Karl Kraus, <hi rend="italic">Dritte Walpurgisnacht</hi>

No other author in Austria has been the subject of computer-aided methods at an earlier point than Karl Kraus – think of the edition and database on Die Fackel. Bernhard Oberreither’s workshop report provides insights into a current edition project located at the Arbeitsstelle Österreichischer Corpora und Editionen at the Austrian Academy of Sciences under the name of Platform Karl Kraus 1933. Its aim is to make available an edition of Dritte Walpurgisnacht including reference material, utilizing the potential of the digital medium regarding contextualization, links to external resources, and an optimized user experience.

Kein anderer Autor war in Österreich so früh Gegenstand computergestützter Verfahren wie Karl Kraus – man denke an die Edition und Datenbank zu Die Fackel. Der Werkstattbericht von Bernhard Oberreither gibt Einblicke in ein aktuelles Editionsprojekt, das als Plattform Karl Kraus 1933 an der Arbeitsstelle Österreichischer Corpora und Editionen an der ÖAW angesiedelt ist. Das Ziel ist es, eine Edition der Dritten Walpurgisnacht und von Bezugsmaterialien bereitzustellen und dabei die Möglichkeiten des digitalen Mediums in Bezug auf Kontextualisierung, Verlinkung mit externen Ressourcen und eine optimierte User Experience zu nutzen.

“Unthinkable Nuremberg”

On April 6, 1933, Karl Kraus wrote a postcard to his long-time lover Sidonie Nádherný von Borutin, informing her about his travel plans and correspondence with mutual friends. At the end, he adds a short note in brackets: (Nürnberg wäre völlig undenkbar) (Pfäfflin 2005a: 735). Kraus’s letters and postcards to Nádherný (and his telegrams even more so) are often written in an elliptic style, full of abbreviations and allusions, so it is not instantly clear why Nuremberg is ‘unthinkable’ and why Nuremberg is mentioned at all. Kraus’s letter from April 14 leads one to assume that Nádherný had contemplated visiting the city of Nuremberg and Kraus had convinced her not to, letting her know about his relief when she canceled the plans (ibid; Pfäfflin 2005b: 570).

This postcard from April 6 contains the first traces of the National Socialist takeover in Germany in their correspondence. At the end of January, Adolf Hitler had been appointed chancellor of Germany, he soon after had persuaded Reichspräsident Paul von Hindenburg to disassemble the Reichstag. The rightwing coalition of National Socialists, German Nationalists, and Stahlhelm (a German paramilitary group) had won the election on March 5, securing a majority by a small margin, mostly because freedom of speech and freedom of the press had been annihilated, and because their political opponents had been subject to persecution, use of brutal force, and unlawful arrest in the aftermath of the Reichstag fire. On March 23, Hitler’s power seizure was completed with the ‘Ermächtigungsgesetz,’ the Reichstag was stripped of its power. Soon, the National Socialists pushed the other members of government aside and declared all parties except for their own unlawful. Hitler’s dictatorship was established (for a timeline of the events see, e.g., Blume/Wichmann 2015).

From 1927 onwards, it was in Nuremberg that the National Socialists held their ‘Reichsparteitag’; it was also in Nuremberg that Hitler had made the first public appearance Kraus had taken note of in Die Fackel, as early as September 1923 (Timms 2005: 16–18; F 632–639: 40–44

Karl Kraus’s periodical Die Fackel (Vienna, 1899–1936) is cited as ‘F,’ followed by the issue number.

). In 1933, Nuremberg was the territory of Julius Streicher, the Gauleiter of Unterfranken, who disseminated his extremely aggressive antisemitism through his paper Der Stürmer, and whose excessive campaigns would include, among many other things, the infamous parading of women who had had relations to Jewish men through the streets of ‘unthinkable’ Nuremberg (see, e.g., the Viennese Arbeiter-Zeitung from August 18 and September 3, 1933: 3 resp. 4; see Früh 1983: 33–36).

For more than a decade, Kraus’s magazine Die Fackel had been having an eye on the rise of National Socialist and other ‘völkische’ ideologies in Germany and Austria alike, he had built references to Hitler into additional verses of his couplets (Timms 2005: 18; F 640–648: 109), he had fought Hitler’s newspaper Völkischer Beobachter in court (see Knüchel/Langkabel 2022), he had made fun of the Austrian National Socialist newspaper Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung (see, e.g., F 838–844: 106–107), and he had denounced the Austrian Social Democrats for seeking unity with Germany (see F 876–884: 1–31). Since Hitler had become German chancellor, he had been working tirelessly on a polemic that in its dimensions surpassed everything printed in Die Fackel to this point. In his letters to Nádherný in May, June, and August 1933, he refers to this endeavor as [g]roße, schwerste Arbeit (Pfäfflin 2005a: 736, 738, see Pfäfflin 2005b: 570–574).

“Suffocating in the Muddle”

It seems that Nádherný had sent him newspaper clippings about the events in Germany, since in June he asked her not to send any more, weil ich in dem Wust bereits ersticke und leider alles anregt (June 4/5; Pfäfflin 2005a: 736).

Indeed, the text he had been working on was a great endeavor, unparalleled in its time, and for it he was working through an immense amount of news reports – most of them horrifying – about the current events taking place in Germany and Austria. His text quotes newspaper articles from as early as March, maybe even February 24, 1933, the last newspaper article quoted was published on September 29 (see Früh 1984a: 14; DW: para 39, p. 141b

The online edition of Karl Kraus’ Dritte Walpurgisnacht (Kraus 2021) is cited as ‘DW’ with reference to the paragraph and page, which takes into account the paragraph-by-paragraph division of the text in this digital edition.

