KARL KRAUS

by Walter Benjamin

De 1899 jusqu’à sa mort, Karl Kraus (1874- 1936) fut le fondateur, et parfois l’unique rédacteur, de Die Fackel (Le flambeau), revue lue par les plus grands (Musil, Wittgenstein ou encore Adorno). Les milieux intellectuels et les journalistes redoutent cette plume acerbe, admirée par Thomas Bernhard et à laquelle Walter Benjamin rend hommage dans cet essai lumineux. Kraus fut un fin limier du langage et a su faire apparaître « le journalisme comme l’expression parfaite du changement de fonction du langage dans le capitalisme avancé ». Mais Benjamin ne fait pas que commenter des idées, il dresse le portrait sans concession d’un dramaturge qui fut aussi son propre personnage : « Shakespeare a tout prévu  ; en effet ! Il a surtout prévu Kraus lui-même. »

96 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2018

About the author

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, Jewish mysticism, and neo-Kantianism, Benjamin made influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders, though the friendship between Arendt and Benjamin outlasted her marriage to Anders. Both Arendt and Anders were students of Martin Heidegger, whom Benjamin considered a nemesis.
Among Benjamin's best known works are the essays "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935) and "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940). His major work as a literary critic included essays on Charles Baudelaire, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Franz Kafka, Karl Kraus, Nikolai Leskov, Marcel Proust, Robert Walser, Trauerspiel and translation theory. He also made major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.
Of the hidden principle organizing Walter Benjamin's thought Scholem wrote unequivocally that "Benjamin was a philosopher", while his younger colleagues Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno contend that he was "not a philosopher". Scholem remarked "The peculiar aura of authority emanating from his work tended to incite contradiction". Benjamin himself considered his research to be theological, though he eschewed all recourse to traditionally metaphysical sources of transcendentally revealed authority.
In 1940, at the age of 48, Benjamin died by suicide at Portbou on the French Spanish border while attempting to escape the advance of the Third Reich. Though popular acclaim eluded him during his life, the decades following his death won his work posthumous renown.

Reviews

[Olga]

The essay focuses on the personality and work of Karl Kraus, an outstanding Austrian writer, a brilliant journalist and satirist ("the master of venomous ridicule" according to S. Zweig), whose influence on the German-speaking intellectuals of that time was enormous.

The headings of the chapters discussing different aspects of Kraus's professional work are 'A Cosmic Man', 'Demon' and 'Monster'.

Kraus was primarily concerned with how his contemporaries use the language. I am facsinated with Benjamin's poetical, expressive language.

'His defeatism is of a supranational, that is, planetary kind, and history for him is merely the
wilderness dividing his race from creation, whose last act is world conflagration. As a deserter to- the camp of animal creation— so he measures out this wilderness. "And only the animal that is conquered by humanity is the hero o f life": never was Adalbert Stifter's patriarchal credo given so lugubrious and heraldic a formulation.'
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It is in the name of animal creation that Kraus again and again bends toward the animal and toward “the heart of all hearts, that of the dog,” for him creation's true mirror of virtue, in which fidelity, purity, gratitude smile from times lost and remote. How lamentable that. people, usurp its place!
These are his followers. More numerously and eagerly than about their master they throng with unlovely sniffings about the mortally wounded opponent. Certainly the dog is not for nothing the emblematic beast of this author: the dog, the ideal example of the follower, who is nothing except devoted creaturely life. And the more personal and unfounded this devotion, the better. Kraus is right to put it to the hardest test.'
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'For opinion is false objectivity that can be separated from the person and incorporated in the circulation of commodities. Kraus never offered an argument that had not engaged his whole person. Thus he embodies the secret of authority: never to disappoint. Authority has no other end than this: it dies or it disappoints. It is not in the least undermined by what others must avoid: its own despotism, injustice, inconsistency. O n the contrary, it would be disappointing to observe how it arrived at its pronouncements— by fairness, for example, or even self-consistency.'
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'Incognito like Haroun al Raschid, he passes by night among the sentence constructions of the journals, and, from behind the petrified facades of phrases, he peers into the interior, discovers in the orgies of “black magic” the violation, the martyrdom of words: “Is the press a messenger? No: the event. Is it speesh? No: life. It not only claims that the true events are its news of events, but it also brings about a sinister identification that constantly creates the illusion that deeds are
reported before they are carried out, and frequently also the possibility of a situation, which in any case exists, that while war correspondents are not allowed to witness events, soldiers become reporters. I therefore welcome the charge that all my life I have overestimated the press. It is not a servant— how could a servant demand and receive so much— it is the event.'
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'Authority and word against corruption and magic— these are the catchwords distributed in this struggle. I t is not idle to prognosticate its outcome. No one, Kraus least of all, can leave the utopia of an “objective” newspaper, the chimera of an “impartial transmission of news,” to its own devices. The newspaper is an instrument of power.'
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'If, however, high capitalism defiles not only the ends but also the means of journalism, then a new blossoming of paradisiac, cosmic humanity can no more be expected of a power that defeats it
than a second blooming of the language of Goethe or Claudius. From that now prevailing it will distinguish itself first of all b y putting out o f circulation ideals that debase the former. This is enough to give a measure of how little Kraus would have to win or lose in su^. a struggle, of how unerringly Die Fackel would illuminate it. To the ever-repeated sensations with which the daily press serves its public he opposes the eternally fresh “news” of the history of creation: the eternally renewed, the uninteerpted lament.'

[Thomas Kerleroux]

assez mal écrit (ou traduit... ?) et quelque peu insipide
ça donne envie de lire Kraus, cependant