The Kraus Project

NESTROY 1 AND POSTERITY

ON THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS DEATH

We cannot celebrate his memory the way a posterity ought to, by acknowledging a debt we’re called upon to honor, and so we want to celebrate his memory by confessing to a bankruptcy that dishonors us, we inhabitants of a time that has lost the capacity to be a posterity … How could the eternal Builder fail to learn from the experiences of this century? For as long as there have been geniuses, they’ve been placed into a time like temporary tenants, while the plaster was still drying; then they moved out and left things cozier for humanity. For as long as there have been engineers, however, the house has been getting less habitable. God have mercy on the development! Better that He not allow artists to be born than with the consolation that this future of ours will be better for their having lived before us. This world! Let it just try to feel like a posterity, and, at the insinuation that it owes its progress to a detour of the Mind, it will give out a laugh that seems to say: More Dentists Prefer Pepsodent. A laugh based on an idea of Roosevelt’s and orchestrated by Bernhard2 Shaw. It’s the laugh that’s done with everything and is capable of anything. For the technicians have burned the bridges, and the future is: whatever follows automatically.3 This velocity doesn’t realize that its achievement is important only in escaping itself. Present in body, repellent in spirit, perfect just the way they are, these times of ours are hoping to be overtaken by the times ahead, and hoping that the children, spawned by the union of sport and machine and nourished by newspaper, will be able to laugh even better then. There’s no scaring them; if a spirit comes along, the word is: we’ve already got everything we need. Science is set up to guarantee their hermetic isolation from anything from the beyond. Let art chase away their worries about which planet happens to be benefiting from the thoughts of the world anterior to them.4 This thing that calls itself a world because it can tour itself in fifty days is finished as soon as it can do the math.5 To look the question “What then?” resolutely in the eye, it still has the confidence to reckon with whatever doesn’t add up. It’s grateful to the authors who relieve it of the problem, whether by diversion or by dispute. But it has to curse the one—living or dead—whom it encounters as admonisher or spoilsport between business and success. And when cursing no longer suffices—because cursing implies reverence—it’s enough to forget. And the brain has barely an inkling that the day of the great drought has dawned. Then the last organ falls silent, but the last machine goes on humming until even it stands still, because its operator has forgotten the Word.6 For the intellect didn’t understand that, in the absence of spirit, it could grow well enough within its own generation but would lose the ability to reproduce itself.7 If two times two really is four, the way they say it is, it’s owing to the fact that Goethe wrote the poem “Stillness and Sea.” But now people know the product of two times two so exactly that in a hundred years they won’t be able to figure it out. Something that never before existed must have entered the world. An infernal machine of humanity.8 An invention for shattering the Koh-i-noor to make its light accessible to everyone who doesn’t have it.9 For fifty years now it’s been running, the machine into which the Mind is put in the front to emerge at the rear as print, diluting, distributing, destroying. The giver loses, the recipients are impoverished, and the middlemen make a living. A hybrid thing has settled in to subvert the values of life by turning them against each other. In the pestilential miasma of the intellect, art and mankind make their peace … A spirit who’s been dead for fifty years today, and who still isn’t alive, is the first victim of this festival of joy, about which reports by the column have appeared ever since. How it happened that a spirit like this was buried:10 it could only be the enormous content of his satirical thinking, and I believe he continues to create. He, Johann Nestroy, cannot tolerate that everything he found intolerable remained in place. Posterity repeats his text and doesn’t recognize him; it doesn’t laugh with him, it laughs against him, it refutes and confirms his satire through the undying nature of the subject matter.11 Unlike Heine, whose wit agrees with the world, who touched it where it wanted to be tickled, and whom it could always handle—the world won’t vanquish Nestroy the way it did Heine. It will do it the way the coward overcomes the strong man, by running away from him and getting a literary historian to spit on him. People will be ungrateful to Heine, they’ll enforce the laws of fashion against him, they won’t wear him anymore. But they’ll always say that he had wide horizons, that he was an emancipator, that he rubbed shoulders with statesmen and still had the presence of mind to write a love poem now and then. Not so Nestroy. No Kaddish will be said.12 No Friedjung13 will succeed in demonstrating that he had a political outlook, let alone the kind of outlook that turns a political outlook into an outlook in the first place. What mattered to him? So much, and therefore nothing of liberalism.14 While the cobblers outside were fighting for the most ideal of wares, he was having his tailors sing