By Walter Hömberg
In early April 1899, a new magazine appears in Vienna. Its bright red cover shows an enormous torch in front of a silhouette of the city. In the introductory article, the editor underscores its combative approach: »The political manifesto of this newspaper thus appears sparse; it has chosen as its theme not a sounding ›what we feature‹ but an honest ›what we kill off.‹« The editor of Die Fackel, Karl Kraus, is well known to press history experts to this day. Some revere him as the greatest satirist of the 20th century, a brilliant diagnostician of the time, a sensitive poet and clear-sighted playwright. For others, he is a merciless polemicist, a ruthless scorner, hopelessly egocentric, a know-it-all, a querulant and nest fouler. The Vienna literary man Hans Weigel gave this assessment: »His criticism was sacrosanct – criticism of him was lèse majesté.«
Keywords: Commentary on the zeitgeist, press criticism, antimilitarism, Karl Kraus
Translation: Sophie Costella
The key points of Karl Kraus’s life: He was born on April 28, 1874 in Jičín, a small town north-east of Prague, as the ninth of ten children of sales clerk Jacob Kraus and his wife Ernestine. Three years later, the family moved to Vienna, where Karl would later attend the Franz-Josephs-Gymnasium high school. This was followed by studies at the University of Vienna, initially in law (in which he completed the first stage of state examinations), later in Romance philology and German studies (in which he never graduated). Even at the age of 18, he was writing cultural reports and reviews for Austrian and German newspapers. In April 1899, he set up the magazine Die Fackel, over which he retained editorial control until shortly before his death on June 12, 1936.
Unique in press history
Die Fackel is unique in the history of the press. It was initially published three times a month, then later irregularly and in varying lengths over a period of 37 years. At the start, it printed articles not only by Kraus himself, but also by other authors such as Peter Altenberg, Egon Friedell, Adolf Loos, and Frank Wedekind. Starting in 1912, however, Kraus no longer wanted to share the space with other authors. The total output of Die Fackel extends to around 20,000 pages. It embodies like almost no other paper the typus of an individual magazine and, consistent with this, was not continued after the death of its founder.
Kraus, who composed his articles in tiny handwriting using ink and an old-fashioned fountain pen, was a fighter by nature. In his view, his main enemies were the contemporary press, particularly the Neue Freie Presse – the paper favored by Vienna’s liberal bourgeoisie. An article in the very first edition of Die Fackel states the aim of »draining the broad swamp of phrases.«
This battle against the press was fought on two fronts. On the one hand, Kraus criticized its dependency on advertising, which can lead to courtesy journalism and even corruption. On the other hand, the language-sensitive journalist fought against the garbage phrases used in reporting: »The world is deaf from this cadence. I am convinced that the incidents do not actually occur anymore, but that the cliches continue to work of their own accord.« He continued: »The language has caused the issue to rot. The times stink from the phrases alone.« Kraus railed against the feuilleton style of journalism that had spread through the contemporary press, as aptly shown in an aphorism that would later become widely quoted: »Writing a feuilleton means curling hair on a bald head.«
Combative journalism
Kraus had one opponent in particular in his sights: Imre Békessy. Born in Budapest in 1887, Békessy had moved to Vienna in the early 1920s and set up various newspapers. The most successful was a daily paper entitled Die Stunde, which subsisted on gossip and scandal. Tabloid journalist Békessy did not earn all his living from these publications. Quite the opposite: He and his associates put pressure on celebrities with scandalous stories and promised not to publish them in return for a hefty amount of hush money. This unscrupulous extortion journalism was of course an ideal target for Kraus, who ultimately succeeded in causing the publisher to desist. Békessy fled first to France, before later returning to Hungary.
Another of the many targets of Kraus’s polemics was Alice Schalek, whose newspaper articles and books reported on the fight of the Austrian troops in the First World War. At the time the first woman to be accredited as a war reporter, she published descriptions of the front that painted a harmonized picture of the soldiers’ everyday lives, writing of the »allure of danger.« Antimilitarist Kraus reacted so strongly that he was accused of misogyny.
