The Forty-Nine Steps

The most obscure history is the history of the obvious. There is nothing more obvious than public opinion, a term that public opinion holds to be innocuous and that has come to comprise in itself huge areas of what can be said: The vast pastures of public opinion are the pride of civilization. And yet public opinion is a fearful thing, which has undergone tortuous, ridiculous vicissitudes until its triumph in the present. There was a time when philosophers used to start with facts, which have now fled among the unicorns. Public opinion remains: mistress of all regimes, shapeless, everywhere, and nowhere, its oversized presence is such as to allow only a negative theology. With the fall of divine rule and the debasement of the vicariate of metaphysics, public opinion has been left in the open as the last foundation stone to cover swarms of worms, some iguanas, and a few ancient serpents. How does one recognize it? Or rather, how does one recognize what is not public opinion? There is no map of opinions, and even if there were it would not be of any use. For public opinion is first of all a formal power, a virtuosity that grows endlessly and attacks any material. Its hoax is to accept any meaning, thereby preventing it from being recognized for whatever ideas it has to offer. Indiscriminate, perinde ac cadaver, public opinion swallows up thought and reproduces it in similar terms, only with a few slight modifications.

Karl Kraus is the “proposition builder” who spent his life pointing out these modifications. For thirty-seven years in Vienna, 1899 to 1936, he published Die Fackel, the frontline bulletin of his war. It was not so much a magazine as a newspaper about newspapers, a parasite on parasites, and people read it in trams and coffeehouses. Here is what Kraus had discovered: Public opinion can talk about everything but cannot say everything. For public opinion has a style, and only by studying its slightest peculiarities of diction will one be able to gain access to its inordinate crimes, to its familiar poisons, to its smirk over one’s death, in short—just as public opinion says—to everyday reality. We still follow the rhetoric of public opinion and continue to use one of its main features: the stock phrase.

What is the organ of public opinion? The press—and today, the whole, immense communications network. Thus, Kraus devoted his newspaper and a great part of his existence to the press, as an appointed site of public opinion, where one can have the leisure to contemplate the fluid surface on which we move at every moment finally congealed in letters. And he certainly did not want what insensitive interpreters chiefly praised him for: to improve the press. By 1904, Kraus had left no doubts on this matter, which lies at the core of his argument with Maximilian Harden: “I once wrote: ‘Harden, who measures journalism with the yardstick of relative ethics, wants to improve the press.’ I want to make it worse, I want to make it harder for it to carry out its vile intentions under the cover of spiritual pretensions, and I consider a stylistically better press more dangerous.”¹ In concentrating on the press, Kraus had grand visions, such as did not often visit even great poets, who concentrated on the pure word. Consider the words I have used as an epigraph: The world, its substance, is, from an industrial standpoint, a by-product; from a neo-Platonic standpoint, it is an emanation of the press. Facts issue from opinions by superfetation. “Is the press a messenger? No: the event. Words? No: life. It not only claims that its news about events are the real events, but it also produces this sinister identity by which appearance always says that facts become news before being facts.”²

Let us imagine a great theological civilization: Anyone born in it inherits a total thought, preceding fact, which then is articulated and manifested in a language, narrower than its origin, the reminder of something previous and stable. For someone born in the theological civilization of post-history, thought is a depository from which one can draw everything except the experience from which each single thought is born, while the availability of the past as a depository is itself the disturbing experience common to all forms of the new age. If the Enlightenment had realized its utopia, the subject would really have been a tabula rasa, able to endure that total abrasion of meaning produced by all-consuming nominalism and by the method that endlessly dissolves substance. And it would also have had unprecedented agility. But that is not so, and therefore it is not utopia that belongs to post-history but rather its inversion and parody. Once the substance is exhausted, the method spins artificial substances from its own slime: Buildings by now have no foundations but are still more solid, as though they grew from the earth. And we certainly find neither the fake tabula rasa in the subject nor the acknowledgment of a previous thought; rather, we find the continuity of opinions, a homeostatic whirl of utterances swarming from past and present, a Cartesian forest of mental railroad tracks, the permanent explanation of history prefigured in the endless speculative fairground, or Académie des Jeux, described by Leibniz.³ But the subject knows nothing about it. One opinion is as good as another: The abyss yawns in this commonplace as in every other. These few words enclose the paralyzing formula of post-historical algebra.