lampoons.15 He limited his partitioning of the world to small businessmen and landlords, to the up-and-coming and the down-and-out, to pensioners and unemployed porters. But that it was the world, not the editorial page, that he partitioned like this; that his wit was forever taking the road from social standing to humanity: conventional wisdom leafs past a chapter as incomprehensible as that.16 Flashes on a narrow horizon—the heavens opening over a grocery store—are not enlightening. Nestroy’s thinking proceeded from social status into the world, Heine’s from the world into the state. And that is more.17 Nestroy remains a joker because his jokes, which shot from the workbench to the stars, came from the workbench and we know nothing of the stars. An earthly politician says more to us than a cosmic buffoon. And since what matters to us is increasing our stores of conventional wisdom, we don’t mind if some earthly buffoons occasionally make Nestroy into a politician and force him to speak the kind of liberal precinct-opinion without which we can no longer conceive of a dead satirist. The phraseurs and riseurs are then happy to admit that he was a mockingbird and a cutup. And nevertheless, he was only cutting them down and blowing off their Calabrian hats.18 And nevertheless, to those who condescend to art and grant it free play between the horizons—that is, from the individual nullity to the social quantity—let it be said with considerable certainty: If art is not what they conceive and condone but instead is the stretch from something seen to something thought—the shortest link from the gutter to the Milky Way—then there has never been a runner under the German sky like Nestroy. Never, it goes without saying, among those who brought the news, with laughing faces, that life is arranged in an ugly way.19 We won’t deny credence to his message because it was a lampoon. Not even because, in his rush, he also sang something for the listener; because, in his contempt for the needs of the audience, he satisfied them, so that his thoughts could soar unhindered. Or because he swaddled his dynamite in cotton and blew up his world only after reinforcing its conviction that it was the best of all possible worlds, and because he laid on the soft soap of congeniality before he started slitting throats, and otherwise didn’t wish to inconvenience anyone. Nor, not being interested in honoring truth before spirit,20 will we think less of him because he often, with the carelessness of an original who has more important things on his mind, took his cue from stagehands. The reproof that was leveled against Nestroy is sillier than any plotline he lifted from a French flunky, sillier than the printed look of any of those quodlibets that he used to toss to the people, who, then as now, won’t give humor a free pass unless they’re also given their hardy-har-har, and who, in those days, weren’t convinced they’d got their money’s worth unless they went home with a cheer for the assembled wedding guests.21 He chose the routine, which had been born as a routine, in order to conceal his substance, which could never be a routine. That even the low theatrical effects here somehow contributed to the deeper meaning, by separating the audience from it—and that, again, there’s deeper meaning even in the fanfare with which the orchestra sends off philosophy—escapes the literary historians, who may well be capable of helping Nestroy to a political conviction, but not to the text that encompasses the immortal part of him.22 He himself hadn’t bargained for this. He wrote on the fly, but he didn’t know the flight would extend beyond the repertoire. Although every Nestroyan line attests that he was capable of it, he didn’t have to withdraw into artistic self-discipline in the face of those who considered him nothing more than a humorist, and the milder jarring of his times denied his response the consciousness of its finality—that blessed incentive to seal revenge on the material in his enjoyment of form.23 If he’d been born later, if he’d been born into these times of journalistic language fraud, he would have conscientiously repaid everything he owed to language. Times that retard the intellectual tempo of the masses incite their satirical counterpart. These times would have left him no time for as casual a prosecution of a bloody feud as the stage permits and insists on, and no orchestra would have been harmonious enough to resolve the dissonance between his nature and the world that grew up after it. His essence was the joke that runs counter to the stage effect, the flat onceness that has to be satisfied with finding a mate for the joke’s material and which, in its rhythmic salvo, hits the target before the thought.24 On the stage, where politeness toward the audience parades around in the negligee of language, Nestroy’s wit could only be coined in the currency of rhetoric, which, far removed from the actor’s tools of characterization, was something again only he could pull off.25 Fragmented times would have driven his essence to concentrate itself in aphorism and glosses, and the world’s more varied screechings would have introduced new cadences to his dialectic in its penetration to the core of the apparatus.26 In his satire, one particular rhythm above all suffices as a winding post for the threads of an observation that is truly of the spirit. But sometimes a Nestroyan climax will look as if the terminologies of class feeling, perorating