Four years ago, Jens Malte Fischer, Emeritus Professor of Theater Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, published an exhaustive – in both senses of the word – biography. Having discovered Karl Kraus right at the start of his studies, he was unable to forget him, and eventually dedicated his dissertation to him. Fischer’s new work – a doorstopper of a tome – presents in detail almost every person that Kraus ever had contact with.
Yet one key contact is missing: Arthur Schütz, the inventor of the »Grubenhund« – a type of false report that he repeatedly put out from November 1911 and that any deskman with common sense would pick up on. Kraus was his forerunner in this regard: Posing as »Civil Engineer J. Berdach,« he smuggled a fictional letter to the editor into the Neue Freie Presse as early as February 22, 1908, intending to reveal the lack of competence on the part of the editorial office. Schütz followed in his footsteps and refined the press critique with numerous other successful experiments. Die Fackel then reported on both forms of false report: the original »Grubenhund« and its younger sister, the »Laufkatze.« A collection of Arthur Schütz’ »Grubenhunde« was then published in 1931 by Jahoda & Siegel, the regular publishing house of Die Fackel.
Letters, poems, plays
Karl Kraus was not only a tireless journalist, but also an excessive letter-writer. Sidonie Nádherný von Borutin, whom he worshipped, alone received more than a thousand letters, cards and telegrams from Kraus. He also dedicated numerous poems to her. Otherwise, Kraus the poet remains to be discovered. He published nine volumes of poetry between 1916 and 1930, and indeed numerous books composed of texts from Die Fackel. Most of his poetry is written in traditional form, with a preference for end rhyme. In an age dominated by expressionism and dadaism, it seems extremely conventional.
Last but not least: Karl Kraus was tireless in reading aloud, presenting both his own texts and works by Shakespeare, Offenbach, Nestroy and other dramatists to large audiences more than 700 times. His own anti-war drama Die letzten Tage der Menschheit [The last days of humankind] was considered unplayable due to its monstrous length, but was eventually performed numerous times in abbreviated form. Anyone who saw the performance at the Salzburger Festspiele in 2014, which was later adopted by the Wiener Burgtheater, would have experienced the play’s continuing topicality.
The last word goes to author and filmmaker Roger Willemsen, who described Karl Kraus as »the last radical of humanism, who spawned and permitted daily journalism. His failure was the failure of more than just himself.«
Expanded version of an article that first appeared in the journal Universitas (79th vol. 2024, no. 934).
References
Fischer, Jens Malte (2020): Karl Kraus. Der Widersprecher. Biografie. Vienna: Paul Zsolnay Verlag.
Klaus, Elisabeth (2008): Rhetoriken über Krieg: Karl Kraus gegen Alice Schalek. In: Feministische Studien, 26(1), pp. 65-82.
Hans Weigel über Karl Kraus. In: Schultz, Hans Jürgen (Hrsg.) (1980): Journalisten über Journalisten. Munich: Kindler Verlag, pp. 172-182.
Schütz, Arthur (1996): Der Grubenhund. Experimente mit der Wahrheit. Ed. by Walter Hömberg. Munich: Verlag Reinhard Fischer.
Geringer, Claudia; Strouhal, Ernst (2023): Die Phantome des Ingenieur Berdach. Medienkritik und Satire. Vienna, Hamburg: Edition Konturen.
Willemsen, Roger (2004): Der einzig Wahre. Karl Kraus 1874-1936. In: Jakobs, Hans-Jürgen; Langenbucher, Wolfgang R. (eds.): Das Gewissen ihrer Zeit. Fünfzig Vorbilder des Journalismus. Vienna: Picus Verlag, pp. 121-126.
About the author
Prof. Dr. Walter Hömberg was Tenured Professor of Journalism Studies and Communication Studies at the Universities of Bamberg and Eichstätt, as well as teaching at the University of Vienna as a guest professor for many years. He has published numerous studies on the history and present of journalism and is the publisher of the almanac Marginalistik, whose second volume was published in 2023.
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Citation
Walter Hömberg: Combative and controversial. Remembering Karl Kraus. In: Journalism Research, Vol. 7 (2), 2024, pp. 188-191. DOI: 10.1453/2569-152X-22024-14244-en
ISSN
2569-152X
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1453/2569-152X-22024-14244-en
First published online
August 2024