The continuity of opinions is the material chosen by Karl Kraus for his prose work, thousands of pages, the 922 issues of Die Fackel. It is an essential characteristic of Kraus’s prose that it carries within it a specter: It may be a passage explicitly quoted from a writer or newspaper, the composition of a word, a stock phrase that gets reworked, a punctuation mark. In any case, until the spectral element has been identified, Kraus’s proposition cannot be read correctly. This procedure is required once one recognizes that the world has become a newspaper. The result of this procedure, to which Kraus stubbornly clung, is that the author must renounce any thought of his own that can be expressed, as is customary, in a series of propositions. The primum is now the continuity of opinions, a totality of language in constant proliferation. The writer pretends to be concerned only with opinions in order to make his way through their jumble and capture thought. His Ariadne will be language. Indeed, Kraus’s relations with language might only be told as an erotic epos:

I do not rule language, but language rules me completely. For me, she is not the handmaiden of my thoughts. I live with her in a relationship that lets me conceive thoughts, and she can do with me what she likes. For the fresh thought leaps out at me from words, and the language that created it is formed retroactively. Such pregnancy of thoughts has a grace that obliges one to kneel down and requires all kinds of trembling attentions. Language is sovereign to thoughts, and if a man succeeds in reversing the relationship, she will make herself useful to him around the house but bar him from her womb.⁴

The work of the “proposition builder” is to abandon himself to language, which is supposed to contain a force of its own, a latent thought, the only one capable of breaking the spell of public opinion. “Thoughts come to me because I take them at their word.”⁵ But once it is removed from the immediate exercise, from being captured by the work of language, thought departs. It is indissolubly bound to the word that called it forth. When Kraus writes, “Progress makes coin purses out of human skin” (p. 279), we see him establishing, with no waste of words, the “dialectics of the Enlightenment.” But Kraus would never have wished to describe that dialectic. And if we have reason to be grateful to Theodor Adorno for having done so, we recognize at the same time that the implications of Kraus’s metaphors continue to multiply beyond the point where Adorno’s involved explication begins to rest on its oars.

Thus, Kraus’s thought can only be recounted by someone who does not understand it: “Many who have fallen behind me in my development can state what my thoughts are in a more comprehensible way.”⁶ On the other hand, Kraus himself, who does not like to “get mixed up in [his own] private affairs” (p. 293), would surely not be equally clear and certain. Kraus believes one cannot know where thoughts come from, and therefore he supposes that they are formed beforehand and go wandering about; only those who have formed their language can receive them. A writer would be someone who “believes in the metaphysical path of thought, which is a miasma, while opinion is contagious and therefore has need of the immediate infection to be received and spread.”⁷

But why not even consider all of Kraus’s aphorisms as a series of opinions? There would seem to be nothing to keep one from doing so. As such, they make a bizarre and contradictory collection, insolent and incongruous, in which the author often seems to support with one hand what he destroys with the other. In the end, one notes that these are the opinions of a man who cares nothing about being “consistent with his own opinions.” But one will also note this: The things Kraus says become unrecognizable as soon as they are restated in other words, because “if a thought can live in two forms, it will not feel as much at ease as two thoughts living in a single form.”⁸ If at this point in its history, thought is no longer the sovereign organizer of language but must necessarily pass each time through the hell of opinion, it is precisely language that will tip the scales: “the difference between a way of writing in which thought has become language and language thought, and one in which language represents simply the shell of an opinion.”⁹ Opinion has the appearance of a formally homogeneous continuum and tends to abrogate the mimetic power of language; Kraus, on the contrary, heightens the difference and makes language into theater, to the extent of calling his work “written recitation,”¹⁰ while always stressing the lightest and most elusive element: the tone. “If I must make a liberal demand, I do it in such a way that reactionaries obey and progressives repudiate me. What matters is the accent of the opinion and the detachment with which it is stated.”¹¹

