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Great Thoughts

E.S. Turner, 7 May 1981

The Macmillan Treasury of Relevant Quotations 
edited by Edward Murphy.
Macmillan, 658 pp., £3.95, August 1980, 0 333 30038 6
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... a serviceable substitute for masturbation. It takes an abundance of imagination, to be sure’ (Karl Kraus). The widespread preoccupation with abortion rates only two entries, one by Laurie Tilsin RN, who is neither an admiral nor a midshipman but, presumably, an American registered nurse. On the general obsession with sex there is Albert Camus: ‘I ...

Women: what are they for?

Adam Phillips, 4 January 1996

Freud and the Child Woman: The Memoirs of Fritz Wittels 
edited by Edward Timms.
Yale, 188 pp., £19.95, October 1995, 0 300 06485 3
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... book that the story of Wittels’s life was the story of his infatuation with three powerful men: Karl Kraus, then Freud, and then the eccentric Viennese analyst Wilhelm Stekel (‘I have committed two crimes in my life,’ Freud remarked, ‘I called attention to cocaine and I introduced Stekel to psychoanalysis’). There are formulaic references to ...

The Innocence Campaign

Isabel Hull: The Sinking of the ‘Lusitania’, 2 February 2017

‘Lusitania’: The Cultural History of a Catastrophe 
by Willi Jasper, translated by Stewart Spencer.
Yale, 233 pp., £18.99, September 2016, 978 0 300 22138 1
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... people missing from his roster. And he doesn’t examine people close to politics (except for Karl Liebknecht and Bethmann’s private secretary, Kurt Riezler) with the result that the protracted semi-public debate about how to juggle the Americans’ demands and those of intransigent military leaders is absent. Jasper concentrates instead on the ...

Yoked together

Frank Kermode, 22 September 1994

History: The Home Movie 
by Craig Raine.
Penguin, 335 pp., £9.99, September 1994, 0 14 024240 6
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... operation. The Mandelstams, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva make appearances. Rilke drops in, mocked by Karl Kraus. Dante and Wallace Stevens are silently cited. Obviously there is never a dull moment, though the sum total of those moments seems duller than they are. There is an old argument about texture and structure in poetry, and John Crowe Ransom thought ...

You are not helpful!

Simon Blackburn: Wittgenstein in Cambridge, 29 January 2009

Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents 1911-51 
edited by Brian McGuinness.
Blackwell, 498 pp., £75, March 2008, 978 1 4051 4701 9
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... Karamazov had suddenly materialised in the close at Barchester. No doubt Wittgenstein’s father, Karl, an Austrian steel magnate, bore some responsibility for the relentless soul-searching, the sense of sin and the pervasive unhappiness that beset his youngest son – and indeed nearly all his sons, for three of Wittgenstein’s four brothers committed ...
A Mania for Sentences 
by D.J. Enright.
Chatto, 211 pp., £12.50, July 1983, 0 7011 2662 0
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The Mirror of Criticism: Selected Reviews 1977-1982 
by Gabriel Josipovici.
Harvester, 181 pp., £16.95, June 1983, 0 7108 0499 7
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In the Age of Prose: Literary and Philosophical Essays 
by Erich Heller.
Cambridge, 268 pp., £20, January 1984, 0 521 25493 0
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... the force, the rallying cry that interconnects Goethe, Hölderlin, Hegel, Nietzsche, Rilke, Kraus, Heidegger and Mann and makes their otherwise disparate works seem the constituent parts of a single timeless enterprise; it is that metaphysical power, both internal and external to the human subject, which no single author can master or be an adequate ...

How he got out of them

Anne Hollander, 24 September 1992

Kafka’s Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg ‘Fin-de-Siècle’ 
by Mark Anderson.
Oxford, 231 pp., £30, May 1992, 0 19 815162 4
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... created a decorative and artistic style that seemed to lack force; somewhat later, Adolf Loos and Karl Kraus held that all ornament was criminal, and that civilisation only advanced to the degree that it rejected embellishment altogether, so that the resultant artifacts suggested a certain sterility along with their undoubted strength. Both negative ...

