Foreword Translator's Translating Dritte Walpurgisnacht
in "Third Walpurgis Night" Karl Kraus, 1933.
Third Walpurgis Night is the last long piece of Kraus, the culmination of his work as a journalist and polemicist, which began in 1899 with the creation of Die Fackel newspaper whose mission already announced by its title that can be translated as "The Torch". Scout and sentry Kraus has been driven by the desire to fight obscurantism and draw attention to the resignations of the mind, because deficiencies and assaults against nature. Owned by its mission and confident of his duty of intransigence, he wrote Die Fackel single from 1911. The numbers could be very unequal, ranging from a few pages to over a hundred pages. Nothing more contrary to the requirement of truth, according to Kraus, that out of a newspaper with the same number of pages so that the interest of timeliness fluctuates. Before any consideration of how information is processed, regularity of the volume is already for him the sign of a lie and a danger because, flanging any hierarchy, the press and puts the information at the same level can not always highlight any at fair value, inflating or reducing the importance of an event due to a calibration only needs fixed: depending on the season, as space can be given to the invasion of a country or police excesses as weddings or pranks of a woman avocado, all interspersed with advertisements - subsidies which happened Die Fackel, who lived only for sales revenues and subscriptions. As long as it seemed, the newspaper enjoyed a readership that could also vary, ranging from 9000 to 38 000 readers by the numbers. Kraus did not care to retain readers by stroking in the direction of the hair. It sometimes takes them directly to them when they are annoying and want to lock him in a role as the troublemaker who has patented an idea about everything and know publicly. Thus he says at the beginning of Third Walpurgis Night: "Some [players] are so brash as I retreat before them more than before the danger they are in fact assault a bookstore before leaving with regret in insinuating that "it is probably for fear that no seems not. "Well guessed the extent of consciousness arise in those moments before such advocates is also an inhibiting factor." The obligation to write, Kraus substituted during the first months of 1933, that of taking the measure of the disaster. As an actor who does his silence to support the response coming
"I remain silent;
and does not say why
and there was silence,
while the earth cracked.
No words that touched; [.,.]
was then indifference.
call
asleep when the world awoke,
does it appear in the brief number that precedes Third Walpurgis Night, the text was originally intended to do quite a number Die Fackel. It has been only partially - numbers 890-905 in late July 1934 - Kraus having renounced the last moment to publish everything in order not to endanger his friends. For the danger that threatens all opponents in this year 1933 is worse than ever. And as surprising as it may seem, Kraus seems to be one of the few as'en see if earlier and with much foresight, and not wearing a political decision but simply providing, from a critique of language, an analysis of the phenomenon he calls an "Event".
Three hundred pages of Third Walpurgis Night were written in five months, and only three after Hitler's appointment as chancellor by Hindenburg, January 30, 1933. But Kraus seems to have everything already understood what was coming: not foreseen or anticipated, because the book is not a light but that of someone who simply knows how to look. The documents on which he relies, everyone could have. Kraus sources had no secret or privileged information. He simply read the newspapers, listened to the radio (often just listen to the radio when looking for the truth "), operated overlap, checked, classified. It also expressly provides sources of information: the Arbeiter Zeitung, the Berliner Tageblatt, the Neue Freie Presse, Reichspost, Berliner Illustrierte and - moderately, as he says - Mein Kampf (for who knows how to read n ' no need to make it his favorite book to see what he peddles ideology and what purpose it continues). Since 1933, therefore, Kraus speaks at length of the preparations for war with Nazi Germany, of its expansionist, anti-Semitism displayed and brutal, the structure of society pre-fascist German concentration camps (the first, Oranienburg, was opened in February 1933, followed by that of Dachau in March of that year) , torture, summary executions, abuse perpetrated against women accused of "being committed" with Jews, "preventive detention" as arbitrary imprisonment without trial and to quickly put opponents away. If Kraus is prophetic, it is in a few sentences that summarize the essential nature of Nazism - which will not yet not all the horror he died in 1936, two years before the Anschluss, he honnissait the idea: "It's a moment in the life of nations, not lacking in size since in spite of electric lighting and even all the expedients of radio science, it returns to the original state where a disruption of all the conditions of life often means death. "Or this:" Simultaneity of Electrical and myth, and atomic decay pyre of everything that exists and no longer exists! "How
then pretend they did not know that it was impossible to know? These "Millions of people who have everything under the eyes and notice nothing" ... The only explanation is that Kraus did not know, we refused to think of it as possible what happened to the other sometimes in full view of everyone: "The strict observance of preventive [... ] Remain under the zealous loyalty to their faith and more because those who sleep in beds do not want to believe. "Do not accept things as they do not affect us personally. Thus, the President of the Austrian PEN Club, himself Jewish, said he did nothing wrong (personally) to the Nazis and that he has never asked anything about his Jewishness, repeating that he was never bothered by the Nazis and that they make a bad case of intent that the suspect referred to as horrible as the disqualifications, the concentration camps and torture.