Where the man in the street is prompt to offer his de gustibus non est disputandum, Kraus talks like a mathematician or an underworld judge. But what is his Euclid or his law code? We will never find out, but we do find, equally vehement, the imperative to rectify language. This undertaking was called “rectification of names” in ancient China; but whereas Confucius could appeal to a powerful all-inclusive custom to reestablish order in words and thus in China, Kraus, in the Byzantine but enervated Kakania, had at his disposal only a musical metaphor: to speak as though appealing to a perfect pitch for language. And the language that reaches his ear has only words in common with what public opinion means by language. In the information culture, the pages of Die Fackel constitute an enclave in which language is presented with characteristics that cannot be reduced to those that newspapers have imprinted on the world: Instead of the deadening clarity of words as an instrument of communication, what we find there is the illuminating complexity of language as a “means for coming to terms with creation.”¹² Kraus looks back to an origin that refuses to define itself: “The origin is the goal”¹³—such is his first axiom. The great Judaic heritage resounds in these words, the memory of Adam giving names. And this origin is mirrored in a messianic end, when—according to a legend that also influenced Walter Benjamin and Adorno—the Kingdom would be established by leaving everything as it is, except for a few slight modifications. Holy Writ and its counterfeit copy, the newspaper, can pass into each other,¹⁴ in both directions, precisely by means of slight modifications: If it is true that the “supreme stylistic task [of satire] is its graphic arrangement,”¹⁵ then this is the basis for Kraus’s theory of quotation, the height of his satire. This slight modification might be merely the addition of quotation marks to a text and its reproduction, without comment, in the pages of Die Fackel. Because these pages are a trial by ordeal, the quotation will emerge dead or alive, in any case transformed; it will have spoken another language. At the outset of World War I, Kraus wrote, “It is my duty to put my epoch between quotation marks, for I know that that alone can express its unspeakable infamy.” Thus, at times, the simple typographical combination of two newspaper quotations on the eloquent blankness of a particular page is enough for the language of infamy to pass judgment on itself.

By adding Judaic esotericism and the obsession of modern formalism, whereby language becomes equivalent to musical material, Kraus achieved a frenzy of words that in the short run should have led him to the Cabala or to absolute literature. It led him instead, like his demon, to apply both of them on a wild and difficult terrain: the press—words coded, then as now, to say something overwhelming and too close for comfort, the world transformed into universel reportage, as Stéphane Mallarmé put it. No other great writer of the century has dared to weave the magic of words and the black magic of society into so dense a web. Kraus’s political polemics are the most exacerbated art pour l’art,¹⁶ and his art pour l’art gives his polemics a force unknown to political speech.

The enigma of these words lies perhaps in their impressive clarity, in the forgotten gesture of expressing together the two separate realms of ’Aλƞ́θεια and δóξα, the joint relation of being and appearing, the heaviest burden, one of which subsequent thought has never ceased trying to throw off. The δóξα of Parmenides is still, simultaneously and in the fullest sense, opinion-appearance; the ordeal between word and thing has not yet been broken. In four lines, three words (δóξας—δoκoũvτα—δoκίμως) indicate variations in appearing and oddly correspond to fr. 28 in Heraclitus, where a similar variation (δoκέovτα—δoκιμώτατoς) comes in two lines. The path of names and opposing forces—indeed, all cosmology belongs to it—δóξα lets us foresee the interruption of the discourse, which takes shape against the background of the undivided heart of ’Aλƞ́θεια. (The reluctance on the part of philologists to recognize in Parmenides a twofold affirmation of δóξα and ’Aλƞ́θεια, and not their incurable opposition, can only be explained if one compiles a case history on the whole course of Western thought, of which philologists have been, without realizing it, the perpetrators.) Δóξα is at the same time the image and discourse of appearance; in it, the whole expresses itself in the flashing of names and forms. In ’Aλƞ́θεια the whole is recognized “by many signs” (fr. 8, 2–3) for that which it indestructibly is, in the fullness of the continuum. They are the two ϕúσεις that the whole admits (see Plutarch, Adversus Coloten, 1114 D): superimposed spheres, both enclosed, but the one in the intact entirety (o Image Missing

λov), without divisions, of ’Aλƞ́θεια; the other in the enumerative completeness (τά Πάvτα), perpetually reshuffled, of δóξα (see fr. 9, 38). A transparently initiatory doctrine that can be traced back—as a variation that already prefigures the nullifying future of philosophy—to the primordial gap between the manifestation and its principle: terms that certainly do not correspond to “intelligible” and “sensible,” as the whole Greek tradition from Aristotle on would like, applying to Parmenides a pair of opposites that do not pertain to him. What holds ’Aλƞ́θεια and δóξα together and keeps one from crossing over into the other is their common obedience to the same goddess, Δíκƞ-’Avάƴκƞ—as stated, respectively, in frs. 10, 6 and 8, 30. The bond of necessity cannot be dissolved, since appearance “will never sever being from being” (fr. 4, 2).

Gorgias is the great figure who marks the severance of the connection between opinion and appearance, the devious and ruinous corollary to the weakness that prevents appearance and ’Aλƞ́θεια from remaining joined. With Gorgias, the terrible sobriety of the West speaks out: “Being, [because] unmanifested, does not have appearance (δoκεĩv) in store; appearance [because] powerless, does not have being in store” (fr. 26). This rift cannot be crossed, and the lack of contact abrogates the criterion, which is a reference to ’Aλƞ́θεια: Now, opinion, the discourse of appearance, becomes discourse about appearance and its manipulation. We enter the combinatorial realm of the modern in the released forces of the discourse, the algebra of power. But the whole history of nihilism, that is, our history, shows us a timid nihilism that does not dare to go all the way: The criterion of truth having collapsed, truth itself has not collapsed, as thought would have required. This timidity is actually the most astute and overwhelming act of reason, which has seen the prime instrument of social control in maintaining the notion of truth. Plato, in the Theaetetus, described this process with admirable bluntness, once and for all: “But in the things I am talking about, namely, questions of right and wrong and holy and impious, they want it firmly stated that these things have neither a nature nor a reality of their own, but that society’s opinion becomes their truth, when such opinion exists and for as long as it exists” (172 b). Here, by now, opinion has emancipated itself, becoming an autonomous force adjusted to nothing external except to society as a tangle of opinions, while one of the meanings of an ancient judgment attributed to Simonides of Keos is revealed: “Appearance (τó δoκεĩv) does violence to truth (τάv Image Missing

λάθειαv)” (Republic, 365 b–c).

