Dritte Walpurgisnacht by Karl Kraus

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dritte Walpurgisnacht by Karl Kraus Caitríona Ní Dhúill and Werner Garstenauer Dritte Walpurgisnacht. By Karl Kraus. Translated by Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms as The Third Walpurgis Night: The Complete Text, with a foreword by Marjorie Perloff. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020. Hardcover. 320 pp. $35. ISBN 978–0-300–23600–2. When a text waits for almost a century to appear in full in translation, the task of making it comprehensible to a new, culturally and linguistically remote readership involves the cracking of multiple codes, from style to contextual knowledge to intertextual reference. As Marjorie Perloff puts it in her foreword to this first full translation into English of Dritte Walpurgisnacht, referring to Kraus's great preoccupation with the power and pitfalls of the press, 'nothing comes to us unmediated' (p. xv). The mediating work of translators — a labour too often rendered invisible — is executed for The Third Walpurgis Night by Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms with the exemplary care and flair evident in their acclaimed translation of The Last Days of Mankind (published in 2015). Just as Kraus did not live to see the publication of his great anti-Nazi polemic, so too does this translation mark the final chapter in Timms's immensely productive decades-long engagement with Kraus. It is tempting and necessary to draw parallels between Kraus's time and our own, and the translators do this with relish where they write of events in 1933 seeming to 'make Germany great again', of Hitler 'taking back control' (p. xxi), or where they render 'Raison annehmen […] und sich […] zufrieden [geben]' (Dritte Walpurgisnacht, 1989, p. 278) as 'calm down and carry on' (p. 202). Even more notable than the undoubted contemporary relevance of the source text is the minute care the translators have taken to explain Kraus's allusions: ten pages of notes, together with a glossary and index running to over thirty pages, provide welcome support to readers lacking familiarity with the context. The explosive effect of Kraus's montage technique is arguably weaker for readers who are culturally and historically remote from the saturation-levels of familiarity with Goethe's Faust Part Two which Kraus would have been able to assume in his own readers. But there are gains, too: Kraus's mining of Shakespeare packs a new emotional punch when the quotations are returned to English, with hindsight revealing an uncanny edge to the choice of 'the worst is not | So long as we can say "This is the worst"' (King Lear IV, 1, quoted on p. 8), especially given the year of writing (1933). That the translators' 'struggle' (as they call it on p. xvii) is ultimately a hermeneutic one is evident in the opening sentence ('Mir fällt zu Hitler nichts ein'), and we can be grateful that they share solutions they rejected ('Mention Hitler and my mind goes blank', 'Hitler brings [End Page 203] nothing to my mind', p. xvii) as well as the one they ultimately settled on ('As to Hitler, I have nothing to say', p. 1). Regarding the editorial history of the source text, one wonders why Bridgham and Timms opted to work from the 1952 Kösel Verlag edition by Heinrich Fischer rather than the later Suhrkamp edition by Christian Wagenknecht. The introduction does not elaborate on this decision, although Wagenknecht's editorial report stresses the differences between the unpublished 1933 galley proofs and the parts published in Die Fackel in July 1934 and notes the shortcomings — in his view — of the 'contaminating' approach taken by Fischer, which created a 'Mischtext' by eliding the differences between the versions. Editorial work on Dritte Walpurgisnacht continues into the digital age with the ongoing project of the Arbeitsstelle österreichischer Corpora und Editionen (ACE) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), directed by Konstanze Fliedl. The revised full text, edited by Bernhard Oberreither, was published in the ACE open access digital edition in June 2021, with an easily navigable register of persons mentioned, together with indexes of the many intertexts. A future edition of the Bridgham/Timms translation would do well to draw on the ACE...