THE CRITIC, KRAUS

Elysium – Between Two Continents hosted a musical and literary evening at the Kaufman Center’s Merkin Concert Hall. The event, inspired by the work of Austrian satirist and writer Karl Kraus (1874-1936), featured songs by Paul Dessau, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Ernst Krenek, Kurt Weill, and Eugen Auerbach, among others. The program title posed the ethical question, “Do you create or do you destroy?”

The performance starred German actress and singer Christa Pillmann and was dedicated to the late actor Tony Randall, who was a member of Elysium’s Advisory Board.

Elysium is an organization that fosters artistic dialogue, creative exchange, and friendship between America and Germany. Over the last decade its particular concern has been to present works of artists exiled and persecuted by fascist regimes of the mid-20th century.

In the program notes, its artistic director, Gregorij H. von Leitis, summed up what theater can offer the public. He cited famed emigre theater director and founder of the Dramatic Workshop at the New School, Erwin Piscator, who said, “The human principle of self-respect and the cultivation of human relationships, the behavior of man towards man, that’s what theater can truly give us. And from this smallest unit we can reach out to the dimension of world politics.”

Elysium’s program director and dramaturge, Michael Lahr, introduced the performers, and also welcomed the Consul General of Austria, Michael Breisky,and his wife Louise; the cultural consul of Germany, Hubert Kolb; the director of the Austrian Cultural Forum, Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, and his wife Karin; and the wife of the consul general of Germany, Sabina Haack. The consul general of Germany, Uwe-Karsten Heye, hosted an after-party.

Kraus’s career is unclassifiable; his witty and biting reflections appeared in the magazine Die Fackel (the Torch) which he founded in 1899. At the outbreak of World War I Kraus was beset by apocalyptic visions and had a foreboding of the terror to come. Kraus’s last public reading occurred in November 1935, featuring Offenbach’s “Kreolin.” Kraus added his own verse that included:

Europe’s might is like a worm
That crawls before it’s kicked.
The word has died, writing has died
Maybe we’ll live to see this madness scatter
Like chaff before the wind.

The writers and musicians whose work was celebrated during the evening faced excruciating circumstances. Writer Ernst Toller, for example, entered World War I enthusiastically but came home a pacifist; he emigrated to Switzerland and, via London, arrived in America in 1937. He wrote, “Whoever is silent in such times betrays his human mission. “Then he fell silent, taking his own life at the Mayflower Hotel in 1938.

Composer Eugen Auerbach collaborated with Kraus’s public readings as well as assisting Thomas Mann’s daughter, Erika, in her cabaret “Die Pfeffermuhle” (The Pepper Mill). Arrested in Paris in 1940, he was deported to Auschwitz.

A tragic insight by Kierkegaard that influenced Kraus hovered over the evening: “A single individual cannot help his era or save it; he can only articulate the thought that it is doomed.” But the evening ended in hope as performers spoke the word “hope” in various languages.

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B(O)URNISHED LEGACY

Columbia College graduate Randolph Bourne (1886-1914), the disillusioned radical essayist, was the subject of a vibrant all day conference at Columbia University, sponsored by the National Arts Journalism Program and the Program in American Studies. Bourne’s writing cuts a swath through a dizzying array of subjects, and journalists, writers, and scholars gathered to discuss his work and its relation to issues of power, the wartime mind-set, disability, education, literary criticism, and American history.

Among those in the audience were poet Marie Ponsot, Margo Jefferson, and a biographer of Dwight MacDonald, Michael Wreszin.

Bourne’s famous line, “War is the health of the state,” has been quoted by liberal anti-war intellectuals as well as anti-interventionists on the right. But aligning him with the right takes him out of context, said Allan Jalon, who organized the conference. He said Bourne belongs to the tradition of leftists who are capable of forging a highly independent path.

Bourne’s ideology belongs to an era before the Soviet Union – his feelings and ideas predate the conflicts that roiled the left in later decades. With the Soviet Union now dissolved, Mr. Jalon said, Bourne’s career and his writing offers a kind of staging ground for thinking about the future.

In opening remarks at the conference, Mr. Jalon said Bourne understood that the most important word in a person’s life is “and,” for he connected politics and culture; the perspectives of the social sciences and the literary artist; and a style both realistic and lyrical.

Three theatrical interludes featured Clark Middleton, who played Bourne in a Los Angeles production of John Belluso’s play “The Body of Bourne.”

Sociologist Todd Gitlin spoke on a panel about Bourne in today’s world. He said the essayist explored the vocabulary of state mindlessness, the fusion of images, and themes that never rise to the level of thoughts. Mr. Gitlin referred to the “Groucho theory” of international relations “Who are you going to believe – me or your own eyes?” Mr. Gitlin said Bourne would have marveled at the current talk of an “endless war” on terror. Mr. Gitlin said one of the great offerings, of democracy, though, was the possibility of self-correction.

Michael True, of the International Peace Research Association Foundation, spoke next. Mr. True said Bourne’s great value was in his engagement. Bourne’s grounding in aesthetics and politics, he said, underlay a fusion of intellect and feeling, classicism and restraint, an ability “to keep things whole.”

Los Angeles-based Fred Dewey, great-grandson of pragmatist John Dewey, said Bourne was good at understanding how the state gets people to go along with its views and “herd” a society into delusion.

Mr. True added the essays on war by Bourne were as fresh as if they had been written 10 minutes ago.