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The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus
A great American writer's confrontation with a great European critic—a personal and intellectual awakening
A hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and farsighted writers in Europe. In his self-published magazine, Die Fackel, Kraus brilliantly attacked the popular media's manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumer capitalism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But even though he had a fervent following, which included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely prophet, and few people today are familiar with his work. Luckily, Jonathan Franzen is one of them.
In The Kraus Project, Franzen, whose "calm, passionate critical authority" has been praised in The New York Times Book Review, not only presents his definitive new translations of Kraus but annotates them spectacularly, with supplementary notes from the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and the Austrian author Daniel Kehlmann. Kraus was a notoriously cantankerous and difficult writer, and in Franzen he has found his a novelist unafraid to voice unpopular opinions strongly, a critic capable of untangling Kraus's often dense arguments to reveal their relevance to contemporary America.
While Kraus is lampooning the iconic German poet and essayist Heinrich Heine and celebrating his own literary hero, the Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy, Franzen is annotating Kraus the way Kraus annotated others, surveying today's cultural and technological landscape with fearsome clarity, and giving us a deeply personal recollection of his first year out of college, when he fell in love with Kraus's work. Painstakingly wrought, strikingly original in form, The Kraus Project is a feast of thought, passion, and literature.
A hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and farsighted writers in Europe. In his self-published magazine, Die Fackel, Kraus brilliantly attacked the popular media's manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumer capitalism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But even though he had a fervent following, which included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely prophet, and few people today are familiar with his work. Luckily, Jonathan Franzen is one of them.
In The Kraus Project, Franzen, whose "calm, passionate critical authority" has been praised in The New York Times Book Review, not only presents his definitive new translations of Kraus but annotates them spectacularly, with supplementary notes from the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and the Austrian author Daniel Kehlmann. Kraus was a notoriously cantankerous and difficult writer, and in Franzen he has found his a novelist unafraid to voice unpopular opinions strongly, a critic capable of untangling Kraus's often dense arguments to reveal their relevance to contemporary America.
While Kraus is lampooning the iconic German poet and essayist Heinrich Heine and celebrating his own literary hero, the Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy, Franzen is annotating Kraus the way Kraus annotated others, surveying today's cultural and technological landscape with fearsome clarity, and giving us a deeply personal recollection of his first year out of college, when he fell in love with Kraus's work. Painstakingly wrought, strikingly original in form, The Kraus Project is a feast of thought, passion, and literature.
336 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 1, 2013
76 people are currently reading
1491 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Franzen
90 books10.1k followersJonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.
Franzen has contributed to The New Yorker magazine since 1994. His 1996 Harper's essay "Perchance to Dream" bemoaned the state of contemporary literature. Oprah Winfrey's book club selection in 2001 of The Corrections led to a much publicized feud with the talk show host.
Franzen has contributed to The New Yorker magazine since 1994. His 1996 Harper's essay "Perchance to Dream" bemoaned the state of contemporary literature. Oprah Winfrey's book club selection in 2001 of The Corrections led to a much publicized feud with the talk show host.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 75 reviews
August 26, 2014
Franzen’s translations of somewhat interesting if outdated essays by an Austrian satirist accompanied by entertaining footnotes in which Jonno rants about modern technologies and AOL email and Amazon and discusses his late pubescent sex life and shares his pretentious letters to his first wife. Nothing about this weird blend of translation, scholarship and personal grievance hangs together. Good poem by Karl Kraus towards the end.
Let no one ask what I’ve been doing since I spoke.
I have nothing to say
and won’t say why.
And there's a stillness since the earth broke.
No word was right;
a man speaks only from his sleep at night.
And dreams of a sun that joked.
It passes; and later
it didn’t matter.
The Word went under when that world awoke. (p313)
Let no one ask what I’ve been doing since I spoke.
I have nothing to say
and won’t say why.
And there's a stillness since the earth broke.
No word was right;
a man speaks only from his sleep at night.
And dreams of a sun that joked.
It passes; and later
it didn’t matter.
The Word went under when that world awoke. (p313)
March 10, 2022
Kraus was a fin-de-siecle satirist. Franzen is a novelist. I have read reviews where people said one should either read the Kraus sections or the Franzen as reading both doesn't work. I like the idea of the footnote commentary, recalling the best of the best of DFW and Derrida. I absolutely loved the opening essay on Heinrich Heine, coupled with the commentary of Franzen, Daniel Kehlmann and Paul Reitter. It explored the wave of resistance that many (often myself) have against popular taste and posterity.
Matters decline after that, Franzen foregrounded his own biography in ever-depressing ways. Freud was parsed through the scalpel of Kraus but we learn too much about Franzen's fidelity and his chain-smoking.
Matters decline after that, Franzen foregrounded his own biography in ever-depressing ways. Freud was parsed through the scalpel of Kraus but we learn too much about Franzen's fidelity and his chain-smoking.
Read
November 9, 2013What an intriguing book. So many angles to view it from...
First of all, the reader will ask themselves, what the hell is Franzen thinking? Is he recasting himself as a modern day Schopenhauer? And what's with all that ignorant, one-sided Internet bashing?
Which is all to say that Jonathan Franzen's ability to put his foot in his mouth has not disappeared, an ability which I believe to be the source of all of the controversy that surrounds him, rather than any of his faults as a writer, thinker or person. He has a way of turning people off with overly strident or glib remarks, and this book, in the form of his footnotes, is a highly concentrated, textual document of his glibness. What remark turns one reader off will most likely turn another on, but there is no doubt that any reader will eventually be turned off at some point by one of Franzen's sweeping judgements or tone-deaf categorizations of the Internet, a subject he admits to know little of other than that he hates it.
Kraus, ostensibly the subject of the book but never really, is a similar writer in the sense they both engage in this kind of highly judgmental discourse. One senses that this is the reason Franzen chose the 'project' -- to show that there's a tradition, a literary one, no less, behind the outright dismissal. Franzen makes a rather severe tactical, or perhaps philosophical, error here. Franzen has chose to fight what he believes to be the stupidity of Internet discourse by using its main weapon of stupidity -- again, the sweeping judgement. The tone of Franzen's takedowns of seemingly random targets like Dylan or Salman Rushdie (for joining Twitter, for Christssakes; saying he thought he was "above" that) aren't unfamiliar to the tone of YouTube comments.
Another severe blind spot in Franzen's critique is his ability to insert himself, often without much relevance at all, into Kraus's commentaries. These autobiographical intrusions would be acceptable in a blogger, but in a piece of high-minded criticism they feel quite narcissistic and, more damningly, uninteresting. For someone attacking social media so stridently, the narcissism feels grossly inappropriate as it seems to be a reflection of the culture which social media has created. To be fair to Franzen, his "me"a and "my"s may be because, as he puts it, he's a "child of the sixties," thus coming of age in the "me" generation.
But as much as a disservice he does to the argument, and I think he does quite a bit, Franzen has a point. There is a conspiracy of silence in mounting the kind of critique which Franzen presents, one which is barely apparent in print media, aside from a few stray Luddites. And there is something limiting about the short attention span, digestible idea, the ideas which make up the discourse of the TED talk generation, the most popular platitudes of which confuse profundity with agreeableness. And I enjoyed his excavation of Kraus, a figure I don't believe I'd ever heard mentioned before, but yet was read by some of my favourite authors (excuse the "my"; I'm something of a blogger, and have no interest in shaming people out of using the internet). Kraus is a more abstract version of his eminently abstract countrymen, and in about 90% of "Heine and His Consequeces" I understand exactly what he was saying, when not being distracted by the pop-up-ad-esque footnotes
So, in a lot of ways, I think Franzen has done something important, in revitalizing Kraus's reputation and writing down his own opinions on the modern world, and has also spoken some truth. But I was reminded of the quote by Samuel Johnson, the great censurer, throughout:
"Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority."
In this eerily accurate assessment, both Franzen and the troll can be found.
First of all, the reader will ask themselves, what the hell is Franzen thinking? Is he recasting himself as a modern day Schopenhauer? And what's with all that ignorant, one-sided Internet bashing?
Which is all to say that Jonathan Franzen's ability to put his foot in his mouth has not disappeared, an ability which I believe to be the source of all of the controversy that surrounds him, rather than any of his faults as a writer, thinker or person. He has a way of turning people off with overly strident or glib remarks, and this book, in the form of his footnotes, is a highly concentrated, textual document of his glibness. What remark turns one reader off will most likely turn another on, but there is no doubt that any reader will eventually be turned off at some point by one of Franzen's sweeping judgements or tone-deaf categorizations of the Internet, a subject he admits to know little of other than that he hates it.
Kraus, ostensibly the subject of the book but never really, is a similar writer in the sense they both engage in this kind of highly judgmental discourse. One senses that this is the reason Franzen chose the 'project' -- to show that there's a tradition, a literary one, no less, behind the outright dismissal. Franzen makes a rather severe tactical, or perhaps philosophical, error here. Franzen has chose to fight what he believes to be the stupidity of Internet discourse by using its main weapon of stupidity -- again, the sweeping judgement. The tone of Franzen's takedowns of seemingly random targets like Dylan or Salman Rushdie (for joining Twitter, for Christssakes; saying he thought he was "above" that) aren't unfamiliar to the tone of YouTube comments.
Another severe blind spot in Franzen's critique is his ability to insert himself, often without much relevance at all, into Kraus's commentaries. These autobiographical intrusions would be acceptable in a blogger, but in a piece of high-minded criticism they feel quite narcissistic and, more damningly, uninteresting. For someone attacking social media so stridently, the narcissism feels grossly inappropriate as it seems to be a reflection of the culture which social media has created. To be fair to Franzen, his "me"a and "my"s may be because, as he puts it, he's a "child of the sixties," thus coming of age in the "me" generation.
But as much as a disservice he does to the argument, and I think he does quite a bit, Franzen has a point. There is a conspiracy of silence in mounting the kind of critique which Franzen presents, one which is barely apparent in print media, aside from a few stray Luddites. And there is something limiting about the short attention span, digestible idea, the ideas which make up the discourse of the TED talk generation, the most popular platitudes of which confuse profundity with agreeableness. And I enjoyed his excavation of Kraus, a figure I don't believe I'd ever heard mentioned before, but yet was read by some of my favourite authors (excuse the "my"; I'm something of a blogger, and have no interest in shaming people out of using the internet). Kraus is a more abstract version of his eminently abstract countrymen, and in about 90% of "Heine and His Consequeces" I understand exactly what he was saying, when not being distracted by the pop-up-ad-esque footnotes
So, in a lot of ways, I think Franzen has done something important, in revitalizing Kraus's reputation and writing down his own opinions on the modern world, and has also spoken some truth. But I was reminded of the quote by Samuel Johnson, the great censurer, throughout:
"Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority."
In this eerily accurate assessment, both Franzen and the troll can be found.
January 13, 2015
Franzen is utterly insufferable. Kraus is excellent, except when he's incomprehensible; some of this is no doubt a result of the man's own style, but I'm not sure an American novelist is the best modern midwife for an English version of a Viennese satirist's century-old essays.
But I don't read German, so I won't quibble. (Franzen has done the curious among us a favor by bringing Kraus's essays to our language at all.) Translation matters aside, it's evident that our modern age's most self-involved novelist has simply used Kraus's work as a platform to memoir-ize his early 20s and rant about his innumerable technological and cultural bêtes-noirs. Even when he makes a rare trenchant point, I find myself so irritated with Franzen's overweening sense of self-importance – if anything, made even worse by his vast need to be loved – that I come to loathe my own opinion.
What is perhaps most irritating about this whole enterprise is that Jon Franzen is purportedly A NOVELIST, which means he probably ought to be working out his complicated relationship with himself and modernity and his past and his artistic predecessors and his ex-wife and 1980s Euro-punks and 1840s German-Jewish poets and 1910s Austrian-Jewish-Catholic-Jewish polemicists and Jeff Bezos and America Online and smartphones THROUGH THE MEDIUM OF FICTION rather than ham-handed modern cultural criticism and self-denying political commentary disguised as explanatory footnotes to another man's work. (By the second half of the book, he gives up the game and simply uses the bottom of the page as space to write tangential and sometimes completely unrelated small-format biographical essays.)
The book's only saving grace is the very smart historical context and analysis provided by Paul Reitter – an American academic and a legitimate expert on Kraus – who in his own understated, humane, but persistent way highlights the very real differences between real scholarship and self-justifying, vanity-project bullshit.
Oh, and P.S. — Franzen blatantly rips off David Foster Wallace in at least one place – p. 21, fn 13 is a straight-up unattributed theft of Wallace's "crank-turner" imagery from the early-'90s McCaffrey interview in the Journal (Review?) of Contemporary Fiction (or somesuch), and Franzen either fails to remember or doesn't have the decency to acknowledge that he stole the construction from one of his betters – and directly channels him without mentioning his name on a number of other occasions. (These tend to be the aforementioned rare occasions when he makes a decent point.) Far be it from me to criticize a guy for adopting other people's intelligent arguments and good ideas as his own, but it sheds a whole different light on the theme of Oedipal competition and slaying of literary predecessors, etc. that appears throughout the commentary. Wallace seems to me to be a huge presence in this book, but Franzen mentions him only once: unflatteringly, when he notes that notwithstanding his own reputation as a critic of older American novelists, "David Foster Wallace was the one who actually called Updike an asshole in print."
God, Franzen is such an asshole.
But I don't read German, so I won't quibble. (Franzen has done the curious among us a favor by bringing Kraus's essays to our language at all.) Translation matters aside, it's evident that our modern age's most self-involved novelist has simply used Kraus's work as a platform to memoir-ize his early 20s and rant about his innumerable technological and cultural bêtes-noirs. Even when he makes a rare trenchant point, I find myself so irritated with Franzen's overweening sense of self-importance – if anything, made even worse by his vast need to be loved – that I come to loathe my own opinion.
What is perhaps most irritating about this whole enterprise is that Jon Franzen is purportedly A NOVELIST, which means he probably ought to be working out his complicated relationship with himself and modernity and his past and his artistic predecessors and his ex-wife and 1980s Euro-punks and 1840s German-Jewish poets and 1910s Austrian-Jewish-Catholic-Jewish polemicists and Jeff Bezos and America Online and smartphones THROUGH THE MEDIUM OF FICTION rather than ham-handed modern cultural criticism and self-denying political commentary disguised as explanatory footnotes to another man's work. (By the second half of the book, he gives up the game and simply uses the bottom of the page as space to write tangential and sometimes completely unrelated small-format biographical essays.)
The book's only saving grace is the very smart historical context and analysis provided by Paul Reitter – an American academic and a legitimate expert on Kraus – who in his own understated, humane, but persistent way highlights the very real differences between real scholarship and self-justifying, vanity-project bullshit.
Oh, and P.S. — Franzen blatantly rips off David Foster Wallace in at least one place – p. 21, fn 13 is a straight-up unattributed theft of Wallace's "crank-turner" imagery from the early-'90s McCaffrey interview in the Journal (Review?) of Contemporary Fiction (or somesuch), and Franzen either fails to remember or doesn't have the decency to acknowledge that he stole the construction from one of his betters – and directly channels him without mentioning his name on a number of other occasions. (These tend to be the aforementioned rare occasions when he makes a decent point.) Far be it from me to criticize a guy for adopting other people's intelligent arguments and good ideas as his own, but it sheds a whole different light on the theme of Oedipal competition and slaying of literary predecessors, etc. that appears throughout the commentary. Wallace seems to me to be a huge presence in this book, but Franzen mentions him only once: unflatteringly, when he notes that notwithstanding his own reputation as a critic of older American novelists, "David Foster Wallace was the one who actually called Updike an asshole in print."
God, Franzen is such an asshole.
July 29, 2016
This is like if you had to translate Michael Musto's column for people living 50 years later and had to explain all the cultural references. (If your first thought is, 'But Michael Musto doesn't expect his ephemera to be read by posterity; if he did he would write in a more timeless style, not relying on a complex web of personal and highly topical references,' then, brother, I am right there with you.)
But also you have to do it semi-auto-biographically a la Into the Wild, explaining where you were in your life when you read it and the ways in which you identified with it and it influenced your life.
The best thing about this book is, of course, Franzen's own skewering of culture in the footnotes, but the second best thing is that it's bi-lingual so you only have to read half the pages.
But also you have to do it semi-auto-biographically a la Into the Wild, explaining where you were in your life when you read it and the ways in which you identified with it and it influenced your life.
The best thing about this book is, of course, Franzen's own skewering of culture in the footnotes, but the second best thing is that it's bi-lingual so you only have to read half the pages.
January 13, 2014
This is an odd book. I may be one of very few people who read it b/c it is about Kraus, rather than b/c it was produced by Franzen. It surely would not have been published if it hadn't had Franzen's name on the cover. As a college student Franzen got interested in the Viennese essayist Karl Kraus (1874-1936). This book consists of 2 lengthy essays by Kraus, 2 shorter pieces associated with one of the essays, and a short poem. The essays are about 2 19th Century German writers, Heine and Nestroy. Kraus detested Heine and loved Nestroy, and made his case in these essays.
The most striking thing about the book is its spatial typography. The essays are presented in the original German (on left-hand pages) with Franzen's translation (on the facing right-hand pages). Because Kraus's German is so hard to translate, the reader is meant to (be able to) consult the original German as needed. But the largest part of the book (literally) is the footnotes that explain/elaborate/take off from the text. Since the footnotes are (of course) at the foot of the pages and not at the end, the book must have been a typographical nightmare for the editor. Since the footnotes are to the English text and so always begin on the right pages, this often results in blank space on the left-hand pages. And since several of the footnotes are extremely long, it also results in many pages (actually, 50) that are only "footnotes."
The typesetting and footnoting of the book is so unusual that I did a scan of the book, rounding to tenths of pages and then adding up. Here is the typesetting topology of the book: Of the roughly 300 content-ful pages of the book, 64 pages are German text. Consequently, 64 pages are English translation. (English tends to be slightly more compressed than German, but that didn't make a relevant difference here.) Because the footnotes only begin on right-hand pages, there is inevitable blank space on many left-hand pages. This blank space, incredibly, amounts to 36 pages worth. The footnotes amount to about 133 pages!
Now for the footnotes: Franzen is not an expert in German literature or in German culture, so he makes regular use of commentary by Paul Reitter for insight into Kraus, and comments from Daniel Kehlmann for insights into German-Austrian culture. 48 pages worth of footnotes are from Reitter; 6 pages worth are from Kehlmann. That leaves 79 pages worth of footnotes for Franzen. He discusses some problems of translation and interpretation, but mostly he offers us an autobiographical commentary about what Kraus has meant to him and a cultural commentary on what Kraus's thoughts might mean for our modern world. For example, Kraus, in the essay on Heine, is inveighing against a popular style of short essay called the "feuilleton." Franzen sees the blog as a contemporary version of the feuilleton, and so uses this as a launching pad for his own critique.
I'm impressed that FSG published this and that we have these translations with helpful commentary. The cultural commentary and personal autobiography by Franzen was rather indulgent, but quite readable. In sum, I liked it, but it wasn't anything great.
Update 1/12/14: See my review of "Wittgenstein's Vienna" for more (and better) on Kraus.
The most striking thing about the book is its spatial typography. The essays are presented in the original German (on left-hand pages) with Franzen's translation (on the facing right-hand pages). Because Kraus's German is so hard to translate, the reader is meant to (be able to) consult the original German as needed. But the largest part of the book (literally) is the footnotes that explain/elaborate/take off from the text. Since the footnotes are (of course) at the foot of the pages and not at the end, the book must have been a typographical nightmare for the editor. Since the footnotes are to the English text and so always begin on the right pages, this often results in blank space on the left-hand pages. And since several of the footnotes are extremely long, it also results in many pages (actually, 50) that are only "footnotes."
The typesetting and footnoting of the book is so unusual that I did a scan of the book, rounding to tenths of pages and then adding up. Here is the typesetting topology of the book: Of the roughly 300 content-ful pages of the book, 64 pages are German text. Consequently, 64 pages are English translation. (English tends to be slightly more compressed than German, but that didn't make a relevant difference here.) Because the footnotes only begin on right-hand pages, there is inevitable blank space on many left-hand pages. This blank space, incredibly, amounts to 36 pages worth. The footnotes amount to about 133 pages!
Now for the footnotes: Franzen is not an expert in German literature or in German culture, so he makes regular use of commentary by Paul Reitter for insight into Kraus, and comments from Daniel Kehlmann for insights into German-Austrian culture. 48 pages worth of footnotes are from Reitter; 6 pages worth are from Kehlmann. That leaves 79 pages worth of footnotes for Franzen. He discusses some problems of translation and interpretation, but mostly he offers us an autobiographical commentary about what Kraus has meant to him and a cultural commentary on what Kraus's thoughts might mean for our modern world. For example, Kraus, in the essay on Heine, is inveighing against a popular style of short essay called the "feuilleton." Franzen sees the blog as a contemporary version of the feuilleton, and so uses this as a launching pad for his own critique.
I'm impressed that FSG published this and that we have these translations with helpful commentary. The cultural commentary and personal autobiography by Franzen was rather indulgent, but quite readable. In sum, I liked it, but it wasn't anything great.
Update 1/12/14: See my review of "Wittgenstein's Vienna" for more (and better) on Kraus.
July 21, 2016
I like Franzen's writing, a lot. I was curious about Kraus. Unfortunately, this book is not an illumination of Kraus. Instead, it's a series of really long footnotes about Franzen's life as a young student/wannabe writer in Germany, which while somewhat interesting, did not help me to understand Kraus. They just distracted me from the Kraus text, interrupting the flow, and not helping me to understand Kraus' difficult writing. (The footnotes provided by Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlmann were far more helpful.) And although I'm very interested in (and in agreement with some of) Franzen's thoughts on technology, it's a little bit hard to take seriously someone who uses examples from AOL to prove his point.
October 6, 2013
Hoping to have a review written within a month or so, for now will just say that I'm both enjoying very much and already cringing at the glib antagonism it'll almost certainly stir up on publication in October.
December 5, 2014
http://www.mytwostotinki.com/?p=940
The Kraus Project by Jonathan Franzen is a hybrid book.
It contains on the upper part of each page on the left side the original German text of four essays and a poem by the Austrian author Karl Kraus, mirrored by the English translation of the respective text on the opposite right page.
On the lower part of each page are numerous footnotes that are sometimes longer than Kraus' text itself. The footnotes are partly by Jonathan Franzen, partly by the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter, partly by the German-Austrian novelist Daniel Kehlmann, like Franzen an admirer of Kraus. Franzen is also the translator of Kraus' texts.
Since Karl Kraus is almost unknown in the English-speaking world, the publisher obviously thought it a good idea to bring this book on the market with Jonathan Franzen as author on the title page. But again, this book is a translated and annotated collection of some of Kraus' texts.
A few words about Karl Kraus:
coming from a wealthy assimilated Jewish family, Kraus grew up in Vienna at the end of the 19th century. Vienna was at that time a melting pot of people and ideas. Literature and theater (two lifelong passions of Kraus) were at its height, Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalysis that revolutionized later many aspects of our lives, Mahler and Schönberg revolutionized music, Adolf Loos, Kraus closest friend revolutionized architecture, the Vienna school of economists revolutionized economics, the Vienna Circle and Ludwig Wittgenstein revolutionized philosophy. All kind of modern ideologies came to light in that period in Vienna, including the "modern" racial Antisemitism and his natural reaction, Zionism, whose main propagandist was the journalist Theodor Herzl, a former colleague of Kraus who would become one of his most hated targets.
"Vienna's streets are paved with culture; the streets of other capitals are paved with asphalt",
is a popular aphorism by Kraus.
In this hotbed of culture and ideologies the typical Kaffeehauskultur developed where each faction of intellectuals had their favorite coffeehouses where they met and engaged in group and cartel building, gossiping, writing and reading. Kraus was part of this culture, but never belonged to any group. One of his most remarkable features is that he successfully obtained his absolute independence during all his intellectual life.
Kraus' main "work" are the roughly 40,000 pages of his journal Die Fackel (The Torch), which he published between 1899 and 1936. In the first years, he admitted every now and then guest authors but from 1912 on, he wrote the journal exclusively by himself.
Die Fackel had a blog-like feel: Kraus' was publishing whenever he had something to say and about whatever he felt he needed something to say. Although literature and theater were always prominent topics in Die Fackel, Kraus was an avid reader of the Austrian and foreign press - and from here he took most of his inspirations.
Kraus was writing about foreign and local policy, about the situation of workers in the factories, about women's rights, he was an early advocate of equal rights of homosexuals, and he was an everyday observer of the journalism in Austria, which was in an extremely bad shape according to Kraus.
This opposition to the frequently badly written journalism made Kraus many enemies, especially since he combined it with irony and sarcasm, but also with undeniable truths. His lawyer was for sure a very busy man and it is said that Kraus won almost all his court cases. He knew the rules and acted within these rules very efficiently to expose corruption, nepotism, stupidity and wrong use of language.
He did all this in a unique style, frequently playing with words and creating a richness of aphorisms that may be rivaled only by Lichtenberg. He was also a stage persona: he gave more than 700 performances reading, singing, acting alone on a stage - his audience consisted mainly of addicted Kraus fans; Elias Canetti for example said in his autobiography that he visited more than 300 of Kraus' unique performances. Kraus must have been a magnetic personality that had many people under his spell.
The two main pieces in The Kraus Project are Kraus' most famous essays on the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine and on the Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy.
Heine is for Kraus on the one hand a great and extremely popular poet. Many of his poems were turned into popular songs and are part of the folk poetry. But Heine's followers turn his spirit into something superficial. And this is not by accident, it is because of specific virtues in Heine's works. In Kraus' times there was a firm belief of many intellectuals that there was a deep difference between Romance and German culture. As Kraus put it:
"Two strains of intellectual vulgarity: defenselessness against content and defenselessness against form. The one experiences only the material side of art. It is of German origin. The other experiences even the rawest of materials artistically. It is of romance origin. To the one, art is an instrument; to the other, life is an ornament. In which hell would the artist prefer to fry? He'd surely still rather live among the Germans. For although they've strapped art into the Procrustean Folding Bed of their commerce, they've also made life sober, and this is a blessing: fantasy thrives, and every man can put his own light in the barren window frames. Just spare me the pretty ribbons!..."
Austria, although linguistically part of German culture, is for Kraus deeply affected by the "French" poet Heine. Even the biggest Anti-semites "forgave" Heine his Jewish origin, just because his verses appeal so much to the tendency of most of the Vienna literati to gloss over everything with patches of jokes and irony. (I owe The Kraus Project the information that young Adolf Hitler in his Vienna years supported an initiative to build a monument for Heine - Heine's poems were later not removed from the school books in Nazi Germany, just his name; it was all supposed to be "folk poetry" then).
While the Heine essay is very acerbic in it's evaluation of the poems of this great German writer, the big hater Kraus shows in the other main essay that he can be also a great admirer and lover: he re-discovers the Austrian actor, singer, playwright Johann Nestroy, a popular performer of the first part of the 19th century who fell into oblivion soon after his death.
That Nestroy is nowadays considered to be one of the greatest authors for theater in German is almost exclusively a result of the decades of Kraus' efforts to make him again popular. I love Nestroy's plays, and there is hardly anything (with the exception of Shakespeare, and the obscure play Datterich by Ernst Elias Niebergall, written in Darmstadt dialect) that I enjoy more on a stage than his plays. To me, the Nestroy essay is Kraus's best essay - the Heine piece, although very interesting, shows also a side of Kraus that is not very appealing: the text is not free from Anti-semitic slurs.
Franzen's translation is a heroic and brave effort and mostly very decent in my opinion. Kraus is extremely difficult to translate and that he tackled this task deserves a lot of respect.
The footnotes are frequently related directly to the text. Paul Reitter adds a lot of his knowledge about Kraus, much to the profit of the reader. Also many of Franzen's and Kehlmann's footnotes are interesting. The one thing that surprised me was that Franzen is dragging the reader a lot into his personal life during the time he lived in Germany and Austria as a student. We learn a lot about the person Jonathan Franzen, including the story of his failed first marriage, and a short bout of mental illness when he was in Germany. If you like Jonathan Franzen as an author (I do), you might as well enjoy this part of the annotations, but if not you will have to skip some of them. I am still wondering if it wouldn't have been better to split the book in two: a translation of Kraus only, and a longer essay with Franzen's view of Kraus.
Kraus was a larger-than-life author. His play Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind) is about 800 pages long. The Kraus Project gives some insight in part of his work, but those who would like to discover the full Kraus and also the Vienna of his times (because most of his work can be only understood from the context) should maybe read in parallel also Carl Schorske's excellent book Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture.
Let me close with a poem by Karl Kraus in which he explains why he kept silent for a long time after the Nazis took power in Germany:
Let no one ask what I've been doing since I spoke.
I have nothing to say
and won't say why.
And there's stillness since the earth broke.
No word was right;
a man speaks only from his sleep at night.
And dreams of a sun that joked.
It passes; and later
it didn't matter.
The Word went under when that world awoke,
Man frage nicht, was all die Zeit ich machte.
Ich bleibe stumm;
und sage nicht, warum.
Und Stille gibt es, da die Erde krachte.
Kein Wort, das traf;
man spricht nur aus dem Schlaf.
Und träumt von einer Sonne, welche lachte.
Es geht vorbei;
nachher war's einerlei.
Das Wort entschlief, als jene Welt erwachte.
The Kraus Project by Jonathan Franzen is a hybrid book.
It contains on the upper part of each page on the left side the original German text of four essays and a poem by the Austrian author Karl Kraus, mirrored by the English translation of the respective text on the opposite right page.
On the lower part of each page are numerous footnotes that are sometimes longer than Kraus' text itself. The footnotes are partly by Jonathan Franzen, partly by the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter, partly by the German-Austrian novelist Daniel Kehlmann, like Franzen an admirer of Kraus. Franzen is also the translator of Kraus' texts.
Since Karl Kraus is almost unknown in the English-speaking world, the publisher obviously thought it a good idea to bring this book on the market with Jonathan Franzen as author on the title page. But again, this book is a translated and annotated collection of some of Kraus' texts.
A few words about Karl Kraus:
coming from a wealthy assimilated Jewish family, Kraus grew up in Vienna at the end of the 19th century. Vienna was at that time a melting pot of people and ideas. Literature and theater (two lifelong passions of Kraus) were at its height, Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalysis that revolutionized later many aspects of our lives, Mahler and Schönberg revolutionized music, Adolf Loos, Kraus closest friend revolutionized architecture, the Vienna school of economists revolutionized economics, the Vienna Circle and Ludwig Wittgenstein revolutionized philosophy. All kind of modern ideologies came to light in that period in Vienna, including the "modern" racial Antisemitism and his natural reaction, Zionism, whose main propagandist was the journalist Theodor Herzl, a former colleague of Kraus who would become one of his most hated targets.
"Vienna's streets are paved with culture; the streets of other capitals are paved with asphalt",
is a popular aphorism by Kraus.
In this hotbed of culture and ideologies the typical Kaffeehauskultur developed where each faction of intellectuals had their favorite coffeehouses where they met and engaged in group and cartel building, gossiping, writing and reading. Kraus was part of this culture, but never belonged to any group. One of his most remarkable features is that he successfully obtained his absolute independence during all his intellectual life.
Kraus' main "work" are the roughly 40,000 pages of his journal Die Fackel (The Torch), which he published between 1899 and 1936. In the first years, he admitted every now and then guest authors but from 1912 on, he wrote the journal exclusively by himself.
Die Fackel had a blog-like feel: Kraus' was publishing whenever he had something to say and about whatever he felt he needed something to say. Although literature and theater were always prominent topics in Die Fackel, Kraus was an avid reader of the Austrian and foreign press - and from here he took most of his inspirations.
Kraus was writing about foreign and local policy, about the situation of workers in the factories, about women's rights, he was an early advocate of equal rights of homosexuals, and he was an everyday observer of the journalism in Austria, which was in an extremely bad shape according to Kraus.
This opposition to the frequently badly written journalism made Kraus many enemies, especially since he combined it with irony and sarcasm, but also with undeniable truths. His lawyer was for sure a very busy man and it is said that Kraus won almost all his court cases. He knew the rules and acted within these rules very efficiently to expose corruption, nepotism, stupidity and wrong use of language.
He did all this in a unique style, frequently playing with words and creating a richness of aphorisms that may be rivaled only by Lichtenberg. He was also a stage persona: he gave more than 700 performances reading, singing, acting alone on a stage - his audience consisted mainly of addicted Kraus fans; Elias Canetti for example said in his autobiography that he visited more than 300 of Kraus' unique performances. Kraus must have been a magnetic personality that had many people under his spell.
The two main pieces in The Kraus Project are Kraus' most famous essays on the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine and on the Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy.
Heine is for Kraus on the one hand a great and extremely popular poet. Many of his poems were turned into popular songs and are part of the folk poetry. But Heine's followers turn his spirit into something superficial. And this is not by accident, it is because of specific virtues in Heine's works. In Kraus' times there was a firm belief of many intellectuals that there was a deep difference between Romance and German culture. As Kraus put it:
"Two strains of intellectual vulgarity: defenselessness against content and defenselessness against form. The one experiences only the material side of art. It is of German origin. The other experiences even the rawest of materials artistically. It is of romance origin. To the one, art is an instrument; to the other, life is an ornament. In which hell would the artist prefer to fry? He'd surely still rather live among the Germans. For although they've strapped art into the Procrustean Folding Bed of their commerce, they've also made life sober, and this is a blessing: fantasy thrives, and every man can put his own light in the barren window frames. Just spare me the pretty ribbons!..."
Austria, although linguistically part of German culture, is for Kraus deeply affected by the "French" poet Heine. Even the biggest Anti-semites "forgave" Heine his Jewish origin, just because his verses appeal so much to the tendency of most of the Vienna literati to gloss over everything with patches of jokes and irony. (I owe The Kraus Project the information that young Adolf Hitler in his Vienna years supported an initiative to build a monument for Heine - Heine's poems were later not removed from the school books in Nazi Germany, just his name; it was all supposed to be "folk poetry" then).
While the Heine essay is very acerbic in it's evaluation of the poems of this great German writer, the big hater Kraus shows in the other main essay that he can be also a great admirer and lover: he re-discovers the Austrian actor, singer, playwright Johann Nestroy, a popular performer of the first part of the 19th century who fell into oblivion soon after his death.
That Nestroy is nowadays considered to be one of the greatest authors for theater in German is almost exclusively a result of the decades of Kraus' efforts to make him again popular. I love Nestroy's plays, and there is hardly anything (with the exception of Shakespeare, and the obscure play Datterich by Ernst Elias Niebergall, written in Darmstadt dialect) that I enjoy more on a stage than his plays. To me, the Nestroy essay is Kraus's best essay - the Heine piece, although very interesting, shows also a side of Kraus that is not very appealing: the text is not free from Anti-semitic slurs.
Franzen's translation is a heroic and brave effort and mostly very decent in my opinion. Kraus is extremely difficult to translate and that he tackled this task deserves a lot of respect.
The footnotes are frequently related directly to the text. Paul Reitter adds a lot of his knowledge about Kraus, much to the profit of the reader. Also many of Franzen's and Kehlmann's footnotes are interesting. The one thing that surprised me was that Franzen is dragging the reader a lot into his personal life during the time he lived in Germany and Austria as a student. We learn a lot about the person Jonathan Franzen, including the story of his failed first marriage, and a short bout of mental illness when he was in Germany. If you like Jonathan Franzen as an author (I do), you might as well enjoy this part of the annotations, but if not you will have to skip some of them. I am still wondering if it wouldn't have been better to split the book in two: a translation of Kraus only, and a longer essay with Franzen's view of Kraus.
Kraus was a larger-than-life author. His play Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind) is about 800 pages long. The Kraus Project gives some insight in part of his work, but those who would like to discover the full Kraus and also the Vienna of his times (because most of his work can be only understood from the context) should maybe read in parallel also Carl Schorske's excellent book Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture.
Let me close with a poem by Karl Kraus in which he explains why he kept silent for a long time after the Nazis took power in Germany:
Let no one ask what I've been doing since I spoke.
I have nothing to say
and won't say why.
And there's stillness since the earth broke.
No word was right;
a man speaks only from his sleep at night.
And dreams of a sun that joked.
It passes; and later
it didn't matter.
The Word went under when that world awoke,
Man frage nicht, was all die Zeit ich machte.
Ich bleibe stumm;
und sage nicht, warum.
Und Stille gibt es, da die Erde krachte.
Kein Wort, das traf;
man spricht nur aus dem Schlaf.
Und träumt von einer Sonne, welche lachte.
Es geht vorbei;
nachher war's einerlei.
Das Wort entschlief, als jene Welt erwachte.
October 24, 2018
The Kraus Project is Jonathan Franzen's showdown with modern times.
Through the highly troublesome and problematic figure of (the one-but-last) fin-de-siecle satirist, playwright and literary critic Karl Kraus he makes a case for an elitist culture. To me, personally, the trouble with that is that it excludes me. Either that or I 'm with the snobs. there seems to be no in-between. This book made me feel uncomfortable.
Anybody with an interest in German literature is going to run into Karl Kraus sooner or later. The Kraus Project is an uneasy introduction to Kraus, if any.
Jonathan Franzen’s book is the diary of a writer, more then two annotated essays by Karl Kraus. It's a tricky one. I bought the book because of Kraus. Not because of a struggling writer-to-be's letters to an ex-girlfriend. That's a book I wouldn 't have bought.
It is the classical (and clichéd?) wrestling of a writer with the world and with himself that stands out in The Kraus Project. Franzen finds in Karl Kraus his literary father-figure. Mmmm.
Sure, internet culture is riddled with kitsch. Social media addiction and what is happening to language and human relations in the process is interesting to follow. It will probably have a huge effect on how ‘we’ used to live, talk and think. But then, language and culture are supposed to be dynamic.
'We' between inverted comma's because in a (not so) silent way there's this rather uncomfortable matter running through the whole issue: call it the trouble with democracy. There is a tendency for the middlebrow to take precedence. Kraus saw it in the early 20th century, Franzen sees it in the early 21st. Especially when combined with a strong market ideology it means the death of originality.
