Karl Kraus: Heine und die Folgen: Schriften zur Literatur ed. by Christian Wagenknecht and Eva Willms (review)

Hitherto an oft-neglected aspect of his oeuvre, Karl Kraus’s literary criticism will reach a wider audience with the recent publication of Heine und die Folgen: Schriften zur Literatur, a fully annotated collection of Kraus’s most important writings on literature, language, humor, and the Viennese literati. Compiled and edited by Christian Wagenknecht and Eva Willms, this volume brings together for the first time Kraus as literary critic, polemicist, and philosopher of language. The selections range from his early breakthrough satire “Die demolirte Literatur” (1897) to his later panegyric on language, “Die Sprache” (1932). Willms and Wagenknecht’s lucid commentaries and endnotes both situate these pieces within their respective contexts and discuss the history of their publication, offering detailed explanations of the often obscure allusions to the literary figures and historical events buried throughout Kraus’s writings. Such excavation is no small task in presenting a satirist who often demanded to be misunderstood.

The result of this assemblage is a more systematic understanding of Kraus’s taste in aesthetic matters, which, as the editors make clear, were always at the same time ethical matters. In “Peter Altenberg” (1909) Kraus praises the eponymous café dweller and master of the short form, who, he argues, distinguished himself from the rest of the coffeehouse poets—the “Jourdichter” (63)—who were merely aesthetes. It becomes increasingly clear in this volume that the (rare) figures Kraus admired are always juxtaposed against the journalistic background from which they stood in stark relief. Hence Kraus’s admiration for (the equally under-appreciated and misunderstood) Johann Nestroy. Kraus’s literary homage to the Viennese dramatist, “Nestroy und die Nachwelt” (1912)—which has been recently translated by Jonathan Franzen in The Kraus Project (2013)—builds to an apocalyptic crescendo: “Nachihm die Sintflut.” From the editors of this collection we learn of the French origin of this phrase—“après nous le déluge”—of which this reviewer at least was previously unaware.

More critical attention may now finally be paid to “Brot und Lüge” (1919), which Kraus wrote under the dire postwar conditions of the newly formed Republic and the recently fallen monarchy. The initial occasion for the essay was the contested issue of whether Austria should sell some of its artistic treasures (above all, a Gobelin tapestry) to the victors of World War I in order to provide nourishment for the suffering population. The editors suggest that “Brot” is one of the few texts in which Kraus does not place a single work of art or artist under his critical lens but rather the moral value, or “Unwert” (406), of art itself. While this essay makes no mention of literature as such, Wagenknecht and Willms argue that “Brot und Lüge” is exemplary insofar as it discloses the relationship Kraus envisioned between art, ornament, and bare life and can therefore be considered a foundational text for understanding the philosophical underpinnings of Kraus’s literary criticism. The editors’ inclusion of this text in the volume is richly justified.

Internal connections between earlier and later works by Kraus are highlighted throughout this compendium. The editors point out, for example, that the aesthetic and moral critiques espoused in “Heine und die Folgen” (1910) were taken up once again in “Von Humor und Lyrik” (1921) and “Der Reim” (1927) in the domain of aesthetics, and “Die Feinde Goethe und Heine” (1915) and “Die Freunde Heine und Rothschild” (1915) in the domain of morality. Once again, the editors are able to provide both an immanent and a historical reading of Kraus’s literary and cultural criticism. For both the expert and lay Kraus reader alike, it is additionally helpful that in the afterword, Wagenknecht and Willms separate Kraus’s texts into speeches, literary polemics, essays about individual works or entire oeuvres, and aesthetic-moral treatises about Dichtung as such. The detailed Personenregister is equally helpful.

The historical background for the essays and polemics provided by editors...