The bond of necessity stated by Parmenides is replaced in Plato by that of proportionality between categorically divided regions, according to a process of assimilation—the relation between model and copy—whose pattern one finds in the Republic (509 b–c). And given Plato’s inexhaustible ambiguity, one will not be surprised by the passage in Parmenides (130 b) where he abruptly mentions that such proportionality has neither the force nor the audacity to extend itself to everything. The correspondence stops before the ridiculous and dirty debris of appearance: “And of things, O Socrates, that would seem to be ridiculous, such as hair, mud, dirt, or any others that may seem low and contemptible, do you wonder if it is necessary to say that a separate form exists of each, distinct from the one we touch with our hands?” Socrates does not dare, and perhaps his hesitancy is not the last of his ironies; but the degradation of appearance also involves the ruin of whatever, beyond appearance, did not want to join with it, even metaphorically. From now on, the great nihilistic analysis, the one that runs through the whole history of Western philosophy and culminates in the Nietzsche of the years 1884–88, will reveal each successive essence to be a disguised appearance. At history’s high noon, announced by Zarathustra, unprecedented words ring out: “With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.”¹⁸ This final passage of nihilism, which would turn the wheel of Western thought back to the point preceding its first movement, is precisely what history, by emerging from itself, has not granted. The whole network of oppositions that until today have formed the grammar and syntax of thought, in the end, risking being deprived of authority, has been deposited in facts, and there it gloriously lives on, without foundation and as though in play. Its immense power has become perhaps even greater: Even if no one believes in the theorems anymore, everyone practices their theater. The structure has reached its maximum strength once it is not stated but simply staged. Now crowned opinions occupy the hyper-Uranian τóΠoς: they are the gods of operetta, parodic and earthly standins flung into the realm of being, to inhabit the place ironically prepared for them by the dispersed ideas.

Opinion, from the moment it is no longer a momentary mental disposition but has become the unmentionables of appearance, surreptitiously usurps an authority that had belonged to thought and removes itself from the actual play of appearance. And people of opinion are adults and no longer have any need to project the source of authority onto the faraway Plain of ’Aλƞ́θεια, “where the reasons and forms and models of what has happened and what will happen lie motionless” (Plutarch, De defectu oraculorum, 422 b–c). Opinion finds confirmation in itself, it flows by itself, and servitude has become spontaneous. The totality of opinion then constitutes a body, the Great Beast described in a memorable passage in Plato, the prime source for Simone Weil’s theory of society:

All these private individuals who ask to be paid, whom the politicians call Sophists and consider to be their rivals, teach nothing else but these beliefs of the crowd, which it expresses when it assembles, and this they call wisdom; as if one were to learn to know the impulses and desires of some Great Beast, grown strong, how to approach and touch it, and when it is more intractable and when more docile, and what are the sounds it is likely to emit, and what sounds emitted by another make it tame or fierce; and after learning all this and living with the creature, with the passage of time should call it wisdom, and having organized it as an art, should turn to teaching it, without knowing anything about the truth of these beliefs and desires in relation to the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad, the just and the unjust, but should only apply all these names to the opinions of the Great Beast, calling the things it likes good, and those it dislikes bad, and without knowing any other reason for these things, should call what is necessary fine and just, never having seen or been in a position to show how the nature of the necessary differs from that of the good. (Republic, 493 a—c).

Today we no longer need Sophists to incite the Great Beast, since the Sophist is the immediate self-regulation of society, an organism nourished by the tensions it itself incessantly generates, an order that is preserved only so long as it expands. The last, anonymous subject of society is the destiny of science as a total experiment on the world, an experiment in which humanity is the chosen material. The Soul of the World no longer has a human face, nor does it appear on horseback in the streets of a city. Likewise, deceit no longer needs to be personified in a subject. The decline of Mephistopheles as a dramatic character is actually his triumph.

