(»Mir fällt zu Trump nichts ein.«)

the torch

Every night, Karl Kraus sat down at his desk to face “the wall of fire”: burning cities, burning books, the tinder-dry bush in flames out of which God spoke to Moses, the crackling babble of a city full of voices. He sweated, his glasses shining, in conference with the fire as he wrote. Kraus was a total writer, perhaps as much as it is possible for a person to be. The heir to a paper mill business (of all things), he did not need a wage: “my business is to pin down the Age between quotation marks.” At 25, he started a magazine with bright red cover, an instant hit. With the first issue, released on April Fool’s Day in 1899, “Vienna turned red,” as though blushing, with a copy of the “red notebook” in so many hands. Kraus was the sole editor for the first decade, writing most of every issue, three issues a month, twelve months a year; after that, he wrote every word of it himself (with a few exceptions). It ran for 922 issues, over almost forty years. It was called Die Fackel: The Torch. Elias Canetti compared that wall of red-bound volumes to a monumental construction like the Great Wall of China, so vast we can’t know all that it encloses.

Kraus had two great loves: the brilliant aristocrat and correspondent Sidonie Nádherná von Borutín (Rilke was likewise devoted to her), and language. He was obsessed with the problem of how to write honestly, truthfully, and clearly, in the deepest sense of those words – and, by the same token, how to fight the misuse of language in lies, in euphemism, in specious argument, in bullshit. The Torch was lit to puncture balloons filled with hot air. Kraus was a relentless satirist, imitating and picking apart comma by comma and sentence by sentence the language of his time and place, for which the truth had to be avoided at all costs. He was so effective that the Neue Freie Presse, one of the biggest newspapers, had as policy to never so much as mention his name – they wouldn’t even cover events, like funerals, where he spoke – because of his bruising mockery of their willingness to take part in cover-ups, misrepresentations, and lies. It was the greatest compliment to never appear in their pages.

From Vienna – “meteorological station of the end of the world” – and, later, Switzerland, Kraus broadcast bulletins from the trials of the Last Judgment where everyone, living and dead, was called to account. His court was always in session, held at the heart of a whole civilization devoted to hypocrisy, pervasive censorship and surveillance, patriotism, crony corruption, displays of wealth, pomp, and power, suppression of ethnic minorities, the performance of morality and family values, the control and sexual abuse of women by men, and a culture of lies, dissimulation, euphemism, and conspiracies of silence (Totschweigentaktik) in the name of Ruhe und Ordnung, quiet and order – abetted by the media, their use of language, and their need for sales, ad dollars, and attention. Kraus subjected all this to a ruthless cross-examination of every word. All his writing reads like testimony – and he read a lot of it aloud, to standing-room crowds in packed theaters. He came to the table, “shy as a bat,” remembers Robert Scheu, sat behind a barricade of papers and read aloud for hours. “Everything flares up when he speaks.”

He would read pieces from his work in progress, the almost-unperformable epic play The Last Days of Mankind. He began working on it in 1915 and finished seven years later – a document of the First World War, when the whole Austro-Hungarian Empire evaporated in the clouds of smoke. In 209 scenes, not counting the ten scenes of prologue and epilogue, it chronicles ruin and slaughter through the death and dissolution of language: righteous speeches and sermons, banal bureaucratic catalogs, propaganda scripts, rambling diatribes, militaristic lingo, profiteering sales pitches and ads, weasel-word coverups of war crimes, banner headlines selling papers, the inarticulate space left to survivors and veterans, shrieks and cries of pain, and endless absurd but accurate details. (More than half of the dialogue was actually quotations.) The play opens with the shout of a newsboy selling papers and ends with the voice of God.

The shortest issue of The Torch was number 888, which contained a speech Kraus had given at the grave of his friend the architect Adolf Loos, and a short poem about Kraus’s long silence on the rise of the Nazis, which opened “Don’t ask why all this time I never spoke.” The longest issue (as far as I know) was »Warum die Fackel nicht erscheint?,« following in 1934: “Why The Torch hasn’t appeared,” with a long letter seeking to again answer the question of why both he and The Torch had gone quiet. He never published Die Dritte Walpurgisnacht, his satirical manuscript devoted to the Nazis. (It came out in 1952.) Partially, this silence was a pragmatic move – he did not want to circulate material to subscribers and supporters in Germany who could be endangered by receiving or possessing it. But Kraus had a larger problem, which he laid out in the opening line of the Walpurgisnacht: »Mir fällt zu Hitler nichts ein,« “I cannot think of anything to say about Hitler” (or “Hitler does not bring anything to mind”).

“Silence reigns,” continued that poem, “because the bedrock broke.” Kraus, total writer, genuinely believed in truth in the form of words, evidence, argument, and style – that people would not tolerate such obvious lies from men who “feel it as a violation if they are thought capable of the actions they commit.” But now he saw the field won by a machine made of “ink, technology, and death,” carrying all before it. The machine had people suited to it: people whose speech “meant two things,” always; functionaries who, confronted with their deeds, “opened their children-eyes wide like the wolf listening to the fairy tale about the wolf”; their ranks staffed by the kind of man who “does not believe the things he sees, indeed not even the things he does.” The Last Days of Mankind ended with a wall of fire looming across the land; now, books were being burned in bonfires and torches marched in vast rallies. “The murderer, if he lies about it enough, has not murdered; the cowardice of a murder bestows on him the stature of a hero.” Nothing made sense anymore, or rather it all made the wrong kind of sense. Where could you even start?

And he was tired. As an heir, he had funded many of his projects himself and given the proceeds – the theater tickets, the subscriptions – to charity. By the mid–1930s he was sick and broke, indeed more or less destitute. He died of a heart embolism in 1936, in Vienna, with copy for the next issue of The Torch on his desk. Brecht, on hearing of his death, said: “As the epoch raised its hand to end its own life, he was the hand.”

“only sick music makes money these days”

Marnie Stern shredding on “Transformer” is how Kraus’s prose feels at its absolute best, so bright and precise it almost hurts, at stroboscopic speed, powered by go-for-broke energy, sunblinding music.

and finally

(Thanks and gratitude to the always fascinating Christian Neukirchen for inspiring this letter.)

One of my heroes, Margaret Hamilton, received the Medal of Freedom last week!

A calming sphere

YKK, SBS, and the $13 billion zipper war

Watt balances, silicon spheres, and the new kilogram

Your source for motorized life-size dinosaur statues

(On a personal note, Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain very sweetly asked me to play the guide to the Enron email corpus for their marvelous experiment in overload and untimeliness: “The Good Life”.)

(Thanks for reading, as ever.)