By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — In “Yesterday’s World,” Stephan Zweig wrote: “For the Jews, being attached to the spirit of the people or country in which they live has become not only a means of external protection, but also a deep inner need. Their desire for a homeland, for peace, for refuge, for security, for ‘non-foreignness,’ compels them to connect themselves with the culture of their environment with all their soul. Nowhere was such a connection more happily realized—except in fifteenth-century Spain—than in Austria.”
One such “happy” person was the Austrian writer-satirist and publicist of Jewish origin, Karl Kraus, who did not look happy and probably agreed with Zweig less than all Austrian Jews.
Kraus was born in the town of Jichin, Bohemia, in 1874 into the family of a wealthy paper-mill owner. In 1877 the family moved to Vienna, where he studied philosophy and philology at the university, and in 1892 began to publish in Austrian and German magazines. In 1899 Kraus founded the journal “Torch.” From 1912 until the end of his life he was editor and sole author of this journal. The magazine was a great success and brought Kraus fame as the “German Juvenal.” The satirist Kraus despised imperial censorship: “Satire that the censor is able to understand deserves to be banned.” The bitter, misanthropic Karl Kraus, Vienna’s Juvenal, was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Zweig called him “a master of venomous mockery.” Freud’s psychoanalysis was his favorite target. In four books of aphorisms, he lashes out at the teachings of the creator of psychoanalysis: “Psychoanalysis is the newest Jewish disease;” “The unconscious is the ghetto of human thoughts;” “The psychoanalyst ̶ is a confessor who can absolve even the sins of the fathers;” “Psychoanalysts dig through our dreams as if in our pockets;” “Psychoanalysis—the disease of emancipated Jews; Religious Jews are content with diabetes;” “Psychoanalysis is the very ailment from which it undertakes to cure us;” “Psychoanalysis of a certain kind is the occupation of lustful rationalists, who reduce everything in the world to sexual motives, except their own occupation.”
Kraus was an opponent of militarism and World War I, which stirred up rampant Austro-German Jewish patriotism. He published anti-war writings against intellectuals who supported the war and plans of conquest: “It is quite natural to die for a fatherland in which it is impossible to live.” His speeches were impressive in light of the sad realities of the war, its many casualties, the failure of the armies of Germany and Austria-Hungary, and the feeling that the war would be long. Beginning in 1915, he worked on an avant-garde play, The Last Days of Humanity, completed after the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I and its dissolution in 1918. There is an apocalyptic foreboding of the coming catastrophe in this drama, which actually took place in Austria two years after the playwright’s death in 1936. The first scene of the play on Vienna’s Ringstrasse begins like this:
“Newspaper vendor.
Special Issue! The heir to the throne has been murdered! Terrorist arrested!
Man (to wife) (stock speculator, Jew):
Thank God he’s not Jewish!
Wife
Let’s go home!”
The five acts of the play are filled with mockery and descriptions of horror. Kraus placed in it the prophetic words: “The Germans will forget that they lost the war, forget that they started it, forget that they led it. For this reason, it will not end.”
In politics and art, Kraus was often an outsider; in Jewish life, too. In 1898, he announced his withdrawal from the Jewish community. In 1911 Kraus was baptized, and in 1923 he announced his departure from Catholicism. He sarcastically explained his conversion to Catholicism when he left it as “motivated mainly by antisemitism”. He denounced revanchists, socialists, and the Catholic Church. Kraus’s aversion to Viennese Jewry was slightly overshadowed by his contempt for Christianity.
In 1898 Kraus wrote a pamphlet against Zionism. He made no secret of his contempt for the movement “which is known as Zionist, or, to use a good old word, antisemitic.” He was furious that Herzl’s “segregation scheme” was greeted with enthusiasm by Austria’s worst antisemites, one of whom said he would solve the Jewish question by baptizing all the Jews, “but I will hold them under water five minutes longer.” Kraus laughed at Herzl, mocking his idea of sending dandies from the Ringstrasse to cultivate the desert in Palestine. “Herzl’s idea was that the Jews of the world are—disenfranchised vagrants because they have no home of their own. But such a postulate,” Kraus argued, “undermines the centuries-long efforts of Jews to struggle for a position of equal citizens in their countries of residence.” Kraus called Zionism “an unpleasant spectacle: rude paws digging in the 2,000-year-old grave of a vanished people”. He venomously ridiculed the claim that German, English, Russian and Turkish Jews had something in common.
