Seite - 221 - in Wien und die jüdische Erfahrung 1900-1938 - Akkulturation - Antisemitismus - Zionismus

Karl Kraus and Gustav Mahler Imagine the “Jews” 1 but the anti-natural, that provides the link that can help us understand the power of reading. Wilde is evoked during the opening decade of the 20th century. At the close of that issue of Die Fackel, Kraus reports two items of gossip back to back : the antisemitic at- tacks abetted by the official city government (with its publicly antisemitic mayor, Karl Lueger) to limit the promotion of Jewish civil servants ; and the permission granted to perform Wilde’s Salome in Vienna but only “if the head of John the Baptist, which Salome brings in, is covered with a cloth. Too dumb !” Kraus retorts. This seemingly random juxtaposition makes one aware of how closely Kraus — Jew, cripple, aesthete — links such varied categories of difference as antisemitism and homophobia, the Jews and Oscar Wilde. In the Christmas issue of 1903 Kraus devotes the first fourteen pages to a detailed review (and review of the reviews) of this production of Salome. It was performed in the Deutsches Volkstheater (the Viennese parallel to Reinhardt’s Kleines Theater), a theater, which was able to produce European avant-garde plays that the Austrian censor otherwise banned by inviting German guest productions. On December 12, 1903 Adele Hartwig brought her version of Salome from the Neues Theater in Berlin ; it was a succes de scandal. Kraus begins his review (as was his usual practice) with an attack on a text, here Friedrich Schütz’s review of the play in the Neue Freie Presse, the paper edited by Kraus’s bete-noire, Moritz Benedikt. The Neue Freie Presse was seen by Kraus and his Jewish as well as non-Jewish contemporaries as a “Jewish” paper, called by Kraus the “Neue feile Presse”. It is important to read Kraus’s opening of his review in light of the rhetoric to which he is responding and in which he clothes his understanding of the play : “When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself, wrote Wilde in the wonderful introduc- tion to his The Picture of Dorian Gray. In the arena of his noble culture of the spirit, the argument of proletarian idea-mongers can only be heard as the Yiddish-accented German [Gemauschel] of the Pharisees, moderated by the excellent direction of Salome. I do not have the pleasure of enjoying works of art as an observer. A fatal sharpness of hearing forces me to listen to the voices which come from the depths, and I cannot pray before I curse the sacrilege. Like the Gemauschel of the Pharisees in Salome [when they cry out] : ‘One sees, that he is not the Elias !’ one cries who has forced himself gesticulating into the foremost row and whose name is Friedrich Schütz.”(1) Die Fackel, 148 (2 December 1903), p. 31. Die Fackel, 150 (23 December 1903), pp. 1–14. Jacques Bouveresse, “L’actualité de Karl Kraus”, Austriaca 49 (1999), pp. 11–36, Paul Reitter, “Karl Kraus and the Jewish Self-Hatred Question”, Jewish Social Studies 10 (2003), pp. 78–116.