Leo Lensing on Michael Hofmann’s Ignorance of Karl Kraus and His Indifference to Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project

The following letter, criticizing Michael Hofmann’s review for The New York Review of Books of Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project, appeared in abridged form in the December 19, 2013 issue of the Review. What follows is the original version, which at the request of the editor was reduced by more than two-thirds.

To the Editors:02BOOK-popup

Michael Hofmann has a handful of perceptive things to say about Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project [NYR October 24]. Most notably, he recognizes that it represents a unique experiment, “a strange, space-bending, Cubist, not unsimpatico book.” Unfortunately, this and other insights are buried in a misinformed, crudely formulated screed hurled at Karl Kraus, a writer whom Hofmann gives ample evidence of not having read carefully.

Hofmann “supposes” that The Last Days of Humankind is Kraus’s “chef d’oeuvre” even though this firmly established judgment of literary history need not be the object of hunches and maybes. The great anti-war drama, documentary and visionary in equal measure, not only directly influenced Brecht’s theory and practice of Epic Theater, but also set a powerful example of modernist textual collage that helped shape the famous political photomontages of John Heartfield as well as Alfred Döblin’s great city novel Berlin Alexanderplatz. Hofmann seems not to realize that the play consists of more than things “heard or overheard by its author”; it also appropriates posters sighted, advertisements copied, films viewed, and countless newspaper clippings pasted onto the manuscript page before being satirically transformed into self-revealing dialogue. The play is consciously constructed in excess of “the conventional five acts” to which Hofmann reduces its form; it also contains a prologue and an epilogue, which, incidentally, brings the scene count to 220, not “209.”  Hofmann thinks that the play is “from 1917,” whereas it was actually published in four special issues of Kraus’s satirical journal Die Fackel (The Torch) in 1918-1919 with the expressionistic epilogue coming first. The red covers and the documentary photograph of Wilhelm II used as the frontispiece of “The Last Night” (the title of the epilogue) gave it the initial impact of a revolutionary pamphlet. Kraus continued to revise and add new scenes based on information suppressed under war-time censorship until the first book edition appeared in 1922.

Hofmann’s notion that the play is “rarely read, much less performed and only translated (thus far) in abridgment” is wrong on all counts. Beginning in the 1960s, a dtv two-volume paperback and, since 1986, the 848-page Suhrkamp edition have, together, sold thousands of copies in Germany.

Even though The Last Days of Humankind—at fifteen hours or ten evenings—has understandably not been a staple of the German-language repertory, productions have not exactly been rare. It might be more accurate to say, intermittent with increasing frequency in times of war. There have been countless staged readings and radio broadcasts since the 1960s. Full-scale productions have occurred less often, but have regularly inspired theatrical experiments of great intensity. In 1983, the Scottish playwright and director Robert David MacDonald staged his own translation of the play with the Citizens Theatre of Glasgow, which became the sensation of the Edinburgh Festival in that year. In 1991, Luca Ronconi, amplifying Kraus’s comments about the mechanization of everyday life accelerated by the war, created a furor by staging the play along the assembly lines of the former Fiat factory in Turin. Johann Kresnik’s 2003 version used an even more spectacular and daunting setting, a massive World-War-II-era submarine bunker in Bremen; this production had to be repeatedly extended and eventually reached a hundred performances.

Although there is thus far only a pair of abridged English versions of The Last Days of Mankind, complete translations exist in French, Italian, Hungarian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese among other languages. Losing wars apparently quickens the appetite for the entire text of the drama.

Hofmann’s jumble of misperceptions about The Last Days of Humankind constitutes more than a refusal to observe philological and literary-historical niceties. It is symptomatic of his failure to understand the drama’s importance for the “Kraus Project.” While the literary essays on Heine and Nestroy may be the focus of the book, Franzen explains that they were originally an auxiliary assignment in a seminar about Kraus’s masterpiece offered at the Free University in Berlin in 1982. His description of the often comic dynamics of this course—a  patient, overly indulgent professor jousting and haggling with authoritarian leftist students, many of them all talk and no text; Franzen and his fellow students struggling to prepare a report on the monstrous drama—really does form part of a “bildungsroman about a clever and ambitious young man on a Fulbright in Germany,” just not the “entertainment” version that Hofmann thinks Franzen should have written.