What seems to have first opportunity to Nazism is less the fact that the public has been kept out it has been integrated into an orchestration of lies and has encouraged its power before installation to repress and deny its involvement . Far from being a disaster sprung from nowhere, Nazism was able to rely on the expectations, fears and repressed desires of a people who, in and largely from the years after the First World War, there was something. Kraus repeatedly protested against the lethargy room and cons of this abdication of conscience: "The Germans did not realize they make - because they realize the other - not only that no nation that also often refers it in fact it is one but the rest of the world does not use as often as one year of the term "blood" than do the German newspapers and radio stations in one day? "Or this:" These voices and faces should not they at least allow one born of a mother just to see? Or about Hitler: "The observer does not it feel heartburn when our man appears in public, especially affable and full of love for children? And this again: "Whether this has an encouraging effect rather than depressing is what is phenomenal. "No less
phenomenal is the paradox that this man wanted to be as extreme lucidity long past - at least in German speaking countries - for someone who had said nothing about Nazism, which could rise up for barbarism, but had not had the foresight to see the barbarism that happened nor the courage to write about it. This error is based on the first sentence Third night of Walpurgis, "I have no idea about Hitler," Kraus stressed that the personal pronoun placed at the beginning of a sentence and refers to himself. This introductory sentence, we chose to leave it in German, "Mir zu Hitler nichts ein fiillt" to keep the voice of Kraus as the key to the beginning of a musical staff. Who knows the issues of translation in fact known that she is disabled as a project itself insofar as said Georges Arthur Goldschmidt, choosing a language marks the impossibility of using another to say that says. Who wants to translate anyway is then faced with the challenge have to transpose a text - with all its contents and induces - in a language that was immediately excluded from the scope of expression. It's a job where one gropes, seeks, invents, directs and throws a lot - yet always with the same result, after a complete tour of the possibilities, ending up at the starting point: the best way to say what has been said, is that of the author. Would not then have to faithfully copy the original-not so naive but the whole experience - the belief that one writes that the only appropriate words. But this is not the extravagance that came out of non-translation of the opening phrase of the text of Kraus, even if doing so exhilarating choice (and ridiculous in its volume) that secret desire to refuse to translate because we traveled all the roads before the transposition that you have reduced the strength of the original. If this sentence is left as it is that much cited, it is not only the voice of Kraus, she also became an emblem. It is not just a joke, a Witz - a joke - but an expression of annoyance, of despair and rebellion. Kraus uses it as a captatio benevolentiae which, by the recoil effect, will allow him to leap and seizing his arm about the waist. It goes well the first twenty pages of Third Walpurgis Night to explain how difficult it is to say what he saw. He says he feels killed by this outbreak of savagery and stupidity that distorts reality so that this deformation him cutting the grass underfoot, the polemicist in him whose mission is precisely to magnify and distort the features of a reality show, caricaturist, the meanness and abomination out. Or even how to distort what is deformed until the climax? How exaggerating exaggeration that went faster and farther than our imagination ? How to describe the sacrilege that has already achieved the stature of abomination? Only after all that is talked of unspeakable and indescribable in the rise of Nazism, as to believe that one sinks into his own folly in being the spectator of this madness, that Kraus to the task to dismiss the head gag who entered the house of language.
Since the full text of Dritte Walpurgisnacht Suhrkamp in 1952, critics could not help but to report. Yet what many have written about this book, Germany and Austria, is staggering. As if they had read that the first sentence ...
_ Willy Haas said (in 1953 Tagesspiege!) Than three hundred pages of text "does not contradict the first sentence of Kraus' and it is only to satisfy a" personal grudge ";
_ Hans Habe (1961 in the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung): "This man of sixty-two years, for forty years, had ideas about everything and everyone ended up completely paralyzed with the phenomenon of Hitler which, as he admits he had no idea ";
_ Scheurig Bodo (Vorwdrts in 1961, organ of the German Social Democratic Party):" When the man in brown shirt with a lock on front began to drum up pierce the eardrums, the master of the language did not know tear one sentence: "I have no idea about Hitler"; "_
Fritz Raddatz (Merkur in 1968):" Karl Kraus was silent. [... ] The book is silent for three hundred pages. [... ] No, this book is scary. [... ] No, Third Walpurgis Night of Karl Kraus is the declaration of an intellectually bankrupt: he had no idea about Nazism ";
_ Werner Ross (in 1974 in the Süddeutsche Zeitung):" But Kraus had no idea about Hitler and this has been a good little comfort for him to see the tyrant oppressed the world of journalism kicking and boot;
_ Rainer Kawa (in 1974 in Die Welt): "" I have no idea about Hitler, "Kraus wrote in 1933, sheepishly;
_ Johannes Gross (in 1981 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung): "The excellent Kraus, who began to have all sorts of ideas for a misplaced comma, and that Hitler had none of that would destroy him and his ilk, mark the abdication complacent of reason. "To borrow a phrase
Kraus: there is still so quiet that it is difficult to find words. Some journalists honest apart (Friedrich Jenaczeck, Edwin Hartl and Werner Kraft among others), there was little that writers such as Alfred Polgar, Michael Scharang Friedrich Dürrenmatt or Elfriede Jelinek (now Nobel for literature in 2004) to capture and emphasize the importance of this text at the point of disturbing sound for over thirty years - until when? - The deluge of nonsense. The lesser evil would be that German journalists have sin of laziness, not finding the courage to read this difficult text, stopping just in this first sentence that seemed so simple, convenient and immediately decided to get a simplistic view but just as comfortable and decided on Kraus's attitude compared to Nazism. Because they have read all Dritte Walpurgisnacht, they condemn themselves without calling a point of intellectual and moral.