). The resulting text contains around 1,500 direct quotes and in addition hundreds of paraphrases, from news reports as well as literary texts. These quotes he compiled into a text of 300 pages: a polemic against National Socialism that is at the same time an enlightened analysis of its propaganda apparatus, a protocol of the day-to-day attacks on the streets as well as the torture and murder in the cellars of the SA and the early concentration camps, a denouncement of opportunists among journalists and artists, a harsh (and in many ways unfair) reckoning with the Austrian Social Democrats, and most of all a wake-up call to the international public.

In September he decided not to publish this text he had been working on for many months (see Wagenknecht 2016: 335; by this date, the text did not yet have the title Dritte Walpurgisnacht). There are many possible reasons. Heinrich Fischer, a confidant of Kraus and the editor of the first print edition of this text, recounts Kraus telling him that publishing this text would pose an incalculable risk to innocent people since it portrays Joseph Goebbels, who in his anger could decide to put fifty Jews into the stand-up caskets (‘Stehsärge’ – narrow confinement for days as a form of torture) of some concentration camp (see Fischer 1952: 308). This was, under the circumstances, a plausible worry, and worries for his own safety might have added to the decision not to publish the Text: Jochen Stremmel refers to the assassination of Theodor Lessing in Czechoslovakia at the end of August 1933, which could have made Kraus aware of his own endangerment (see Stremmel 1982: 71). In his commentary to Kraus’s letter to Nádherný, Friedrich Pfäfflin points to a remark from April 6 – Kraus doubts whether he would (still?) be in Vienna by May – that together with the fact that Kraus had his passport renewed in May opens the possibility of Kraus contemplating emigration (see Pfäfflin 2005b: 570). A German annexation of Austria was very much a possibility in 1933.

While the text itself was not published,

Instead, Kraus published the shortest issue of Die Fackel ever, four pages, containing a eulogy for Adolf Loos and the famous poem starting with the words Man frage nicht (F 888).

parts of it were included in Die Fackel No. 890–905 from July 1934, when Kraus inserted long quotes from the text he now called Dritte Walpurgisnacht (see F 890–908: 77). In this issue, he doubled down on his denouncement of the Social Democrats and his commitment to Engelbert Dollfuß – an irritating move for many, since Dollfuß had turned Austria into an authoritarian ‘Ständestaat’ and since the civil war in February 1934 had claimed roughly between 300 and 2,000 lives (accounts vary widely) and had led to the ban of the Social Democratic Party as well as the execution of nine leaders of the Social Democrats’ ‘Schutzbund’.

For a concise summary of the events see the article in <ref target="https://www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at/Februar_1934">Wien Geschichte Wiki</ref>. (The article is largely based on Maderthaner 1993: 264f.)

The fallout among Kraus’s readers was immense, as statements by Walter Benjamin, Klaus Mann, Elias Canetti, and many others show (see Pfäfflin 2008: 304–311). In November 1934, in a letter to his brother, the latter admits: Ich möchte ihn, obwohl er so schwach ist, körperlich züchtigen. Welch ein Thersites! Welch ein Goebbels im Geiste! (Canetti 2008: 305)

Third Walpurgis Night

Reading these lines is an especially bitter experience if one knows how contemptuous Kraus had portrayed Goebbels and many other National Socialist leaders in the unpublished Dritte Walpurgisnacht, how the text reflects an extremely high degree of awareness of everything that had happened in Germany and that was reported in German and foreign newspapers.

Kraus starts by describing his speechlessness, the impossibility of articulating the events taking place in Germany due to their nature; in light of the quasi-religious worship demanded by Hitler and gladly or compulsorily performed by his followers, Kraus ironically speaks of his envy for this newfound ‘mental simplicity’. He describes the situation of the satirist deprived of his enemies (some of whom had fallen victim to the new regime) and confronted with a reality impossible to satirize. The justification of this inability then becomes his impetus for writing (see DW: para. 1–10).

