Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus - Softcover

FRANZEN, JONATHAN

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250056039 ISBN 13: 9781250056030

Verlag: Picador Paper, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Franzen presents his definitive new translations of Kraus and annotates them spectacularly, with supplementary notes from Kraus scholar Paul Reitter. Kraus was a cantankerous and difficult author, and in Franzen he has found his match: a novelist unafraid to voice unpopular opinions strongly, a critic capable of untangling Krauss often dense arguments to reveal their relevance to contemporary readers.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jonathan Franzen is the author of novels such as The Corrections (2001), Freedom (2010), and Crossroads (2021), and works of nonfiction, including Farther Away (2012) and The End of the End of the Earth (2018), all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.

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The Kraus Project

By Jonathan Franzen, Matt Buck

Picador

Copyright © 2013 Jonathan Franzen
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-250-05603-0

Contents

HEINE AND THE CONSEQUENCES (1910), 
HEINE UND DIE FOLGEN, 
NESTROY AND POSTERITY (1912), 
NESTROY UND DIE NACHWELT, 
AFTERWORD TO "HEINE AND THE CONSEQUENCES" (1911), 
NACHWORT ZU "HEINE UND DIE FOLGEN", 
BETWEEN TWO STRAINS OF LIFE: FINAL WORD (1917), 
ZWISCHEN DEN LEBENSRICHTUNGEN, 
LET NO ONE ASK ... (1933), 
MAN FRAGE NICHT ..., 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 

CHAPTER 1

Heine and the Consequences

* * *

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! Spare me this good taste that over there and down there delights the eye and irritates the imagination. Spare me this melody of life that disturbs my own music, which comes into its own only in the roaring of the German workday. Spare me this universal higher level of refinement from which it's so easy to observe that the newspaper seller in Paris has more charm than the Prussian publisher. Believe me, you color-happy people, in cultures where every blockhead has individuality, individuality becomes a thing for blockheads. And spare me this mediocre chicanery in place of one's own stupidity! Spare me the picturesque moil on the rind of an old Gorgonzola in place of the dependable white monotony of cream cheese! Life is hard to digest both here and there. But the Romance diet beautifies the spoilage; you swallow the bait and go belly-up. The German regimen spoils beauty and puts us to the test: how do we re-create it? Romance culture makes every man a poet. Art's a piece of cake there. And Heaven a hell.

Heinrich Heine, however, has brought the Germans tidings of this Heaven, to which their heart is drawn with a longing that has to rhyme someplace and that leads in subterranean passages directly from the countinghouse to the Blue Grotto. And, on a byway that German men avoid: from chopped liver to the blue flower. It was inevitable that the one with their longing and the other with their longings would consider Heinrich Heine the Fulfiller. Tuned by a culture for which the mere material of daily life suffices as a complete artistic experience, Heine provides mood music for a culture whose experience of art begins and ends with the attractions of its content. His writing works from the Romance feel for life into the German conception of art. In this configuration it offers the utile dulci, it ornaments German functionality with French spirit. And so, in this easy-to- read juxtaposition of form and content, in which there is no discord and no unity, it becomes the great legacy from which journalism continues to live to this very day, a dangerous mediator between art and life, a parasite on both, a singer where it should only be a messenger, filing reports where a song would be in order, its eye too fixed on its goal to see the burning color, blinded to all goals by its pleasure in the picturesque, the bane of literary utility, the spirit of utiliterature. Instrument made into ornament, and so badly degenerated that even the current mania for decorating consumer goods can scarcely keep up with the progress of applied art in the daily press; because at least we have yet to hear that the Wiener Werkstätte is manufacturing burglary tools. And even in the style of the most up-to-the-minute impressionistic journalism the Heinean model does not disavow itself. Without Heine, no feuilleton. This is the French disease he smuggled in to us. How easy it is to get sick in Paris! How lax the morality of the German feel for language becomes! The French language lets every filou have his way with her. You have to prove yourself a man in full before the German language will give you the time of day, and that's only the beginning of the trouble you're in for. With French, though, everything goes smoothly, with that perfect lack of inhibition which is perfection in a woman and a lack in a language. And the Jacob's ladder that leads to her is a climax you'll find in the German dictionary: Geschmeichel, Geschmeide, Geschmeidig, Geschmeiß. Anybody and everybody can procure her services for the feuilleton. She's a lazy Susan of the mind. The most well-grounded head isn't safe from flashes of inspiration when it deals with her. We get everything from languages, because they contain everything that can become thought. Language arouses and stimulates, like a woman, brings joy and, with it, thought. The German language, however, is a companion who will think and make poetry only for the man who can give her children. You wouldn't want to be married like this to any German housewife. And yet the woman of Paris need say nothing except, at the crucial moment, très jolie, and you'll believe anything of her. Her mind is in her face. And if her partner had beauty in his brain as well, Romance life would not be merely très jolie but fecund, ringed not by bibelots and dainties, but by deeds and monuments.

If they say of a German author that he must have learned a lot from the French, this is the highest praise only if it isn't true. For it means: he's indebted to the German language for what the French gives to everybody. People here are still being linguistically creative when people over there are already playing with the children, who came blowing in, nobody knows how. But ever since Heinrich Heine imported the trick, it's been purely an exercise in diligence if a German feuilletonist goes to Paris to fetch himself some talent. If somebody nowadays actually goes to Rhodes because people dance better there, he is truly an excessively conscientious swindler. That was still necessary in Heine's day. You'd been to Rhodes, and back here people believed that you could dance. Today they'll believe that a cripple who has never left Vienna can dance the cancan, and many a person who never had a single good finger now plays the viola. The profitable return on distance from the reader should never be underestimated, and foreign milieus continue to be what gets taken for art. People are very talented in the jungle, and talent begins in the East around the time you reach Bucharest. The writer who knocks the dust off foreign costumes is getting at the fascination of the material in the most convenient way imaginable. And so a reader with a brain has the strongest distrust imaginable of storytellers who knock about in foreign milieus. The best-case scenario continues to be that they weren't there; but most of them are unfortunately so constituted that they actually have to take a trip in order to tell a story. Of course, to have spent two years in Paris isn't merely the advantage of such Habakkuks, it's their definition. They strew the drifting sand of French, which finds its way into the pockets of every dolt, into the eyes of German readers. And let the inverse of an epigram of Nestroy, this true satirical thinker, apply to them: things go well enough from Paris to St....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Picador Paper
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Deutsch
• ISBN 10: 1250056039
• ISBN 13: 9781250056030
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar