The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus ed. by Jonathan Franzen (review)

Rarely do the worlds of twentieth- century Austrian modernism and twenty-first-century American fiction so explicitly collide. Yet it is this unlikely marriage that we find in Jonathan Franzen’s translations of some of Karl Kraus’s seminal writings: Heine and the Consequences (1910), the afterword to Heine and the Consequences (1911), Nestroy and Posterity: On the Fiftieth Anniversary of his Death (1912), Between Two Strains of Life: Final Word (1917), and Kraus’s last poem, “Let No One Ask . . .” (1934). Paul Reitter’s commentaries provide the necessary historical context and critical insight into the various discourses and polemics to which Kraus was responding (or into which he inserted himself), and the contemporary Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann aids in both parsing some of the difficult syntax and allusions for which Kraus was known and providing details about the late nineteenth- century and early twentieth-century Austrian and German literary landscape. Collectively, this project represents a productive encounter between past and present, fiction and the academy; it may even have spawned a new literary genre.

In translating these essays, Franzen, Kehlmann, and Reitter have undertaken a monumental task. This is not only because Kraus’s German—riddled with the dialects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and rapidly shifting between higher and lower registers—presents inherent difficulties but also because Kraus himself made a concerted effort to remain, in a sense, untranslatable to his own contemporaries. But this ties in well with Franzen’s main point, which is precisely that Kraus actually has “more to say to us in our own media-saturated, technology-crazed, apocalypse-haunted historical moment than his more accessible contemporaries now do” (5). Franzen’s reason for publishing these translations today—a project he began in 1983, while he was a student and a struggling writer living in Berlin—is that fin-de-siècle Vienna and fin-de-siècle America have more in common than merely a similar chronological status vis-à-vis a new century. In Kraus’s time, the empire in which he lived was on the precipice of decline, and he was one of its most perspicacious chroniclers. The provocative question Franzen implicitly poses to us is whether Kraus’s apocalyptic vision has also prefigured the decline of the American Empire.

The translations succeed at rendering Kraus’s prose (and poetry) into an English that still retains many of the tensions, allusions, and wordplay that inform the original German. Occasionally, however, word choices appear somewhat arbitrary when read in context. “Blockhead,” for example, is an odd choice for Trottel in Kraus’s playful but acerbic sentence toward the beginning of his essay on Heine: “Glaubt mir, Ihr Farbenfrohen, in Kulturen, in denen jeder Trottel Individualität besitzt, vertrotteln die Individualitäten.” (10–11). In the essay on Nestroy, Franzen has chosen “class feeling” for Standesbewusstsein (170–71), and “assimilation of the mind” for the ambiguous term Vergeistigung (200–201). Editorial decisions like these are necessary, but they invariably betray a position or an interpretation that is imposed more by the translator than represented by the original author. This is the case for any translation of an author who deliberately resists being placed into a camp, whether literary or political. Some of these decisions add something to the original; others take something away. Reitter, however, explicitly underscores this problem by pointing to some of the challenges in translating, for example, Kraus’s use of the term Stoff, which could refer to the “content,” “material,” or “subject matter” of a particular discourse (15).

A leitmotif throughout the footnotes, which both surfaces in many of Kraus’s early writings and is of central concern to Reitter’s reading of Kraus, is Kraus’s treatment of German-Jewish identity. Indeed, Kraus’s ostensible anti-Semitism is one the most difficult aspects of Kraus to “translate” or render intelligible to a contemporary audience. Franzen...