Karl Kraus (1) (1874–1936)

The Hitler administration hit Germany and the world like a bombshell. Suddenly, relations with all other countries soured. No other leader could find a way to work with him. Germany became reviled globally. Human rights, freedom of speech and travel shriveled. It became a surveillance country. An exit visa was needed, even just to visit Austria next door, as every movement was tracked. What few tourists ventured in were constantly harassed by various forces of police. Government lies and show more fake news (as it was called even then) became the norm. Though it was not intended as such, The Third Walpurgis Night, written in 1933, presents an eerie parallel universe to the Trump administration today.

The book is a long polemic, incorporating many of the abuses of the new Hitler administration. It was written during Hitler’s first term, just as it was just beginning. Its author, Karl Kraus, was a well- known satirist and editor of Die Fackel (The Torch), a satirical magazine. He had both a sly and direct style of attack, and the book he produced was so damning he surely would have been murdered had it been published before he died, some three years later. It is only now available in English, and it is enlightening.

The new Germany was built entirely on fear. For example, courts could not be counted on for any kind of justice; they always sided with the Nazi or the party. Judges were there for their loyalty to Hitler, not their wisdom. If you were beaten up, you must have provoked it, simply by say, being Jewish in public.

Early on, the Hitler administration managed to sequester the elderly president, Hindenburg, by “offering” to compassionately take care of him, at his own home. He never reappeared, but despite publicly disliking Hitler, he suddenly issued a glowing statement praising Hitler’s intellect, knowledge, sagacity and sheer genius - to the skies. He might as well have said very stable genius and The Chosen One. Same thing, only Hitler pretended someone else said it of him, where Trump says it of himself because no one else would. In Germany, it was a key omen of things to come.

Sidelining Hindenburg allowed Hitler to give himself a free hand to make Germany into a war machine like no other before, pouring huge amounts into defense, drafting every man, and instilling the fear of faltering loyalty and nationalism. And all the while, the government denied it was mobilizing. It claimed it only ever sought peace. All the other claims were incorrect and hurtful to Germans. At the time of the book, Germany was already pummeling Austria with air-dropped leaflets and getting it to accept Germanification before it took over completely.

Soon, job applicants had to show party membership and loyalty, and a lack of Jewish blood going back at least three generations. Jews were encouraged to leave, often by beatings, torture and murder. Yet they couldn’t obtain exit visas. (A prominent politician publicly encouraged Einstein to move to the United States, which would be an improvement for both countries, he said.) Instead, they were herded into concentration camps in “protective custody” from the state-encouraged beatings, robberies, torture, arson and murders.

Concentration camps provided free slave labor to giant German firms like Bayer, Krupp, and Siemens. The Hitler administration minimized it, lying that there were only 24,000 in the camps, combined. This led the Prussian state to brag it alone had more than half of all detainees, followed by another state that boasted it had three times many as Prussia. (There are 16 states in Germany.) Like the Chinese today, Germany claimed detainees were in “protective” custody, that they were treated well, fed well, educated, and both enjoyed and appreciated the opportunity. Coerced labor in the USA is not a Trump invention; it is well ingrained in the carceral economy.

The detainees were weekly humiliated by being forced to parade through town. The public could clearly see they were pathetic, skinny, stumbling, foggy, barely clothed remnants of the doctors, lawyers, musicians and craftsmen they used to be. People lined the streets to see if they knew any of them, since disappearing people meant no trail or traceability. The truth is they were worked hard and starved to death, that being cheaper than feeding them. They were disposable, and there was an endless supply.

Kraus takes the lies and presents them straightforwardly, followed by a twist of the knife: “Forms confirming that nothing has happened to torture victims are routinely available In the Brown House to all who succeed in leaving the building.”

He said the outrageous lies, absurd rulings and contradictions emanating from the government engendered disbelief among some, like when the president sided with pillaging protestors over the victims, much as Trump sides with the “very good people” who attack others. Book burnings were encouraged, as ignorance was the preferred state, and attendance became mandatory. Science was frowned upon. Erudition was frowned upon. Foreigners were frowned upon. Restaurants were required to remove all foreign words from their menus.

The lies grew. The government claimed only 20 people had lost their lives in the “revolution,” while hundreds of thousands went missing. Before the current availability of mass media, a prize of 200 Austrian shillings was offered for the best example of fake news out of Nazi Germany, already in 1933. There were endless choices.

Government positions were handed out to loyalists with criminal records – a murderer to a concentration camp guard, as well as a man who horsewhipped a woman to Prime Minister of Saxony. Smallminded men with party cards did very well for themselves. The Trump administration follows this path closely, selecting the totally unqualified for their loyalty.

Jesus was co-opted for the cause. In Hitler’s spec, Jesus always had to be portrayed as a blue-eyed blond, with a swastika prominent on his robe or covering. Trump of course has gone farther, hinting that he might be The Chosen One himself. Both men were totally irreligious, had no knowledge of the bible and broke every commandment continually.

Like Trump’s, the Hitler administration hyped rallies: “… those absurd rallies … aimed at fooling the German people into thinking it is becoming something exceptional without needing to make any special effort.”

Nationalism became both required and obsessive: “As patriotism opens the citizen’s eyes to the interests of the state, it leaves them blind to the interest of humanity at large.”

The constant lying began to become acceptable: “… the big lie of Nazism, which blatantly shifts shape by the hour, yet is never discredited, even when contradicting itself.”

Alternative facts fooled few at first, but were accepted by most before long: “The allegation that Goering was responsible for disseminating news of the Communists having started the Reichstag fire a good hour before it happened is probably mistaken, since the fire itself broke out earlier than scheduled.”

The goal was simple: “… to reduce the life of the state, the economy and cultural practices to its simplest formula, namely annihilation.”

