Creative Destruction: Karl Kraus and the Paradox of Satire

The object of satire often bothers the satirist. Of course, satire is nothing but the attempt to ridicule or condemn an object – the venality and decadence of society, the vanity and mediocrity of the literati, and so on. To invoke a recent attempt to determine the constants of satirical writing, the satirizing author seeks to gain the reader’s approval for the aggression or negative critical energy he or she directs against an object or experience familiar to both (Schönert 9). But the claim about the bothersome object has an additional meaning: satirists do not want the objects they have singled out for censure to define their art. They may rage against an ugly world, but this, they claim, does not condemn their art to ugliness. Satire should instead be valued for the skill with which someone or something is being criticized or the height from which it is being attacked. In his discussion of satire in Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, Friedrich Schiller acknowledges this problem in the process of diminishing its significance:

Stehen wir nur hoch in der Beurteilung, so hat es nichts zu sagen, wenn auch der Gegenstand tief und niedrig, unter uns zurückbleibt. Wenn uns der Geschichtschreiber Tacitus den tiefsten Verfall der Römer des ersten Jahrhunderts schildert, so ist es ein hoher Geist, der auf das Niedrige herabblicke, und unsere Stimmung ist wahrhaft poetisch, weil nur die Höhe, worauf er selbst steht und zu der er uns zu erheben wußte, seinen Gegenstand niedrig machte.

(742)

According to Schiller, satire is saved from the badness of its object because it is written from a point of great elevation. Society may only seem to be so deeply in decline because of the effect of distance on perception, for it is the high vantage point of the satirist rather than some intrinsic quality that makes the object of satire appear fallen. But Schiller’s ingenious rhetoric draws attention to a perennial problem in satire. Satirical writers frequently fear that their work risks being vitiated by the baseness of its material and will turn into yet another medium for the corruption that they want to eliminate.

The writings of the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus (1874–1936) provide numerous illustrations of satire’s entanglements, or the troubling contamination of satire by its object. In the pages of his journal, Die Fackel, Kraus occasionally despaired at society’s power to trump his critique by means of its absurd, thought-defying evilness. The intended object of satire, he felt, could overpower the satirical effort. Faced with the horrors of the First World War, for instance, Kraus claimed that he as a satirist was deprived of words. In the article “In dieser großen Zeit,” published at the eve of the war, Kraus exclaimed: “Die jetzt nichts zu sagen haben, weil die Tat das Wort hat, sprechen weiter. Wer etwas zu sagen hat, trete vor und schweige!” (2). There can be no playful “victory of intelligence over stupid power” when this power is set in motion to ruin all of civilization (Frye 113). But critically minded readers of Kraus also claimed that his texts inflicted ferocious violence rather than remedied it and thus was as terrible as the society it castigated. According to the author Elias Canetti, once an admirer of Kraus, the audience of the hectoring satirist lived under a sort of dictatorial rule (51).

Kraus, then, could not escape society’s constitution, and some asserted that he ended up personifying a number of its worst tendencies. To his supporters, and perhaps to himself, he was unfortunately helpless to remedy the ills of his day and his satire could only reproduce banality and badness. To his critics, his unrelenting rhetoric and command over his supporters turned him into a tyrant in Viennese culture. In the first case, Kraus’s satire is deemed helpless to overcome the absolute badness of society by means of critical representation; in the second, the satire perversely reduces critical thought and in this way colludes with the conditions it purports to challenge.

Kraus himself was often frustrated by the constraints...