Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
thunder and lightning, storms, surf, and earthquakes” his “world-historical
answer to the criminal existence of men.”
65
historians have noted the shift
in Kraus's tone between roughly 1908 and 1911, from irony to “invective.”
But little attention has been paid to the rhetorical role of seismic disasters
in this transition.
66
the hubris of modern science and technology was a consistent theme in
Kraus's early writings. A better known example of Kraus as scientific watch-
dog is his 1909 essay on the “discovery—or, as it has also been called, the
conquest” of the North Pole. Kraus saw this as a feat of political chauvinism
and technological arrogance. the dispute over the priority for the discovery
was, to Kraus, a typical case of the machinations of science and the press.
each prolonged the dispute in order to bolster its own authority; each, while
claiming to speak for “truth,” ran roughshod over it. Science and the press
seemed equally to blame for feeding the modern race to conquer nature.
Nature, however, would have the last laugh:
If nature knew that the news about the reaching of the North Pole has “height-
ened a feeling of superiority over nature” in all errand boys, it would split its
sides laughing, and cities and states and department stores would then be
thrown somewhat out of kilter. As it is, nature twitches a bit more frequently
than is good for the superiority of its inhabitants. In a matter of weeks the el-
emental forces have so clearly evinced their readiness to meld into a realm of
reason that even the masses must understand. they did so by destroying hun-
dreds of thousands of lives and untold millions in property in America, Asia,
and Australia by means of earthquakes, flash floods, typhoons, and torrential
rains, leaving only european newspaper editors with the hope that “the hu-
man will” will shortly “move all levers of nature.” every parasite of the age is
left with the pride of being a contemporary. they print the newspaper column
“Conquest of the Air” and ignore the adjoining heading “earthquakes”; and
in the year of Messina and daily tremors of the earth man proved his superior-
ity over nature and flew to Berlin.
67
In this collage of headlines, Kraus set natural disasters as the counterpoint
to technological “progress.” Like recent theorists of the “risk society,” Kraus
warned against responding to the failures of modernization with redoubled
modernization.
68
Kraus's “apocalyptic satire” first exploded in a little-known essay entitled
“the earthquake,” published in February 1908—a full ten months before
the disaster in Messina and eight months before the Bosnian crisis that fore-
shadowed the Great War. the occasion was a minor earthquake centered