Given, however, the virulence and persistence of these attacks, there is little doubt that we are not in front of individual blunders but a genuine intention to denigrate. Even if a player decides to stop at that first sentence, common sense suggests it would be prudent and wonders if it is possible to write three hundred pages - not to say nothing (many often succeed this feat) but - to say we have nothing to say. The goal of this propaganda is hardly a secret two-humped: if the same great Kraus, a ruthless sentinel did not see it coming, how the German people could he have suspected something? If even one who wanted the model incorporates the journalist did not find anything to write about Hitler, how the press of the time (including journalists of the postwar period are the heirs) would she have done better? Double absolution through falsification. The fact remains that many who have made a name in the newspapers prefer to make fools of uneducated, narrow-minded and dishonest admitting they can not read instead of reporting a book - they are not required to share all the analysis and conclusions but - it is impossible to sweep out of hand by pretending to condemn it before any real critical analysis, it says nothing about Nazism. "Satanic shamelessness or bottomless stupidity? "Would have asked Kraus. Hopefully, times have changed since German reunification in 1990 and we'll hurt Kraus wrote scathing in 1915: "We must say with all the necessary understanding that I am aware that I write incomprehensibly. I never doubted that the fools at the time did not understand my style. This should go a little better with the idiots to come, even if I'm sure I'm not writing for them either. "
[....]
I'm here to give special thanks to Gerald Stieg who responded with patience and relevance [....]. Without him, this translation, which I assume all the imperfections and shortcomings, would not be what it is. And it is nothing other than the first translation of this book in a European language. If one looks at the effect on the fate of Third Walpurgis Night, you realize that, more than seventy years after it was written, this text was previously reserved only for players beating the German, Except for one other language, Japanese, three translators having tackled this text in the 1970s. The translation, given my total ignorance of the language, of course I have not been of any help. He just took many years to translate this text in French that he took Japanese to implement it in their language.
Why this text is difficult?
First problem: It must be viewed in the context of Kraus, "go porous" - as the translator said Francoise Cartano nicely - and agree to get rid of what might be called an ideology. Kraus's discourse is not always in tune with what is known of this period usually and personalities that have marked. There is something revolutionary in the view that Kraus takes us. Figures such as Felix Salten, Austrian president of the Pen Club and creator of Bambi (taken by Disney) or Franz Werfel, and many others spend today advised people who denounced the Nazis and fled. It is the balance that has left us the story. If this image is true, it is true that a few years later. Yet Kraus wrote in 1933, when many public figures had not yet given a certificate of good conduct and not only by emigrating had deluded but had talked and acted villains, supporting evidence. Therefore, to translate correctly, agreeing to put in a new wake and see that some guidelines were not always those that history has officially accepted. This is so for Alfred Kerr (the largest theater critic at the time, was expected to know happened in her box before getting up the curtain). If it has denounced Nazism in 1928, installed in a convinced pacifist reputation has always worked for understanding among peoples, he must first win it for a trial against Kraus, who had threatened to publish his poems hawkish years 1914-1918 and had asked to repay the fees of his lectures to the widows and orphans of war. Because, for Kraus, one that is not the First World War is already pregnant with the second.
They are among the few men of letters who have always condemned the state violence and who immediately and unequivocally opposed to the rise of Nazism without first trying to profit, regardless of the victims s that are already piling up, to react only when they became victims in their turn. Kraus quote: "Some have argued against the guardianship of an intellectual life more large-scale protest insistent enough to at least cover the shame of silence scientists like Frank and Stein, Planck and Koehler stood up courageously against the hurly-burly that requires the university to be a shooting range and a antiséminaire; artists like Lieberman and Ricarda Huch opposed the mission would give guidance heroic muses. "It must be added Brecht, Einstein and Tucholsky, Kraus suggests that several times.
[....]