If kitsch is what the market wants, then kitsch is what it gets. Whether kitsch-politicians or kitsch-culture. Karl Kraus wanted to deliberately keep out the middlebrow petty bourgeois by using an almost impenetrable style of writing. He succeeded as far as I'm concerned.
The end of the old literary way of looking at the world and life in general is predicted on a daily basis by middle-aged men (Nicolas Carr). Bookshops close their doors. It is getting harder and harder to find the time and peace and quiet to immerse oneself in Thomas Mann’s meandering sentences, surrounded as we have ourselves with distracting technology. It may be so.
Cultural pessimism is of all times, which is not to say that things are not getting critical. I hesitate to call them apocalyptic. Franzen himself narrows the apocalyptic character down to personal apocalypse. Loss is the price we have to pay for an ever changing luxurious lifestyle.‘We lost the ability to be cultural heirs’, says Franzen. What we were raised on and grew fond of will be meaningless to our kids. Quite a wide remark. That's just one of the more obvious traits of modernity. My grandparents must have felt the same.
Unless of course you yourself are a parent ‘pawing your smartphone every five minutes’.
In Kraus' lifetime, harbingers for apocalypse were an intensifying anti-semitism (Kraus himself was on the wrong side in the Druyfus case) and a political system that was stuck in feudal times. Real apocalypse emerged in the form of WWI, in the old Habsburg order disappearing, in nazism coming up and Hitler making his rise to power.
You can find analogies in the early 21st century, I guess, if you want. There's much talk of the old world disappearing fast. There's much historicizing going on. Whether we're talking the order of the transition from the historical age of Romanticism to Modernism, modernity or the like? Probably. And that is putting it in very mild terms, according to some.
I like to think that there’s more to the worldwide web then Der Untergang des Abendlandes. The highstreets in general are filled with kitsch. Kitsch is what the masses want, virtual or real, and Karl Kraus knew it. He gave them the opposite, he gave them literature.
It isn ’t very hard to be a snob these days, as Franzen is called quite often. Just mention a couple of classic writers or composers or use some unhip, difficult sounding words et voilà. (A French word here and there works wonders as well).
That's what you get in an age of widespread fashionable and neurotic conformism and wanting to be liked. Karl Kraus didn’t give a shit, at least not in his writing, pushing a cultural icon like Heinrich Heine off his pedestal.
In itself, such attacks could make for a more lively 'public' debate and be an invitation to formulate balanced replies.
If there would be such a thing as a public debate.
Columnists in quality newspapers are professional writers, brands, who have a polemic, or discussion amongst themselves and we, the readers, can hop along on their respective wagons and formulate our second-hand ‘opinions’. We have our public intellectuals, TV-philosophers to tickle us into critical thinking.
But all the old books are still out there as well. If we 'can 't sit still for five minutes' without reaching for an iPad or smartphone to check the latest replies on our silly facebook entries, then who's to blame? Who creates the 'media-saturated, technology-crazed, apocalypse-haunted historical moment, in Jonathan Franzen's formulation? Who are the people that make up that 'population of internet users too doped up on "enslavingly addictive" technoconsumerist products to "face the real problems" of the modern world? You? Me? Everybody else?
Franzen howls along in the choir of culture-pessimists. I share their concerns. Internetworshippers are often reminiscent of religious zealots.
But I wonder would he (or Kraus would he live today) be just as pissed-off if, instead of flooded with fashionably styled smug faced narcissistic zombies trailing behind their smartphones in a consumer trance, the sidewalks would be thronged with shabbily dressed intellectuals scratching their chins reading Dostojewski out loud?
Is it the being pissed-offness that’s looking for an elegant means of expression more than the subject at hand? After all, more or less slightly pissed-off, creative, angry brains are responsible for a good part of our literary heritage.
I surprised myself by finishing this book. I think I ‘m actually going to read it again. It did show me something of Kraus and of Vienna at that most interesting time, all be it in a sort of by-the-way manner. But it isn ’t Franzen who’s doing that so much as his fellow footnote writers Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlmann.
Through the highly troublesome and problematic figure of (the one-but-last) fin-de-siecle satirist, playwright and literary critic Karl Kraus he makes a case for an elitist culture. To me, personally, the trouble with that is that it excludes me. Either that or I 'm with the snobs. there seems to be no in-between. This book made me feel uncomfortable.
Anybody with an interest in German literature is going to run into Karl Kraus sooner or later. The Kraus Project is an uneasy introduction to Kraus, if any.
Jonathan Franzen’s book is the diary of a writer, more then two annotated essays by Karl Kraus. It's a tricky one. I bought the book because of Kraus. Not because of a struggling writer-to-be's letters to an ex-girlfriend. That's a book I wouldn 't have bought.
It is the classical (and clichéd?) wrestling of a writer with the world and with himself that stands out in The Kraus Project. Franzen finds in Karl Kraus his literary father-figure. Mmmm.
Sure, internet culture is riddled with kitsch. Social media addiction and what is happening to language and human relations in the process is interesting to follow. It will probably have a huge effect on how ‘we’ used to live, talk and think. But then, language and culture are supposed to be dynamic.
'We' between inverted comma's because in a (not so) silent way there's this rather uncomfortable matter running through the whole issue: call it the trouble with democracy. There is a tendency for the middlebrow to take precedence. Kraus saw it in the early 20th century, Franzen sees it in the early 21st. Especially when combined with a strong market ideology it means the death of originality.
If kitsch is what the market wants, then kitsch is what it gets. Whether kitsch-politicians or kitsch-culture. Karl Kraus wanted to deliberately keep out the middlebrow petty bourgeois by using an almost impenetrable style of writing. He succeeded as far as I'm concerned.
The end of the old literary way of looking at the world and life in general is predicted on a daily basis by middle-aged men (Nicolas Carr). Bookshops close their doors. It is getting harder and harder to find the time and peace and quiet to immerse oneself in Thomas Mann’s meandering sentences, surrounded as we have ourselves with distracting technology. It may be so.
Cultural pessimism is of all times, which is not to say that things are not getting critical. I hesitate to call them apocalyptic. Franzen himself narrows the apocalyptic character down to personal apocalypse. Loss is the price we have to pay for an ever changing luxurious lifestyle.‘We lost the ability to be cultural heirs’, says Franzen. What we were raised on and grew fond of will be meaningless to our kids. Quite a wide remark. That's just one of the more obvious traits of modernity. My grandparents must have felt the same.
Unless of course you yourself are a parent ‘pawing your smartphone every five minutes’.
In Kraus' lifetime, harbingers for apocalypse were an intensifying anti-semitism (Kraus himself was on the wrong side in the Druyfus case) and a political system that was stuck in feudal times. Real apocalypse emerged in the form of WWI, in the old Habsburg order disappearing, in nazism coming up and Hitler making his rise to power.
You can find analogies in the early 21st century, I guess, if you want. There's much talk of the old world disappearing fast. There's much historicizing going on. Whether we're talking the order of the transition from the historical age of Romanticism to Modernism, modernity or the like? Probably. And that is putting it in very mild terms, according to some.
I like to think that there’s more to the worldwide web then Der Untergang des Abendlandes. The highstreets in general are filled with kitsch. Kitsch is what the masses want, virtual or real, and Karl Kraus knew it. He gave them the opposite, he gave them literature.
It isn ’t very hard to be a snob these days, as Franzen is called quite often. Just mention a couple of classic writers or composers or use some unhip, difficult sounding words et voilà. (A French word here and there works wonders as well).
That's what you get in an age of widespread fashionable and neurotic conformism and wanting to be liked. Karl Kraus didn’t give a shit, at least not in his writing, pushing a cultural icon like Heinrich Heine off his pedestal.
In itself, such attacks could make for a more lively 'public' debate and be an invitation to formulate balanced replies.
If there would be such a thing as a public debate.
Columnists in quality newspapers are professional writers, brands, who have a polemic, or discussion amongst themselves and we, the readers, can hop along on their respective wagons and formulate our second-hand ‘opinions’. We have our public intellectuals, TV-philosophers to tickle us into critical thinking.
But all the old books are still out there as well. If we 'can 't sit still for five minutes' without reaching for an iPad or smartphone to check the latest replies on our silly facebook entries, then who's to blame? Who creates the 'media-saturated, technology-crazed, apocalypse-haunted historical moment, in Jonathan Franzen's formulation? Who are the people that make up that 'population of internet users too doped up on "enslavingly addictive" technoconsumerist products to "face the real problems" of the modern world? You? Me? Everybody else?
Franzen howls along in the choir of culture-pessimists. I share their concerns. Internetworshippers are often reminiscent of religious zealots.
But I wonder would he (or Kraus would he live today) be just as pissed-off if, instead of flooded with fashionably styled smug faced narcissistic zombies trailing behind their smartphones in a consumer trance, the sidewalks would be thronged with shabbily dressed intellectuals scratching their chins reading Dostojewski out loud?
Is it the being pissed-offness that’s looking for an elegant means of expression more than the subject at hand? After all, more or less slightly pissed-off, creative, angry brains are responsible for a good part of our literary heritage.
I surprised myself by finishing this book. I think I ‘m actually going to read it again. It did show me something of Kraus and of Vienna at that most interesting time, all be it in a sort of by-the-way manner. But it isn ’t Franzen who’s doing that so much as his fellow footnote writers Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlmann.
September 18, 2024
This is a book that quite literally upgrades your IQ with every single page. Not an easy read but when did Franzen provide something other than that?
This is an early non-fiction of his, centered around Karl Kraus - an Austrian writer and journalist, who quite easily be called the grandfather of cultural blogging. He was the sole author of most issues of Die Fackel, one of the most influential Austrian satirical newspapers of its time.
As we are well apart of the burning topics of his articles and essays Franzen has the challenging task to translate their context to the modern reader in a way that is simultaneously interesting and informative. And he does that brilliantly.
I have to point out that this is an uber slow read as you have to stop after almost every paragraph to rationalize the given information. But it is totally worth it. Franzen once again delivers an excellent piece of work. I will remain a life-long fan of his.
This is an early non-fiction of his, centered around Karl Kraus - an Austrian writer and journalist, who quite easily be called the grandfather of cultural blogging. He was the sole author of most issues of Die Fackel, one of the most influential Austrian satirical newspapers of its time.
As we are well apart of the burning topics of his articles and essays Franzen has the challenging task to translate their context to the modern reader in a way that is simultaneously interesting and informative. And he does that brilliantly.
I have to point out that this is an uber slow read as you have to stop after almost every paragraph to rationalize the given information. But it is totally worth it. Franzen once again delivers an excellent piece of work. I will remain a life-long fan of his.
April 16, 2021
Back in the late 90’s, the literary buzz around two straight, white male, American writers, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, was deafening. The commotion around David Foster Wallace has always been perplexing; he holds the reader in utter contempt and needed a more brutal editor; “Infinite Jest” has at least one beautiful section that could be a stand-alone book (i.e. tattoos in a Boston Rehab center), but also some of the most boring, showily precocious and ponderous prose of the 90’s; I came damn close to throwing an unfinished copy of “Infinite Jest” in the Atlantic Ocean (it was a biodegradable paperback). Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” on the other hand, is a keeper. Laugh out loud funny and self-mocking, it skewers the farcical American Christmas tradition with culminating scenes of a dysfunctional family and elder care issues during a final family holiday gathering.
Touting “The Corrections” is completely unnecessary; after all, it has sold about 10 million copies, making Franzen a household name. The “Oprah Controversy” that followed the initial publication turned Franzen into both a much loved and much reviled figure; with David Foster Wallace unfortunately gone (depression is horrible), those with a cultural agenda aim their darts squarely at Jonathan Franzen, whom they view as the literary personification of Clueless, Elite, Straight Male Patriarchy.
While Franzen has encouraged some of the pop culture darts with polemics close to my Luddite heart (e.g. a lengthy essay rant against Twitter and a contrarian opinion that public parks and trails often destroy nature and rare bird species, concluding that the true preservers are super-rich Republicans with private land), he has done his best to write the Great American Novel. . .and has done so more than once.
Lingering beneath the surface of his best books is a Germanophilia directly addressed in his essay “My German Problem,” which outlines the unpopularity in the decision of those who radiate towards this unfortunately maligned language, stereotyped, falsely, as strident and shrill.
“The Kraus Project,” which appeared after “Freedom,” was under the radar of anyone who was not a Franzen fanatic or Germanophile. Franzen returned to his Fulbright Scholarship days in Munich to rework his translations and obsession with Karl Kraus, the Austrian cultural critic and satirist from the 1890’s-1930’s often compared to George Orwell for his incite on language and its political metaphors. The Orwell of Vienna if you will. This handsome, bilingual and heavily annotated edition--it took an author of Franzen’s repute and a publishing house like FSG to get an edition done well--makes the difficult task of tackling Kraus in either German, English or both easier; I was assigned Kraus in a University of Arizona MA class on German Jewish writers and found his philosophical prose a bit much to handle “auf Deutsch.” I chose “easier” writers. . . like Franz Kafka and the little-known Edgar Hilsenrath for my major papers. However, native Germans in the class were captivated by Kraus and some of his allusions on the nuance of the language which went over my American head.
