At The Surface Poem by gershon hepner

At the surface lies the root,
Karl Kraus declared: what is official
should be considered to be moot
contrasted with what’s superficial.
Unimportant details tell
the secrets that you cannot learn
by going deep into the well
without a route for your return.

Adam Reitter, reviewing The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe, by Paul Reitter, writes about Karl Kraus in the NYR, October 23,2008 (“The Torch of Karl Kraus”) : When the eighteen-year-old Elias Canetti first came to Vienna in 1924, nothing more plainly marked him as a provincial than the fact that he had never heard of Karl Kraus. For a quarter-century, Kraus had been publishing Die Fackel (The Torch) , a magazine that relentlessly exposed the crimes, lies, and blunders of Austrian society—above all, of its press, which he considered its greatest plague. 'Why didn't Eternity have this deformed age aborted? Its birthmark is the stamp of a newspaper, its meconium is printer's ink, and in its veins flows ink, ' ran a typical Krausian aphorism. The Neue Freie Presse, the influential Viennese daily, was Die Fackel 's favorite target. It was a measure of how deeply Kraus got under the skin of its powerful editor, Moriz Benedikt, that the Neue Freie Presse had a standing policy of never mentioning Kraus's name in any context. When the writer Peter Altenberg died in 1919, the paper refused to cover the funeral because Kraus had delivered the eulogy…”it is next to impossible, ” writes his chief English interpreter, Harry Zohn “on a large scale, to convey in English an idea of Kraus’s style, the most brilliant in modern German letters.”...Even Kraus’s call for “redemption through assimilation”—“Durch Auflösung die Erlösung! ” —is pithier in German….For all his invective against journalists, Kraus himself was a journalist, and the pages of Die Fackel are filled with comments on passing event—the scandals, crimes, celebrities, advertisements—that the Viennese were talking about day by day. Kraus addressed himself conscientiously to such trivia, believing, as he wrote in 1914, that”the root lies at the surface” —that the disease of the age would be diagnosed from itw most trivial symptoms. (The formula suggests why Kraus was such an important influence on Benjamin and Adorno.) Thus the Hervay trial of 1904, in which the wife of a provincial official was accused of bigamy, provoked some of Kraus’s best attacks on Austrian sexual hypocrisy. The Friedjung trial of 1909, in which a nationalist history professor was sued for libel by Croatian politicians whom he had accused of treason—on the basis of documents that were pproved to be forgeries, concocted by Austria’s Foreign Office—were another glorious moment for the satirist.


10/11/08