This focus on language is not a free game virtuoso but the means chosen by Kraus to escape the Nazi occupation and dismiss those who manipulate it for pervert and falsify the mind. This approach to the rise of Nazism is admittedly fragmentary and can not account alone for the full extent of the phenomenon but it is fundamental. When Kraus began his third night, the whole language is not contaminated, "as a nation wakes up and stands a dictatorship that now control everything except the language," and is the confrontation of a language with a language architected disjointed, a language with a healthy patient language (like Goethe could say that romance is what is sick and classicism that is healthy) that the body of this text. Language is for
Kraus instead of justice. It 's not a coincidence that its targets are the professional handling of words - most responsible for the dissemination of distorted reality: the intellectuals. Given the reactions to the release of the full Dritte Walpurgisnacht, the tradition of resistance to the truth and betrayal of the language does not seem to be losing ground among intellectuals. What gives, alas! due to Kraus, who put over all three groups responsible - or irresponsible journalists and writers, political leaders (especially those of social democracy) and the Nazi propaganda chief, 1 " Intelligent Goebbels. "
course there are also actions, and those of the Nazis to power enough to condemn this regime. "What distinguishes man, what are his actions is the aspect of his actions showing what man. There is nothing in him that his actions and that is where it shows what it is, "Hegel said to his students in his lectures on the philosophy of mind (1827-1828 ). But actions are initiated by words. It can not be any social critique without criticism of language. Every ideology, whether conscious or unconscious, has its own language, cynically manipulated by some naive or employee by others but never without consequence for the social body. Who has the political and social power that has the words, and which consolidates the power of words more about his social and political power. It is difficult to invest all the rooms in the house of language but it is easy to believe that some are closed or never existed when the group to whom you are addressing is not really curious and simply a guided tour. Kraus bases his argument on the fact that we do not read, that we simply visit certain parts, those were the most cleverly decorated to make us believe that these are the only true living spaces. If Kraus refers to nights Goethe's Walpurgis is not only to denounce the new witchcraft is being prepared, this dark chaos "promises a revival," but also because the great writers who do not use language passively, as a matter stereotyped have their way already said everything about the dangers that threaten us. Thus he meets a number of intellectuals disappointed Die Fackel contains only the sonnets of Shakespeare: "In Shakespeare, there were already all that is current, including my position. This is also the sense of Goethe quotes with which Kraus opens this new night:
Towards the feast of horror last night as often
I walk ...
many times it repeats itself!
followed closely by this:
A new emperor appeared.
And clearly marked routes,
crowd through fields and pastures;
All follow the banners flying
Who claim a lie. - Gregarious nature.
Banners lies far elements of rational discourse or artistic, the words are just as places of clarification of illusion and deception. The thing was not new when launched Kraus Die Fackel. What has changed is the magnitude of the phenomenon, which is no longer limited to a private sphere nor geographically limited. "The National Socialist thought fascinated by his ability to believe that he who once said the truth is credible for all the lies and to make the flight, she rarely did not commit, as an alibi for thousands of murders. "Some intellectuals are not content to follow the flag waving but the well Top: Benn delusional about the new type of man to journalists writing after the day of the boycott against the Jews, nothing has happened to those who were the target. While the opposition Social Democrats will not allow himself any means other than those authorized by the Constitution to stop the fascist wave, refusing to deal with off-the-law the Nazis - which have already caused their German comrades. Under these conditions, the Nazis, as skilled in the practice of violence as in the art to cover their tracks, play on velvet. "The world, which still forms of thinking, this game follows words with deeds, acts with the words, shaken, concerned, pending the outcome. If he sticks more to the words and their meaning warlike, he was told that it takes more judge his actions on the Reich; if he beckons, he quotes the speech in the Reichstag. If it evokes a contradiction, it becomes epiphenomena that can touch the heart of the revolution, which came to power legally. "Kraus is well aware of the magnitude of the task:" Do not believe it happen in a jiffy to unravel the web of this spider sophisticated cross-bearers. "Propaganda mix one thing and its opposite -" Rebirth of a Nation "... "Love of freedom "... "Defense of Germanic values" ... - Rallying around the largest number of fuzzy ideals. "This in essence will never be what it seems and to integrate all antitheses, so it acts more strongly than by denying what it denies. The reason is no longer master of the game but a sort of "magic" (the word is Kraus): group identification by emotional denial that makes it easier to exclude others - including Jews. Stigma is not so much prejudice than the desire to cling to power: to work with cowardice for not risking being called a coward by the dominant. What matter then the excluded acts which do not count since they are not judged for what they do but for who they are. Therefore Kraus attacks without hesitation to the illusions of the Jews, derision Supreme strive to be more German than the Germans in order to curry favor with the Nazis. He who hunts for his stupidity disastrous consequences, both general and particular, sees no reason to ignore the responsibility of the victims - be they Jewish, communist, or Masonic. "By spreading the idea that Jews, Marxists, cyclists as followers of relativity are the cause of all misfortunes and also the outcome of the war, has caused some disturbances in the mind. Rather than pity, Kraus made whenever the choice of irony with which he bites the most sensitive subjects. "Preventive detention": "There has perhaps never been a time that is also intensely involved in the protection of citizens, and this benevolent intention would in any case need a better understanding. "The killings against those who seek to flee:" It is not uncommon that we are witnessing a crisis of nerves, mostly among travelers who we then commits suicide. "The official lies:" We may already be simplified by assuming from the outset that it is always the opposite of what is said or thought that - even if it is not safe. But there is one subject on which Kraus never exercises its irony, is the human suffering, the broken lives in the name of ideas. After the Apocalypse in his eyes that was World War I, Kraus sees coming a new era of barbarism, as if one had learned nothing, as if the imagination had dried up. Kraus can make fun of the press and its formulaic, his false attacks and lies, he can laugh and talk strategies policies, but it is intractable when the price is measured in human lives, when complaints about the small corporatist concerns of affluent replace the denunciation of atrocities, imprisonment, torture and murder. He passes for an intellectual, haughty, outrageous a formalist, an analyst cold has never been wrong about emergencies on the hierarchy of values: "The slightest human lives, even if only an hour snatched from the most miserable of lives, is well worth a library burned. "
PIERRE Deshusses
and does not say why
and there was silence,
while the earth cracked.
