinder), his words are a voice that no longer belongs to him and that guarantees the life of this nonstop spectacle. Their function is like that of the blade used by Chuang-tzu’s perfect butcher, who for nineteen years used the same knife to quarter thousands of oxen; the blade never lost its edge, “because I let it go through only where it can”—in the imperceptible empty interstices. And Prince Wenhui answers the butcher: “Thank you, you have just taught me how to prolong one’s life, by using it only for what does not consume it.”²²

Exactly a year and a month after the assassination in Sarajevo, Kraus, in three days, wrote the “Prelude” to Last Days and conceived the plan of the work. The first months of war had been a period of paralysis and silence for him. And he gave the reasons for this silence in the pulsing words of the speech “In dieser grossen Zeit,”²³ where he even alluded to the growing din of voices in his room, “whether they come from animals, from children, or only from mortars,” but stopped short with the injunction: “If anyone has something to say, let him step forward and shut up!”²⁴ For ten months thereafter, only one slim issue of Die Fackel would be published, in February. But for Kraus, this silence, as would later be the case on the advent of Hitler, was the dark side of a monstrous discourse about to burst out: “Everything Kraus wrote is like that: a silence turned inside out, a silence that catches the storm of events in its black folds, billows, its livid lining turned outward.”²⁵ Once Kraus’s tension had reached that state of mimetic and judicial fever that for him was the necessary condition for writing, he threw himself into his most reckless enterprise and succeeded: “The world war entered completely into The Last Days of Mankind, with no solace and no respect, no embellishment, no sweetening, and above all, this is the most important point, without ever getting accustomed to it.”²⁶ He announces it in a splendid letter to his beloved Sidonie Nádherný on 29 July 1915, a letter that might stand as an epigraph for the whole work:

26 July

Now, while from my desk I can hear the daily, inevitable, and awful cry—Extra! Extra!—which will henceforth afflict the human ear for all time, now I have spent an hour in Thierfehd [a Swiss village where Kraus had been with Sidonie]. And nothing, nothing has changed! No idea, whether thought, spoken, or shouted, would be loud enough, no prayer fervent enough to pierce this material. So to show this impotence, won’t I have to disclose everything that I can’t do just now—and at least do something: expose myself? What else is there to do?

This road will have to be taken, even if it goes on too long, as long as the road to China is still open. I’ll choke on what ought to be shouted, so as not to choke some other way. I’m not sure anymore of my nerves in the street. But it would be better if all this were to happen according to a precise plan, and also that it be dedicated to that person for whom I live, and I’d no longer care to live if she thought that to keep silent threatened her own human dignity, to the point where I can no longer stand to witness events in silence, or rather words that have erased humanity’s memory for all of cosmic time. There is a person without whom nothing can happen, because everything must happen for her. . . .

This state of fatigue has still released a spark, and it has given birth to the plan for a work that, should it ever appear, would certainly be equivalent to exposing myself in the most total fashion. The first act, the prelude to the whole, is finished and could even stand by itself. But where to send it? Switzerland, where we took refuge with our dear little automobile, fails us in this. Maybe it will be of some help to us later; or otherwise America.

Anyway, whatever may or may not happen at this point, I now feel freer.²⁷

A perceptive reading of The Last Days of Mankind would be fatally damaging to Bertolt Brecht. Such a reading is long overdue. Having drawn for decades on the rich storehouse of that text and having derived from it most of the formal devices that were to make his theater’s fortune (from montage to the scrambling of levels, from cabaret parody to the use of raw material), Brecht would find himself forced to accept a direct comparison, and this would crush him. Kraus abandons himself to the force of language without restraint, like one possessed, without any ulterior motive of social pedagogy, and he achieves almost unbearable heights of comedy and terror: I mention only the appearances of Schalek (the “true heroine of this glorious era,”²⁸ who puts any Mutter Courage in the shade) or of old Biach (no death is more epic than his, when he gurgles and chokes on sentences from the newspaper, whereupon, in retaliation, “groups form” around his corpse in scene 5, 9), or the invincible, sugary ravings of the feuilletonist Hans Müller (scene 1, 25), or the scene with the patriotic housewives (scene 2, 18), or the tormented intimate dialogue of the Schwarz-Gelber couple (scene 2, 33), or the exhortation to tourism uttered by the schoolmaster (scene 1, 9), or the meek and bloody ravings of Franz Josef (scene 4, 31), or the Prussian von Dreckwitz’s vigorous and sportive bloodbath spirit (scene 2, 14), or the choral delirium, as of a domestic slaughterhouse, in the final scene of the last act. Brecht, like a good German, instead of putting “art at the service of the shopkeeper,” puts it at the service of the Cause, which is not always better. Didacticism in itself is already a disaster for form, but most of all this captious and blackmailing didacticism, this attempt at the aesthetic transfiguration of Sovietism, ends by arousing a certain disgust. In the course of time, the same thing may happen with Brecht as happened with Voltaire: a complete chemical separation of texts. On the one hand, many of his poems will be read as being by the greatest Chinese poet of the century; on the other, there will be an increasing tendency to forget his misused theater. Like Voltaire’s tragedies, which everyone used to know and today no one dares read, Brecht’s plays belong in great part to those literary creations that marry for love the mediocre side of their period’s intellectuality and sink with it to the bottom.

The hagiographic literature on Kraus—from Leopold Liegler’s book, the first authorized study, to the products of a few zealous campus dwellers who in recent years have started browsing on “the Austrian Mind”²⁹—offers the most convenient and immediate arguments against him. According to the image of Kraus that emerges from this apologetic mosaic, we would have on our hands a human being exclusively endowed with fine sentiments, prone to all the proper indignation, vaguely nostalgic for a purer and more noble past, fond of women and animals, and encased in his ideas as in a coat of mail. All of which would lead one to suspect the worst. But fortunately the image is false. Meanwhile, if we want to grant Kraus the highest honor, that of being “the greatest German satirist, the only one in the literature of this language whom one has the right to name next to Aristophanes, Juvenal, Quevedo, Swift, and Gogol,” by the same token we will have to recognize that he shares with these writers “a very definite kind of substance, which I would simply call ‘murderous.’”³⁰ And Canerti’s curt remark should be enough to deter us from the image of a humanitarian hero. As for his relation to the past, one can fully concur with what Benjamin observed with subtle irony: “It is his program to reverse the development of bourgeois-capitalist affairs to a condition that was never theirs.”³¹ But things change in the face of existing realities, and one need only read once the “tragic couplets” of Franz Josef (scene 4, 31) or the forlorn judgment on him (with its marvelous beginning: “He was merely a pedant and not a tyrant, merely cold and not ferocious. . . . He was a tireless worker, and among various death sentences he also signed one that struck down humanity”)³² to understand that Kraus was the first and only writer to bury, without hesitation, without tears, and with perfect knowledge of the Habsburg “demon,” the whole glorious history of that monarchy that “for reasons of prestige . . . must long have wanted to commit suicide.”³³ He was really not the right person for the kind of operation that in stock-market jargon is called a recovery in values.

In his long essay on Kraus, Benjamin quotes a single but decisive passage from The Last Days of Mankind: “Kraus portrayed himself as hopelessly subjugated to the demon; in the pandemonium of the age he reserved for himself the most melancholy place in the icy wilderness lit by reflected flames. There he stands on the Last Day of Mankind—the ‘grumbler’ [that is, Faultfinder] who has described the preceding days.”³⁴ The passage from Kraus follows: “I have taken the tragedy, which is divided into the scenes of decaying humanity, on myself, so that it might be heard by the spirit who takes pity on the victims, even though he may have renounced for all time his connection with a human ear. May he receive the keynote of this age, the echo of my bloodstained madness, through which I share the guilt for these noises.”³⁵ These are the lines in which Kraus, more lucidly than anywhere else in his work, acknowledged his involvement in the evil he was skewering. Not only is reality here tinged by black magic, but so is the language that hurls itself at that reality. To grasp this infernal connection, one must venture all the way to that archaic and demonic nucleus that Benjamin was the first to perceive in Kraus: “The dark background from which his image detaches itself is not formed by his contemporaries, but is the primeval world or the world of the demon.” Thus, again we approach obsessive voices, and the voice-that-catches-all-voices: “His passion for imitating them [his fellow men] is at the same time the expression of and the struggle against this implication, and also the cause and the result of that ever-watchful guilty conscience in which the demon has his habitat.” Finally, with an elegant wave of his hand, Benjamin presents us with the genealogy of the satirical writer: “The satirist is the figure in whom the cannibal was received into civilization.”³⁶ Benjamin’s words echo Canetti’s about the “murderous substance” in which all great satirists communicate. And they also echo a late sentence by Kraus, who in a few words describes his work of gloomy exorcism, where from the start he had not been spared contagion: “Night after night, for twenty-six years, I laugh when the raw material of my time gets ready to pass into my mold.”³⁷

The subtitle Tragedy in Five Acts should be understood primarily in its rhetorical function as antiphrasis. Just as the single acts do not have the necessary requirements to be such, since each would last at least a whole night, so the word “tragedy” hangs suspended like a neoclassical relic over the heads of hundreds of characters, all of them unfit to be called tragic. As for the dialogues between the Faultfinder and the Optimist, which perform the function of the chorus in Greek tragedy—and perhaps no text in modern literature achieves the fiery eloquence of scenes 4, 29 and 5, 54—they do no more than suggest that tradition. The Faultfinder, of course, is Kraus himself, who subjects the war to the acid test of words, but he is also a little Viennese figure alongside the others, an eccentric whom they have all seen grow up and who now, behind a lectern, recites his works like a maniac. “They can say what they like . . . but what a writer!”³⁸ observes one of his anonymous Viennese listeners, and with this the judge with the flaming sword is cut down to size and becomes no bigger than all the other little Viennese figures. “There have been periods when causal thinking was a fine thing, the mark of a small clique of discerning people; today it’s dishwater, every newspaper reader offers us the fundamentals of his Weltanschauung and his rheumatism; today what we must put up with is the juxtaposition of things, and to give expression to it has become our most suitable and substantial task.”³⁹ So, amid the rubble of a later war, wrote Gottfried Benn, one of those great writers whom Kraus did not care to understand. And yet in Last Days, Kraus was acting in the sense of that sentence. Antiquated as he was in some of his tastes, and suspicious of the modern, he was nevertheless devastating in drawing the ultimate formal consequences from the situation around him. Instead of abandoning himself to expressionist pathos, which tries to compensate for the impossibility of tragedy by the immediacy of pain, Kraus set up the only theatrical structure suited to the case: a theater of repetition and aimless chatter, in which atrocities go forever hand in hand with futility, a perennial juxtaposition of everything with everything else, which allows for no development, where every direction is equally legitimate, and one is not even given the satisfaction of seeing a finger pointed on the stage at those responsible.

Kraus is careful to bypass any question of responsibility, which can always be conveniently attributed to reactionary intrigue or to the intrinsic malevolence of capitalism. These last facts may not be in doubt, but they are still secondary to the “abysmal void” of Foreign Minister Poldi Berchtold’s face as he appears, smartly dressed and charming, in a photograph on which Kraus comments. This is “the void into which we have all been flung and that has swallowed us up.”⁴¹ Because it has not cared to pay attention to these little things and has treated such words as paradoxes and not as sober observations, a society devoted to Good Causes, with its moist eye and ever thoughtful brow, has gone on accumulating “correct analyses” in the face of the century’s successive atrocities, while a greater consideration of physiognomy, tone of voice, gestures, and minutiae of style would have spared it from making such an enormous contribution to the legacy of stupidity in our time. Thus, before Nazism existed, even only as a name, Kraus wrote the most precise description of Nazism to appear in the German language. And not because he was informed in advance about the iniquities that would be committed by Hitler and the big industrialists. All he had to do was to hear the voices and look at the faces in the street twenty years before.

Behind idle questions of responsibility, Kraus found something much more distressing: the certainty of general irresponsibility, the now ritual impossibility of achieving that knowledge of guilt that is the very soil of tragic events. The world that Kraus rehearses before our eyes is “a world that fights wars for which no one can be held responsible.” And this because never before had it been so obvious, as in August 1914, that no one, among all those clearly and thoroughly responsible, had any idea what he was doing: “None of them was fully aware. Austria can’t help it! She just let herself be encouraged by Germany to drag Germany into the war. And Germany drove Austria to wage this war that she didn’t want.”⁴² The Viennese “I can’t help it” here takes on a cosmic dimension, like the posters of the Gersthof innkeeper Wolf. That sentence contains the most despairing condemnation, one that reverses the Gospel saying “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). For Kraus, no one is more loathsome than those who did not know what they were doing: They now rank first among the unforgivable. And since our whole world, in peace and war, is an experiment in which no one knows what the experiment is about or where it is heading (not only that, but—and this is the worst—people deny not knowing), it is subject to the same condemnation.

But I said that this comedy is frightful. Behind its hundreds of voices, each riveted by its slightest nuances, we can hear Kraus’s unique and compulsive voice. This is the demon who sits beside us and goads us each time to inescapable, automatic laughter, which has the sound of dry leaves. Thus the actual ending of Last Days should only be listened to, and it overflows the text. It can be found on a recording,⁴³ where Kraus reads the true introduction to what happened after “the last days of mankind”; its title: “Advertisement for Tours of Hell.” The subject is a brochure that spares us nothing in offering a program of visits to the battlefield of Verdun “at the reduced price of 117 francs.” Kraus printed it in full on a single folding spread in Die Fackel,⁴⁴ and he used to read it in public. The text is divided into two main sections. The first gives the reasons for this touristic initiative. With the scrupulous pedantry of someone who insists on showing that his offer is well worth 117 francs, the anonymous author explains why Verdun deserves to be included in the pantheon of the picturesque: “In this small area, where more than a million, indeed perhaps a million and a half men gave their lives, there is not a single square centimeter of surface that has not been blasted by grenades.” This makes Verdun “the battlefield par excellence” and therefore “an image of terror and horror of unprecedented grandeur.” But in the details of the tour and the satisfactions it offers, a sort of psalmody begins in which each versicle begins with a verb addressed to the customer:

Depart by the evening express train, second class, from Basel. . . . Stay overnight in a first-class hotel, service and tips included. . . . Enjoy an ample breakfast in the morning. . . . Cross the destroyed villages in the fortified zone of Vaux with their giant cemeteries with hundreds of thousands of dead. . . . Visit the Ossuaire (charnel house) of Thiaumont, where the remains of unknown casualties continue to be collected and stored. . . . Visit the Tranchée des Baïonnettes or des Ensevelis. . . . Skirt the Ravin de la Mort. . . . Enjoy lunch at Verdun’s best hotel, with wine and coffee, tip included. . . . Return in the afternoon through the horribly devastated Haudiaumont zone. . . . Dine at our hotel in Metz, with wine and coffee, tip included. . . . Everything included in the price of 117 francs, with lavish hospitality in first-class hotels.