There is no way to distinguish opinion from thought except by analyzing its language. Ever since the trial by ordeal between word and thing was broken, this curse has accompanied discursive thought. Though the Sophists were the first to reveal it, Socrates was the first to see its consequences and to attempt to rescue thought from the fatal trap. Faced with the parasitism of opinion on thought, he chose to become a parasite on parasites, to disguise his own language in theirs, and in short, to extract thought from the discourse of others. In the Republic (340 d), he is accused of “arguing like a sycophant.” In Socrates, thought, under the pressure of sophistry, abandons the seat of authority and substitutes irony at a distance: The stink of the rabble that Nietzsche sniffed in him is the price, heroic and degrading, of this first contact with opinion. To cover oneself with opinion in order to wear it out is a mortal risk: Opinion is thought’s shirt of Nessus. Socrates’ behavior carries out the renunciation of original words; henceforth, thought agrees to move on the plane of social violence, which is the violence of opinion; was it not to be public opinion that killed Socrates? This is the first attempt to extract thought from language that speaks without consciousness. Language that speaks in us beyond our consciousness is also that of the robber and guest to whom, by applying Occam’s razor, the name of unconscious has been given. But opinion neither robs us nor claims the ambiguous status of guest; on the contrary, like a paternal benefactor, it reassures us and fortifies the bastions of our ego, which are festooned with opinions. What does the emancipated man have to boast of except his opinions? They are one way to display the fingerprints of his ego. The black magic of opinion is so incomparably effective because opinion is a reasonable language, and reasonableness does not involve consciousness. Originally the mobile physiognomy of appearance and the process of forms in language itself, opinion seems increasingly to congeal in the course of its history. In the end, it is paralyzed in its “majesty.”¹⁹ Now opinions can be defined as statements uttered violently and spontaneously, apart from all consciousness, and this leads to the cautious hypothesis that the petrification of opinion is the last phenotypical mutation stamped by culture on man. On this prospect of motionless horror, the future has also opened.

The altar of opinion is the commonplace. Every time a commonplace is uttered—to guarantee ceremonial orthodoxy, the officiants will have at their disposal no more than a certain number of tones and modes of expression—the original abyss yawns once again, and the elements are divided. Léon Bloy suggests that a commonplace be defined as the parodic inversion of a theologoúmenon, a way of speaking about God: “Without their knowing it, the most vacuous bourgeois are tremendous prophets; they can’t open their mouths without convulsing the stars, and the abysses of light are immediately invoked by the chasms of their Stupidity.”²⁰ And his words find a sequel in Kraus: “to learn to see abysses where there are commonplaces.”²¹ Flaubert in Bouvard et Pécuchet, Bloy and Kraus, they all tackled this enormous phenomenon, but only Kraus lived to witness its final, dreadful metamorphosis.

Commonplaces, stock phrases—these are stones of language “that take us back to that little known epoch immediately preceding the catastrophe. ‘At that time,’ says Genesis, ‘the earth had only one language.’”²² The supreme goal of writing has always been, to quote Mallarmé once more, to get away from languages that are “imparfaites en cela que plusieurs” [imperfect in that they are many] and, at the same time, to discover in things a language written and spoken in silence, as attested by centuries of speculation on hieroglyphs. But if, at a certain point in time, everything turns into parody, even this doctrine, which no tradition has developed as has the Hebrew, will have to encounter the current presence of its counterfeit. Nazism will bring this about. Its operation implies “the annihilation of metaphor”:²³ The image, retranslated into a language of facts, now gives off the sounds of torture. This is the event that silenced Kraus when Hitler took power. Brecht noted what had happened:

But Kraus did not simply fall silent, as he had announced in his last poem, the one to which Brecht refers. The “eloquent one” denounced in the harshest terms the loss of words that resulted from the advent of Nazism: He wrote Die dritte Walpurgisnacht (The Third Night of Walpurga), a mighty oak growing over the common grave of the century, a forbidding massif, an ironclad work of which only the incipit is generally known—one might say almost justly, since, in accordance with the rule of the “proposition builder,” the first proposition in the book corresponds to the whole: “Apropos of Hitler, nothing comes to mind.” And the text goes on:

I am well aware that, with this result of prolonged thought and many attempts to grasp what has happened and the force behind it, I fall considerably short of expectations, which perhaps were stretched as never before toward the polemicist from whom a popular misunderstanding demands what is called taking a stand, by doing precisely, every time an evil has in some way touched a sore spot in him, what is also called facing up to it. But there are evils where this ceases to be a metaphor, while behind the face the brain, which also participates in some way in these actions, would no longer think itself capable of having any thoughts at all. I feel as though I’ve been hit on the head, and if, before actually being so, I nevertheless would not like to consider myself satisfied to appear to be silenced as I in fact am, it is in obedience to something that obliges me to take account even of a failure and to explain the situation in which such an absolute collapse in the sphere of the German language has placed me, and my personal sense of weakness on the occasion of the reawakening of a nation and the establishment of a dictatorship that today commands everything except language.²⁵

