“Wo Ungesetz gesetzlich überwaltet”: Karl Kraus's Reading of National Socialism

Abstract

'CONTRA-HUMAN' POLITICS AND THE SATIRIST'S RETREAT '[.. .] die Demokratisierung Europas ist zugleich eine unfreiwillige Veranstaltung zur Züchtung von Tyrannen[. . .]'. 1 In a letter written to Gershom Scholem in 1920, Walter Benjamin provocatively suggested that the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was on his way to becoming a 'great politician'. 2 Benjamin was presumably referring to Kraus's radical and paradoxically 'inhuman' humanism, which finally, so it seems, assumed political form once the Habsburg Empire had crumbled. 3 And indeed, in his essay 'Brot und Lüge' (1919) (one of the two specific pieces to which Benjamin is referring in this letter, the other being Kraus's parodic 'Volkshymne'), Kraus unambiguously declares: 'Nur eine Politik, die als Zweck den Menschen und das Leben als Mittel anerkennt, ist brauchbar. Die andere, die den Menschen zum Mittel macht, kann auch das Leben nicht bewirken und muß ihm entgegenwirken.' 4 While the immediate occasion for this understated critique was the hesitance of the postwar Austrian government to sell off its prized cultural possessions in order to provide nourishment for its starving population, Kraus's larger point is that a political system