Among all the more or less pleasant letters sent to the K. editorial team , one in particular warmed our hearts. It comes from one of our most esteemed contributors who, paradoxically, has just discovered that he writes for the magazine.
Dear K.,
Eternity is long, especially towards the end. We owe this aphorism to my contemporary Kafka, not to your comical Woody Allen! As so often, Franz has hit the nail on the head with his few words. So, to make up for the lack of time, I recently signed up for Twitter – under a false name, of course.
In my day, reading the prose of one’s contemporaries was a pain in the ass, but frankly, your age is far beyond anything I could have imagined. Remember the arduous task I set myself when I was alive? To track down the improper uses of language in order to denounce the weak thinking that was lurking there and which would, I sensed, destroy my world. Between 1910 and 1933, I was doing just that: hunting down the imprecision that presaged the worst. By working relentlessly, I managed to publish my magazine two or three times a year. Thanks to things like Twitter, nowadays I could now publish a full weekly. Though, nobody seems interested in this phenomenon. I don’t blame you. I was right in my day: my world was dying. And yours no longer seems to take offence at a misplaced comma or the proliferation of “therefore” in a sentence that has no discernible logical sequence.
But I digress. The reason I’m writing to you is this: I’m deeply narcissistic. So I search my own name very regularly, including on Twitter. To my great surprise, one of those users who can’t write a proper sentence took offence at the fact that you, dear K., had recently published a book containing some of my articles. The book is called La fin d’une illusion (The End of an Illusion ) – a very Viennese title, which is not to my displeasure, but it doesn’t justify my appearing in it, which I did. Stunned, I continued my investigation and discovered that you are a magazine in which I regularly publish.
Dear K., I got angry. I wanted to sue you – after all, in my day, I’d sued people for typographical errors in quotations from my texts. Then I started reading what I write in your magazine, and I got even angrier: where’s the attention to language in my quest for what’s badly thought out today? Granted, when I write in your columns, I continue to track down common stupidity, and sometimes I even take my cue from a detail of everyday life, but I no longer pay any attention to language. I’ve lost my finesse, dear K., I’ve even lost my malice. Enraged, from the powerlessness of my eternity, I then started reading the whole of K. Yes, the whole of all the issues published in the last three years – I don’t have so many other urgent things to do.
My dear K., I still don’t know who you are, nor who I am in you. But I think I’ve understood why I write for you. Like me, you’re trying to save a world, and as in my day, that world is called Europe. But you’re more Jewish than I’ve ever been. I lived in a world where it was possible to believe that saving culture and protecting Jews were the same thing. So I defended culture more than my people. That world is gone, and in the next one, yours, that idea is doomed to ridicule. So you defend the Jews to save a Europe aware that it cannot be itself without the Jews. As a result, you’ve made me a Jew again, shamelessly, without asking me. You tore me away from that horrible universalism of general culture that vomits my aphorisms onto the Internet so that anyone can transcribe them into a so-called original greeting card. You didn’t do it out of communitarianism, to claim property rights over my true identity and thus shield me from cultural appropriation, as we say today. You simply did it because you needed me.
Dear K., I was the last cultural Jew, I was, in the words of one of my detractors, the “moral conscience of the bourgeoisie, while it still had one”, the nightmare of my contemporaries until they decided to turn night into reality. I kept quiet then. And you’re right not to wake me up in this figure of the cultural Jew, as if nothing had happened between my death in 1936 and today. Dear K., you are fighting so that all of you are not the last Jews of Europe, of this new Europe which, in truth, no one would have believed could rebuild itself after the crime, but which did so by placing it at the center of its thinking. Today, all that remains is an obscure “never again”. Another of my contemporaries whom I detested, Freud, would have had to say some things about this “wish”. All I can see in this incomplete sentence is absence of thought. Forgive me, I always come back to language.
In any case, dear K., I hope you win your battle: it deserves to be fought, it must be fought, and even if I’m not quite sure who I am in this new configuration, know that you can count on me. I’ll stay angry, it’s just who I am, but I promise I won’t sue you. I’m on your side.
Your Karl Kraus