Kraus’s topic is the new reality under Hitler, as seen through the lens of the press and other media; his topic is also this lens itself, whose – in Kraus’s perception: harmful – working is now subject to the new conditions of ‘Gleichschaltung’. Besides the National Socialist propaganda itself revving up, Kraus points out the effects of this ‘Gleichschaltung’ on German newspapers and examples of opportunism among previously liberal journalists (such as the critic Bernhard Diebold – see DW: para. 11); he shows the journalistic symptoms of an atmosphere of fear, of implicit or explicit extortion; above all, he deems the press fundamentally unfit to convey the truth and, what is more, responsible for the rise of Nazism (see, e.g., DW: para. 64, p. 269). At the same time, Kraus relies on the press as his most important source of information, demonstrating that in 1933, a capable reader of newspapers was very much able to know what was going on in Germany, if he or she wanted to. Citing German as well as Austrian (and, by proxy, French, British, and other foreign) newspapers, he gives a horrendous and detailed account of the violence in Germany. He – sometimes mockingly, sometimes in desperation – shows the working of the German propaganda machinery at once firing up and denying these crimes (see, e.g., DW: para. 42). Looking at Germany trying to keep up appearances for the world public, he points out the mind-numbing quality of its rhetoric strategy (das blendende und betäubende Naturwunder der Lüge, DW: para. 58, p. 239), which by way of impertinence reconciles bloodthirst with whining, steps towards armament with hypocritical desire for peace. Searching for a philosophical foundation of this new Germany and after dismissing Goethe, Wagner, Nietzsche, and even Spengler for this role (see DW: para. 18), he turns with particular poignancy towards Gottfried Benn (see DW: para. 19, 26, 28–30), dissecting his infamous Antwort an die literarischen Emigranten (Benn 1933) as a testament to his opportunism as well as to a dimwittedness concealed by pseudo-intellectual references and verbal mannerisms. Turning to the situation in Austria and the National Socialist agitation for a German takeover (see DW: para. 51), he takes the surprising stance for Dollfuß – as, as one may well read it, the lesser of two evils –, while denouncing the Social Democrats’ resistance against the rise of the Austro-fascist ‘Ständestaat’ following the so-called ‘Selbstausschaltung’ (self-termination) of parliament in March (for historical background see, e.g., Tálos 2013). Kraus dedicates a long section towards the end of the text to the sorry disproportion between Social Democrats’ rhetoric and their actual lack of power, and, as Kraus sees it, their close-minded actions hindering Dollfuß’s attempt at saving freedom from barbarism (see DW: para. 53–57). As for the future of the ‘Third Reich’ (see DW: para. 63–64), Kraus hints at a possible split line in the regime: between a leadership scrambling to protect economic interests and unsatisfied foot soldiers insisting on ‘ideals’ and promises made in the beginning. Kraus rightly predicts the SS’s longevity and in contrast the SA as a possible obstacle for Hitler (see DW: para. 64).

Kraus’s historical conceptualization of the ‘Third Reich’ in Dritte Walpurgisnacht is threefold: He gives testimony to the unprecedented quality of this regime as well as to the continuities reaching back into the past (see, e.g., Linden 2017; Linden 2020: 75–78). He also recognizes characteristics of World War mentality reawakening in the ‘Third Reich’. When the text ends – enigmatically – with a quote from Goethe’s Faust II, it is the last of some 150 references to this work, which, as Ari Linden points out, serves the purposes of integrating the unprecedented and the continuous qualities of Nazism and of depicting a reality that otherwise defies description (see Linden 2020: 63–81). The numerous references to Schiller refer to the nationalist appropriation of the poet, while Kraus at the same time draws from Schiller’s work to describe German madness (see Krolop 1992). Shakespeare – to name a third of the eminently important sources for Kraus – and especially Macbeth confronts the German excess and amorality with a literary universe in which misdeeds are still followed by moral judgment (see Timms 2005: 505–506).

These and many other references to literary works are accompanied by countless allusions to his own work in Die Fackel – the German militarist mentality, the destructive power of the press, and his dispute with the Social Democrats are among the topics he revisits. At the same time, Dritte Walpurgisnacht shows a tightly knit web of self-references, taking up motifs and themes numerous times throughout the text.

The text does not put forward its arguments systematically, there is a meandering quality to it, or, as Irina Djassemy pointed out, no hierarchy that dominates the text structure (see Djassemy 2011: 256–257

Djassemy adds: Der Nachteil der Krausschen Darstellung besteht allerdings darin, dass sie keine präzise soziologische Erkenntnis des Nazismus ermöglicht, welche doch für seine Bekämpfung notwendig ist. (Djassemy 2011: 257)

). There is some linearity in how Kraus refutes his initial claim that [w]ith regard to Hitler, nothing comes to [his] mind (DW: para. 1, p. 1), and yes, there is an arc linking Kraus’s contemplation of the incommensurability of Nazism in the beginning with the end, where he comes back to this theme (see DW: para. 64, p. 269). Also, a raise of tension can be made out towards the end (e.g., syntactically, see for example DW: para. 64, pp. 277–279). But for the text as a whole, if one were to look for a description of its structure – apart from its obvious collage-like traits –, then the imagery chosen would have to take into account the character of a text that is not ordered to the last, that ultimately cannot be unified along, e.g., one line of argument. This imagery would have to depict Dritte Walpurgisnacht as a text blazing nonlinear and non-hierarchical but interlinked paths through the German Walpurgis Night of 1933.

These traits to some extend resonate with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s description of the ‘rhizome’ (1977) as a metaphor for a text’s structure resp. its reading – and perhaps a ‘rhizomatic’ reading of Dritte Walpurgisnacht would indeed be rewarding.

This might be in part caused by the situation of text production, as one more, purely practical reason keeping Kraus from publishing the text: The historical context it was written in was changing (or, to be more precise: deteriorating) on a daily basis. In theory, the text was never finished, it could have sprouted further in many places until 1945 and beyond.

Resurrection / Renaissance

Still, by September 1933, the unpublished text was complete, if not finished (see Wagenknecht 2016: 336). It consisted of 268 sheets of galley proofs with hundreds of hand-written additions and corrections, 11 typewritten pages containing the end of the text, and another 15 typewritten pages with longer additions for insertion.