If writing has always aspired to lead metaphors back to their origin, which is then once again found to be something improper, the Nazis immediately did something all too similar, with their “eruption of the stock phrase into action” (p. 123). This is the event that imposed silence on Kraus and then made him write the grandiose commentary on his silence. When “rubbing salt on open wounds” is a present fact and not the remote and forgotten origin of a metaphor, when dead metaphors reawaken to be applied directly to the bodies of the victims, the metaphor itself decays, and its end is the hellish mirror of the origin: “Since the thing has happened, the word is no longer usable” (p. 123). Finally, “blood spurts from the scab of stock phrases,” and the word is silent. “This is—in the new faith, which isn’t even aware of it—the miracle of transubstantiation” (p. 121).

“Incognito like Haroun al Raschid, he passes by night among the sentence constructions of the journals, and, from behind the petrified façades of phrases, he peers into the interior, discovers in the orgies of ‘black magic’ the violation, the martyrdom of words”²⁶—this is Walter Benjamin’s marvelous image of Kraus. In almost forty years of these nightly forays, Kraus had already discovered what was to happen until our own day, but he did not care to be a witness of Nazism in the same manner. He had never disdained any kind of enemy, enveloping them all, from the least significant to the most infamous, in the miasma of Die Fackel, but now for the first time an immense adversary looms and he does not treat it as such. In Die dritte Walpurgisnacht, one can see that many things cross Kraus’s mind concerning the lackeys or hierarchs or inadequate opponents or propagandists of Nazism, but the figure of Hitler is the only one to remain indistinct. And this is the last and most difficult revelation left by Kraus: He was the first to recognize that he stood on the threshold of an age that drains the conceptual and dramatic notion of adversary by extending it to everything, dispersing it in fog, easily turning anyone into his own enemy. Afterward, nothing is left but to listen attentively to the sounds of the world, the great slide from one archon to another, and to spell out the signs that allow one to tread cautiously in the amorphous.

Here there is no need to take up the tragedy of Kraus’s last years. That is a secret door over which he himself wrote, “On the occasion of the end of the world I want to retire to private life,”²⁷ while he was dying of public life. But his last works have a special significance: After writing and not publishing Die dritte Walpurgisnacht, Kraus published instead a very long issue of Die Fackel with the title “Warum Die Fackel nicht erscheint”—which contains large extracts from the unpublished work—to explain his own silence and to mock those who were still counting on his “taking a stand” in the face of Nazism. Before his death, he published a few more issues of Die Fackel, devoted primarily to Johann Nestroy, Jacques Offen-bach, and Shakespeare and only marginally to politics. “When the roof is burning, it’s no use praying or washing the floor. Praying, however, is more practical,”²⁸ as Kraus had written many years before. It is to this activity, supremely defenseless and yet practical, that his last work returns: the preparation of Die Sprache, a volume of writings on language containing, among other things, memorable essays on the comma, the apostrophe, subject and predicate, rhyme, and typographical errors; the book would be published only after his death. The political significance of these pages is condensed in a few words: “If humanity did not have stock phrases, it would not need weapons.”²⁹

Meanwhile, right on that threshold where Kraus recognized the insufficiency of his and all other words, the perfect appropriateness of his previous words was retrospectively confirmed by events. Apart from the unprecedented, Nazism added nothing new. On the third night of Walpurga, the Nazis are ignes fatui that become a funeral pyre, but the theatrical machine that operates the phantasmagoria is the same one that Kraus had been observing for years, a machine in whose gears the world is still caught. In the end, Kraus was able to address these words of farewell to the press, his first target and the mouthpiece of opinion for all other evils, shorthand for society as degradation: “For National Socialism has not destroyed the press; it is the press that has made National Socialism. As reaction, only in appearance; in truth as fulfillment.”³⁰