in succession, had arranged themselves as the steps of a Jacob’s ladder. These lively exponents of their professional point of view are always standing with one foot in their trade and the other in philosophy, and if their face is always changing, it’s really just a mask, because they have Nestroy’s one and only tongue, which has unleashed this sage torrent of words. Whatever else they may be, they are, above all, thinkers and speakers and are always in danger, on the public stage, of shortchanging their thought to save their breath. This utterly language-infatuated humor, in which word and sense capture each other, embrace, and hold each other entwined to the point of inseparability, indeed to the point of indistinguishability, stands above anything that a stage scene can communicate and therefore falls into the prompter’s box, in a way comparable only to Shakespeare, from whom you likewise have to remove Shakespeare before you can produce a theatrical effect—unless the mission of a stage character who begins to drone and rave without regard to anything going on behind him would be assured of applause by the oddness of such behavior. Odder yet, that the verbal and oral wit that he carries into his dialogue doesn’t impede his powers of characterization, of which there’s enough left over to outfit an entire dramatis personae and, even as it’s causing us to think, to fill the theater with concrete mood, gesture, suspense, and action. He borrows foreign subject matter. Where, though, is the German comedy writer who could borrow from him the power to create a character with three words and a milieu with three sentences? He’s all the more creative when he lifts foreign material into his own work. He goes about it differently than the better-known contemporary recaster Hofmannsthal, who strips the hides off honorable cadavers to inter questionable remains in them, and who would no doubt defend his serious professional work against comparison with an author of farces.27 Like all superior readers, Herr von Hofmannsthal reduces the work to its material. Nestroy takes his material from where it was barely more than material, invents what he has found, and his achievement would be considerable even if it consisted only in the reconstruction of plots and in the whirl of reinvented situations—that is, only in the welcome opportunity to entertain the world and not in the voluntary compulsion to observe the world as well. But the higher Nestroy, the one who owes nothing to any foreign idea, is somebody who has only head and no figure, for whom a role is only a pretext for his text,28 and in whom every word attains a fullness that surpasses character, even the one who stands there in the breadth of Scholzian29 humor as the model of a basic type in the satellite theaters of Vienna.30 It wasn’t Nestroy the actor but the costumed advocate of his satirical prerogative, the executor of his attacks, the spokesman for his own eloquence, who might have exerted that mysterious effect which, while its artistic origins have certainly never been understood, has come down to us as the center of a heroic age of theater. The theatrical form of Nestroy’s mind was bound to die out with his body, and the routine of its nimbleness, which we still here and there see popping up with virtuoso poise, is a costume borrowed illegitimately. In his farces, the lead role remains unfilled unless the expert in his greasepaint also happens to come by his satirical spirit. Only the fruitful comedy of his fuller secondary roles has found original successors, such as the actor Oskar Sachs,31 whose style seems, in its vital composure, to descend from the classical Carltheater.32 But as the origin and perfection of a popular type, an actorly creator such as Girardi, who stands on the margins of the empty scene offered by the stagecraft of the past decade, could surpass the theatrical value of Nestroy’s art, which had only to clothe its own fullness of thought.33 This is why even a layman of the stage such as Herr Reinhardt could propose a Nestroy cycle to a Girardi.34 In Girardi, the character thrives on the poverty of its textual support; with Nestroy it shrivels up on the wealth of the words. There’s so much literature in Nestroy that the theater balks, and he has to step in for the actor. He can do it because it’s a written art of acting.35 In this proxyship for the actor, in this embodiment of what easily eludes the actual demands of theater, there lives today a spirit whose affinity with him can now and then be recognized in the very outlines of his personality: Frank Wedekind.36 Here, too, there’s something overproductive, in which what’s organically lacking in the character is made up for with identification, and which mediates personally between confession and credibility.37 The actor wrote for a poet a role with which the poet wouldn’t trust an actor. In Wedekind—leaving aside an example of linguistic-satirical lineage that means more to me personally—we’re presented with a monologuist for whom a seeming conventionality and casualness of scenic form likewise suffices for speaking past it, and singing past it, things that are truly new and essential. The kinship in the cadences of aperçus was pointed out once by the late critic Wilheim.38 Cadence is that superficiality on which thoughts most rely, and there must somewhere be a common standpoint for observing the world when sentences are spoken that could just as well be Nestroy’s as Wedekind’s:

