The Difference Between "Transgression" and The Overrated Art of Satire

I don't have time to write something about Karl Kraus and the sophistication and power - even relentless pummeling - of his satire but this can give you some idea of why it deserves the name "satire" even as what passes for that today doesn't.  I will point out that some have said that Kraus was the most significant successor to Jonathan Swift in that department of writing.

When, in the late war years, artists and writers began to understand the very real horror of the Great War, they turned their attention from politics and culture to the ordeal of those who had actually fought in the trenches. Here the most striking German work was Ernst Jünger’s The Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern) of 1920, with its graphic account of frontline combat. By the time Erich Maria Remarque’s pacifist All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen Nichts Neues) was published in 1928, the mood had shifted completely. “This book,” says Remarque in a headnote to what was to become an international best seller and later a celebrated film, “is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war."

But—and here things get complicated—Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind has no more in common with All Quiet on the Western Front than with the odes in praise of war of 1914–1918. For whereas Jünger or Remarque or, for that matter, the English war poets like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen wrote highly subjective and graphic accounts of warfare, bearing sympathetic witness to the ostensibly innocent young soldiers who were its victims, Kraus’s documentary drama uses every device in its poetic arsenal to dramatize the complicity, cravenness, and often inadvertent cruelty, not only of those who make war, but also of those who carry it out or remain behind. From the first shrill cry of the newsboy announcing the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to the petty controversies between waiters and diners in the local cafes, to the dispatches from the Ballhausplatz (the ministry) and the sermons preached in Vienna’s churches, few, if any, are seen as exempt from the fevers and follies of war. What often begins as accident rapidly turns into status quo, revealing a latent viciousness that seems to permeate, not only the public discourse, but also the entire social fabric. High culture versus mere “civilization”: the dichotomy counts for little to the hungry children in the schoolroom forced to recite patriotic pieties or to the new recruits at military headquarters trying to bribe the petty bureaucrats in charge to give them a few hours of leave.

Kraus’s cruel apocalyptic vision may well have struck modernist readers as excessive; unlike, say, Brecht, he saw no political alternative to the capitalist competition that drove the war engine. If anyone was to blame for the cult of war, it was, in Kraus’s view, the press corps of which he was himself a member. Such obsession with the media will strike many readers as misconceived or at least excessive. Walter Benjamin, a great admirer of Kraus’s, reminded readers that “the newspaper is an instrument of power. It can derive its value only from the character of the power it serves.” This was in 1931, shortly before the Nazis came to power.

Yet the same article says:

Discussions of the early twentieth-century avant-garde rarely refer to the writings of Kraus or Wittgenstein,[who knew?] of Joseph Roth and Elias Canetti, and, in the next generation, of Paul Celan or Ingeborg Bachmann. In part, this neglect has to do with the subordinate status of post-World War I Austria, whose literature has been treated, at least in the English-speaking world, as if it were merely part of the larger body of “German” writing. In this context, the emphasis on the Marxist literature of the Weimar Republic, from Bertolt Brecht to the great critical theorists Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, has eclipsed its very different Austrian counterpart.

I'll raise the point, first, that Brecht's Marxism already gives a lot of what he wrote and his biography something of a quaint irrelevance that it didn't have before the fall of the  "German Democratic Republic",  just to add a touch of irony, despite his undoubted greatness as a writer.  Likewise his lumpen proletariat  content must have always seemed bizarre to the actual underclass whose experience of gangsters and pimps wasn't suggestive of liberation. That was never more than an elite fantasy.  If that will lead him into obscurity is improbable, though for the English speaking world probably mostly due to his having written musical comedies and comic operas.  Kraus has, though.

Yet Kraus was a far, far bigger political presence in his time than just about any contemporary so-called "satirist".  His body of work is enormous and he had an actual political effect in the late part of the Hapsburg empire, such as no satirist today can claim.   His role in the largely forgotten Harden–Eulenburg affair,  a homosexual scandal of the late Hapsburg empire, is where I first heard of Kraus. That scandal has, by some, been credited with bringing down figures around the Kaiser who may have prevented the Great War, which, itself, led to Nazism.     A tragic failure of the alleged power of satire, in itself. Kraus opposed the chief scandal monger, Maximilian Harden, their epic war against each other would have been like Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman going at it with brass knuckles instead of only with lawyers.

As he was producing his work Kraus was fully exposed to lawsuit in a way that of our "satirists" seldom are.  Unlike writers in the third-world and dictatorships, ours are seldom at enough risk to call what they do "brave" in that way.  They don't even have to flee like Brecht did when his satire didn't protect him from reality, both in Nazi Germany and later in the red scare in the United States - so much for the power of the First Amendment.  That he ran, eventually, to the bloody dictatorship in East Germany has even more revealing truths to tell that are beyond the scope of mere satire.

The most politically influential "comedy" in English speaking countries is the insane unreality of right wing hate-talk radio and cabloid TV.  Those provide, essentially, the same level of content as most of the pseudo-leftist "satirists" whose acts are merely based on mocking targets agreed on by their target audience.  That is why someone like Mort Sahl  is able to pass harmlessly between the imaginary wall that separates pseudo-left from actual right and why people were puzzled when Dennis Miller turned out to be a center right Republican despite having worked on a commercial network TV comedy show which many on the left were successfully sold on content that was merely transgressive of already dead taboos.  What happened when Sinéad O'Connor truly transgressed on Saturday Night Live over real issues instead of comic ones is illustrative of what would happen if they'd actually transgressed living taboos.

I most certainly don't agree with everything about Kraus, I'm here to point out that he was a genuine satirist, a form that I have already said I thought was pretty useless in making real change.  Real change requires far more effort than satire does.

Well, I guess I had better stop before I make a liar of myself and do write something about him.  I'm hardly a scholar of his extremely complex work and life, just a casual reader of a small part of it.

Update:  Apropos of my recent transgressions against Strunk-White and Hemmingway, also from the article linked to above.

If it were the intention of the press to have the reader assimilate the information it supplies as part of his own experience, it would not achieve its purpose. But its intention is just the opposite, and it is achieved: to isolate events from the realm in which they could affect the experience of the reader. The principles of journalistic information (newness, brevity, clarity, and, above all, lack of connection between the individual news items) contribute as much to this as the layout of the pages and the style of writing. (Karl Kraus never tired of demonstrating the extent to which the linguistic habitus of newspapers paralyzes the imagination of their readers.)

What you could say about the press is even more true of electronic media under the First Amendment, here.  They are free to do service to the corporate oligarchy what the press in Imperial Austria did for their aristocracy.  Only it's easier to insert subversion in print, than it is over cables or controlled airwaves, problem is, with TV and radio available, not enough people will read it.