Page - 224 - in Wien und die jüdische Erfahrung 1900-1938 - Akkulturation - Antisemitismus - Zionismus

Sander L. Gilman view recounting the biography of Wilde in a condemnatory manner, contrasting him with Byron and Heine. Kraus reports quite correctly Schütz’s condemnation of the poet as homosexual. But his reading of Schütz’s discussion of Salome as a text and the visiting Berlin production has a different slant once the original review is examined. Schütz stresses the historical marginality of the court of Herod, does not glorify the history of the Jews under the Romans, and comes only in his penultimate paragraph to condemn “the direction of the Volkstheater” in having “the Hebrews mauscheln” : “if such a concept were correct then one would need to play [those dramas such as Hebbel’s] Judith… which play on the soil of Judea in Yiddish (Jargon).” Kraus places this condemnation of the representation at the very opening of his review since it was the quality of the production (and the language of the review), which spoke most directly to his own sense of identity. He read Schütz’s review as an attack on the homosexual poet Wilde from the standpoint of the Jewish press, an attack which set the corrupt discourse of the self-conscious Jew, Schütz, against the forces of pure art, represented by Wilde’s representation of the Jews. It was an attack on the avant-garde from the side of the forces of reaction, but a Jewish reaction, which he ironically labels as no different from the forces of Catholic reaction. But, of course, the perversion of the discourse of the Jew, no matter what the ideological identity of the individual, was inexorably linked with the pollution of the language of the homosexual. Thus Kraus needed to separate his discourse about the avant-garde (which was not “Jewish” but about Jews) from that of the “bad” Jews, such as Friedrich Schütz, and their discourse about the Jews. Kraus’s view was no more an unambiguous affirmation of the label of “perverted” for the cultural avant-garde than had Nietzsche’s aphorism glorified the “degenerate” as the sole image of the true artist. On January 4, 1904 Kraus followed his review of Salome with a further attack on Friedrich Schütz under the title “The Picture of Dorian Gray (Toward a Picture of Friedrich Schütz),” which again begins with a para- phrase of the homophobic rhetoric of the period : “In that rag, the advertising pages of which are open to the offering of every perversion and whose owners in a notorious manner financially benefit from the procuring of pederastic contacts, a certain F. Sch. has fumed about Oscar Wilde in a moral wrath.” While Kraus proceeds to quote from Wilde on the corruption of critics in general, as he had at the beginning of the earlier review, he began by condemning the homo- phobic Schütz for writing for a mere homosexual rag. The Jew, who condemns the homosexual, is not above pandering to (and for) him. The importance of this state- “Das Bildnis Dorian Grays (Zum Bildnis des Friedrich Schütz)”, Die Fackel 151 (4 January 1904), pp. 18–23.