I and I

Philip Oltermann: Thomas Glavinic, 14 August 2008

Night Work 
by Thomas Glavinic, translated by John Brownjohn.
Canongate, 384 pp., £8.99, July 2008, 978 1 84767 051 9
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... The opening scene of Night Work, Thomas Glavinic’s Viennese novel, recalls something Karl Kraus said about the city in 1914: Vienna was a ‘Versuchsstation des Weltuntergangs’, an experimental station for the apocalypse. Jonas, Glavinic’s protagonist, gets up one morning and switches on the TV. There is no picture, only snow ...

Mr Lukacs changes trains

Edward Timms, 19 February 1987

Georg Lukacs: Selected Correspondence 1902-1920 
translated by Judith Marcus and Zoltan Tar.
Columbia, 318 pp., $25, September 1986, 9780231059688
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... complete self-commitment. Lukacs’s conversion, on this view, is analogous to that of the young Karl Marx: the theorist of alienation converted to Communism under the pressure of political events. And this conversion has been assigned exemplary significance. ‘After Marx,’ Löwy suggests, ‘Lukacs is probably the most important traditional intellectual ...

Making a Break

Terry Eagleton: Fredric Jameson’s Futures, 9 March 2006

Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions 
by Fredric Jameson.
Verso, 431 pp., £20, September 2005, 1 84467 033 3
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... visions of what might transcend it. This is what makes ‘positive’ utopias so ideological. As Karl Kraus remarked of psychoanalysis, they are part of the problem to which they pose as a solution. This is surely obvious enough in accounts of alien abductions, in which you are transported to what looks for all the world like your local Accident and ...

Except for His Father

Isabel Hull: The Origins of Genocide, 16 June 2016

East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity 
by Philippe Sands.
Weidenfeld, 437 pp., £20, May 2016, 978 1 4746 0190 0
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... is still in our possession’) became a cliché of Austrian propaganda, bitterly lampooned by Karl Kraus in his play The Last Days of Mankind – the phrase repeated again and again as Austria slides into oblivion. The new states of Poland and Ukraine battled for the city in 1918, touching off a pogrom that killed more than a hundred Jews. Poland ...

The Young Man One Hopes For

Jonathan Rée: The Wittgensteins, 21 November 2019

Wittgenstein’s Family Letters: Corresponding with Ludwig 
edited by Brian McGuinness, translated by Peter Winslow.
Bloomsbury, 300 pp., £20, November 2018, 978 1 4742 9813 1
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... who had previously promoted stylish philosophical authors such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Karl Kraus, but he was rebuffed. He seems to have taken the rejection in his stride: if his ‘new method’ was worthless, he said, then it was best forgotten, and if it was any good then it would be recognised in due course. In that event philosophers ...

Vermicular Dither

Michael Hofmann, 28 January 2010

The World of Yesterday 
by Stefan Zweig, translated by Anthea Bell.
Pushkin Press, 474 pp., £20, 1 906548 12 9
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... dialogue; and to drain some of the schematic grand guignol out of them. Of course he failed the Karl Kraus test – who didn’t? Kraus quotes some yea-sayer to the effect that Zweig with his novellas had conquered all the languages of the world, and adds two words of his own: ‘except one’. The story went the ...

Boys will be girls

Clive James, 1 September 1983

Footlights! A Hundred Years of Cambridge Comedy 
by Robert Hewison.
Methuen, 224 pp., £8.95, June 1983, 0 413 51150 2
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... providing equal opportunities for women. The Viennese cabaret world produced such great minds as Karl Kraus, Egon Friedell and Alfred Polgar while the stars of the Footlights were putting on their lipstick, climbing into their frocks and singing arch little numbers aimed at European intellectuals. While Carole Lombard was making Twentieth Century, the ...

Impatience

J.P. Stern, 30 August 1990

Unmodern Observations 
by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Herbert Golder, Gary Brown and William Arrowsmith.
Yale, 402 pp., £30, February 1990, 0 300 04311 2
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The Importance of Nietzsche 
by Erich Heller.
Chicago, 200 pp., £23.95, February 1989, 0 226 32637 3
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... retracing its argument from Goethe through Nietzsche and Jacob Burckhardt to Rilke, Spengler, Karl Kraus and Kafka: and concluded by commending the book to ‘everyone who cares for the survival of literature and of human values. The condition it describes is our condition, and I can think of no other modern book in which it is described so ...

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