Not content to dismiss Kraus’s dramatic masterpiece, Hofmann also belittles another entire genre in which he produced highly original work. Does Hofmann really believe that the aphorism is “not a robust and jolly English commodity,” but rather “a sort of Franco-Balkan form, La Rochefoucauld meets E. M. Cioran or Lichtenberg”? Leaving aside this mispotted history of the genre, what about Nietzsche, whose influence Kraus denied with suspicious vehemence, and Oscar Wilde, whose work he embraced and published in Die Fackel? Kraus’s aphoristic work has had a more vigorous afterlife in the English-speaking world than Hofmann realizes although he unwittingly explains why when he summarizes: “Just as Shakespeare seems to be full of quotations, so Kraus is full of aphorisms” – one has only to add “and quotations from and allusions to Shakespeare.” Hofmann the poet has also missed W. H. Auden’s energetic championing of Kraus and his inclusion of a disproportionate number of his aphorisms in A Certain World, his “commonplace book.”

For Hofmann the translator, Franzen’s rendering of Kraus’s texts is “overliteral and a little wooden throughout,” a judgment that ignores the sustained scrupulous attention to linguistic nuance, allusion and wordplay for which Franzen enlisted the expert assistance of the Austrian novelist Daniel Kehlmann and the American Kraus scholar Paul Reitter. Rather than dumbing down Kraus’s complex prose, Franzen throws himself into reproducing and explicating its complexities. Surely, this is preferable to flagrant re-writing, for which Hofmann himself has been taken to task in the Times Literary Supplement [March 2, 2001] and in these pages. As J. M. Coetzee remarked of his translations of Joseph Roth, “is it part of the translator’s job to give his author lessons in economy?” [NYR February 28, 2002]

Ultimately, Hofmann thinks it doesn’t matter because Kraus’s writing is “too artificial, too conniving, and above all too squalid” to be considered “brilliant.” He aims to demonstrate this point with four substantial quotations from the essay on Nestroy. Whether these passages actually lack brilliance is at least open to question. But why not choose a quotation from the essay on Heine—Hofmann’s “darling,” whom he is otherwise anxious to defend—for example, this one:

A person who makes fun of his adversary’s sex life is incapable of rising to polemical power. And a person who ridicules his adversary’s poverty can make no better joke than this: Platen’s Oedipus would “not have been so biting if its author had had more to bite on.” Bad opinions can only make bad jokes. The play of wit and word, which compresses whole worlds of contrast onto the tiniest of surfaces and can therefore be the most valuable kind of play, must, in Heine’s hands, as in the hands of the dismal Saphir, become a slack pun, because there are no moral funds to underwrite it.

 

This is neither artificial nor conniving, and the squalor comes with the homophobia and the misplaced ridicule directed at the poet August von Platen. As it happens, Hofmann does cite a single phrase from the same page where Kraus cites Heine’s text; “two words,” all, he implies, that he has “taken away from Kraus”: “schöne Köchin,” “a crooked female cook” in Franzen’s rendering.

In a long concluding paragraph, Hofmann indulges in a giddy riff about this “skewed cook,” in which he explains that Heine is “protesting his love of women.” He would rather “have” a misshapen lower-class female than “the most aesthetic aesthete,” as Hofmann willfully renders the original “der schönste Schönheitsfreund” (“the most beautiful friend of beauty”). In a footnote, Daniel Kehlmann explains that in this context Heine’s persona is clearly saying that he prefers a coarse woman to the most beautiful “gay aesthete.” Does Hofmann really not know that when he exclaims “Goodness, how I love my ‘schiefe Köchin’!” he is mimicking the homophobic voice of Heine’s narrator, or does he just not care? Perhaps this is simply more evidence of careless reading. As for many other things, Kraus had a solution for this problem, too. “One has to read my pieces twice, in order to acquire a taste for them. I don’t mind, however, if one reads them three times. But I prefer that they not be read at all rather than only once. I would just as soon not take responsibility for the mental congestion of a bonehead who doesn’t have time.”

