The Austrian Karl Kraus, journalist, playwright, poet and satirist, published 922 issues of a magazine, most of which he wrote alone, convinced that in a misplaced comma one can read the catastrophe of the era that allows it. For a century, his hidden influence has been much more important than the cultural arena recognises and is projected in works as far removed from each other as those of his compatriot, Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek or the last poet to win the Cervantes Prize, the Venezuelan Rafael Cadenas. Now, 150 years after his birth and 125 years after the birth of his magazine, The Face (the torch), the importance of its absence shines. If recently the director of The New YorkerDavid Remnick, recalled that “The New York Times “overlooked the Holocaust,” it is worth remembering that Kraus saw this coming 10 years earlier when he read the newspapers circulating in Vienna, including the foreign ones.
The great culture of a century ago openly acknowledged the influence of Kraus and his magazine: from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Sigmund Freud, via Theodor Adorno, Elias Canetti and Walter Benjamin. Throughout the almost four decades of The FaceBetween 1899 and 1936, Kraus dissected some of the contemporary ills with this method: “Simply by opening the newspaper,” as the political scientist Eric Voegelin recalled in Hitler and the Germans (Trotta, 2024), recently translated into Spanish. Three years before his death, in The Third Walpurgis Night (Hiru), written just after National Socialism came to power in Germany in 1933, “accurately described and revealed [la] authentic nature [del nazismo]”. He was “the first great critic of propaganda, anticipating the Orwellian vision of a totalitarian society dominated by doublethink and newspeak,” according to his biographer Edward Timms in Karl Kraus, apocalyptic satirist. Culture and catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (Viewfinder).
Language was Kraus’s main occupation (Jicin, present-day Czech Republic, 1874; Vienna, Austria, 1936), because his main concern was life, whose degradation he saw anticipated in that of language, and humanity, which suffered both degradations. This intimate and tragic relationship, and his unwavering commitment to fight against both, makes his analysis of Nazi propaganda not only a “must read for every student of Political Science” (Voeglin), but for any reader, and perhaps for that reason It was reissued in the United States at the end of Trump’s first termFour years later, and with the prospect of the tycoon’s return, Kraus’ voice continues to be called upon to meet current events, also in Spain.
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In June, La Casa Encendida included him in the cycle Fire alarms. The far right had not yet won the European elections in Austria and France, but Trump’s return to the White House continued to gain supporters. “It is impossible not to remember Kraus in the current state of affairs, where responsibility for public speech has completely lost its value. We began to see this very clearly in the elections that Trump won in 2016, where cynicism and lies were validated as political tools,” says Sandra Santana, professor of Aesthetics at the University of La Laguna (Tenerife) and invited to speak about Kraus in that cycle, over the phone.
“When words deviate from their meaning,” Santana explains in a landmark essay on Kraus, The labyrinth of the word (Acantilado), “imposture begins to reign.” For Adan Kovacsics, translator of several of Kraus’ works into Spanish, including an anthology of The Torch (Acantilado), with the fusion between information and spectacle, which Kraus also warned about, “everything has been fused, with the shallow depth of field and the short intellectual journey of certain television channels.” “It is essential to understand what spectacle is and that politics has joined in,” he adds. The paradox, for Kovacsics, is that, as with Trump, “everything was in plain sight,” but with the machinery and skill with which Nazism emptied language, the era was left without words or imagination to see what it itself promoted.
To understand how Trump, to whom the accountant of The Washington Post He attributed more than 30,000 lies in his first termhas dissolved the relationship between responsibility and public discourse, there is nothing better than opening the newspaper and reading what an evangelical leader said about Trump days after the catastrophic debate between Biden and him on CNN: “As president of the United States, he fulfilled each and every one of the promises he made to us,” said the religious leader (Financial Times6-24-2024). The next day, Martin Wolf noted that Trump’s ability “to define truth for his followers is an example of the Führerprinzip —the idea that the leader defines the truth” (FT, 25-6-2024). An idea that refers to the thesis of The Führer defends the righta work by jurist Carl Schmitt, one of the most influential thinkers in the new right. Those who think that the analogy is an exaggeration, and that Trump does not even have a Schmitt, should know that Adrian Vermeule may suffice, Harvard professorwhich promotes a “illiberal legalism” that puts the dot and the i on liberalism and the final nail in the coffin on the Constitution. For now, the Supreme Court has already said that President Trump is above the law.
Kraus was right in seeing what Nazi propaganda was predicting because he understood that its objective was not so much to take over “the atrocities as the clarifications,” just as Trump does not intend to take over anything in particular, except the media attention, that is, everything. Only when the world ceases to be the reference, and speeches are only compared to each other, is the path paved for the triumph of truly self-referential politics. The news is not that his vice-presidential candidate baptized him in 2016 as the “Hitler of the United States”, but if it was a criticism then, today I could repeat it as praise without falling into incoherence, because in the face of Trumpism, denouncing contradiction makes no sense; contradiction is its method.
Voegelin argues that National Socialism also triumphed against this background of indifference, and relies on Kraus and his dissection of the “double language of Germany” to try to “refute all the lies that have been told about [los campos de concentración]that is, the second reality elaborated by (…) the German episcopate.” Hitler’s coming to power also crowned the failure of social democracy, including the Austrian one, which even when its German comrades were tortured and murdered, continued to prefer to oppose the Austrian Christian Democratic government rather than the German National Socialists. “Devoted to the pastime of talk and tactics, they have lost almost all material conquests,” he wrote of the social democrats; of the social democratic intellectuals, who believed “they could break the [el] magic circle [del nazismo] through the Constitutional Court.” Kraus therefore supported the Austrian Christian Democratic Chancellor: anything but Hitler.
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