Christian Wagenknecht in his 1989 print edition of Dritte Walpurgisnacht gives an account of the whereabouts of the different materials: The manuscript is lost (see also: Scheichl 1982); hundreds of notes on small sheets of paper are kept in the Wienbibliothek im Rathaus (WBR), as is the text’s comprehensive motto and five typewritten pages of paralipomena, containing passages that were excluded from the final version of the text. Kraus himself had a duplicate made from the final galley proofs and gave it to Nádherný; today, it is part of her estate in the Brenner-Archiv, Innsbruck. After Kraus died in 1936, his lawyer Oskar Samek brought the original to Switzerland, from where he sent it to the U.S. He followed, and in 1939, he produced a transcript of which a carbon copy was in the possession of the painter Albert Bloch and today is kept in the Brenner-Archiv as well. Samek bequeathed the original to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (the library of which is now the National Library of Israel), where it got lost and was found again in 1987 (it is part of the Abraham-Schwadron-Collection, signature: Schwad 01 19 290.1). A copy negative of the original proofs, which belonged to Kraus’s printer Martin Jahoda, is kept in DLA Marbach (see Wagenknecht 2016: 339–340, 344).

Dritte Walpurgisnacht was not published before, during, or immediately after the war – the reasons being obvious political and historical ones as well as a legal quarrel between Heinrich Fischer and Oskar Samek. Kraus, who throughout his life had been of the utmost meticulousness when it came to proofreading his texts, had left an incoherent last will, the condition of which bears witness to late and maybe hasty corrections and Kraus’s bad physical shape near the end of his life (see Krieghofer 2018: 215–216). After the legal dispute was settled, Heinrich Fischer’s edition of the text could be published – not by an Austrian, but by a German publishing house. There are reports of Social Democrats having hindered an Austrian edition of Kraus’s work; his falling out with this party continued to have consequences even after the war (see Stremmel 1982: 164).

The text was published as Die dritte Walpurgisnacht – with the added article, which Fischer did not provide an explanation for.

He just states: Für die Buchausgabe hielt es der Herausgeber aus der historischen Perspektive für richtig, den Titel in »Die Dritte Walpurgisnacht« zu ändern. (Fischer 1952: 309)

Among other editorial interventions, he divided the text into chapters and contaminated some parts of the version of 1933 with corrections Kraus had added a year later for publication in Die Fackel No. 890–905; also, the text’s motto, which consists of a collage of twenty-three quotes from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust II, is not part of this edition. While it does not meet standards one might have applied in the decades to follow, Fischer’s edition still initiated the so-called ‘Kraus-Renaissance’ (see Wagenknecht 2016: 340).

Fischer’s edition was reprinted several times. Also, the latest print edition of Dritte Walpurgisnacht (Kraus 2015) is based on Fischer’s version, with added footnotes, a foreword and materials.

In 1989, Christian Wagenknecht published the text in a meticulously crafted edition in a form as close as possible to the original galley proofs, including the motto. In an apparatus, this edition provides the portions of the text published in 1934, which deviates from the 1933 version in countless details; an index of persons contains 198 names. Wagenknecht’s notes on text genesis and tradition are still authoritative.

An Online Platform and a Digital Edition of Dritte Walpurgisnacht

Currently, the platform Karl Kraus 1933 is in the making at the ACE (Austrian Corpora and Editions) at the ACDH-CH (Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage).

For the list of project team members, see kraus1933.ace.oeaw.ac.at/projekt.html.

Its goal is to provide an edition of Dritte Walpurgisnacht and related materials and in doing so exploit the possibilities of the digital medium in terms of contextualization, linking to external resources, and an optimized user experience.

The text itself is presented in a well-readable form, augmented by layers and layers of additional information, some of which are already published, while others will be part of future publication steps. The two portions of the platform already published are:

– Notizen zur Dritten Walpurgisnacht: Two sets of Karl Kraus’s notes, mostly representing early stages of Dritte Walpurgisnacht, as a facsimile edition with decipherings.

– Annotierte Lesefassung: An edited text based on the galley proofs, with all additions to and corrections of the galley proofs – handwritten or typewritten – incorporated into the text,

For the principles guiding this edition, especially the (quite conservative) approach to emendation, see the editorial notes on the project website: kraus1933.ace.oeaw.ac.at/annotierte_lesefassung.html

constituting a well-readable version of Dritte Walpurgisnacht. This version is augmented by:

* Annotations indicating intertextual relations. * Annotations indicating references to persons.

Both are interlinked with extensive indexes.

Notes

In 2019, Kraus’s handwritten notes dating from the period around the creation of Dritte Walpurgisnacht have been published online in the form of facsimiles with deciphered text. This constituted the first step in a multipartite publication process of Dritte Walpurgisnacht and related materials on Karl Kraus 1933. The originals are kept in the Wienbibliothek im Rathaus (WBR; signatures H.I.N.-176044 and H.I.N.-177198) and are provided for display via the WBR’s IIIF service.

The notes consist of two sets, which show no discernible order, amounting to 353 sheets, written on in pencil and black ink (with later additions in red), some on both sides. Kraus presumably used these small notes, most of which stem from 1933, to write down short excerpts, cues, and initial formulations to be worked into Dritte Walpurgisnacht; some of the notes serve other literary purposes (and were processed into, e.g., Die Fackel No. 890–905), others seem to serve a different use.

WBR, sign. H.I.N.-176044, fol. 4v and 5r. The text on the left reads Darum gibt es / nur eines: / Kampf bis / aufs Messer. / Wir können noch / weitere Nadelstiche / vertragen. On the right, the last five lines: Einmal aber / kommt der / Tag, an dem / mit diesen Burschen / aufgeräumt wird.