It was clearly madness to those who understood the world: “All around, nothing but wonder at a state whose institutions – down to the last legal paragraph – derive from a delirium.”

Though the three introductions in the book promote Kraus as a master satirist, I could find no satire in it at all. It is all sly sarcasm when it isn’t just a vicious direct attack. Various luminaries of the time have their own chapter where Kraus eviscerates them. As comedians have found with Trump, it is hard to satirize a living satire. It is sufficient to quote them.

Kraus is a highly perceptive, educated and analytical force. The book is peppered with poetic quotes from the likes of Faust, Macbeth, Goethe and Bayard Taylor. Kraus the editor bashes the Nazis for their criminally bad German, misspellings and rhetorical garbage, much as the incoherent and illiterate alt-right rantings on social media plague Americans today.

The atrocities against the Jews are held pretty much at bay until about 150 pages in. At that point, having battered the reader with all the political nonsense, the real ugliness of the Hitler administration comes to the fore. The obvious racism of the Trump administration has not even begun to approach the starting line by comparison.

A problem with the book is that most of the names, well known to all at the time, are completely meaningless in 2020. The pop culture habit of name dropping is great in real time, but doesn’t last beyond a generation. Trying to read the ebook version was worse, as the critical endnotes that help explain who these people were are hard to find, and getting back to where you left off is almost as frustrating. The same goes for the glossary.

The translators have done a grand job, adapting German poetry so it rhymes in English, adapting sentence structure so it rings true to English eyes. It’s too bad it took so long, but it is here now, during the first Trump term, just in time to see how it all unfolds.

As Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth said:
What need we fear who knows it
When none can call our power to account?

David Wineberg show less

This essay, which Kraus often read in public, was inspired by the anti-Chinese hysteria following the 1909 murder of Elsie Sigel. A young Christian woman was killed by a Chinese man she loved (but maybe not loved exclusively). The sensational topic finds matching lurid expression in Kraus' shrill, biting tones, resulting in a book that seems to hop and boil in one's hands. (My edition reproduces Oskar Kokoschka's graphics from the original--this was the only book by Kraus ever originally show more published illustrated.) Rarely are anti-racist and anti-clerical sentiments married to misogyny with such éclat. show less

I'm not sure I'm capable of writing a balanced review of this book. I expected to like it more than I did, but I also liked it more than I expected to--the sheer bulk of the thing, its relentlessness, and the flaws in this edition (see below) made it less enjoyable than I had hoped. The genius of its construction, the emotional impact, and the utter refusal to button up anything, on the other hand, make it a model of what literature should be. Perhaps nobody ever had a finer eye for the show more telling detail, and there are thousands of them here, which can be exhausting. But, as the self-reflective Kraus tells us, that's important. The Optimist complains at one point that the Grumbler (i.e., Kraus) shouldn't fixate on particular details, but see the glory and virtue that the war should be about, at its best. Piling up the details is the only way to crush this kind of idiocy, and so, here's the pile. There's little development, because stupidity, hypocrisy, and greed don't develop, they just squat on the world. But the final scene (V, 55) and the Epilogue are astonishing nonetheless. One might just read them, and get the gist, but their emotional weight comes from the hundreds of preceding pages. Once you're thoroughly drained by all of that, the conclusion is far more telling.

So, I'm very glad this has been translated, and Bridgham and Timms have made it thoroughly readable. There is one major flaw: rather than footnotes, or even endnotes, we have a 'glossary.' That's fine if you're just looking up names, but not so great if you're looking up, say, what he's talking about with the postcards of atrocities. There is a glossary entry for them, but it's not under postcards, or atrocity, and so on. In general, if you think something's worth a footnote, it's in the glossary, but you'll have to read the glossary all the way through to find it. Speaking of postcards, there are very few illustrations here; the now out of print German edition has a bunch, which are very helpful in giving you a sense for what enraged Kraus so much. These were genuinely horrible people. Kraus himself wasn't perfect--his attitude towards 'the Jews' (more particularly: bourgeois, i.e., rich, Jews) is, with hindsight, disturbing--but you know what he wasn't doing? Demanding that they be slaughtered in the name of German honor.

One small thing I noticed in the translation: there's a cheeky allusion to Celan's 'Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland' in the epilogue ('Death is a master from Berlin'); that doesn't really exist in the German. The sense is there, perhaps, but I do wonder how many other liberties the translators took. That could have been reined in if there'd been, you know, footnotes, so the reader could check the supposed allusions. Some more American-English speakers might find the lingo a bit odd, as well.

Also: best last line of any book I've ever read, but readers might miss the irony, because, you know, no footnote. Though it is in the glossary, of course. show less

"Austrian political satire" sounds as though it should be one of those famous examples of oxymoron - like "military intelligence" and "English cooking". But it turns out that satire actually flourishes in conservative, authoritarian cultures. It isn't much fun attacking sacred cows unless they really are treated as sacred.
Karl Kraus seems to have devoted his life to the cause of satire: with his paper Die Fackel he was a thorn in the flesh of everyone in authority from Franz-Josef to the show more Nazis. But Die letzten Tage... is the work for which he is remembered. A vast, complex, unperformable play, as full of contradictions and inconsistencies as The Good Soldier Švejk; the Austrian Oh, what a lovely war; the ultimate hatchet job on k. und k. pretentions. And, given that it was written well before the Nazis came to power in Austria, a scarily prescient look at how cultural and ethical values break down in wartime.
It isn't easy to read: part of the reason it spent so long on my TBR shelf is the all-but-impenetrable Viennese dialect Kraus uses in many scenes; another is the wealth of topical references, hard to make sense of even with the glossary in the back of the book. But I think it was worth the struggle. show less