Read an Excerpt
Deborah Sengl’s Karl Kraus
Introduction by Marjorie Perloff
Today, in the midst of its centenary, we recognize World War I (1914–18) as one of the watersheds of European history. It was the “Great War” that forever changed the identity of Europe and sowed the seeds of World War II (1939–45) and the Holocaust; indeed, it is now customary to think of the two world wars as one. The intense nationalism that set off the first world war is especially remarkable. Even some of the most beloved German writers of the period like Thomas Mann and Rainer Marie Rilke were, at least at its outset, enthusiastic proponents of the war. German and Austrian writers and intellectuals felt that the newly united Germany, having rapidly industrialized and modernized itself, must take its rightful place as the most “advanced” of European nations, and that the English and French colonial empires, with their imperial power, must give the German-speaking nations their due.
One of the few major writers who felt otherwise was Karl Kraus, the famed editor of — and only contributor to — Die Fackel (The Torch), the journal that the Viennese intelligentsia read religiously every day. In 1915, Kraus began to write his great anti-war play The Last Days of Mankind, publishing the early sections in Die Fackel. Not completed until 1922 and almost never produced in its entirety because of its inordinate length and complexity — Kraus himself remarked that a performance “would take some ten evenings in terrestrial time” and so was fit only “for a theatre on Mars” — Last Days is perhaps the first, and surely one of the greatest, documentary dramas. As Kraus tells us in his Prologue:
The most improbable actions reported here really occurred. […] The most improbable conversations conducted here were spoken word for word; the most lurid fantasies are quotations. Sentences whose insanity is indelibly imprinted on the ear have grown into the music of time. The document takes human shape: reports come alive as characters and characters expire as editorials. […] An unending cacophony of sound bites engulfs a whole era.
[…]
Spectres and wraiths, masks of the tragic carnival, necessarily have real-life names, for nothing is fortuitous in an age conditioned by chance. […] Even what occurs at the corner where Vienna’s Ringstrasse meets the Kärtnerstrasse is controlled from some point in the cosmos.1
Last Days is thus a montage of actual documents, whether newspaper dispatches, editorials, public proclamations, minutes of political meetings, manifestos, letters, picture postcards, and interviews. Quotations from Shakespeare and Goethe are interspersed with cabaret song, patriotic ode, tableau vivant, vaudeville, puppet play, and, in the later acts, even photomontage so as to create a strange hybrid — part tragedy, part operetta, part carnival, part political tract — in which “high” and “low” come together in a new blend. Throughout, the comic, the hilarious, the grotesque, the surreal dominate. “In Berlin,” as Kraus had famously quipped, “things are serious but not hopeless. In Vienna, they are hopeless but not serious.”
To perform such a play is obviously a major challenge. In the anniversary year 2014, two major productions were mounted in Vienna, but both were judged by critics and audiences to be problematic. Indeed, Leo A. Lensing, in a commentary for the London Times Literary Supplement (January 9, 2015), declared that the best “performance” of Last Days was neither the one at the Volkstheater nor the one at the Burgtheater, but an artwork: namely, Deborah Sengl’s brilliant installation mounted in 2013–14 at the Sammlung Essl in Klosterneuburg. Sengl created forty-four “scenes” of the play, using as her “actors” one hundred and seventy-six taxidermied white rats placed on small wooden podiums. The artist, Lensing posits, seems to have understood Kraus’ drama better than the various theatre people, who all too often resorted to a verbal slapstick that undercut the “rhetorical tension and incisive analysis” of the original.
Fortunately, the Sammlung-Essl Kunst Verwaltung has issued an excellent exhibition catalogue of Sengl’s Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit (2014), with superb color plates of the forty-four successive tableaux and reproductions of the original sketches, as well as essays by Meinhard Rachensteiner and David Schalko, and an interview (reproduced both in German and English) with Günter Oberhollenzer and Andreas Hoffer. Thus we can follow this unusually happy conjunction of artist and poet — a “collaboration,” so to speak, across the century in which a young female artist, born sixty years after the outbreak of World War I, could give such an uncannily apt representation of that war’s absurdities and trauma, as imagined by the fiery and aggressive prophet of doom in what was still a K & K (kaiserlich & königlich) Vienna. At the same time, it is important to understand that Sengl’s “scenes” are not just illustrations of The Last Days of Mankind: writing from the perspective as a woman of the twenty-first century, Deborah Sengl has given Kraus’ drama her own interpretation.
The Mousetrap
How and why did Sengl hit on the notion of using taxidermed rats to represent Kraus’ characters? In her catalog interview, Sengl explains, “The decision for the rats was taken relatively quickly, because I find that they are most closely related to people. […] They bear a resemblance to us.” For one thing, “they are certainly the most selfish creatures, thinking of themselves first. It is not for nothing we humans are both extremely afraid of rats and disgusted by them, but we also use them in order to pursue advances in research. There is a lot of common ground between us and the rats” (143).
But isn’t this a cliché? “Men are no better than rats!”, “You’re a rat!”, “The rats are leaving the sinking ship!” “What a ratty thing to do!”: it is not exactly an original metaphor. Then again, these are specifically white rats. Only the “Grumbler,” the choric figure who stands for Kraus himself, is black — a big black rat in the midst of the white ones, and he appears only in a few apocalyptic scenes. White was chosen, so Sengl tells us, to create an aura of neutrality:
I did not want to make anyone look better or worse through color. Should I have presented all civilians in grey and all military people in army brown? That would have created hierarchy, a ranking. I didn’t want that, because every one — the way Karl Kraus sees it — is equally to blame for the war: the soldiers that kill others, but also the journalists who wage war or create a stir in the media, or the civilians that do not resist and spread other people’s opinions. Everyone is somehow to blame. (143)
We can take this a step further when we remember that whiteness is also the color of absence: one thinks of Melville’s great chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale” in his Moby Dick, where the narrator explains that the white whale was more terrifying than any black one could ever be because one couldn’t confront the intangibility of its absence of color and weight and dimension.