The resulting lines, most of them written down with a blunt pencil in small handwriting and some of them crossed out, are nearly or de facto illegible. Still, Gerald Krieghofer managed to decipher a large portion of the text, identifying up to one hundred passages in the first set of notes that constitute early stages of formulations later to be found in Dritte Walpurgisnacht – among them two samples of National Socialist rhetoric on fol. 4v and 5r (see Fig. 1). Both stem from the same speech given by Wilhelm Brückner (Hitler’s Adjutant in Chief) in Königsberg at the end of May 1933 as cited in, among other newspapers, the Reichspost of June 1, 1933.

The passages are taken from a threat towards the German National Party, which at the time was the National Socialists’ coalition partner. In light of Dritte Walpurgisnacht, the first passage illustrates, apart from poor use of metaphors, the Revindikation des Phraseninhalts (DW: para. 31, p. 118), meaning the phenomenon that with the National Socialist takeover, reality caught up with the literal meaning of what before were metaphors – such as Kampf bis aufs Messer (DW: para. 31, p. 119). The second quote is used earlier in the Text (DW: para. 21, p. 78) to refer to the tensions between the two ruling parties and the National Socialists’ open aggression. Less than a month later, the German National Party would dissolve itself.

The second set, the sheets of which are glued onto the pages of a paper folder, contains about twelve to fifteen passages that found their way into Dritte Walpurgisnacht, among them a lengthy excerpt from Hitler’s Mein Kampf (used to illustrate the contrast between pompous tone and trivial content – see fol. 39; DW: para. 62, pp. 251f.).

WBR, sign. H.I.N.-177198, fol. 39. The text passage titled Wert der Arbeit is from Mein Kampf, part 2, chapter 2.

An Edited Version with Intertexts and Persons

For the transcription of the galley proofs, a data model was chosen with the goal of representing their original structure, while at the same time building the foundation for a rendering of a well-readable edited text – with all the corrections and additions incorporated – and providing additional layers of information on countless text passages. Due to the numerous corrections and editing traces – especially beyond the first 60 pages, which appear to have been subject to more rounds of proofing than the rest (see Wagenknecht 2016: 385) –, text modeling turned out to be quite a complex endeavor, as Fig. 3 might indicate.

National Library of Israel, signature: Schwad 01 19 290.1, page 158. The page from paragraph 43 shows some two dozen corrections in the left and right margins, one extensive handwritten addition at the top to be added before the first line of the printed text and to be further extended by another handwritten passage at the top as well as by one at the bottom of the page. Lines 12 and 13 show a transposition (of a comma), the paragraph beginning in line 22 is marked to be relocated to the end of the preceding paragraph.

This transcription of the galley proofs, resulting in a TEI-XML document of considerable size, is both the basis for the aforementioned rendering and is also enriched by further annotation layers; the second step of the publication process in May 2021 included this reading version of the text with annotations concerning referred to persons and intertexts, interlinked with indexes for both (Annotierte Lesefassung).

Kraus’s style as a writer – Gershom Sholem called it Kraus’s Musivstil (mosaic style; Krolop 1992: 239) – is famed (and in some cases infamous) for its use of quotation. His texts show the widest conceivable range of modes of intertextual reference, from the simple (but never quite simple) verbatim quote to the most subtle Tonfallzitat (ibid: 236), be it marked or unmarked, true to its source or distorted, obvious or elusive, approving or scathing, awestruck or contemptuous. Kraus himself called Dritte Walpurgisnacht ein polemisches Kunstwerk in seinem Reichtum an Satzumschlingung, an Bezügen und Voraussetzungen, denen doch nur der geschulte Leser gewachsen ist (F 890–905: 77). While literary scholars describe the text as surpassing even the pinnacle of the art of quotation, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (Stieg 1999: 421), one translator in his misery has chosen drastic words, describing the Dritte Walpurgisnacht in its abundance of quotations and allusions as total vermint (see ibid: 420; Krolop 1994: 25) – an interesting choice of words, but accurate nevertheless.

Addressing these quotes in the digital edition on the platform Karl Kraus 1933 put forward several challenges, not the least of which was to identify the hundreds of texts alluded to. A lot of research was dedicated to exactly this question in the past decades (see, e.g., Stremmel 1982; Früh 1983, 1984a, 1984b; Krolop 1992), so there was a solid foundation to build upon. Today, the technical conditions for this kind of research are completely different than they were for, e.g., Eckart Früh, Kurt Krolop, or Jochen Stremmel, whose contribution to this field of research cannot be overstated. Building on these results, we incorporated the intertextual relations into the TEI-XML file and added many more references, especially to newspaper articles. In many cases, online accessible full-text corpora proved indispensable resources – most of all the service ANNO by the Austrian National Library, without whose research possibilities the edition would hardly be able to provide as many intertexts as it does. Still, many articles had to be researched by hand in the analog newspaper collections of German and Austrian libraries. However, a certain number of referenced texts remains unidentified.

With regard to the annotated persons, biographical reference works and publications on research topics from this specific period of history were utilized; in many cases, newspapers also proved to be of great use – especially concerning persons unknown today. The project aimed to identify the not well-known or even unknown victims mentioned in the quoted reports as well as the perpetrators among the National Socialists – to do particular justice to the character of the text as a day-to-day record of the seizure of power in events of every size and category. Apart from printed or online sources, the holdings of various archives were among our most important sources for biographical information. However, due to the current health crisis, visits to these archives were in many cases out of the question, and more often than not we had to rely on the generosity of numerous archivists, whose support provided us with invaluable information.