No words that touched; [.,.]
was then indifference.
call
asleep when the world awoke,
does it appear in the brief number that precedes Third Walpurgis Night, the text was originally intended to do quite a number Die Fackel. It has been only partially - numbers 890-905 in late July 1934 - Kraus having renounced the last moment to publish everything in order not to endanger his friends. For the danger that threatens all opponents in this year 1933 is worse than ever. And as surprising as it may seem, Kraus seems to be one of the few as'en see if earlier and with much foresight, and not wearing a political decision but simply providing, from a critique of language, an analysis of the phenomenon he calls an "Event".
Three hundred pages of Third Walpurgis Night were written in five months, and only three after Hitler's appointment as chancellor by Hindenburg, January 30, 1933. But Kraus seems to have everything already understood what was coming: not foreseen or anticipated, because the book is not a light but that of someone who simply knows how to look. The documents on which he relies, everyone could have. Kraus sources had no secret or privileged information. He simply read the newspapers, listened to the radio (often just listen to the radio when looking for the truth "), operated overlap, checked, classified. It also expressly provides sources of information: the Arbeiter Zeitung, the Berliner Tageblatt, the Neue Freie Presse, Reichspost, Berliner Illustrierte and - moderately, as he says - Mein Kampf (for who knows how to read n ' no need to make it his favorite book to see what he peddles ideology and what purpose it continues). Since 1933, therefore, Kraus speaks at length of the preparations for war with Nazi Germany, of its expansionist, anti-Semitism displayed and brutal, the structure of society pre-fascist German concentration camps (the first, Oranienburg, was opened in February 1933, followed by that of Dachau in March of that year) , torture, summary executions, abuse perpetrated against women accused of "being committed" with Jews, "preventive detention" as arbitrary imprisonment without trial and to quickly put opponents away. If Kraus is prophetic, it is in a few sentences that summarize the essential nature of Nazism - which will not yet not all the horror he died in 1936, two years before the Anschluss, he honnissait the idea: "It's a moment in the life of nations, not lacking in size since in spite of electric lighting and even all the expedients of radio science, it returns to the original state where a disruption of all the conditions of life often means death. "Or this:" Simultaneity of Electrical and myth, and atomic decay pyre of everything that exists and no longer exists! "How
then pretend they did not know that it was impossible to know? These "Millions of people who have everything under the eyes and notice nothing" ... The only explanation is that Kraus did not know, we refused to think of it as possible what happened to the other sometimes in full view of everyone: "The strict observance of preventive [... ] Remain under the zealous loyalty to their faith and more because those who sleep in beds do not want to believe. "Do not accept things as they do not affect us personally. Thus, the President of the Austrian PEN Club, himself Jewish, said he did nothing wrong (personally) to the Nazis and that he has never asked anything about his Jewishness, repeating that he was never bothered by the Nazis and that they make a bad case of intent that the suspect referred to as horrible as the disqualifications, the concentration camps and torture.
What seems to have first opportunity to Nazism is less the fact that the public has been kept out it has been integrated into an orchestration of lies and has encouraged its power before installation to repress and deny its involvement . Far from being a disaster sprung from nowhere, Nazism was able to rely on the expectations, fears and repressed desires of a people who, in and largely from the years after the First World War, there was something. Kraus repeatedly protested against the lethargy room and cons of this abdication of conscience: "The Germans did not realize they make - because they realize the other - not only that no nation that also often refers it in fact it is one but the rest of the world does not use as often as one year of the term "blood" than do the German newspapers and radio stations in one day? "Or this:" These voices and faces should not they at least allow one born of a mother just to see? Or about Hitler: "The observer does not it feel heartburn when our man appears in public, especially affable and full of love for children? And this again: "Whether this has an encouraging effect rather than depressing is what is phenomenal. "No less
phenomenal is the paradox that this man wanted to be as extreme lucidity long past - at least in German speaking countries - for someone who had said nothing about Nazism, which could rise up for barbarism, but had not had the foresight to see the barbarism that happened nor the courage to write about it. This error is based on the first sentence Third night of Walpurgis, "I have no idea about Hitler," Kraus stressed that the personal pronoun placed at the beginning of a sentence and refers to himself. This introductory sentence, we chose to leave it in German, "Mir zu Hitler nichts ein fiillt" to keep the voice of Kraus as the key to the beginning of a musical staff. Who knows the issues of translation in fact known that she is disabled as a project itself insofar as said Georges Arthur Goldschmidt, choosing a language marks the impossibility of using another to say that says. Who wants to translate anyway is then faced with the challenge have to transpose a text - with all its contents and induces - in a language that was immediately excluded from the scope of expression. It's a job where one gropes, seeks, invents, directs and throws a lot - yet always with the same result, after a complete tour of the possibilities, ending up at the starting point: the best way to say what has been said, is that of the author. Would not then have to faithfully copy the original-not so naive but the whole experience - the belief that one writes that the only appropriate words. But this is not the extravagance that came out of non-translation of the opening phrase of the text of Kraus, even if doing so exhilarating choice (and ridiculous in its volume) that secret desire to refuse to translate because we traveled all the roads before the transposition that you have reduced the strength of the original. If this sentence is left as it is that much cited, it is not only the voice of Kraus, she also became an emblem. It is not just a joke, a Witz - a joke - but an expression of annoyance, of despair and rebellion. Kraus uses it as a captatio benevolentiae which, by the recoil effect, will allow him to leap and seizing his arm about the waist. It goes well the first twenty pages of Third Walpurgis Night to explain how difficult it is to say what he saw. He says he feels killed by this outbreak of savagery and stupidity that distorts reality so that this deformation him cutting the grass underfoot, the polemicist in him whose mission is precisely to magnify and distort the features of a reality show, caricaturist, the meanness and abomination out. Or even how to distort what is deformed until the climax? How exaggerating exaggeration that went faster and farther than our imagination ? How to describe the sacrilege that has already achieved the stature of abomination? Only after all that is talked of unspeakable and indescribable in the rise of Nazism, as to believe that one sinks into his own folly in being the spectator of this madness, that Kraus to the task to dismiss the head gag who entered the house of language.
Since the full text of Dritte Walpurgisnacht Suhrkamp in 1952, critics could not help but to report. Yet what many have written about this book, Germany and Austria, is staggering. As if they had read that the first sentence ...
_ Willy Haas said (in 1953 Tagesspiege!) Than three hundred pages of text "does not contradict the first sentence of Kraus' and it is only to satisfy a" personal grudge ";
_ Hans Habe (1961 in the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung): "This man of sixty-two years, for forty years, had ideas about everything and everyone ended up completely paralyzed with the phenomenon of Hitler which, as he admits he had no idea ";
_ Scheurig Bodo (Vorwdrts in 1961, organ of the German Social Democratic Party):" When the man in brown shirt with a lock on front began to drum up pierce the eardrums, the master of the language did not know tear one sentence: "I have no idea about Hitler"; "_
Fritz Raddatz (Merkur in 1968):" Karl Kraus was silent. [... ] The book is silent for three hundred pages. [... ] No, this book is scary. [... ] No, Third Walpurgis Night of Karl Kraus is the declaration of an intellectually bankrupt: he had no idea about Nazism ";
_ Werner Ross (in 1974 in the Süddeutsche Zeitung):" But Kraus had no idea about Hitler and this has been a good little comfort for him to see the tyrant oppressed the world of journalism kicking and boot;
_ Rainer Kawa (in 1974 in Die Welt): "" I have no idea about Hitler, "Kraus wrote in 1933, sheepishly;
_ Johannes Gross (in 1981 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung): "The excellent Kraus, who began to have all sorts of ideas for a misplaced comma, and that Hitler had none of that would destroy him and his ilk, mark the abdication complacent of reason. "To borrow a phrase
Kraus: there is still so quiet that it is difficult to find words. Some journalists honest apart (Friedrich Jenaczeck, Edwin Hartl and Werner Kraft among others), there was little that writers such as Alfred Polgar, Michael Scharang Friedrich Dürrenmatt or Elfriede Jelinek (now Nobel for literature in 2004) to capture and emphasize the importance of this text at the point of disturbing sound for over thirty years - until when? - The deluge of nonsense. The lesser evil would be that German journalists have sin of laziness, not finding the courage to read this difficult text, stopping just in this first sentence that seemed so simple, convenient and immediately decided to get a simplistic view but just as comfortable and decided on Kraus's attitude compared to Nazism. Because they have read all Dritte Walpurgisnacht, they condemn themselves without calling a point of intellectual and moral.
Given, however, the virulence and persistence of these attacks, there is little doubt that we are not in front of individual blunders but a genuine intention to denigrate. Even if a player decides to stop at that first sentence, common sense suggests it would be prudent and wonders if it is possible to write three hundred pages - not to say nothing (many often succeed this feat) but - to say we have nothing to say. The goal of this propaganda is hardly a secret two-humped: if the same great Kraus, a ruthless sentinel did not see it coming, how the German people could he have suspected something? If even one who wanted the model incorporates the journalist did not find anything to write about Hitler, how the press of the time (including journalists of the postwar period are the heirs) would she have done better? Double absolution through falsification. The fact remains that many who have made a name in the newspapers prefer to make fools of uneducated, narrow-minded and dishonest admitting they can not read instead of reporting a book - they are not required to share all the analysis and conclusions but - it is impossible to sweep out of hand by pretending to condemn it before any real critical analysis, it says nothing about Nazism. "Satanic shamelessness or bottomless stupidity? "Would have asked Kraus. Hopefully, times have changed since German reunification in 1990 and we'll hurt Kraus wrote scathing in 1915: "We must say with all the necessary understanding that I am aware that I write incomprehensibly. I never doubted that the fools at the time did not understand my style. This should go a little better with the idiots to come, even if I'm sure I'm not writing for them either. "
[....]
I'm here to give special thanks to Gerald Stieg who responded with patience and relevance [....]. Without him, this translation, which I assume all the imperfections and shortcomings, would not be what it is. And it is nothing other than the first translation of this book in a European language. If one looks at the effect on the fate of Third Walpurgis Night, you realize that, more than seventy years after it was written, this text was previously reserved only for players beating the German, Except for one other language, Japanese, three translators having tackled this text in the 1970s. The translation, given my total ignorance of the language, of course I have not been of any help. He just took many years to translate this text in French that he took Japanese to implement it in their language.
Why this text is difficult?
First problem: It must be viewed in the context of Kraus, "go porous" - as the translator said Francoise Cartano nicely - and agree to get rid of what might be called an ideology. Kraus's discourse is not always in tune with what is known of this period usually and personalities that have marked. There is something revolutionary in the view that Kraus takes us. Figures such as Felix Salten, Austrian president of the Pen Club and creator of Bambi (taken by Disney) or Franz Werfel, and many others spend today advised people who denounced the Nazis and fled. It is the balance that has left us the story. If this image is true, it is true that a few years later. Yet Kraus wrote in 1933, when many public figures had not yet given a certificate of good conduct and not only by emigrating had deluded but had talked and acted villains, supporting evidence. Therefore, to translate correctly, agreeing to put in a new wake and see that some guidelines were not always those that history has officially accepted. This is so for Alfred Kerr (the largest theater critic at the time, was expected to know happened in her box before getting up the curtain). If it has denounced Nazism in 1928, installed in a convinced pacifist reputation has always worked for understanding among peoples, he must first win it for a trial against Kraus, who had threatened to publish his poems hawkish years 1914-1918 and had asked to repay the fees of his lectures to the widows and orphans of war. Because, for Kraus, one that is not the First World War is already pregnant with the second.
They are among the few men of letters who have always condemned the state violence and who immediately and unequivocally opposed to the rise of Nazism without first trying to profit, regardless of the victims s that are already piling up, to react only when they became victims in their turn. Kraus quote: "Some have argued against the guardianship of an intellectual life more large-scale protest insistent enough to at least cover the shame of silence scientists like Frank and Stein, Planck and Koehler stood up courageously against the hurly-burly that requires the university to be a shooting range and a antiséminaire; artists like Lieberman and Ricarda Huch opposed the mission would give guidance heroic muses. "It must be added Brecht, Einstein and Tucholsky, Kraus suggests that several times.
[....]
This focus on language is not a free game virtuoso but the means chosen by Kraus to escape the Nazi occupation and dismiss those who manipulate it for pervert and falsify the mind. This approach to the rise of Nazism is admittedly fragmentary and can not account alone for the full extent of the phenomenon but it is fundamental. When Kraus began his third night, the whole language is not contaminated, "as a nation wakes up and stands a dictatorship that now control everything except the language," and is the confrontation of a language with a language architected disjointed, a language with a healthy patient language (like Goethe could say that romance is what is sick and classicism that is healthy) that the body of this text. Language is for
Kraus instead of justice. It 's not a coincidence that its targets are the professional handling of words - most responsible for the dissemination of distorted reality: the intellectuals. Given the reactions to the release of the full Dritte Walpurgisnacht, the tradition of resistance to the truth and betrayal of the language does not seem to be losing ground among intellectuals. What gives, alas! due to Kraus, who put over all three groups responsible - or irresponsible journalists and writers, political leaders (especially those of social democracy) and the Nazi propaganda chief, 1 " Intelligent Goebbels. "
course there are also actions, and those of the Nazis to power enough to condemn this regime. "What distinguishes man, what are his actions is the aspect of his actions showing what man. There is nothing in him that his actions and that is where it shows what it is, "Hegel said to his students in his lectures on the philosophy of mind (1827-1828 ). But actions are initiated by words. It can not be any social critique without criticism of language. Every ideology, whether conscious or unconscious, has its own language, cynically manipulated by some naive or employee by others but never without consequence for the social body. Who has the political and social power that has the words, and which consolidates the power of words more about his social and political power. It is difficult to invest all the rooms in the house of language but it is easy to believe that some are closed or never existed when the group to whom you are addressing is not really curious and simply a guided tour. Kraus bases his argument on the fact that we do not read, that we simply visit certain parts, those were the most cleverly decorated to make us believe that these are the only true living spaces. If Kraus refers to nights Goethe's Walpurgis is not only to denounce the new witchcraft is being prepared, this dark chaos "promises a revival," but also because the great writers who do not use language passively, as a matter stereotyped have their way already said everything about the dangers that threaten us. Thus he meets a number of intellectuals disappointed Die Fackel contains only the sonnets of Shakespeare: "In Shakespeare, there were already all that is current, including my position. This is also the sense of Goethe quotes with which Kraus opens this new night:
Towards the feast of horror last night as often
I walk ...
many times it repeats itself!
followed closely by this:
A new emperor appeared.
And clearly marked routes,
crowd through fields and pastures;
All follow the banners flying
Who claim a lie. - Gregarious nature.
Banners lies far elements of rational discourse or artistic, the words are just as places of clarification of illusion and deception. The thing was not new when launched Kraus Die Fackel. What has changed is the magnitude of the phenomenon, which is no longer limited to a private sphere nor geographically limited. "The National Socialist thought fascinated by his ability to believe that he who once said the truth is credible for all the lies and to make the flight, she rarely did not commit, as an alibi for thousands of murders. "Some intellectuals are not content to follow the flag waving but the well Top: Benn delusional about the new type of man to journalists writing after the day of the boycott against the Jews, nothing has happened to those who were the target. While the opposition Social Democrats will not allow himself any means other than those authorized by the Constitution to stop the fascist wave, refusing to deal with off-the-law the Nazis - which have already caused their German comrades. Under these conditions, the Nazis, as skilled in the practice of violence as in the art to cover their tracks, play on velvet. "The world, which still forms of thinking, this game follows words with deeds, acts with the words, shaken, concerned, pending the outcome. If he sticks more to the words and their meaning warlike, he was told that it takes more judge his actions on the Reich; if he beckons, he quotes the speech in the Reichstag. If it evokes a contradiction, it becomes epiphenomena that can touch the heart of the revolution, which came to power legally. "Kraus is well aware of the magnitude of the task:" Do not believe it happen in a jiffy to unravel the web of this spider sophisticated cross-bearers. "Propaganda mix one thing and its opposite -" Rebirth of a Nation "... "Love of freedom "... "Defense of Germanic values" ... - Rallying around the largest number of fuzzy ideals. "This in essence will never be what it seems and to integrate all antitheses, so it acts more strongly than by denying what it denies. The reason is no longer master of the game but a sort of "magic" (the word is Kraus): group identification by emotional denial that makes it easier to exclude others - including Jews. Stigma is not so much prejudice than the desire to cling to power: to work with cowardice for not risking being called a coward by the dominant. What matter then the excluded acts which do not count since they are not judged for what they do but for who they are. Therefore Kraus attacks without hesitation to the illusions of the Jews, derision Supreme strive to be more German than the Germans in order to curry favor with the Nazis. He who hunts for his stupidity disastrous consequences, both general and particular, sees no reason to ignore the responsibility of the victims - be they Jewish, communist, or Masonic. "By spreading the idea that Jews, Marxists, cyclists as followers of relativity are the cause of all misfortunes and also the outcome of the war, has caused some disturbances in the mind. Rather than pity, Kraus made whenever the choice of irony with which he bites the most sensitive subjects. "Preventive detention": "There has perhaps never been a time that is also intensely involved in the protection of citizens, and this benevolent intention would in any case need a better understanding. "The killings against those who seek to flee:" It is not uncommon that we are witnessing a crisis of nerves, mostly among travelers who we then commits suicide. "The official lies:" We may already be simplified by assuming from the outset that it is always the opposite of what is said or thought that - even if it is not safe. But there is one subject on which Kraus never exercises its irony, is the human suffering, the broken lives in the name of ideas. After the Apocalypse in his eyes that was World War I, Kraus sees coming a new era of barbarism, as if one had learned nothing, as if the imagination had dried up. Kraus can make fun of the press and its formulaic, his false attacks and lies, he can laugh and talk strategies policies, but it is intractable when the price is measured in human lives, when complaints about the small corporatist concerns of affluent replace the denunciation of atrocities, imprisonment, torture and murder. He passes for an intellectual, haughty, outrageous a formalist, an analyst cold has never been wrong about emergencies on the hierarchy of values: "The slightest human lives, even if only an hour snatched from the most miserable of lives, is well worth a library burned. "
PIERRE Deshusses
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