Hauptmann, hol her das Standgericht!
Captain, call out the firing squad!
Ich sterb’ für keinen Kaiser nicht!
No one can make me shed my blood
Hauptmann, du bist des Kaisers Wicht!
for King and Country. Go ahead, shoot!
Bin tot ich, salutier’ ich nicht!
Once I’m dead, you can’t make me salute!
Kraus based these verses on an antiwar poem from the Chinese.
A more formidable challenge is how to render such a complex play performable. Kraus’s Preface may claim that it is not intended for an earthly audience, but there have been numerous German adaptations, and as early as 1982 there was a landmark Edinburgh Festival production of selected scenes translated by Robert David MacDonald, later broadcast by BBC Radio. Taking our cue from MacDonald’s pioneering achievement we have done our best to attune the dialogue to the stage. Kraus’s primary aim was to dramatize the propaganda that sustained the slaughter, and a play thus burdened with history cannot avoid longueurs — passages that are best read as book drama. His documentary technique exposes the pronouncements of political and military leaders, from the German Kaiser to the Viennese editor in chief, as “unspeakable”—in every sense of the word. But there are innumerable more dramatic and imaginative scenes that cry out for performance.
The sprawling play gains an inner coherence from networks of recurrent imagery, which we have done our best to sustain. The dialogues are dense with metaphors from a multiplicity of semantic fields: animal life, food and drink, parts of the body, clothing, costume and uniform, health and sickness, theatre and performance, hunting and shooting, location and landscape, buying and selling, mopping up trenches and cleansing ethnic minorities — the range is inexhaustible. Dualisms such as “up” and “down” and “inside” and “outside” create further contrapuntal patterns. Streets and buildings become symbolic spaces, alerting us to the military-industrial complex taking shape as profiteers besiege the Ministry of War. Some verbal patterns evolve into leitmotifs, associated with a particular catchphrase such as “I went up there and wangled it” (our rendering of “Ich bin hinaufgegangen und hab es mir gerichtet”). Dodging the draft becomes linked with landing lucrative contracts.
Patterns of metaphor form an ironic counterpoint to the harsh realities of war. Thus a pervasive preoccupation with food and drink spills over into vernacular phrasing such as “das hab ich gefressen”—a metaphor for “I’m losing patience.” Our version sustains the metaphor, so that “I’ve had a bellyful” becomes the phrase used by the irate Viennese grocer who throws starving customers out of his shop (III, 30). Ironic forms of body language permeate the play, as smugly obese members of the ruling class patronize severely wounded veterans. Meanwhile, spokesmen for the Austro-German alliance proclaim the need to stand staunchly “shoulder to shoulder”, a Homeric image utterly out of place in a war conducted with machine guns and poison gas.
Rendering animal imagery, which reaches its climax in the verse Epilogue, requires a similar sensitivity to nuances. Boasting of his courage, the Death’s Head Hussar declares: “Ich bin ein junger Jaguar,/das Vaterland ist in Gefahr.” In our version this becomes: “I strike as swiftly as a snake,/my country’s future is at stake.” Rhyme and rhythm are sustained, but the bestiality of war is differently embodied. War as pictured by Kraus reduces human beings to scavengers and predators, but these motifs are balanced by scenes portraying God’s creatures as helpless victims, notably the 1,200 horses drowned when a transporter is sunk by a warship (IV, 45). The metaphorical patterning becomes more highly charged when animal images acquire Jewish connotations. In a coffeehouse scene (V, 25), semiassimilated speculators with names like Hamster and Mastodon chew over the latest commodity prices in a veritable feeding frenzy, while impending losses leave an elderly investor feeling he’s a “Pechvogel”—a “lame duck.”
In his use of animal imagery Kraus is both heir to Aristophanes and a contemporary of Kafka. Such scenes may have attractions for costume designers, but the horizon darkens as Ravens appear on the battlefield. These motifs culminate in the Epilogue with the identification of Moriz Benedikt, the Jewish-born editor in chief of the Neue Freie Presse, as Lord of the Hyenas. Like his star reporter Alice Schalek, Benedikt is an identifiable contemporary who has been “reimagined”—as the big beast of Austrian journalism. Kraus clips key phrases from the press and restages them as dialogue in order to reveal their pernicious implications. The essential point is not that such writings are “Jewish” but that they are “journalistic”—in the worst sense: churning out patriotic rhetoric to justify the horrors of war.
There is a passage in Die Fackel of January 1917 where Kraus juxtaposes a photo of Moriz Benedikt against a bust of Lord Northcliffe, the chauvinistic British press magnate who controlled The Times and the Daily Mail. The heading identifies Northcliffe as the “English Benedikt” and Benedikt as the “Austrian Northcliffe.” There is a clear implication that if there had been any English satirist worth his salt, the proprietor of The Times would have been targeted for his jingoism as fiercely as Kraus mocks the rhetoric of the Neue Freie Presse. There is indeed an English writer whose memoir of the First World War neatly encapsulates Kraus’s findings: the poet Robert Graves, author of Goodbye to All That. While serving with the British army on the Western Front, he describes how he felt when returning home on leave: “England was strange to the returned soldier. He could not understand the war madness that ran about everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. Everyone talked a foreign language; it was newspaper language.” This takes us to the heart of the issues dramatized in Kraus’s play. The interconnections between pseudo-militarism, war madness, and newspaper language — and their impact on the destinies of mankind: these are themes likely to resonate with modern readers.
Kraus places war-torn Vienna within a cosmic framework, as foreshadowed by the Preface: “Even what occurs at the corner where Kärntnerstrasse meets the Ring is controlled from some point in the cosmos.” This metaphysical perspective is signaled in the Prologue by the Grumbler’s response to the ominous implications of the funeral of Franz Ferdinand (in words addressed to Almighty God):
War dies die Absicht, als Du Tod und Leben
Was this Your purpose when You first devised
Zu seligem Unterschied erfunden hast?
the blissful counterpoint of life and death?
Stürzt in die Bresche der Unendlichkeit
And can the mortal foe, that rabid mob,
der irdische Feind, ein tollgewordener Haufe?