Reading “The Kraus Project,” I was happy to learn that many of the allusions went over Franzen’s head too, or—at least—left him perplexed. My bilingual read revealed that Franzen and I often stumbled over the same words; Franzen corresponded with his German professor from the era, Kraus scholar Paul Reittner, and Austrian author Daniel Kehlmann to insure this bilingual edition is brilliant and essential to any native English speaker who wants to learn about Kraus. Franzen was already a fine translator with a version of Frank Wedekind’s “Spring Awakening” to his credit.
What makes this book truly indispensable are Franzen’s copious annotations-- often longer than either the texts or translations themselves--on his own ex-patriot era and his exacting clarifications of what Kraus’s concepts and allusions mean in contemporary American society and the modern world. His observations linking an analogy of Kraus’s to the cultural effects of PC v. Mac and the differences between the users of each is worth the price of the book alone (at least in a paperback, if there ever was one, because this book is increasingly hard to stumble across). Franzen, as one would expect, is a PC guy. To paraphrase his analogy, Mac has dumbed down features that enable any idiot to think he or she is an artist, causing a glut of mediocre art.
“The Kraus Project” was almost immediately remaindered and disappeared a couple of months after publication. I was shocked to see this book recently displayed in the Strand Rare Book room for prices higher than a first of “The Corrections,” but not “The Twenty-Seventh City,” Franzen’s first novel, where he slavishly imitates Thomas Pynchon.
Notes:
The front jacket of “The Kraus Project” is a reproduction of the first issue of Kraus’s literary journal, Die Fackel (The Torch or Flame).
April 30, 2014
Any normal person will stop reading now.
This spring, I’ve been a basketcase -- emotional. With intention, I’ve been striking into several projects that distract my head-voices, that improve my ego, that feed my knowledge spot. And so I picked up this book.
What? Really?
Yes, Really. The me of ten years ago kept her finger on the pulse of certain cultural dust-ups. Ten-years-ago me would have read every word of The Guardian piece (an article-length redaction of the Franzen bits of this book, I suspect) published September, 2013. But, because I was too involved with other ridiculouses (namely, a high-profile work project that has yet to disclose its rewards), I missed it. The article has been pulled offline.
I devoted the best parts of my head to the soul-sucking of work, and I missed it.
The forensics (Google searches resulting in excited headlines of months-old magazine pieces) I’m able to put on this article indicate the theme is technology’s ruination of literary and critical writing. E.g., “While we are busy tweeting, texting and spending, the world is drifting towards disaster, believes Jonathan Franzen, whose despair at our insatiable technoconsumerism echoes the apocalyptic essays of the satirist Karl Kraus – 'the Great Hater.’”
I’m angry, and repulsed by this constant state. How can I get out of it? Find an angier person who can’t hurt me? Franzen is reliably angrier than I can ever be. Right? And he’s writing about this obscure early 20th-century Austrian essayist who hates more than he? This could be a dose of good, clean, DULL, anger.
While the echoes of the debate are Google-able, the comments to the original article are uniformly along the lines of proclaiming Franzen little more than a crank, a Luddite, a White Male, arguing self-interest in preservation rather than revolution in the literary arts. (This my unsupported, inflammatory summary of the “anti-Franzen” side of the dialogue. I’m less interested in archiving highlights in this debate than I am touching on impressions while reading the book. It’s interesting, though, that both Franzen and his critics, both, use hyperbole, pathos, fallacy, and also focus on one point that unpacks neatly to illustrate “evidence” for their theses. I suppose it’s a rhetorical technique to argue one’s point this way, but to a suspecting reader, the author seems to erect panes into a glass house.)
So to the library, to check out this book. What is this book? It’s one of the stranger books I’ve
decided to read for “fun.” It’s a multi-layered conversation. On the verso, the original German of a few of Kraus’ essays -- in one he is said to lampoon a beloved 19th century poet; in another he “celebrates” his favorite Austrian literary artist. On the recto, Franzen’s translation.
In the footnotes, explanation, pondering, commentary, modern-day riffs from Franzen and two other guys: the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and the Austrian author Daniel Kehlmann. The scholars are asked to do the heavy lifting to provide historical and cultural context. Reitter is also allowed to drift into describing what Kraus may have “actually meant” here and there. (It did seem to me that Franzen took advantage of these scholars. I imagined Franzen’s “celebrity” wowwing Reitter and Kehlmann into submitting their work to this book. I hope Franzen did the right thing to make sure these two were compensated for their work. Particularly when Franzen writes, in his footnotes, that too many writers are giving their work away in the blog marketplace.)
I read none of the main text.
I read only the footnotes.
And I read only the footnotes that Franzen wrote.
And I read only the footnotes that Franzen wrote that concerned his life, his writing, and his views on the art of writing.
And I got a hell of a lot out of my reading. And continue to turn over some of the ideas brought out in teeny font of those rambling footnotes:
On the root of anger being the desire for quality (pp. 110, 120)
On the erosive technology-capitalism connection, and the importance to use technologies to its purpose rather than adapt purpose to the technologies (p. 141)
On the importance of diversity and empathy, of embracing conflict, to meaningful art (p. 158)
On discovering truths about human nature, through conflict (pp. 214, 217)
On the connection between cultivating an audience, and an artist’s responsibility to its audience to create “good” art, which by definition ought provoke (pp. 270-272)
On the question of the artist’s medium of engagement with its audience (pp. 273, 293)
Salman Rushdie’s Tweet, in response to Franzen’s opinion that Rushdie ought to know better than engage his audience in 160-character chunks:
“Dear #Franzen, @MargaretAtwood @JoyceCarolOates @nycnovel @NathanEnglander @Shteyngart and I are fine with Twitter. Enjoy your ivory tower.”
Franzen’s an angry middle-aged crank. But I can’t pass judgment: I’m Ms. Crankypants.
This spring, I’ve been a basketcase -- emotional. With intention, I’ve been striking into several projects that distract my head-voices, that improve my ego, that feed my knowledge spot. And so I picked up this book.
What? Really?
Yes, Really. The me of ten years ago kept her finger on the pulse of certain cultural dust-ups. Ten-years-ago me would have read every word of The Guardian piece (an article-length redaction of the Franzen bits of this book, I suspect) published September, 2013. But, because I was too involved with other ridiculouses (namely, a high-profile work project that has yet to disclose its rewards), I missed it. The article has been pulled offline.
I devoted the best parts of my head to the soul-sucking of work, and I missed it.
The forensics (Google searches resulting in excited headlines of months-old magazine pieces) I’m able to put on this article indicate the theme is technology’s ruination of literary and critical writing. E.g., “While we are busy tweeting, texting and spending, the world is drifting towards disaster, believes Jonathan Franzen, whose despair at our insatiable technoconsumerism echoes the apocalyptic essays of the satirist Karl Kraus – 'the Great Hater.’”
I’m angry, and repulsed by this constant state. How can I get out of it? Find an angier person who can’t hurt me? Franzen is reliably angrier than I can ever be. Right? And he’s writing about this obscure early 20th-century Austrian essayist who hates more than he? This could be a dose of good, clean, DULL, anger.
While the echoes of the debate are Google-able, the comments to the original article are uniformly along the lines of proclaiming Franzen little more than a crank, a Luddite, a White Male, arguing self-interest in preservation rather than revolution in the literary arts. (This my unsupported, inflammatory summary of the “anti-Franzen” side of the dialogue. I’m less interested in archiving highlights in this debate than I am touching on impressions while reading the book. It’s interesting, though, that both Franzen and his critics, both, use hyperbole, pathos, fallacy, and also focus on one point that unpacks neatly to illustrate “evidence” for their theses. I suppose it’s a rhetorical technique to argue one’s point this way, but to a suspecting reader, the author seems to erect panes into a glass house.)
So to the library, to check out this book. What is this book? It’s one of the stranger books I’ve
decided to read for “fun.” It’s a multi-layered conversation. On the verso, the original German of a few of Kraus’ essays -- in one he is said to lampoon a beloved 19th century poet; in another he “celebrates” his favorite Austrian literary artist. On the recto, Franzen’s translation.
In the footnotes, explanation, pondering, commentary, modern-day riffs from Franzen and two other guys: the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and the Austrian author Daniel Kehlmann. The scholars are asked to do the heavy lifting to provide historical and cultural context. Reitter is also allowed to drift into describing what Kraus may have “actually meant” here and there. (It did seem to me that Franzen took advantage of these scholars. I imagined Franzen’s “celebrity” wowwing Reitter and Kehlmann into submitting their work to this book. I hope Franzen did the right thing to make sure these two were compensated for their work. Particularly when Franzen writes, in his footnotes, that too many writers are giving their work away in the blog marketplace.)
I read none of the main text.
I read only the footnotes.
And I read only the footnotes that Franzen wrote.
And I read only the footnotes that Franzen wrote that concerned his life, his writing, and his views on the art of writing.
And I got a hell of a lot out of my reading. And continue to turn over some of the ideas brought out in teeny font of those rambling footnotes:
On the root of anger being the desire for quality (pp. 110, 120)
On the erosive technology-capitalism connection, and the importance to use technologies to its purpose rather than adapt purpose to the technologies (p. 141)
On the importance of diversity and empathy, of embracing conflict, to meaningful art (p. 158)
On discovering truths about human nature, through conflict (pp. 214, 217)
On the connection between cultivating an audience, and an artist’s responsibility to its audience to create “good” art, which by definition ought provoke (pp. 270-272)
On the question of the artist’s medium of engagement with its audience (pp. 273, 293)
Salman Rushdie’s Tweet, in response to Franzen’s opinion that Rushdie ought to know better than engage his audience in 160-character chunks:
“Dear #Franzen, @MargaretAtwood @JoyceCarolOates @nycnovel @NathanEnglander @Shteyngart and I are fine with Twitter. Enjoy your ivory tower.”
Franzen’s an angry middle-aged crank. But I can’t pass judgment: I’m Ms. Crankypants.
August 25, 2016
Ich liebe Kraus, ich mag Franzens Romane, und ich fand die Herangehensweise an das "Kraus-Projekt" unheimlich spannend, aber ich bin unsicher, was ich von diesem Buch halten soll.
Die ausufernden Fußnoten machen es, selbst für jemanden, der an akademische Texte mit vielen Fußnoten gewöhnt ist, recht mühsam zu lesen. Kann nur empfehlen, zuerst die Fußnoten zu ignorieren und für den Kontext den Essay zur Gänze zu lesen, und dann von vorne zu beginnen und die Fußnoten mitzulesen.
Franzen setzt die Feuilletonisten von einst mit den Bloggern von heute gleich. Grundsätzlich eine interessante Analogie, auch wenn ich mit Franzens Schimpftirade über Social Media persönlich nicht konform gehe. Diese durchargumentierte Verachtung wird allerdings dadurch ad absurdum geführt, dass etliche von Franzens Fußnoten sich gar nicht wirklich mit dem Text befassen, sondern komplett unzusammenhängende Anekdoten aus seinem Auslandssemester in Deutschland und seiner ersten Ehe erzählen, was dann doch irgendwie stark an das Grundprinzip von Social Media erinnert. Wenn Salman Rushdie twittert, ist das Pfui, aber wenn Jonathan Franzen sein Privatleben in in von einem renommierten Verlag gedruckten Fußnoten ausbreitet, dann ist das Hui und ganz was anderes? Kann man verstehen, muss man aber nicht.
Die Fußnoten von Paul Reitter (einem amerikanischen Germanisten und Literaturwissenschaftler, von dem ich zuvor noch nie was gehört habe) und Daniel Kehlmann (ind ich bin wirklich kein Kehlmann-Fan) waren wesentlich interessanter und auch relevanter, weil fundiert und auf Kraus bezogen statt auf beliebige Assoziationen.
Ärgerlich fand ich vor allem den zweiten Teil, Nestroy, denn Franzen hat es geschafft, den kulturhistorischen Österreich/Wien-Bezug komplett außer Acht zu lassen bzw. zu verdrehen. Reitter und Kehlmann reißen ihn da raus, aber gerade da wird sehr deutlich, dass das "Kraus-Projekt" trotz allem nicht besonders literaturwissenschaftlich ist. Dennoch fand ich die "Außenseiterperspektive" auf ein "Nationalheiligtum" wie Kraus und Nestroy es sind, interessant.
Neugierig wäre ich auf Franzens englische Übersetzung der Kraus-Essays, die in der deutschen Ausgabe (logischerweise? leider!) nicht inkludiert ist.