By the same token, the props had to be white as well. In the preparatory drawings for each tableau, reproduced on the left-hand page corresponding to the tableau on the right, there is color, but once the mouse tableau is assembled on its wooden platform, all color disappears, giving way to the nullity of white. “Color is distracting,” remarks Sengl. “The purity is deceptive, however. […] People try to maintain a bogus purity behind which madness lurks” (143).
Consider for example, Act IV, Scene 10: Three Fashionable German Ladies (Modedamen). Here is the text of the short scene:
Three fashionable German ladies looking at a German fashion magazine.
FIRST FASHIONABLE GERMAN LADY Look at item number 4393. The latest hit! Bluebell fancy-dress costume, in light mauve silk, bell-shaped flared skirt with pink edging, chimes well with cloche hat — just the thing for the Carnival season!
SECOND FASHIONABLE GERMAN LADY No, no, what about this little number? 4389: Mortar ensemble in glossy satin, appliquéd mortar-motif trimmings; large mortar-shaped headdress — that’s what I want. Anyway, the Carnival is in full swing!
THIRD FASHIONABLE GERMAN LADY I’ll go a step further and make a sacrifice. I’ll turn the Bluebell into a Mortar.2
In Sengl’s drawing [figure 1], the first rat wears a short skirt of blue panels that look like fish tails; her mermaid outfit does not go with the gold cloche that sits heavily on her head. The second “lady” wears a long satiny pink skirt and indeed her “hat” does look like a mortar. But the third rat, smaller than the other two, has no color at all: the long colorless garment it wears looks like a shroud. Nature (the bluebell) has indeed been transformed by mortar.
The actual tableau [figure 2], however, is much more subtle and deviates from Kraus’ text. In the all-white portrait, the first “lady’s” skirt looks like an assemblage of hospital bandages, the “cloche” hat like a military cap — or indeed like a mortar. Rat #2 is wearing a kind of diaper, made from ballooning white gauze, and her “bell” or cloche hat almost matches the first. And the third rat, staring at the other two, tail straight up in the air like an emblem of erection, is merely nude. The fashionable outfits, as depicted in the ladies’ magazine, are reduced to white diapers and then to the bare thing — the body — itself. At the same time — and is this what renders Sengl’s rat-sculptures so intriguing — this erect rat has an air of self-confidence missing in the other two, who seem to be pleading with one another or at least trying to come to terms. Fashionable Lady #3 watches them arguing and keeps her distance; she stands somehow outside the drama, looking in.
Sengl’s tableau is thus more mysterious than Kraus’ little scene which is, after all, fairly obvious satire: even in wartime, these rich ladies compete with one another, and their fashion choices are, in turn, influenced by the paraphernalia of war. And further: the lack of facial expression of these little white rats — their blank black beady eyes staring straight ahead — means that Sengl must use body pose and stance to create her drama. Instead of Kraus’ documentary realism — the latest fashions in the illustrated magazine — Sengl’s depiction stresses the reduction of the fair ladies to infants or hospital patients, the third rat surveying the other two with a look that could be interpreted as one of sadness. In Sengl’s abstracted version of the drama, in other words, satire turns to pathos.
The Turn to Abstraction
Consider Act 1, Scene 2 (LDM, 24), which takes place in the chambers of Chief of Staff Conrad von Hötzendorf. The Field Marshal was the frequent butt of Kraus’ satire: having made his name as officer in the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, he seems to have had no idea how to conduct the World War that followed. It was Hötzendorf who advocated the preemptive strike against Serbia that initiated hostilities. In the scene in question, Kraus depicts the great military hero as more or less in his dotage. He has summoned — and then forgotten he did so — the court photographer Skolik, “the one who took that nice shot,” the Major Adjutant reminds von Hötzendorf, “during the Balkan War — of your Excellency poring over the map of the Balkans.” Confused, the Field Marshal is now poring over the wrong map — that of the Balkans again rather than the Italian Front where the current World War I battle is going on. Skolik and the Adjutant play along, humoring the senile old General. “What perfect timing!” says Skolik. “A moment of profound deliberation that I must surely attempt to capture. I can already see the inscription: Chief of Staff Conrad v. Hötzendorf, with his adjutant Major Rudolf Kundmann, study the map of the Balkans — ah, what am I saying, I mean of the Italian front. Will that do, Excellency?” And he urges the old Field Marshal (who in real life was known for having mishandled the Serbian campaign of 1914) to sit up straight and look “more staunch.” “After all,” Skolik adds, “the photograph is meant to be “a lasting historical memento of this age of grandeur.” And a little “scowl” would help to give the Field Marshal a more solemn look. “A space has already been specifically reserved for Your Excellency. The cover picture in Die Woche.” So much for the glory of Austrian generals: Die Woche was an illustrated magazine published in Berlin — a joke Kraus’ audience would have understood and laughed, especially since, according to the photographer, Hötzendorf’s portrait is to appear next to one of the German Kaiser on a boar hunt! Here as throughout, Kraus’ mode is sharp satire, relying on documentary realism — in this case, the confusion about the maps. Sengl’s version [figures 3 and 4], has a different tone. In the tableau, the Field Marshal is sitting at a long white table ...
