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in Lower Austria. Its timing—during the carnival season, in the year of the
sixtieth jubilee of the reign of emperor Franz Josef—was perfect for Kraus's
purposes. the jubilee was, in his eyes, a shameful parade of hypocrisy, given
the fractiousness of imperial politics. With such a rude interruption to their
festivities, would the Viennese finally feel chastened? No, they seemed de-
lighted with the earthquake. Suess's efforts at public outreach had paid off.
Suddenly, all of Vienna seemed to be racing to report their experiences of
the earthquake:
Now, I thought to myself, at last there will be peace for a spell. We have been
admonished. Our brains have been joggled into confusion; the Viennese will
see that the patience of the earth cannot be counted on; he will learn humility
and will be prepared to perish without causing a sensation. . . . Not a trace of
it! Now all hell breaks loose for real. the oafs stumble into the street, snatch
up “observations” where they can get hold of them, and run into the editorial
offices to announce that they have felt a jerk. that they were there, too! Poles
fall, windows clang, children prattle, mothers misspeak, and fathers write let-
ters to the
Neue Freie Presse.
69
In this passage, Kraus presented typical earthquake observations as ready-
made comedy. he went on to speculate that “the geologists of the
Neue
Freie Presse
” were charging the public to print their observations as if they
were advertisements. he even suggested that businesses were sending in
earthquake reports as a form of publicity. What Kraus scoffed at was not
simply the public's infantile need to be quoted about such banalities. More
contemptible was their obsession with the least consequential effects of
the earthquake, while its existential significance escaped them completely.
“the Viennese greet the apocalypse with a hallo! hallo! . . . No, that was
certainly not telluric, that was a cosmic earthquake. . . . And it was a test of
how the Viennese will behave at the apocalypse, which will certainly take
place this year.”
70
these lines foreshadow Kraus's reaction six years later to
the war fever of 1914.
then Kraus had a flash of inspiration. he penned his own earthquake
report for the
Neue Freie Presse,
signed by one “Civil engineer J. Berdach” in
Leopoldstadt, a heavily Jewish neighborhood:
Just as I was reading your highly esteemed paper I felt a shaking in my
hand. Since this phenomenon was only too familiar to me from my many
years of residence in Bolivia, the well-known seismic center, I rushed right
to the compass that I have in my house since those days. My intuition was
