The Revolt of the Pendulum Read Online Free PDF Page A

international beau monde . There is no
reason to think that mass murder would ever have got started anywhere in Europe if the Nazis hadn’t come to power in Germany. But the Nazis, on their way up, had a lot of prejudice to draw
upon, and it doesn’t need a very big minority to look like a majority when it comes parading down the street. Military force transferred to civilian life was the revolutionary new element
that would eventually paralyse conventional political expression and Kraus’s critique along with it. After the war, Kraus realised almost as soon as Hitler did that if the war’s
unfettered violence were to be unleashed in peacetime politics, private armies could enforce a new and criminal legality. Unlike Hitler, however, he had little idea of what to do about it. He can
scarcely be blamed for that. Apart from the psychopaths, hardly anybody had. Sticking with the old legality looked like the only civilized option. The realisation that the civilised option, even
with a professional army at its command, had little hope of prevailing against the uncivilised one was slow to dawn. By the time it did, the sun had set. Comprehension came after the fact.
    Kraus saw the menace, however, and should be respected for his insight. From 1923 onwards he had no doubts that the Nazis were out to wreck everything. He just had trouble believing that they
could. On the eve of the First World War, Kraus had said ‘violence is no subject for polemic, madness no subject for satire.’ Here was a new and madder violence, a reign of terror. When
it came to power in Germany, in 1933, Kraus was faced more acutely than ever with the question of what form of government in Austria might stave it off. His Social Democrat admirers were horrified
when he failed to condemn the authoritarianism of Dollfuss, but Kraus was choosing the lesser of two evils: a choice that evil always demands we make, revealing itself in the demand.
    In his long paper ‘Third Walpurgis Night’, Kraus pilloried the Social Democrats for not realising that only Dollfuss’s illiberal measures could keep the Nazis out. Timms gives
a long and valuable analysis of ‘Third Walpurgis Night’ – it was the speech about the Nazis that Kraus gave after saying they had left him speechless – but doesn’t
make enough out of the fact that Kraus never published it. It was meant to appear as a special issue of Die Fackel , but it didn’t. In effect, Kraus was already retreating from his
public role. After the assassination of Dollfuss, he gave up altogether.
    He was through with politics. The sophisticated reasoning of a lifetime had come down to the elementary proposition that anything was better than the Nazis. After Kraus’s death, the
plebiscite that Schuschnigg called for would probably have shown that the majority of Austria’s population thought the same. Aware of this, Hitler terrorised Schuschnigg into calling off the
plebiscite, and the Nazis duly marched in. A lot of them were already there. Austrian citizens put on swastika arm-bands and set about their vengeful business. Kraus was lucky enough to breathe his
last before they took power but he already knew that his long vigilance over the use of language hadn’t changed a thing.
    The dying Kraus could congratulate himself that he had at least, at last, seen things clearly. He had discovered the limited effectiveness of telling people they are fanatics when they think
fanaticism to be a virtue. The full force of totalitarian irrationality had become plain to him: the real reason why ‘Third Walpurgis Night’, pace Timms, was not only
unpublished, but incoherent. It was a piece of writing that knew that it was useless. Kraus might have reached the same conclusion about all his previous satirical writings had he lived long
enough. His German equivalent, Kurt Tucholsky, had the same trouble sinking to the occasion. Asked why he had not said more about the Nazis, he said, ‘You can’t shoot