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below, which was followed by a horizontal shock, probably in the direction
northwest-southeast.” “That is the marvelous thing,” Kraus remarked, “and
it has always amazed me about these learned professions: that they at the
instant of an earthquake immediately look at the clock and are even clearly
oriented with respect to the direction of the shock. The likes of us are not
capable to distinguish west from east when all is calm, certainly not in the
manner of an Englishman and that of a reader of
Die Zeit.
But the readers
of
Die Zeit,
as soon as their wives whisper the word earthquake, they are
already
enlightened,
whisper northwest-southeast, and moreover have the
presence of mind to sit down immediately and send the shiksa from the
country, who is
not enlightened,
and is instead howling and clanging plates
in the kitchen expecting the end of the world, to the editorial office, so that
the letter will be in the morning paper for sure.”
35
Kraus's insight was worthy of his nemesis Freud. All around him, Kraus
saw denial—denial of the power of nature to escape human control. It had
become impossible to perceive disasters as disasters. All one saw were rep-
resentations of disaster through the lens of the press, recast in the “scientific
intonation” that stripped them of the horrific. Well before Jünger, Kraus
perceived that firsthand accounts of disaster were being transformed into
a predictable genre. He thus recognized the tendency of modernism to re-
press natural disasters beneath a veneer of stylization and metaphor. Kraus
portrayed the reports of earthquake observers as a narcissistic, self-indulgent
genre akin to the
feuilleton:
a jargon-ridden and vacuous form of “cosmic
prattle.” He decried the very goal of training the public to perceive a threat-
ening natural world through the lens of modern science. It was a lens of
false security, transforming disasters into geophysical specimens. “A lowly
genre,” as Kraus once described satire—“as far below the dignity of a histo-
rian as an earthquake.”
36
Kraus saw as clearly as anyone what was at issue when the newspapers
talked earthquakes. Since the eighteenth century, a society's response to
earthquakes had been a measure of its enlightenment. Yet, in Kraus's view,
what a poor bank clerk took for “Aufklärung” in 1910 could not have been
further from the real thing. In these terms, only the “unenlightened” would
be so crass as to display fear at such a moment, to “expect the end of the
world.” Kraus, the messenger of apocalypse, cast his lot with the unenlight-
ened. Once again, Kant's ghost was haunting Europeans' encounters with
seismic instability. The question was plain: what was enlightenment?
What Kraus failed to see was that this bank clerk was engaged in a dia-
logue. What did Kraus really know of the project that Eduard Suess had
launched in 1873 with his appeal to the public for seismic observations?