Methodology for and Presentation of Intertextual Relations

Our research into persons and especially intertexts had to be preceded and guided by methodological reflection. Linking a text to entities such as intertexts and persons in the course of a scholarly digital edition is not a trivial task, since there are many ways to go about it – and all of these have their own implications and consequences for the possible readings of the text, all of these ultimately represent interference with the text. One has to account for the fact that linking one text to another in itself creates meaning and constitutes an act of commentary, even interpretation (see, e.g., Groddeck 1993).

I discuss this issue in a little more depth in the opening remarks of Oberreither 2022 [forthcoming].

With regard to the annotation of intertextual relations, we were looking for a concept of intertextuality that would give us the leeway we needed to encompass the wide range of intertextual references mentioned earlier, but at the same time reasonably limit the number of intertexts to be researched and annotated in the document.

Our considerations started off with a generous textualist approach

Moritz Baßler’s ‘textualist’ approach conceptualizes the notion of the ‘cultural archive’ as the synchronous totality of the Dokumente einer gegebenen Kultur: The cultural archive contains (as ‘syntagms’) a culture’s texts, literary and non-literary, interlinked via the paradigmatic axis through equivalence, whereas equivalence corresponds to intertextuality. (See Baßler 2005: 182 et passim)

, the solution we arrived at was narrowed down to simulate a specific historical and geographical context. Inside this context, we disregarded the question of what Kraus ‘might have read’ and simply distinguished between the following:

– Specific identifiable intertexts. In most cases, these intertexts are quoted verbatim, in other cases they are, e.g., mentioned by title. They also include intertexts

Depending on the type of referred to text, we utilized two different notions of ‘text’, meaning: For literary quotes, the reference does not indicate a certain edition, but the abstract ‘work’ embodied in all its editions. Accordingly, these editions in external resources linked to are marked as ‘exemplary’.

the wording of which was distorted or adapted in the course of working them into Dritte Walpurgisnacht. – General intertextual relations. In most cases, intertexts of this category are not quoted verbatim. Instead, this category includes references to texts that are closely related in content to the (mostly up-to-the-day) facts referred to in Dritte Walpurgisnacht. This way, we were able to provide newspaper items as context for, e.g., the myriad of cases of National Socialist aggression Kraus mentions without directly quoting one specific text out of a number of newspaper reports. For this category, we added a geographical/distributional constraint by excluding newspapers that were published outside Vienna and had no supraregional significance (whereby the latter is admittedly a somewhat fuzzy category). – In the course of the work, to also serve important passages that would otherwise stay without intertext, we felt it necessary to add another category: for cases where either the text itself suggests a verbatim quotation and our evidence corresponded only on a topical, not on a literal level, and for cases where the equivalent texts we could find stemmed from one of the newspapers excluded above. These few cases are clearly indicated to the readers (“Berichterstattung z. B. in:” – “Reporting in, e.g.:”).

One benefit of this broad embedding is that though they do not have the validity of an authoritative commentary by far, these articles still provide some context to topics Kraus mostly refers to in a very brief manner.

It must be taken into account that reporting in newspaper articles can be distorted for medial, political, and other reasons – this knowledge, however, is provided by the Dritte Walpurgisnacht itself many times and comprehensively.

Another advantage of this approach is that by providing these intertexts as a whole and by not limiting them to those quoted verbatim, the textual context provided by the edition at the same time serves as a cultural background in a broader sense. This is in line with Sigurd Paul Scheichl’s proposal that, when contextualizing Kraus, it is hardly sufficient to provide the quoted passage itself; instead, Kraus’s texts interact with the whole text, or a whole type of text, or even the entirety of newspapers of a particular era (Scheichl 1997: 287f.). Thus, we simulate a realm of experience for a specific historical, geographical, and, so to speak, medial point in time (for an examination of Dritte Walpurgisnacht in its media context – including radio and cinema – see especially Ganahl 2015, pp. 21–111, also: Ganahl 2008). After all: The observations of German atrocities processed in Dritte Walpurgisnacht could be made as early as 1933, from Vienna, under the conditions of the media landscape of the time, which the text reflects on intensively.

To account for one of the specifics of the media landscape in 1933, the bibliographical references of the intertexts to a high degree mirror the operating method of newspapers to quote each other. This is significant because, after a certain point in time, news from Germany was scarce due to restrictions imposed on journalists and publishers. To account for this lack of direct information, newspapers from other European countries seem to have quoted each other’s reports on Germany more frequently.

This is an educated guess based on the observation that in the twelve months following the emergency decree of February 4, 1933, search hits in ANNO for the terms ‘Manchester Guardian’, ‘Daily Herald’, and ‘Times’ in newspapers such as the Arbeiter-Zeitung or Die Stunde are significantly higher than in the twelve months before (nearly twice as high).

As for the presentation/visualization of intertextual relations, the project aimed at an optimized user experience. To that end, the edition indicates the relation by highlighting the text passage in question. A narrow column in the right margin gives a short and, on click, a long version of the bibliographic information. The latter includes, wherever possible or necessary, additional information and resources (for the TEI-XML, see Fig. 4):

The TEI-XML of an entry in the index of intertexts: Bibliographic information on Benn’s infamous Antwort an die literarischen Emigranten; below the encoding of the newspaper’s facsimile, including the zone-elements linked to the citedRange-elements above. – A digital facsimile of the source, allowing for parallel reading of the referring and the referred to text – with the respective passage in the referred to text highlighted for better orientation. This parallel reading is especially interesting with regard to Kraus’s handling of citation. In particular, the juxtaposition of Social Democrats’ publications and their citation in Dritte Walpurgisnacht is revealing: It shows how Kraus, in order to make his point, does not refrain from distorting his opponents’ words.