Eins hat mir das Buch jedoch verdeutlicht: Kraus war ein Produkt seiner Zeit, und obwohl er sich dafür halten mag und sich bemüht, ist Franzen kein moderner Kraus. Ja, schade. Aber es ist dennoch ein spannender Einblick und ich habe es gern gelesen.
Die ausufernden Fußnoten machen es, selbst für jemanden, der an akademische Texte mit vielen Fußnoten gewöhnt ist, recht mühsam zu lesen. Kann nur empfehlen, zuerst die Fußnoten zu ignorieren und für den Kontext den Essay zur Gänze zu lesen, und dann von vorne zu beginnen und die Fußnoten mitzulesen.
Franzen setzt die Feuilletonisten von einst mit den Bloggern von heute gleich. Grundsätzlich eine interessante Analogie, auch wenn ich mit Franzens Schimpftirade über Social Media persönlich nicht konform gehe. Diese durchargumentierte Verachtung wird allerdings dadurch ad absurdum geführt, dass etliche von Franzens Fußnoten sich gar nicht wirklich mit dem Text befassen, sondern komplett unzusammenhängende Anekdoten aus seinem Auslandssemester in Deutschland und seiner ersten Ehe erzählen, was dann doch irgendwie stark an das Grundprinzip von Social Media erinnert. Wenn Salman Rushdie twittert, ist das Pfui, aber wenn Jonathan Franzen sein Privatleben in in von einem renommierten Verlag gedruckten Fußnoten ausbreitet, dann ist das Hui und ganz was anderes? Kann man verstehen, muss man aber nicht.
Die Fußnoten von Paul Reitter (einem amerikanischen Germanisten und Literaturwissenschaftler, von dem ich zuvor noch nie was gehört habe) und Daniel Kehlmann (ind ich bin wirklich kein Kehlmann-Fan) waren wesentlich interessanter und auch relevanter, weil fundiert und auf Kraus bezogen statt auf beliebige Assoziationen.
Ärgerlich fand ich vor allem den zweiten Teil, Nestroy, denn Franzen hat es geschafft, den kulturhistorischen Österreich/Wien-Bezug komplett außer Acht zu lassen bzw. zu verdrehen. Reitter und Kehlmann reißen ihn da raus, aber gerade da wird sehr deutlich, dass das "Kraus-Projekt" trotz allem nicht besonders literaturwissenschaftlich ist. Dennoch fand ich die "Außenseiterperspektive" auf ein "Nationalheiligtum" wie Kraus und Nestroy es sind, interessant.
Neugierig wäre ich auf Franzens englische Übersetzung der Kraus-Essays, die in der deutschen Ausgabe (logischerweise? leider!) nicht inkludiert ist.
Eins hat mir das Buch jedoch verdeutlicht: Kraus war ein Produkt seiner Zeit, und obwohl er sich dafür halten mag und sich bemüht, ist Franzen kein moderner Kraus. Ja, schade. Aber es ist dennoch ein spannender Einblick und ich habe es gern gelesen.
August 26, 2019
Sorry Franzen, this wasn't for me. I picked this up because I've enjoyed Franzen's novels. It seemed like an interesting premise. For me, it just plain didn't work. Apparently there are different versions, that use different layouts of the translated essays and the extensive footnotes. My version had the german 'original' on the left page, the english translation on the right page, with the extensive footnotes on the lower half of both pages. The idea here was that Franzen was going to translate this cranky essayist from early 1900's Germany, and provide lots of footnote support so that we would understand the essayists pop culture references, and historical world. Well, I tried a couple different ways to read this, read the page, read those footnotes as they come up. Very tough to maintain any continuity since the footnotes were often much longer than the essay. So, then I tried to read through the essay and go back and read the footnotes -- again, just left me in a disjointed mess. Also, this book was published in 2013 -- six long years ago -- some of the cultural references that Franzen was making in his footnotes felt as dated as the old German ones Kraus was making. Remember the old Apple v Mac ads with John Hodgman? I do remember them, but it feels a lifetime ago. And, I'm pretty sure my adult children will not remember them (because they never 'watched' TV). Before long, the footnotes in this book will need interpretive footnotes. At any rate, it seemed quite the chore to fight my way through this text, and though I enjoyed some of Franzen's meandering footnotes; I really wasn't getting much benefit from the original cranky German. He has lots of issues with the dividing line between art and craft, work and friviolity. Kraus saw himself as a serious person, with a serious interest in work, and a completely separate serious interest in art. Ugh. He just wasn't someone I wanted to spend time with.
Read
May 6, 2015Honestly, I really haven't encountered a book like this before-- a translation of a (relatively) celebrated author's work, with extensive annotations that not only explain the translations, but themselves tell a narrative. Hell, it almost seems like a nouveau-roman plot device, except it's America's favorite mopey fuck Jonathan Franzen talking about shitty Berlin apartments and his adolescent love woes. I wound up wanting more Kraus, to be honest, and less of Franzen's rehash of the material he discussed far better in his essays. But, on the whole, I did like it.
October 13, 2013
Sadly, Franzen's translation has not helped me to understand Karl Kraus. Paul Reitter's footnotes were useful to some extent and Jonathan Franzen's footnotes were interesting enough and entertaining, occasionally in an "I want to shout at you" way. But I am still fairly mystified as to what on earth Kraus meant - as indeed Franzen, Reitter and Kehlmann admit to being at various points. Which makes the project slightly more likeable, I suppose.
July 20, 2016
(3.5/5.0) Dear Lord, the reviews are right! He can't do non-fiction as well as he thinks.
April 30, 2014
Culled from the annals
of yawn, by its most
eminent preservationist.
of yawn, by its most
eminent preservationist.
February 27, 2015
The Kraus Project is Jonathan Franzen's showdown with modern times.
Anybody with an interest in German literature is going to run into Karl Kraus sooner or later. The Kraus Project is an uneasy introduction to Kraus, if any.
Through the highly troublesome and problematic figure of fin-de-siecle satirist, playwright and literary critic Karl Kraus Franzen makes a case for an elitist culture.
To me, personally, the trouble with that is that it excludes me. Either that or I 'm with the snobs. there seems to be no in-between. This book made me feel uncomfortable.
Jonathan Franzen’s book is the diary of a writer, more then two annotated essays by Karl Kraus. It's a tricky one. I bought the book because of Kraus. Not because of a struggling writer-to-be's letters to an ex-girlfriend. That's a book I wouldn 't have bought.
It is the classical (and clichéd?) wrestling of a writer with the world and with himself that stands out in The Kraus Project. Franzen finds in Karl Kraus his literary father-figure. Mmmm.
Sure, internet culture is riddled with kitsch. Social media addiction and what is happening to language and human relations in the process is interesting to follow. It might have a devastating effect on how ‘we’ used to live, talk and think.
'We' between inverted comma's because in a (not so) silent way there's this rather uncomfortable matter running through the whole issue: call it the trouble with democracy. There is a tendency for the middlebrow to take precedence. Kraus pointed that out in the early 20th century, Franzen sees it in the early 21st and blames ‘internet-culture’. Especially when combined with a strong market ideology that can certainly mean the death of originality. Now, originality is an overrated idea to begin with.
If kitsch is what the market wants, then kitsch is what it gets. Whether kitsch-politicians or kitsch-culture. Karl Kraus wanted to deliberately keep out the middlebrow petty bourgeois by using an almost impenetrable style of writing. He succeeded as far as I'm concerned.
The end of the old literary way of looking at the world and life in general is predicted on a daily basis by middle-aged men (Nicolas Carr). Bookshops close their doors. It is getting harder and harder to find the time and peace and quiet to immerse oneself in Thomas Mann’s meandering sentences, surrounded as we have ourselves with distracting technology. It may be so.
Cultural pessimism is of all times, which is not to say that things are not getting critical. I hesitate to call them apocalyptic. Franzen himself narrows the apocalyptic character down to personal apocalypse. Loss is the price we have to pay for an ever changing luxurious lifestyle.‘We lost the ability to be cultural heirs’, says Franzen. What we were raised on and grew fond of will be meaningless to our kids. Quite a wide remark. That's just one of the more obvious traits of modernity. My grandparents must have felt the same.
Unless of course you yourself are a parent ‘pawing your smartphone every five minutes’.
In Kraus' lifetime, harbingers for apocalypse were an intensifying anti-semitism (Kraus himself was on the wrong side in the Druyfus case) and a political system that was stuck in feudal times. Real apocalypse emerged in the form of WWI, in the old Habsburg order disappearing, in nazism coming up and Hitler making his rise to power.
You can find analogies in the early 21st century, I guess, if you want. There's much talk of the old world disappearing fast. There's much historicizing going on. Whether we're talking the order of the transition from the historical age of Romanticism to Modernism, modernity or the like? Probably. And that is putting it in very mild terms, according to some.
I like to think that there’s more to the worldwide web then Der Untergang des Abendlandes. The highstreets in general are filled with kitsch. Kitsch is what the masses want, virtual or real, and Karl Kraus knew it. He gave them the opposite, he gave them literature. Or so they say. I don ’t know because I don ’t understand it as I do not know enough about that whole fascinating place and time of Vienna in the crumbling Austrian Hungarian double monarchy of Kraus’ times. It’s all very detailed and then you have to get the injokes.
It isn ’t very hard to be a snob these days, as Franzen is called quite often. Just mention a couple of classic writers or composers or use some unhip, difficult sounding words et voilà. (A French word here and there works wonders as well).
That's what you get in an age of widespread fashionable and neurotic conformism and wanting to be liked. Karl Kraus didn’t give a shit, at least not in his writing, pushing a cultural icon like Heinrich Heine off his pedestal.
In itself, such attacks could make for a more lively 'public' debate and be an invitation to formulate balanced replies. If there would be such a thing as a public debate.
Columnists in quality newspapers are professional writers, brands, who have a polemic, or discussion amongst themselves and we, the readers, can hop along on their respective wagons and formulate our second-hand ‘opinions’. We have our public intellectuals, TV-philosophers to tickle us into ‘critical thinking’.
But all the old books are still out there as well. If we 'can 't sit still for five minutes' without reaching for an iPad or smartphone to check the latest replies on our silly facebook entries, then who's to blame? Who creates the 'media-saturated, technology-crazed, apocalypse-haunted historical moment, in Franzen's formulation? Who are the people that make up that 'population of internet users too doped up on "enslavingly addictive" technoconsumerist products to "face the real problems" of the modern world? You? Me? Everybody else?
Franzen howls along in the choir of culture-pessimists. I share their concerns. Internetworshippers are often reminiscent of religious zealots. They need to be shocked out of their complacency by something unhip every now and then. Karl kraus is about as unhip as one can get.
But I wonder would Franzen (or Kraus would he live today) be just as pissed-off if, instead of flooded with fashionably styled smug faced narcissistic zombies trailing behind their smartphones in a consumer trance, the sidewalks would be thronged with shabbily dressed intellectuals scratching their chins reading Dostojewski out loud?
Is it the being pissed-offness that’s looking for an elegant means of expression more than the subject at hand? After all, more or less slightly pissed-off, creative, angry brains are responsible for a good part of our literary heritage.
I surprised myself by finishing this book. I think I ‘m actually going to read some Kraus at some point. The Kraus Project did show me something of Kraus and of Vienna at that most interesting time, all be it in a sort of by-the-way manner.
But it isn ’t Franzen who’s doing that so much as his fellow footnote writers Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlmann.
Anybody with an interest in German literature is going to run into Karl Kraus sooner or later. The Kraus Project is an uneasy introduction to Kraus, if any.
Through the highly troublesome and problematic figure of fin-de-siecle satirist, playwright and literary critic Karl Kraus Franzen makes a case for an elitist culture.
To me, personally, the trouble with that is that it excludes me. Either that or I 'm with the snobs. there seems to be no in-between. This book made me feel uncomfortable.
Jonathan Franzen’s book is the diary of a writer, more then two annotated essays by Karl Kraus. It's a tricky one. I bought the book because of Kraus. Not because of a struggling writer-to-be's letters to an ex-girlfriend. That's a book I wouldn 't have bought.
It is the classical (and clichéd?) wrestling of a writer with the world and with himself that stands out in The Kraus Project. Franzen finds in Karl Kraus his literary father-figure. Mmmm.
Sure, internet culture is riddled with kitsch. Social media addiction and what is happening to language and human relations in the process is interesting to follow. It might have a devastating effect on how ‘we’ used to live, talk and think.
'We' between inverted comma's because in a (not so) silent way there's this rather uncomfortable matter running through the whole issue: call it the trouble with democracy. There is a tendency for the middlebrow to take precedence. Kraus pointed that out in the early 20th century, Franzen sees it in the early 21st and blames ‘internet-culture’. Especially when combined with a strong market ideology that can certainly mean the death of originality. Now, originality is an overrated idea to begin with.
If kitsch is what the market wants, then kitsch is what it gets. Whether kitsch-politicians or kitsch-culture. Karl Kraus wanted to deliberately keep out the middlebrow petty bourgeois by using an almost impenetrable style of writing. He succeeded as far as I'm concerned.
