Kraus peoples his play with a multitude of identifiable historical characters, ranging from statesmen led by Emperor Franz Joseph and Kaiser Wilhelm II to patriotic authors such as Hans Müller and Ludwig Ganghofer. For further information, readers may turn to our Glossary and Index. Just as important as who they were is what they represent. In the Prologue one passerby boasts about socializing with a celebrity: “Gestern hab ich mit dem Sascha Kolowrat gedraht.” In our version this becomes: “Last night I was out partying with the Sascha Film people”, foreshadowing the impact of cinema in the play as both satirical motif and dramatic technique — a theme highlighted in a pioneering article by the American scholar Leo Lensing. Our Glossary also elucidates historical references, names of places, authors and composers, popular and patriotic songs, and other significant motifs featured in the dialogue. With a few exceptions, characters with fictional or symbolic names are not listed, since many of them are merely platitudes on two legs.
This medley of authentic detail and imaginative fantasy may remind readers of Joyce’s Ulysses; and there are anticipations of Orwell’s critique of doublespeak in the recurrent duologues between the naively patriotic Optimist and Kraus’s raisonneur, the sceptical Grumbler. Their discussions provide a commentary on fundamental issues raised by the play, including the question of responsibility. It would be tempting to blame diplomats like Count Berchtold, the Austrian Foreign Minister who drafted the ultimatum to Serbia that provoked the outbreak of war. But equally significant for Kraus, as the Grumbler explains (in Act III, Scene 41), is the failure of citizens like himself to exercise democratic control over the political, military, and financial elites that are running — and ruining — the country.
Further challenges for the translator arise from the musical motifs that permeate the play, from patriotic marches to the tinkling tunes of Viennese operettas and Berlin nightclubs. Kraus orchestrates this medley of sounds and voices into the death knell of a doomed civilization. Sources are identified in the Glossary so that the original scores can be used in stage productions. The spirit of the most celebrated songs is not hard to recapture: “Staunch stands and true/The Watch on the Rhine” or “Prince Eugene made a bridge, a bridge he made,/So they crossed the river and took Belgrade.” But it is difficult to convey in English the resonance of “In der Heimat, in der Heimat da gibt’s ein Wiedersehn” (an equivalent would be “Keep the home fires burning/Till the boys come home”, as we indicate in a stage direction). The haunting German words recur in each Act as the men marching away grow increasingly grey and the prospects of their returning home more remote.
The play is enriched by literary allusions that are difficult to convey in translation, and purists may find some turns-of-phrase too free. We debated at length how to convey the allusions to “Wanderers Nachtlied” (Wanderer’s Night Song), one of Goethe’s most delicate early poems. The Grumbler indicts the vogue for crude parodies that equated peace on the mountaintops with the silent threat of submarine warfare. This sense of desecration is hard to recapture, since there is no canonical English translation of verses described by Kraus as the nation’s most sacred poem. Is an actor to interrupt the dialogue and read out a scholarly footnote? Our solution, recalling the affinities between Goethe and Wordsworth, is to borrow lines about a solitary wanderer that will resonate with English audiences. Goethe’s mountaintops are transmuted into Wordsworth’s vales and hills.
We have also debated how to convey the ethical underpinning derived from the Kantian distinction between “Lebensmittel” (the means of life) and “Lebenszweck” (the ends of life). Drawing on secondary associations—“Lebensmittel” in the sense of “food and drink”—the Grumbler uses this contrast to mock mindless self-indulgence and the impact of consumerism. War (he claims) is being waged to expand export markets, regardless of the loss of life. Thus in his final diatribe the Grumbler warns: “Und zehrt das Lebensmittel vom Lebenszweck, so verlangt es den Dienst am Todesmittel.” Our translation highlights the existential risk: “And if the means of subsistence erode the purpose of existence, they enslave us to the instruments of death” (V, 54).
Flexibility is also needed in rendering verses that modulate from staccato mockery into plangent lament, sustaining rhymes and rhythms that blend pathos with humour. When the “Lebensmittel/Lebenszweck” motif recurs in one of the couplets of the Epilogue, we translate: “Consumption becomes the whole purpose of life/and shopping obsesses the world and his wife.” Further ingenuity is required in rendering the Freudian slips and associated tongue twisters that permeate the play. The Holy War, proclaimed by a tub-thumping demagogue at the outbreak of hostilities, comes out as a “lowly whore” (I, 1). In scenes where the satirical effect depends on a vivid use of the vernacular, we have done our best to find colloquial equivalents — without attempting to distinguish between Austrian, Bavarian, and even Swabian dialects, as Kraus does with such versatility.
Perhaps the greatest challenge arises from the pervasive wordplay, designed to deconstruct received opinions. Nineteenth-century Germans liked to identify themselves as the “nation of poets and thinkers”—“das Volk der Dichter und Denker.” Responding to atrocities, Kraus’s Grumbler inverts this into “das Volk der Richter und Henker”—“the nation of judges and hangmen” (I, 29). Put into plain English, the verbal felicity of this dictum is lost. Translators sleep more peacefully when such patterns can be reproduced. Thus the proverb “Ein gutes Gewissen/ist ein sanftes Ruhekissen” finds its way into English as “A conscience without guilt/is like a feather quilt.” The wordplay becomes more complex in a reference to army chaplains as “Heiligenscheinwerfer” (“Heiligenschein” = “saintly halo”; “Scheinwerfer” = “searchlight”). In our version this becomes “Holy Water Sprinklers” (V, 55).
A more contentious issue arises from speech patterns that reflect tensions between Christians and Jews. Kraus’s satirical panorama includes a range of characters whose German betrays traces of Yiddish. Sometimes a comparable English-Yiddish or American-Yiddish phrase can be used, but more often the Jewish-inflected nuances are barely detectable beyond the original cultural matrix. At the outbreak of war European Jews attempting to assimilate to gentile society often felt themselves to be outsiders. Their aim was to become fully accepted citizens of their chosen nation. What Kraus recognizes — and sardonically dramatizes — is that their efforts are self-defeating, not least because of the resistance they encounter. His play shows them composing patriotic songs or newspaper articles that are even more pro-German (or pro-Austrian) than those by German or Austrian gentiles. The gap between these exalted aspirations and the increasingly problematic fortunes of war generates a tragicomedy abounding in satirical ironies.
Should we consistently attempt to recapture those Jewish undertones, for example, by rendering “meschugge” as “meshugga”, rather than “crazy”? This can be clarified by posing a parallel question: When translating scenes that satirize mainstream German militarism, should we always translate “Vaterland” as “Fatherland”? To do this would restrict the meaning of Kraus’s play by implying he is only satirizing German (or Austrian) militarism. But the tragedy of mankind has implications for the superpatriots of all belligerent nations, so we sometimes anglicize the phrasing to show that “Vaterland” signifies “my country, right or wrong.” Even “Kaiser” is not always “the Kaiser.” This broader perspective is epitomized by the verses of the Dying Soldier with which the Epilogue begins, freely translated as follows: