When Karl Kraus published the first issue of its magazine Die Fackel, The Torch, said trying to be a light in the midst of a grim fate.
Kraus was born in 1874. From 1899 until his death, 1936, published 912 numbers, more than 30,000 printed pages. Unpublished left his book The third night of Walpurgis written in the summer of 1933, months after Hitler's rise to power. The work would see the light in 1952. It was a relentless reporting, literary and political, of Nazism.
In his journal, Kraus, in deliveries that lasted several years, he published his extraordinary creation The Last Days of Humanity, a claim against the development and decay of human society and the possibility of achieving a more just and happy. It focused on terrorism and genocide caused by the first world war that caused so much havoc to human beings and nature, denouncing the political, economic, military, religious and journalism itself, allied to them, and cause of the tragedy . In its first ten years of existence, the torch made room for, among others, the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Alban Berg, Bertold Brecht, Elias Canetti, Sigmund Freud, Max Horkheimer, Oskar Kokoscha, Adolf Loos, Heinrich Mann, Arnold Schoenberg, August Strindberg, George Trakl. From 1911 until his death was Kraus who took over in total solitude, most papers published in the magazine, with his caustic humor, their expansive culture, their language refined, its critical violence. They denounced economic corruption, police brutality, poverty of the press, pan-Germanism, public morality, exploitation of women, the civilization based on science, technology, communication, economic - the stock market, understood as progress instead of emancipating driving to destruction. The press was overwhelmingly for him a triple alliance of ink, technical, and death, so invited to collaborate with him in denouncing the "rogue journalism."
In 2010 we are engaged in an undeclared war, less bloody, but with terrible consequences for the freedom, the progress of society, the very existence of human beings. We speak of local conflicts that continue to succeed in various stages of the world, the famines that took the lives of millions of people, the constant attacks of the nature of the devastation of thought submitted by the media to an authentic mass destruction intelligence, the difference of cultures dominated by leisure international oligopolies. A unified world in terrible, blind obedience, powerlessness, sclerosis of the left organizations, economic terrorism imposed by the multinational exploitation and crime. Our torch is intended to be one of those cries of rebellion they arise, individual or collective, in the network. Invited to participate in it with partners who wish to express their opinions, suggestions, brief papers, reviews, complaints, Utopian the deepest sense of journalism: the bullet that explodes in the reader's complacency. Will be reflected in the numbers that appear in this newspaper-blog. These collaborations can address my particular email:
andres@andressorel.com
Kraus did not forget the perversion of language, language that has now emptied of content words and concepts such as democracy, justice, freedom, rule of law culture, human rights. So his inseparable friend Walter Benjamin wrote of him:
"Evening Walk linguistic constructions of the newspapers and after the rigid facade of spy cliches interiors, discovered in the orgies of black magic and statutory rape lie of the words "
Kraus asked a century ago We now ask ourselves: is it possible
literature as absolute reigns of horrors?
That is question that we provide to all those who want to collaborate in this new torch.
This work was written in early June 2010. In a Zeberio Valley. It started one morning at dawn. I left the house plunging into the deep forest. The fog had swallowed. Only in the distance, emerging from the abyss of nothingness, glimpsed the peaks of the mountains. Under them all was a deep, dense, continuous and thick white patches of emerging from the songs of hundreds of birds engrossed in blindness. Next the path where my feet were floating higher and watched the bare branches of pine, spruce, ash, trade winds. Gradually, the fog was lifting, unobscured by the upward momentum of the sun and ocean mist began to appear blurred silhouettes of the burnt house, the chapel in recent centuries and attracted pagan religious ceremonies and celebrations to the people scattered the valley. When the sun is peppered with light nature discovering its many shades, I became aware of the repetitive routine news were aware of some events in the last hours in the world: a taxi driver was murdered in London before his own suicide, a ten people could not specify whether they were nine, maybe some more, the components of the Turkish flotilla was heading to Gaza and had lost their lives gunned down by Israeli military forces, the English political and trade union bureaucrats, to the laughter of the employers and the fascist party of the opposition continued their chant addled on the issue of labor reform and social peace and termed these entelechies designed for the greater glory of the rulers of the capital, and repeated and repeated tiring other news, the sports events, from weather forecasts to the bedroom scenes and more or less held or bereaved related stories Sex ... Everything was light, mountains and valleys studded with plants and trees waking up around me. Floated under the watchful eye of blue sky and the sun, an infinite space traveler, undulating ridges of jagged peaks, remaining on the earth, under the deepest fog and not entirely clear, thick, lush green islands. Ah, it was agreed to stress the officials strike on day 8. Neoverticales unions, vulgar grateful repast officials would fulfill his pact with the government and business leaders, more refined and expensive taste for the pittance, and a virtual strike would make his day before the humorous appreciation and applause from the extreme right in its safe to walk to the tyranny of absolute power. For a moment I struggled to put myself in the time lived. Kraus remained silent when he heard, in some mountain or valley in the Swiss Alps, which had broken out, that was the word used by the newspapers, "the European war. His gaze wandered through a landscape similar to what I now beheld. Nearly a hundred years ago in the conventional measurement. When unfolded before his eyes and looked at his newspaper headlines, smiled at the eloquent appeal to the sacrifice of the nation. Was necessary to defend our homeland and killing their most illustrious sons. And the Emperor, and the arms manufacturer, and the cardinal and the editor, during a banquet on their way to people, because "as everyone knows" they will represent.
My audience and I understand perfectly: he did not hear what I say and I do not say what he wants to hear
K. Kraus
magazine
Next issue: Speech against intellectuals.
magazine
Next issue: Speech against intellectuals.
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