“She’s in her twentieth year now, was married three times, satisfied a colossal lot of lovers—sooner or later, the needs of her heart were bound to register.”39

A biographical comment like this would also be made, just as it is, by one of the Nestroyan bringers of thought if, with the same vault of antitheses, he could get himself over his beloved’s past. And in Earth Spirit40 somebody could again come close to speaking the wonderful line that occurs in Nestroy:

“I seen an old gray horse once pullin’ a brick wagon. The future’s been weighin’ on my mind ever since.”41

But here, perhaps, the absolute Shakespearean quality of such a lightning illumination of a mental landscape is sublime beyond any modern comparison. It’s a line by which you’d like to reintroduce to the contemporary reader’s muddled eye what poetry is: a within fetched from a without, a perfect unity. Observed reality taken up in feeling, not massaged until it fits the feeling. It could be used to reveal the method of all poetastery, all feuilleton poetry, which looks around for a handy piece of the external world in order to dispose of a stock mood. The case of Heine breaks open and collapses on a sentence like this, for it offers the dead certainty that an old gray horse would start to muse: How good was my life before / This wagon must I pull today / O happy neighs of yore / You’ve gone, you’ve gone away! / But the wagon said, Don’t frown / It is an old refrain / Once the road starts going down / It never goes up again … And we’d be fully informed about the author’s mood, including the ironic resignation. With Nestroy, who wrote only rough couplet stanzas, you can detect passages in every farce where his purely poetic piloting of thought through the densest of materials—where more than the mind: the mind’s process of assimilation—becomes visible. It’s the advantage over beauty possessed by a face that’s changeable to the point of beauty. The coarser the material, the more penetrating the process. In satire, the linguistic demands are less easily questioned, and fraudulence more difficult, than in the kind of poetry that doesn’t bother earning the stars and for which distance isn’t a road but a rhyme. Satire is thus rightly the poetry of impediment, richly compensated for being the impediment of poetry. And how it has both together: of the ideal, the entire ideal, and distance as well! It is never polemical,42 always creative, while counterfeit poetry is mere yea-saying, a contemptible appeal to the already available world. How satire is true symbolism, inferring a lost beauty from a found ugliness and setting up little images of meaning in place of global concepts! Counterfeit poetry, which takes weighty matters for granted, and counterfeit irony, which rejects weighty matters, have one and the same face, and a single wrinkle separates Heine’s lonely tear from Herr Shaw’s common laughter. But the joke is nasty to the smokestack because the joke affirms the sun. And acid wants the gleam, and the rust says it’s only corrosive.43 Satire can perpetrate a disruption of religion to arrive at reverence. It inclines toward high emotion. Even in places where a given emotion is deployed like just another object from the outside world, so that satire’s contradiction can shimmer through.44 Yes and No mix and multiply, and thought springs forth. A game, as unprincipled as love. The result of this perfect penetration, preservation, and intensification of polar tendencies: a Nestroyan tirade, a melody by Offenbach. Here someone’s rapture at a pastoral play is underscored by the very joke deriding it; there the caricature of someone’s pining moonlight love runs riot over parody and into transcendence. This is true high-spiritedness, for which nothing is profane.

“A real practical fanatic once told me that the dandiest thing is when there’s two lovers and one of them dies first and comes back to the other one as a ghost. I can just see it, when she’s sitting there at her garden window some flowery night, with moonlight playing all over her pearly tears, and it would be getting whiter and whiter behind the bushes, and that whiteness would be yours truly—completely spirit, not one speck of body, but with the bedsheet of eternity over my head all the same, on account of decency—I stretches out my arms to her, I points to a star in the sky, ‘there shall we be united,’ so to speak—she gets the itch for a heavenly rendezvous, and would you believe it, she casts off her earthly shackles and we go amalgamating and waffeting and pendulating into the azure-blue night sky…”

Inverted pathos presupposes emotion, and Nestroy’s wit always has the gravity that knew emotion in its better days. Like the wit of every true satirist, it rolls down the long alley toward where the Muses stand, to strike all nine of them. Nestroy the disputer is the disputatious catalogue of every feeling in the world.45 The buffoon who was banished from the stage, but went on cracking jokes behind the tragic hero as he was leaving, seems fused with the hero for an epoch, amusing himself in a style that reaches into his own heart and, in a strangely suspended tone, almost like Jean Paul’s, sustains the joke that’s being perpetrated here with horror.

FRAU VON ZYPRESSENBURG: Is one’s father a hunter, too?—TITUS: No, he runs a quiet, solitary business in which resting is his only work; he lies fettered by a higher power, and yet he’s free and independent because he’s disposing of himself;—he’s dead.—FRAU VON ZYPRESSENBURG (aside): How profligately he uses twenty lofty words to say what can be said with one syllable. The man obviously has the makings of an author.

And it is the loftiest yet tersest paraphrasing of a monosyllabic condition, the way the words here play around death. This blurred emotionality, which Nestroy breathes into the most modest of his characters’ asides, has led literary historians to think that his wit is aimed at their noble impulses.46 In truth, it’s aimed only at their phrases. Nestroy is the first German satirist in whom language forms thoughts about things. He liberates language from its lockjaw, and for every cliché it turns him a profit in thought. Indicative are such expressions as:

“Good thing I drownded my sorrows, or despair woulda driven me straightaway to drink.”

Or:

“The apples go over here! People got no idea how to organdize. They go mixin’ up apples and oranges like apples and oranges.”

Language is making fun of itself here. The cliché is driven back into the hypocritical convention that created it:

“All right, out with your decision, my sweet”—“But Herr von Lips, I really must first…”—“I understand, there can be no talk of refusing, but to say yes, you think some deliberation is in order.”

The cliché inverts itself into truth:

“I’ve shared adversity with you; it’s now my most sacred duty to stick with you in good times, too!”

Or, debased to neologism, the language of the upper classes is caricatured by language from the mouths of the unrefined: