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that the magnetic influence of the various machine factories in the Au evi-
dently played a decisive role.—the Sunday columnist illuminated the topic
exhaustively from the humorous side; and the professional meteorologists
for their part happily took the opportunity to unload some of their excess
expert knowledge into journalistic channels.” 62 A week later, however, Mu-
nich's Central Institute for Meteorology apparently received the following
letter, with spelling mimicking a thick local accent: “Dear sirs, it is not true
that my husband Xaver was thrown from bed by an earthquake; it was by
me because he was still lying around in bed at half past eight, the lazy good-
for-nothing. Yours respectfully, Josepha Dorninger.”
On one hand, this story contained familiar seeds—an earthquake sud-
denly turns a domestic spat into a public spectacle and exposes a browbeaten
husband to ridicule. But the real butt of the satire was not the unfortunate
couple, but rather scientists and journalists: namely, Munich's newspaper
editors, with their “cosmic prattle” of pseudo-scientific explanations; the
journalists who wrung humor from the situation; and the scientists who
forced their expertise on the public. In this case, the light humor of earlier
earthquake journalism had morphed into trenchant social critique. Very
likely, Simplicissimus modeled this story on the satiric genius of one of its
most controversial contributors, Karl Kraus.
“We Fled to Science”
the earth can take no more. It was only a nervous twitch,—and the chatter is end-
less. What then when it really loses its patience?
—Karl Kraus 63
Karl Kraus has been called an “anti-journalist,” a writer whose purpose was
to expose the ways in which modernity disfigured language itself. 64 he at-
tacked the sensationalistic, self-obsessed journalism of his day as a reflec-
tion of the hypocrisy, arrogance, and complacency of bourgeois culture.
Walter Benjamin aptly likened Kraus to a premodern prophet of doom: “In
old engravings, there is a messenger who rushes toward us crying aloud,
his hair on end, brandishing a sheet of paper in his hands.” Not by co-
incidence, some of Kraus's most acid critiques of fin-de-siècle journalism
before 1914 were those dealing with the reporting of earthquakes and vol-
canic eruptions. Benjamin was one of the few critics who recognized that
Kraus's vision centered on the revenge of the nonhuman world. Kraus was,
in Benjamin's words, “Cosmic Man,” who made the “insolently secularized
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