This has been noted several times; for an early account see Jaromir [n.d.]: 23; see also Pfabigan 1976: 350, and, more recently, Ganahl 2015, pp. 87–89.

Also, it provides insight into Kraus’s handling of translation and contamination of his sources (for example DW: para. 49, pp. 194f.) and in some cases, it makes apparent the influence of the visual aspect of a printed newspaper page on Dritte Walpurgisnacht. For example, Kraus addresses the layout of newspaper pages, in which editorial content and advertisements collide in unfortunate but, according to Kraus, highly significant ways (see, e.g., DW: para. 24, p. 59). – In other cases, a text passage of the referred to text is quoted to enable the reader to contextualize the quote in Dritte Walpurgisnacht. – Wherever possible, a link leading to an external source was added, providing a digital/facsimile version of the text in question. Among these external sources are renowned resources and large corpora such as ANNO (Austrian National Library), TextGrid Repository (DARIAH-DE), ZEFYS (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin), Internet Archive, Wikisource (Wikimedia foundation), Gallica (Bibliothèque nationale de France), and many others; among the referred to resources more specific for Dritte Walpurgisnacht are Faustedition, Nietzsche Source, Börsenblatt digital (SLUB Dresden), and of course Die Fackel online (ÖAW).

Persons: Selection, Representation, and Historical Focus

As for the annotation of persons, it was our goal to identify as many of the persons mentioned in the text as possible (victims, perpetrators, opportunists, bystanders), including:

– Members of groups – such as [die] Mörder[] von Potempa, where the National Socialists convicted for murdering Konrad Pietrzuch in 1932 in Potempa are listed (see Kluke 1957; see DW: para 63, p. 254). – Lesser (if at all) known persons, wherever they could be identified, even if referred to only by, e.g., their family relation, their occupation, or the events they were involved in.

Compiled under these principles, the index of persons now contains 372 entries.

For example, where Wagenknecht’s index lists the writer Emil Ludwig, the index of Karl Kraus 1933 also lists the German politician Adolf Ludwig with his wife and son, the three of them being referred to as Kind[], Mutter and entflohene[r] Vater in Dritte Walpurgisnacht (DW: para. 60, p. 247; Wagenknecht 2016: 381).

Each entry contains information on birth and death, as well as occupation and party affiliation. If an entry in the Gemeinsame Normdatei exists, its GND identifier was added, to be transformed into a GND-link in the entry’s representation in the app.

However, we refrained from automatically importing biographical information into our edition via APIs provided by various online sources, the reason being a methodological one: Similar to the intertexts, the index of persons was carefully researched

Our research was able to draw on existing findings published, e.g., in biographical encyclopedias and resources such as www.deutsche-biographie.de, www.biographien.ac.at, data.matricula-online.eu, or publications with a historical focus such as Klee 2009, Klee 2007, the grave search on www.volksbund.de, Rothländer 2012, and many more. For an extensive list, see kraus1933.ace.oeaw.ac.at/register.html.

and edited aiming at – to a certain degree – representing a specific point in time: While the first occupation given for each entry is a broad, more general term and does usually cover a longer time span, the additional occupational information is given with a focus on the years around 1933. This takes into account the political shift and the ‘Gleichschaltung’ that more often than not resulted (to put it euphemistically, yet correctly:) in a shift in the lives of the persons listed in our index, oftentimes reflected in a change of occupation.

An example for an entry in the index of persons, showing biographical information with an emphasis on 1933, a link to the GND, and the list of occurrences in Dritte Walpurgisnacht; index entries for intertexts are designed analogously.

Technical Setup

Regarding the Notizen, image files are provided by the WBR via IIIF, the transcription was conducted using Transcribus; Mirador and Jekyll function as the image viewer resp. the site generator.

The Annotierte Lesefassung web application consists of a customized version of the TEI publisher built on top of the XML database eXist-db. This approach has a number of benefits:

– The software is cost-neutral (apart from optional in-depth technical support). – The text is rendered based on ODD files, which contain processing models for the TEI elements and are modeled in TEI themselves, which entails a degree of sustainability. – The TEI publisher app is very low-threshold from a user point of view. It thus also allows for the fast and easy creation of simple, preliminary versions of the text intended for the work process and early proofing.

The image files were annotated using Martin Holmes’ Image Markup Tool, the resulting XMLs transformed in bulk to fit our specifications. Presentation of the images in the app is implemented using OpenSeadragon.

Pending Work

As of March 2022, pending work includes:

– A Commentary: Kraus’s text often refers to the daily events of the year 1933, which was in a state of constant upheaval; at the same time, he establishes connections to past events and developments. Knowledge of these historical events and cultural facts is a prerequisite for a rewarding reading of the text (see also Stremmel 1982: 83). The commentary will be elaborating on passages that for present readers otherwise might remain opaque,

I refer to the notion of secondary opacity as coined by Manfred Fuhrmann (Fuhrmann 1985: 43).

providing the necessary historical and cultural background information, and will be accompanied by a timeline of the events mentioned in the text. – An apparatus integrated into the edited version of the text, indicating the passages printed in 1934 in Die Fackel No. 890–905 and containing the variants Kraus created when reworking the passages. – A combined view of the galley proofs’ facsimiles and a transcription reflecting the text’s genesis as shown on the galley proofs through additions, corrections, and transpositions, adding a document-oriented approach to the edition. – The paralipomena held by WBR (signature: H.I.N.-177195), which contain a passage of five pages that did not make it into the version represented by the galley proofs.