In “Torch,” Kraus published several articles for which he was accused of antisemitism: he printed anti-Jewish remarks by Otto Weininger and excerpts from the writings of Chamberlain, a racist and antisemite, Richard Wagner’s son-in-law. Kraus was a perpetual opponent of the state, of his colleagues and fellow tribesmen. In his obituary to Franz Ferdinand he called Austria “a laboratory of apocalypse;” “I belong to no party and treat them all with the same contempt;” “Vienna’s streets are paved with culture, ̶ he wrote. In other cities they are covered with asphalt;” “I poke my pen at the corpse of Austria, for I persistently believe that life still lingers in it.”
Beginning in 1923, Kraus repeatedly warned of how dangerous Hitler was. He spoke out against Pan-Germanism and the desire to bring about the Anschluss of Austria, which many Austrian Jews endorsed. In the last years of his life Kraus believed that Judaism and Christianity should fight against racism together. In the pages of his journal, Kraus vehemently attacked psychoanalysis, Viennese writers and Viennese theater, especially the Viennese press. The main Viennese newspaper, the “Neue Freie Presse,” Kraus called the Neue Feile Presse—the new corrupt press. “Most of all I despise two kinds of people—Jews and journalists. Unfortunately, I belong to both kinds,” wrote Ferdinand Lassalle, the founder of German Social Democracy.
Kraus attacked the liberal, cosmopolitan press, which was ruled by assimilated Jews and to which he himself belonged. In attacking this press, Kraus criticized his own circle of people whose aspirations and weaknesses he knew and shared. Kafka said of him, “He is a splendid critic of journalists. Only an inveterate poacher can be such a strict forester.”
Separated from Judaism and from national culture, marginalized German-speaking Jews tried to solve the Jewish question by complete assimilation, up to and including baptism, like Gustav Mahler and Karl Kraus, or by joining socialism, like Ernst Bloch, Kurt Tucholsky and Ernst Toller, or by joining communism, like Arnold Zweig. They stripped themselves of their national flesh and national spirit, but, in order not to become ghosts, associated themselves with political movements of an international character. According to Kraus, antisemitism persisted because Jews retained their “status” as Jews and therefore could not assimilate into Viennese society. He considered them guilty of retreating into the “transparent ghetto” of aesthetic values, literary expression, and capitalist materialism created by the “Jewish press.” He criticized his colleagues for the way he thought and did himself.
Theodor Lessing classified Krauss as a self-hating Jew, calling him “the most eloquent example of Jewish self-loathing”. Theodor Adorno expressed Lessing’s view more sharply, describing Kraus as an “inverted, self-burning Shylock,” “who sacrifices his own blood.” According to Brecht, Kraus “turned himself into the measure of the failure of his era.” Kraus’ satire was imbued with the spirit of the cosmopolitan refugee from Judaism. Of all marginalized Jews, Kraus was the most critical of his famous countrymen. In numerous articles, he passionately opposed revision of the Dreyfus case and found it reprehensible to sympathize with him because his “guilt or innocence is not proven.” Kraus’ attacks on prominent tribesmen—Heine, Dreyfus, Freud, Herzl, and fellow liberal press—betray a Judophobic attempt to “purge” himself of Jewishness. His aggressive satire and sharp criticism of fellow Jews were self-defense against antisemitism.
Kraus’ break with society resembled the complete alienation experienced by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. “Vienna’s Kierkegaard” Karl Kraus despised Viennese society. On March 13, 1938, the Nazis entered Vienna. Austria, formed after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ceased to exist 20 years after its inception: 99.71% voted for the Anschluss. Two years after Kraus’ death, the vast majority of Vienna’s residents, which the writer had always opposed, voluntarily accepted Nazi rule.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. Author of 9 books and about 600 articles in paper and online, was published in 79 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, French, and German.