BIOGRAPHY

embodiment of a distinct human type, once ubiquitous, now practically extinct: the Austrian café intellectual. Vienna in Kraus’s glory days – roughly the first thirty years of the twentieth century – was the city where you could consult Sigmund Freud or Alfred Adler about your psychological problems; witness Ludwig Wittgenstein lecturing on philosophy; to a concert composed – and conducted – by Gustav Mahler (and sleep with his amorous wife Alma afterwards, as Oskar Kokoschka, among very many others, was wont to do). You could watch a play by Arthur Schnitzler; read a poem by Rilke or Trakl; view a painting by Klimt or Schiele; enter a building designed by Adolf Loos; hear an unending work in progress by Robert Musil – and discuss it all the next day with any or all of these luminaries over a kleiner Brauner in one of Vienna’s many hundred cafés: the Central, the Griensteidl, the Museum, the Landtmann, or Dehmels. The city was, in short, the pulse, the beating heart of all that was most exciting and advanced in European culture, and much of that culture was indisputably Jewish, with Kraus as its quintessential figure. Less reputably, and some way down the social scale, Vienna was the one place, and just before the First World War the one time, when you could, just conceivably, rub shoulders with Hitler, Stalin and Trotsky on the same day. You wouldn’t want to rub up too closely to Hitler, of course, even before his gory days – he was a homeless tramp and probably verminous; not to mention the virulently toxic ideas that were festering beneath his long, threadbare coat. But it was the abrasive interface between these clashing cultures, and the devastating ultimate effect of the totalitarian ideology being incubated by this as yet unknown trio, that would concern Karl Kraus all his life, and would eventually engulf his world. The first volume of Timms’s work concerned the launching in 1899, as the century turned, of Kraus’s periodical Die Fackel (‘The Torch’); an idiosyncratic journal, written, edited and published (at irregular intervals, but roughly once a month) by Kraus alone. Die Fackel achieved a circulation of 30,000, equivalent to one of Vienna’s many ordinary newspapers and unheard-of for an unapologetically highbrow journal of politics and culture. Timms’s first volume also covered the writing of Kraus’s other great project – his sprawling, marathon, hugely ambitious theatrical extravaganza (‘play’ is far too pale a word), Die letzte Tage der Menschheit (‘The Last Days of Mankind’). Written and

Kraus, by Kokoschka

performed at the height of the First World War, the work was an enormous combustion of scenes, songs and an army of characters whose message, despite the complexity of its structure, was prophetically stark: the war was a catastrophe which would destroy not only the rickety structure of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but Europe itself. Kraus peered through the fog of war and saw the abyss that lay ahead. His personification of the Zeitgeist – and his encapsulation of it in his own magazine – made him an Austrian Dickens or Orwell – even a Dostoyevsky. Volume Two opens with the Apocalypse having arrived in 1918, and finds Kraus surviving amidst the ruins – still publishing Die Fackel and still as keen as ever to swim against the tide of received opinion. His most consistent posture was that of the contrarian. Born a Jew, he converted to Catholicism. As most of his fellow café intellectuals embrace the heady doctrines of Socialism and Communism, Kraus begins to espouse a cautious and essentially conservative position that leads him – as social and political tensions rip the fragile fabric of postwar Austria apart – to support the ‘Austro-Fascist’ clerical dictatorship of Engelbert Dollfuss, as the only available alternative to Hitler’s Nazis on the one hand, and Stalin’s Bolsheviks on the other. Kraus’s commitment to Dollfuss’s regime may have been logical – but it cost him the friendship of many of his fellow café intellectuals, outraged by Dollfuss’s destruction of parliamentary democracy and his ruthless repression of Socialists and Nazis alike. Kraus took his adoration to ludicrous extremes; even carrying in his wallet a picture of the diminutive dictator (Dollfuss’s lack of stature won him the nickname ‘Mini-Metternich’), which he was liable to whip out and moon over, asking companions if the titchy tyrant’s cherubic features did not resemble those of an angel. Despite his increasingly conservative stance (essentially a defensive reaction to the rise of Hitlerism), Kraus retained the respect of Marxists such as Brecht and Benjamin, for his spiky individualism and sheer intellectual integrity. Kraus’s piercing prophetic powers allowed him to understand the vile nature of Nazism and the threat it posed as early as the mid 1920s, when Hitler was still a ranting street-corner orator in Munich. He also anticipated the ideas of a contemporary historian of the movement, Michael Burleigh, in seeing Nazism as a political religion: Kraus described it as a modern pagan

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

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