Kaffee und Plätzchen

KekseKekseCome to the German House  this Friday afternoon to converse in German, play boardgames, eat cookies, and enjoy a cup of coffee.

Location:  65 Lawn Ave,
Time: Friday,  November 15th 4:30-6pm

Iris Bork-Goldfield to speak at Middletown Film Festival

Tuesday, November 5, 7 PM, Center for Film Studies

In July – directed by Fatih Akin, Germany, 2000, 99 min.im-juli_77007

A charming comedy focusing on a somewhat naive and geeky teacher Daniel (Moritz Bleibtreu) as he embarks on a wondrous road trip in search of his dream girl. And it all starts at the beginning of his summer holiday, when he buys a ring from the aspiring artist and street vendor Juli (Christiane Paul). The ring bears a Mayan sun symbol, which, according to Juli, has the power to lead him to the woman of his dreams.  Will he find her?

Introduction by Iris Bork-Goldfield

Organized by Russell Library

 

 

Exercising Judgment in Ethics, Politics, and the Law

arendtconference

Wesleyan University is hosting a conference on Hannah Arendt on September 26-28, 2013. The conference is made possible by the generous support of David Rhodes, COL ’68. It is hosted by the Center for the Humanities and co-sponsored by the College of Letters; Jewish and Israel Studies; German Studies; Government; Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory; and the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service).

Uli Plass is moderating the session on Judging Evil on September 27, 4:00-6:00 p.m. in Bechkam Hall.

Leo Lensing is introducing the the film Hannah Arendt, directed by Margarethe von Trotta on September 27, 8:00 p.m.

Conference Program 

More Information about the conference

Krishna Winston Translates Günter Grass’s From Germany to Germany

Krishna Winston, the Marcus L. Taft Professor of German Language and Literature, is the translator of Günter Grass’s From Germany to Germany, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2012.

In January 1990, just months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Günter Grass made two New Year’s resolutions: the first was to travel extensively in the newly united Germany and the second was to keep a diary, to record his impressions of a historic time. Grass takes part in public debates, writes for newspapers, makes speeches, and meets emerging politicians. He talks to German citizens on both sides, listening to their bewilderment and their hopes for the future. Ideas for stories take root—his novels The Call of the Toad and Too Far Afield.

From Germany to Germany is also a personal record. Grass reflects on his family, remembers his boyhood, and comments on the books he is reading, the drawings he is making, and the sumptuous meals he cooks for family and friends. The picture that emerges—not only of the two Germanys struggling for a single identity but of a changed world after the end of the Cold War—is engrossing, passionate and essential for anyone who wants to understand Europe’s new leading nation.

Jan. 25, 2013 by 

Krishna Winston to Attend Günter Grass Translators Gathering in Germany

Krishna Winston, the Marcus L. Taft Professor of German Language and Literature, will attend a translators working meeting with Günter Grass Feb. 10-14 in Lübeck, Germany. Grass, 85, is novelist, poet, playwright, artist and sculptor. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999.

Prof. Winston has translated several of Grass’s works, including his 1990 diary, From Germany to Germany, which was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in November 2012.

This will be her fourth meeting with Grass and fellow translators. The group will focus the discussion on Grass’s poetry, autobiographical writings and artwork.

“It’s a pretty special thing when translators can sit down with the author for several days and hear from him directly what they should pay attention to, what was in his mind when he wrote certain passages, and what  historical, political, literary, or other background they may need in order to get the translation right,” Winston said.

Grass maintains an office in a historic building immediately adjacent to the GG Haus, a museum dedicated to literature and the visual arts, with a special emphasis on Grass’s work in both areas and on other artists with multiple talents.

Jan. 25, 2013 by 

Peter Handke in America

Friday, December 7th, 6:30 p.m. Deutsches Haus at New York University, 42 Washington Mews New York, NY 10003

Please join the German House in New York City for a discussion with Fatima Naqvi (Rutgers University), Christoph Bartmann (Goethe Institut NYC), Klaus Kastberger (University of Vienna), Heike Polster (University of Memphis), Krishna Winston (Wesleyan University), and Thorsten Carstensen (The Indiana University School of Liberal Arts).

Peter Handke in America is an important theme for understanding the writer’s work. Because of his life-long fascination with America, Handke was among the first German-speaking writers of his generation to present a positive image of the United States against the anti-imperialist aversions of the European 1968-movement. Particularly in his early work, scholars have traced his fascination with writers such as John Ford, Walker Percy (whom he also translated), as well as the blues, New York City, the image of the “Native American” and with the beauty of the American landscape. His 1971 novel Short Letter, Long Farewell makes his fascination with the United States the central motif. Handke also lived in New York (after lengthy travels through Alaska), where in 1979 he wrote his important novel The Long Way Round. In his film Three American LPs, he co-produced with Wim Wenders, many of these themes can also be clearly identified. More information

You can watch some of the discussion on Youtube.

William C. Donahue, “Domesticating the Holocaust: Our Twisted Love Affair with Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader.”

William Donahue, Professor of German and Professor of Literature as well as a member of the Center for Jewish Studies and the Center for European Studies at Duke University, will discuss new research on the reception of the Holocaust for a work in progress and for Holocaust Lite, the recently published German translation of his book Holocaust as Fiction. Bernhard Schlink’s “Nazi” Novels and Their Films. Holocaust in Fiction is “the first scholarly study to probe the ‘Schlink phenomenon’ and to analyze its profound role in coming to terms with the Holocaust. Donahue dissects the seductive, transnational appeal of his work and the ways in which popular culture more generally has contributed to the success of Germany’s normalization campaign” (Todd Samuel Presner).

Tuesday, November 13, 2012 at 7:30p.m. Downey 113

Sponsored by German Studies and Jewish & Israel Studies

GERMAN STUDIES OPEN HOUSE

 

 

 

 

Interested in becoming a GERMAN STUDIES major or minor?

Want to learn more about the GRST department and studying in Germany?

Come and join us at our  Open House on Wednesday, October 17 at 4:30p.m. in FIsk 404.

Encore Performance of Schnitzler’s Dreams at the Berliner Ensemble

On October 14, actors from the Berliner Ensemble, the theater founded by Bertolt Brecht, will stage a second dramatic reading of Leo Lensing’s edition of Schnitzler’s Träume, co-edited with Peter Michael Braunwarth and published by Wallstein Verlag. The first performance was given on June 24 to a full house.

Since its publication in March, which was followed by a second printing in June, Träume has elicited an unexpectedly wide and positive response in the Austrian and German media. ORF TV (Austrian National Television) presented a feature on the book in the evening news on May 6; and Austrian Public Radio included a review a month earlier in “Ex libris,” a weekly program discussing new books. Deutschlandfunk, Deutschland Radio and Westdeutscher Rundfunk, three of Germany’s most prominent public radio stations, broadcast extensive reviews; Deutschlandfunk also named Träume  “Book of the Week” on May 15 (Schnitzler’s birthday). The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published a full-page excerpt from the book in its Sunday edition in February and followed up with a very positive review and the designation as one of five “Books of the Week” on May 14. The reviewer for the prestigious Arts pages of the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich) called Träume “the most fascinating new book of the season,” and Die Welt (Berlin) published a two-page spread that combined a review with lengthy excerpts.  Austrian Public Radio included the book on its May “Bestenliste,” the ten best books of the month; and Southwest German Broadcasting (SWR) followed suit by naming it number 5 on its own list of the ten Best Books for July and August. Most recently, reviews appeared in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the Times Literary Supplement.

 

The Social Individual

Several German authors, works and themes will be presented at this year’s annual conference of the Northeastern American Society for 18th Century at Wesleyan University on October 12 and 13.

Friday, 12 —  9:00 – 10:30 a.m. 