The end of the old literary way of looking at the world and life in general is predicted on a daily basis by middle-aged men (Nicolas Carr). Bookshops close their doors. It is getting harder and harder to find the time and peace and quiet to immerse oneself in Thomas Mann’s meandering sentences, surrounded as we have ourselves with distracting technology. It may be so.
Cultural pessimism is of all times, which is not to say that things are not getting critical. I hesitate to call them apocalyptic. Franzen himself narrows the apocalyptic character down to personal apocalypse. Loss is the price we have to pay for an ever changing luxurious lifestyle.‘We lost the ability to be cultural heirs’, says Franzen. What we were raised on and grew fond of will be meaningless to our kids. Quite a wide remark. That's just one of the more obvious traits of modernity. My grandparents must have felt the same.
Unless of course you yourself are a parent ‘pawing your smartphone every five minutes’.
In Kraus' lifetime, harbingers for apocalypse were an intensifying anti-semitism (Kraus himself was on the wrong side in the Druyfus case) and a political system that was stuck in feudal times. Real apocalypse emerged in the form of WWI, in the old Habsburg order disappearing, in nazism coming up and Hitler making his rise to power.
You can find analogies in the early 21st century, I guess, if you want. There's much talk of the old world disappearing fast. There's much historicizing going on. Whether we're talking the order of the transition from the historical age of Romanticism to Modernism, modernity or the like? Probably. And that is putting it in very mild terms, according to some.
I like to think that there’s more to the worldwide web then Der Untergang des Abendlandes. The highstreets in general are filled with kitsch. Kitsch is what the masses want, virtual or real, and Karl Kraus knew it. He gave them the opposite, he gave them literature. Or so they say. I don ’t know because I don ’t understand it as I do not know enough about that whole fascinating place and time of Vienna in the crumbling Austrian Hungarian double monarchy of Kraus’ times. It’s all very detailed and then you have to get the injokes.
It isn ’t very hard to be a snob these days, as Franzen is called quite often. Just mention a couple of classic writers or composers or use some unhip, difficult sounding words et voilà. (A French word here and there works wonders as well).
That's what you get in an age of widespread fashionable and neurotic conformism and wanting to be liked. Karl Kraus didn’t give a shit, at least not in his writing, pushing a cultural icon like Heinrich Heine off his pedestal.
In itself, such attacks could make for a more lively 'public' debate and be an invitation to formulate balanced replies. If there would be such a thing as a public debate.
Columnists in quality newspapers are professional writers, brands, who have a polemic, or discussion amongst themselves and we, the readers, can hop along on their respective wagons and formulate our second-hand ‘opinions’. We have our public intellectuals, TV-philosophers to tickle us into ‘critical thinking’.
But all the old books are still out there as well. If we 'can 't sit still for five minutes' without reaching for an iPad or smartphone to check the latest replies on our silly facebook entries, then who's to blame? Who creates the 'media-saturated, technology-crazed, apocalypse-haunted historical moment, in Franzen's formulation? Who are the people that make up that 'population of internet users too doped up on "enslavingly addictive" technoconsumerist products to "face the real problems" of the modern world? You? Me? Everybody else?
Franzen howls along in the choir of culture-pessimists. I share their concerns. Internetworshippers are often reminiscent of religious zealots. They need to be shocked out of their complacency by something unhip every now and then. Karl kraus is about as unhip as one can get.
But I wonder would Franzen (or Kraus would he live today) be just as pissed-off if, instead of flooded with fashionably styled smug faced narcissistic zombies trailing behind their smartphones in a consumer trance, the sidewalks would be thronged with shabbily dressed intellectuals scratching their chins reading Dostojewski out loud?
Is it the being pissed-offness that’s looking for an elegant means of expression more than the subject at hand? After all, more or less slightly pissed-off, creative, angry brains are responsible for a good part of our literary heritage.
I surprised myself by finishing this book. I think I ‘m actually going to read some Kraus at some point. The Kraus Project did show me something of Kraus and of Vienna at that most interesting time, all be it in a sort of by-the-way manner.
But it isn ’t Franzen who’s doing that so much as his fellow footnote writers Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlmann.
January 18, 2022
A challenging but satisfying read. Franzen manages to reveal the parallels between media discourse in the 2010s and the changing world of publishing and literary criticism in fin de siecle Vienna. The translations of Kraus are great but the real rewards are in Franzen's copious footnotes, where he elaborates on Kraus's points, explains some wonderful idioms and references a casual (not German-speaking) reader would miss, and (just occasionally enough to not get boring) reveals some personal details about his own experiences with Kraus and German culture.
Kraus frequently excoriated other writers that he found unserious (like Heine) with devastating criticism, but was famously silent for a long time after Hitler came to power, which may have appeared to be a sign of tacit support, until Kraus published a poem "Man frage nicht" (Let no one ask) that starts with the line "let no one ask what I've been doing since I spoke. I have nothing to say and won't say why." This poem is a valuable glimpse into Kraus's perspective on the appropriateness of language and specifically his craft, criticism. Franzen makes the case here that, whereas Kraus had leveled his harshest possible criticism at other writers and thinkers, it would be inappropriate for him to level that same degree of criticism at a real-world political horror like that of the Hitler and the nazis. There was no doubt to anyone familiar with Kraus that he had nothing but disdain for the nazis, and for him to criticize them would only elevate them to a level that they did not deserve.
Reading this was truly a rewarding experience, and I imagine that would be true for anyone with an interest in European history, especially around the intellectual and cultural life of fin de siecle Vienna. The format can be difficult, but it is best to think of this as three books read simultaneously: the original German, the translations, and Franzen's commentary.
Kraus frequently excoriated other writers that he found unserious (like Heine) with devastating criticism, but was famously silent for a long time after Hitler came to power, which may have appeared to be a sign of tacit support, until Kraus published a poem "Man frage nicht" (Let no one ask) that starts with the line "let no one ask what I've been doing since I spoke. I have nothing to say and won't say why." This poem is a valuable glimpse into Kraus's perspective on the appropriateness of language and specifically his craft, criticism. Franzen makes the case here that, whereas Kraus had leveled his harshest possible criticism at other writers and thinkers, it would be inappropriate for him to level that same degree of criticism at a real-world political horror like that of the Hitler and the nazis. There was no doubt to anyone familiar with Kraus that he had nothing but disdain for the nazis, and for him to criticize them would only elevate them to a level that they did not deserve.
Reading this was truly a rewarding experience, and I imagine that would be true for anyone with an interest in European history, especially around the intellectual and cultural life of fin de siecle Vienna. The format can be difficult, but it is best to think of this as three books read simultaneously: the original German, the translations, and Franzen's commentary.
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January 21, 2021TL;DR: Read either the Kraus essays or the Franzen footnotes, as the book doesn’t work when you try to do both.
Whatever the opposite of gestalt is, that’s this book. To start, Kraus the writer and Kraus the man are insanely difficult to comprehend, and the task of understanding is made near impossible by a constant barrage of thematically scattered footnotes introduced by Franzen. And yet, it’s hard to complain because I didn’t read this book to comprehend Kraus. I picked up this book to read Franzen. His stuff was elucidating and personal. Interesting to read. The question I have is why does Franzen have to compete with Kraus, interrupt Kraus, pretend the book is about Kraus.
This book would’ve been kinder to its ostensible subject and the reader if it was simply a collection of Franzen essays about Kraus, but the conceit (and original sin) of the book was that Franzen *himself* translated Karl. Franzen’s in-text commentary should’ve been kept to a bare minimum as a result. Or, he could’ve include companion pieces separately. Any other structure would’ve been preferable to the hundred footnotes that disrupt the exceedingly difficult task of reading Kraus’s grumblings. Franzen often interrupts a take-down of Heine or whatever else Kraus is saying to talk about Post-Structuralism and Gravity’s Rainbow or his frustrated sex life or the S-Bahn. Kraus is swallowed up for pages at a time. Who does the author see as the main attraction here? If it was really Kraus, why interject constantly? If it was Franzen, he should’ve subdued Kraus.
Despite this book being a structural shipwreck, each individual element is good enough to stand alone. It was just too many voices at once, and as a result a lot of the book was just noise. Disappointing in the end.
Whatever the opposite of gestalt is, that’s this book. To start, Kraus the writer and Kraus the man are insanely difficult to comprehend, and the task of understanding is made near impossible by a constant barrage of thematically scattered footnotes introduced by Franzen. And yet, it’s hard to complain because I didn’t read this book to comprehend Kraus. I picked up this book to read Franzen. His stuff was elucidating and personal. Interesting to read. The question I have is why does Franzen have to compete with Kraus, interrupt Kraus, pretend the book is about Kraus.
This book would’ve been kinder to its ostensible subject and the reader if it was simply a collection of Franzen essays about Kraus, but the conceit (and original sin) of the book was that Franzen *himself* translated Karl. Franzen’s in-text commentary should’ve been kept to a bare minimum as a result. Or, he could’ve include companion pieces separately. Any other structure would’ve been preferable to the hundred footnotes that disrupt the exceedingly difficult task of reading Kraus’s grumblings. Franzen often interrupts a take-down of Heine or whatever else Kraus is saying to talk about Post-Structuralism and Gravity’s Rainbow or his frustrated sex life or the S-Bahn. Kraus is swallowed up for pages at a time. Who does the author see as the main attraction here? If it was really Kraus, why interject constantly? If it was Franzen, he should’ve subdued Kraus.
Despite this book being a structural shipwreck, each individual element is good enough to stand alone. It was just too many voices at once, and as a result a lot of the book was just noise. Disappointing in the end.
August 24, 2020
Jonathan Franzen was a student in Berlin in 1981 when he encountered Karl Kraus’s works. In his tumultuous years as a Fulbright student, he found himself and what he wanted to be (so fortunate to able to figure yourself out in your early 20s). In this original volume, he recalled some of those memories and translated two essays by the famed Austrian satirist and journalist: one regarding Heinrich Heine (the German poet) and the other on Johann Nestroy (the German playwright)—the two works which completed his study. With special annotations to Kraus’ essays, Franzen writes that Vienna in early 20th century was not that different from our contemporary life seen from our incessant cultural and technological indulgence.
𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘒𝘳𝘢𝘶𝘴 𝘗𝘳𝘰𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵 is not only social and technological criticism. It’s a masterful translation of a difficult work. But why promote Kraus now? Perhaps Franzen identifies with Kraus in many ways. They’re both authors who don’t shy away from giving unpopular opinions (I’m glad Franzen is not on Twitter). They also endorsed the idea that technology doesn’t necessarily translate into progress as a society. In many ways, our democracy suffers because of it. The book also presents his critique on his fellow novelists like John Updike and Philip Roth and shares his vulnerability towards their fame and works. It’s a unique reading experience. Through his analysis of Kraus, I learned much about Franzen’s formative years as an author (the peaceniks, Berlin Wall, nuclear threat, identity crisis). I may not understand every sentence (so dense), but I’ll savor it like a good book is meant to.
𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘒𝘳𝘢𝘶𝘴 𝘗𝘳𝘰𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵 is not only social and technological criticism. It’s a masterful translation of a difficult work. But why promote Kraus now? Perhaps Franzen identifies with Kraus in many ways. They’re both authors who don’t shy away from giving unpopular opinions (I’m glad Franzen is not on Twitter). They also endorsed the idea that technology doesn’t necessarily translate into progress as a society. In many ways, our democracy suffers because of it. The book also presents his critique on his fellow novelists like John Updike and Philip Roth and shares his vulnerability towards their fame and works. It’s a unique reading experience. Through his analysis of Kraus, I learned much about Franzen’s formative years as an author (the peaceniks, Berlin Wall, nuclear threat, identity crisis). I may not understand every sentence (so dense), but I’ll savor it like a good book is meant to.
May 7, 2023
A 4.5
I love Franzen....and this is probably a book only a fan would enjoy. I was unfamiliar with Kraus & Heine, so I wondered if I would enjoy reading the commentary of one unknown author on another unknown. But Franzen took care of that with his detailed footnotes. It felt like taking a Critical Lit class. Kraus's commentary on life at the turn of the 20th century seems almost as apt today. I see why Franzen appreciates him.
Franzen's reflections on his own life are even better. He dives into his own neurosis. He is frank on the journey his life has taken, and how his choices (mistakes) affected it. I love seeing behind the curtain a bit. And I loved his comments about technology. It should be a tool, not a way of life - a servant, not a master. Yes!!!
Franzen's takedown of Hemingway (and uplifting of Faulkner) is something I can never un-read. Hemingway could only write about things adjacent to his own experiences. It is journalism in the mask of a novel - admittedly very good journalism! But, if he had stayed home, would he been able to write anything? While Faulkner stayed home and created something from his mind. I deeply enjoy Hemingway, but I am not sure I will ever see him the same way again.
Since Covid, its eerie to read comments/predictions about epidemiology written years before, and this book contains one.
Nothing I would recommend, but I loved it. And it pointed me to many other books/authors mentioned that I want to read, (Ludwig Borne, Gravity’s Rainbow, Measuring the World) or try again (Faulkner, Updike)
I love Franzen....and this is probably a book only a fan would enjoy. I was unfamiliar with Kraus & Heine, so I wondered if I would enjoy reading the commentary of one unknown author on another unknown. But Franzen took care of that with his detailed footnotes. It felt like taking a Critical Lit class. Kraus's commentary on life at the turn of the 20th century seems almost as apt today. I see why Franzen appreciates him.
Franzen's reflections on his own life are even better. He dives into his own neurosis. He is frank on the journey his life has taken, and how his choices (mistakes) affected it. I love seeing behind the curtain a bit. And I loved his comments about technology. It should be a tool, not a way of life - a servant, not a master. Yes!!!
Franzen's takedown of Hemingway (and uplifting of Faulkner) is something I can never un-read. Hemingway could only write about things adjacent to his own experiences. It is journalism in the mask of a novel - admittedly very good journalism! But, if he had stayed home, would he been able to write anything? While Faulkner stayed home and created something from his mind. I deeply enjoy Hemingway, but I am not sure I will ever see him the same way again.
Since Covid, its eerie to read comments/predictions about epidemiology written years before, and this book contains one.
Nothing I would recommend, but I loved it. And it pointed me to many other books/authors mentioned that I want to read, (Ludwig Borne, Gravity’s Rainbow, Measuring the World) or try again (Faulkner, Updike)
December 16, 2017
"La scienza è analisi spettrografica; l'arte è sintesi luminosa. Il pensiero è nel mondo, ma non lo si possiede. È disseminato in elementi linguistici tramite il prisma dell'esperienza materiale, l'artista li suggella trasformandoli in pensieri. Il pensiero è qualcosa di trovato, di ritrovato. E chi lo cerca è un onesto rinvenitore, il pensiero gli appartiene, anche se un altro l'avesse trovato prima di lui." - Karl Kraus, Heine e le conseguenze, p. 61
"Arte è ciò che sopravvive alla materia." - Karl Kraus, Nestroy e la posterità, p. 179
"Di fronte al lettore, quelli che sono in parola con il pensiero ricoprono una posizione infinitamente difficile rispetto a quelli che lo ingannano con la parola. A costoro il lettore crede subito, agli altri solo dopo cent'anni." - Karl Kraus, Postfazione a Heine e le conseguenze, p. 191
"Arte è ciò che sopravvive alla materia." - Karl Kraus, Nestroy e la posterità, p. 179
"Di fronte al lettore, quelli che sono in parola con il pensiero ricoprono una posizione infinitamente difficile rispetto a quelli che lo ingannano con la parola. A costoro il lettore crede subito, agli altri solo dopo cent'anni." - Karl Kraus, Postfazione a Heine e le conseguenze, p. 191
November 6, 2024
What did I just read? I appreciate what this book was trying to do, and I suppose Franzen did it well, but this was such pretentious, disconnected biblio-speak that it all felt so one note. I miss texts like this; I miss being a student and talking about theory and all of the brainwork it takes to think and engage in this way. But I will be honest in saying this was such a slog to get through. Not my fav, and it honestly sort of weakened my otherwise favorable opinion of Franzen. Meh. At best, meh.
September 7, 2017
Difficult and dense. But the commentary Franzen provides is incredible. He relates media-obsessed volume-driven "bloggers" of the turn of the 19th century to today's technology fueled content storm with pristine, cutting dialogue. Plus he provides these insights into his own development that provide an unexpected view into the soul of a writer struggling into adulthood during the escalated global climate of Europe in the 90s (not unlike the US now).
October 5, 2022
Kraus' prose is difficult enough without the boring, unrelated interjections by Franzen. An average page includes several words by the Viennese satirist with the rest devoted to half-baked ramblings about macbooks and twitter reminiscent of being trapped in a conversation with a first-year media studies student.
The single benefit of this edition is that it demonstrates the timelessness of Kraus' work: though Franzen is writing more than a century after, he has already become more dated.
The single benefit of this edition is that it demonstrates the timelessness of Kraus' work: though Franzen is writing more than a century after, he has already become more dated.
February 15, 2023
An interesting insight into what a literary/intellectual feud looks like in an academic and cultural hub as fertile as pre-WWI Vienna.
Mixed with, or shall we say rather, imbued in the racial and religious tensions that fueled minds and communities all over poverty and disease-striken Europe, the sour critique with which Kraus flogged Heinrich Heine and his adulators accused of flimsiness, opportunism and skimpy materialism barely concealed under the pretense of art and literature.
Mixed with, or shall we say rather, imbued in the racial and religious tensions that fueled minds and communities all over poverty and disease-striken Europe, the sour critique with which Kraus flogged Heinrich Heine and his adulators accused of flimsiness, opportunism and skimpy materialism barely concealed under the pretense of art and literature.
January 1, 2014
Jonathan Franzen is an angry man. Or at least his public persona is. And he first found this wellspring of anger in his early 20s, lonely and caught in a web of social and sexual frustration, as a student and aspiring novelist in Germany. Germany is also where he discovered another publically angry man: early 20th-century journalist and critic Karl Kraus, Viennese publisher of the icy intellectual journal Die Fackel (The Torch).
Kraus is relevant today, Franzen argues, because he early recognized the pernicious and trivializing impact of popular media and sweeping technological change upon culture, writing, and thought. Kraus’s principal targets were the incipient “lifestyle” features, reviews, and society items that filled a new section of the mainstream newspapers known collectively as “feuilleton,” which literally means “small sheet.” Needless to say, Franzen surveys a target-rich environment with the metastasizing of these newspaper supplements into today’s obsession with social media.
“Culture can’t catch its breath,” he quotes Kraus as saying, and whatever our opinions of Facebook, crowdsourcing, or the iPhone 5, we can all appreciate how breathless we have become merely getting through a media-saturated day.
Franzen employs Kraus and his critique of Viennese and German culture to great effect in his own laceration of our mindless worship of technological change for its own sake, without ever asking ourselves whether, simply because something can be manufactured in the digital world, it should be, or whether this mind-numbing onslaught of such goods is truly good for us as human beings and members of society.
As Franzen writes: Grassroots resistance to these technologies is almost entirely confined to health and safety issues, and meanwhile various logics – of war theory, technology, of the marketplace – keep unfolding automatically. We find ourselves living in a world with hydrogen bombs because uranium bombs just weren’t going to get the job done; we find ourselves spending most of our waking hours texting and e-mailing and tweeting and posting on color-screen gadgets because Moore’s law said we could. We’re told that, to remain competitive economically, we need to forget about the humanities and teach our children “passion”. . . for digital technology and prepare them to spend their entire lives incessantly reeducating themselves to keep up with it.
Compare to Kraus: For the technicians have burned the bridges and the future is: whatever follows automatically . . . Present in body, repellent in spirit, perfect just the way they are, these times of ours are hoping to be overtaken by the times ahead, and hoping that the children, spawned by the union of sport and machine and nourished by newspaper, will be able to laugh even better then.
Franzen is playing the long game in The Kraus Project. Instead of presenting us with a book-length essay on Kraus and modern culture, Franzen has translated several of Kraus’s most famous works – “Heine and the Consequences” (his evisceration of the romantic poet and writer Heinrich Heine, 1797-1856) and “Nestroy and Posterity” (his elevation of Austrian comic playwright Johann Nestroy, 1801-1862), with his own comments as footnotes, along with those of two other eminent Kraus scholars.
This means we must cope with Kraus’s prose directly, which is not an undertaking for the faint of heart. The problem isn’t the translation: it is excellent, and with his co-editors, Franzen ensures that we have clear explanations of even the subtlest cultural and political references to Viennese society and culture. The problem is Kraus: he writes some of the densest, most prickly prose imaginable. I actually laughed at how often a footnote would confess that none of the three editors was quite sure what Kraus was saying. Kraus is a brilliant aphorist, but he also exhibits some of the worst habits of German intellectual writing with his almost wilful obfuscations and abstractions. Lots of preening and erudite showing off; don’t labor under the illusion that you will learn much about Heine by reading “Heine and the Consequences.”
One key to understanding the notorious difficulty of reading Kraus seems to slip by Franzen: no one ever edited Kraus or called him out for bad or self-indulgent writing. Kraus was independently wealthy, so he could afford to ignore advertisers and subscribers and write what he damn well pleased. In fact, for many years he wrote entire issues of Die Fackel by himself. An assimilated Jew, he could also indulge himself in a certain anti-Semitic tropes in his self-proclaimed role as defender of high German culture – at least until the Nazis arrived and Kraus, to his credit, recognized that the game was up.
I enjoyed wrestling with Kraus’s opaque prose until the novelty wore off. Then I skimmed and stuck with Franzen’s commentary, which is prose of a different, higher order, and a deep pleasure to read, whether polemical or literary. His notes are also a rueful and moving portrait of the artist as a confused young man who may have doubted himself and his relationships, but who never relinquished his literary dreams.
Kraus is relevant today, Franzen argues, because he early recognized the pernicious and trivializing impact of popular media and sweeping technological change upon culture, writing, and thought. Kraus’s principal targets were the incipient “lifestyle” features, reviews, and society items that filled a new section of the mainstream newspapers known collectively as “feuilleton,” which literally means “small sheet.” Needless to say, Franzen surveys a target-rich environment with the metastasizing of these newspaper supplements into today’s obsession with social media.
“Culture can’t catch its breath,” he quotes Kraus as saying, and whatever our opinions of Facebook, crowdsourcing, or the iPhone 5, we can all appreciate how breathless we have become merely getting through a media-saturated day.
Franzen employs Kraus and his critique of Viennese and German culture to great effect in his own laceration of our mindless worship of technological change for its own sake, without ever asking ourselves whether, simply because something can be manufactured in the digital world, it should be, or whether this mind-numbing onslaught of such goods is truly good for us as human beings and members of society.
As Franzen writes: Grassroots resistance to these technologies is almost entirely confined to health and safety issues, and meanwhile various logics – of war theory, technology, of the marketplace – keep unfolding automatically. We find ourselves living in a world with hydrogen bombs because uranium bombs just weren’t going to get the job done; we find ourselves spending most of our waking hours texting and e-mailing and tweeting and posting on color-screen gadgets because Moore’s law said we could. We’re told that, to remain competitive economically, we need to forget about the humanities and teach our children “passion”. . . for digital technology and prepare them to spend their entire lives incessantly reeducating themselves to keep up with it.
Compare to Kraus: For the technicians have burned the bridges and the future is: whatever follows automatically . . . Present in body, repellent in spirit, perfect just the way they are, these times of ours are hoping to be overtaken by the times ahead, and hoping that the children, spawned by the union of sport and machine and nourished by newspaper, will be able to laugh even better then.
Franzen is playing the long game in The Kraus Project. Instead of presenting us with a book-length essay on Kraus and modern culture, Franzen has translated several of Kraus’s most famous works – “Heine and the Consequences” (his evisceration of the romantic poet and writer Heinrich Heine, 1797-1856) and “Nestroy and Posterity” (his elevation of Austrian comic playwright Johann Nestroy, 1801-1862), with his own comments as footnotes, along with those of two other eminent Kraus scholars.
This means we must cope with Kraus’s prose directly, which is not an undertaking for the faint of heart. The problem isn’t the translation: it is excellent, and with his co-editors, Franzen ensures that we have clear explanations of even the subtlest cultural and political references to Viennese society and culture. The problem is Kraus: he writes some of the densest, most prickly prose imaginable. I actually laughed at how often a footnote would confess that none of the three editors was quite sure what Kraus was saying. Kraus is a brilliant aphorist, but he also exhibits some of the worst habits of German intellectual writing with his almost wilful obfuscations and abstractions. Lots of preening and erudite showing off; don’t labor under the illusion that you will learn much about Heine by reading “Heine and the Consequences.”
One key to understanding the notorious difficulty of reading Kraus seems to slip by Franzen: no one ever edited Kraus or called him out for bad or self-indulgent writing. Kraus was independently wealthy, so he could afford to ignore advertisers and subscribers and write what he damn well pleased. In fact, for many years he wrote entire issues of Die Fackel by himself. An assimilated Jew, he could also indulge himself in a certain anti-Semitic tropes in his self-proclaimed role as defender of high German culture – at least until the Nazis arrived and Kraus, to his credit, recognized that the game was up.
I enjoyed wrestling with Kraus’s opaque prose until the novelty wore off. Then I skimmed and stuck with Franzen’s commentary, which is prose of a different, higher order, and a deep pleasure to read, whether polemical or literary. His notes are also a rueful and moving portrait of the artist as a confused young man who may have doubted himself and his relationships, but who never relinquished his literary dreams.
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