The Imagination and Sociability in German Literature ……………………………………………………………  Wyllys 115

Chair:  David Pugh (Queen’s University)

Andrea Speltz (University of Guelph):“Imaginative Compassion in Christoph Martin Wieland’s Die Geschichte des Agathon 

Paola Mayer (University of Guelph): “Einbildungskraft as Creator of Einbildung: E.T.A. Hoffman’s Die Räuber

Dennis Mahoney  (University of Vermont): “Joseph von Eichendorff and the Domestication of the Romantic  Imagination”

Edward Larkin (University of  New Hampshire): “Imagining the Social Individual: C.W. Frölich’s Über den Menschen und seine Verhältnisse

 

Friday, 12 — 2:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.

Open Panel on Enlightenment Philosophy  …………………………………………………………… Usdan 108

Chair:  Lucy Guenova    (Wesleyan University)

James J. Caudle  (Yale University): “‘Sociability and other Cruel Sports’: James Boswell Among The Soaping Club and The Criticks”

Charlotte M. Craig (Rutgers  University): “Ambivalent Traits in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Image: Enlightener, National Author, Patriot,  Cosmopolitan, Freemason”

Michael Printy (Wesleyan University): “‘Revolutions of the Spirit’: The Protestant Enlightenment and the Rise of German Philosophy

Catherine Keohane (Montclair State University): “Seeing Oneself  in(stead of) the Poor: Charity and Imaginative Substitution”

Satuday, 13  —  10:45 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.

Sense and Sociability in France and Germany ……………………………………………………………  Wyllys 110

Chair:  Edward Larkin (University of New Hampshire)

Masano Yamashita  (University of Colorado): “Enlightenment Conceptions of Commonality: French Questionings of the Public Nature of  Aesthetics”

David Pugh  (Queen’s University):  “Social Anxieties in German Asthetics”

Mark Ilsemann  (University of Virginia): “‘Everyone has  […]  Their Own Way of Seeing’: The Science of  Optics  (and its Metaphors) in Georg   Forster’s  Anthropology”

 

Satuday, 13  — 2:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.

Genius ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Wyllys 112

Chair:  Ulrich Plass (Wesleyan    University)

Sarah Eron  (University of Rhode Island): “Fielding’s Muse: Inspiration, Genius, and the Dialogic Novel”

Amelia Bitely  (University at Buffalo): “‘His name consenting crowds repeat’: The Exhortations and Praise of Genii Loci

Lorraine Piroux  (Rutgers University): “Imagining the Social Genius: Possession and Self-­‐Possession in Diderot’s  Paradoxe sur le comedien

Joseph Drury  (Villanova University): “The Machine in the Ghost: Ann Radcliffe’s Music”

 

My Most Prized Possessions – Krishna Winston reading at the Deutsches Haus at New York University

On September 21, Krishna Winston and German author Christopher Kloeble read from his book Meistens alles sehr schnell and Krishna’s translation of it (More Often Than Not All Very Fast) at the Deutsches Haus at New York University. The event was moderated by Martin Rauchbauer, director of the German Haus.

The serious but still humorously told story centers around the Bavarian village of Königsdorf and the complicated family history of its main protagonists. Albert, who is 19 years old, grows up in an orphanage without knowing who his mother is, or whether she is even alive. All his life he had to play father to Fred, who needs his help, even though Albert is his son: Fred is an elderly man with the mind of an innocent child who occupies himself with reading encyclopedias, counting green cars and is considered the hero of a tragic bus accident that took place in the village. When doctors discover that Fred only has five months to live, father and son embark on a quest to find Albert’s mother, an odyssey that leads deeper and deeper into the past. Kloeble in his own words: “This novel is primarily about love. Love between father and son. Fading love. Motherly love. False love. Passionate love. Love-hate. And last but not least the (impossible) love between brother and sister.”

http://deutscheshaus.as.nyu.edu/object/dh.event.mymostprizedpossesions210912

Leo Lensing and His Altenberg Collection in a Documentary Film


On May 2, Leo Lensing attended a screening of A Little Pocket Mirror, a documentary on the Austrian writer Peter Altenberg (1859-1919), at the Neue Galerie in New York. The British art historian Gemma Blackshaw and the award-winning filmmaker David Bickerstaff collaborated on the project. Lensing is one of the consultants interviewed in the film, which includes footage of several objects from his collection of Altenberg’s manuscripts and inscribed photographs.