In the course of these tasks, it is very likely that information related to the already published portions of the edition surfaces; accordingly, there will be constant updates of all the edition’s parts, which in this respect can be seen as a work in progress. When finished, we are confident the edition resp. the platform Karl Kraus 1933 will be a valuable and comprehensive resource for Kraus research, granting numerous access points into the text via various textual views and indexes; and at the same time, a well readable and adequately commented version of Dritte Walpurgisnacht, providing every reader with a low-threshold entrance into one of the major works by the most important German-language satirist of the first half of the 20th century.

Sources referred to by abbreviation (all accessed March 14, 2022): DW – Bernhard Oberreither (ed., 2021): Dritte Walpurgisnacht. Annotierte Lesefassung. Available from kraus1933.ace.oeaw.ac.at/annotierte_lesefassung.html. F – Arbeitsstelle österreichische Corpora und Editionen/Austrian Academy Corpus (2007/2019): Die Fackel. Herausgeber: Karl Kraus. Available from fackel.oeaw.ac.at. Sources referred to by URL (all accessed March 14, 2022): www.volksbund.de – Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V.: Gräbersuche online. Available from www.volksbund.de/erinnern-gedenken/graebersuche-online. www.deutsche-biographie.de – Hist. Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und Bayerische Staatsbibliothek: Deutsche Biographie. Available from www.deutsche-biographie.de. www.biographien.ac.at – Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften: Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon. Ed. by Christine Gruber. Available from www.biographien.ac.at. data.matricula-online.eu – ICARUS, International Centre for Archival Research: Matricula-online. Available from data.matricula-online.eu. www.boersenblatt-digital.de – Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden: Börsenblatt digital. Available from www.boersenblatt-digital.de. faustedition.net – Anne Bohnenkamp-Renken, Silke Henke, and Fotis Jannidis (project lead): Faustedition. Available from faustedition.net. www.nietzschesource.org – Nietzsche Source: Digitale Krit. Gesamtausgabe. Werke und Briefe. Hg. v. Paolo D’Iorio [based on the edition by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari]. Available from www.nietzschesource.org. anno.onb.ac.at – Österreichische Nationalbibliothek: ANNO, AustriaN Newspapers Online. Historische österreichische Zeitungen und Zeitschriften online. Available from anno.onb.ac.at. textgridrep.org – DARIAH-DE: Textgrid Repository. Available from textgridrep.org. zefys.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de – Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz: ZEFYS Zeitungsinformationssystem. Available from zefys.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de. archive.org – Internet Archive. Available from archive.org. wikisource.org – Wikimedia Foundation: Wikisource. Available from wikisource.org. gallica.bnf.fr – Bibliothèque nationale de France: Gallica. Available from gallica.bnf.fr. Sources referred to by author and year: Baßler, Moritz (2005): Die kulturpoetische Funktion und das Archiv. Eine literaturwissenschaftliche Text-Kontext-Theorie. Tübingen: Francke. Benn, Gottfried (1933): Antwort an die literarischen Emigranten, in: Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, May 25 1933, pp. 1–2. Blume, Dorlis/Wichmann, Manfred (2015): Chronik 1933. Available from www.dhm.de/lemo/jahreschronik/1933, accessed March 14, 2022. Canetti, Elias (2008): Letter to Georges Canetti from September 13 1934, in: Heinrich Pfäfflin (ed.): Aus großer Nähe. Karl Kraus in Berichten von Weggefährten und Widersachern. Göttingen: Wallstein, pp. 305–307. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari (1977): Rhizom. Transl. Dagmar Berger. Berlin: Merve. Djassemy, Irina (2011): Die verfolgende Unschuld. Zur Geschichte des autoritären Charakters in der Darstellung von Karl Kraus. With a foreword by and edited by Stefan Gandler/Joachim Rauscher/Stephan Bundschuh. Wien/Köln/Weimar: Böhlau. Fischer, Heinrich (1952): Nachwort/Anmerkungen, in: Kraus 1952, pp. 295–309. Früh, Eckart (1983): Dritte Walpurgisnacht und Arbeiter-Zeitung, in: Noch mehr April 1983. Früh, Eckart (1984a): Dokumente zur Dritten Walpurgisnacht, in: Kraus-Hefte, 32, pp. 2–15. Früh, Eckart (1984b): Dokumente zur Dritten Walpurgisnacht, in: Kraus-Hefte, 33, pp. 10–11. Fuhrmann, Manfred (1985): “Kommentierte Klassiker?”, in: Gottfried Honnefelder (ed.): Warum Klassiker? Ein Almanach zur Eröffnung der Bibliothek deutscher Klassiker. Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker-Verlag, pp. 37–57. 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M.: Fischer Taschenbuch. Klee, Ernst (2009): Das Kulturlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945. Revised edition. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch. Kluke, Paul (1957): Der Fall Potempa, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 5/3, pp. 279–297. Available from www.ifz-muenchen.de/heftarchiv/1957_3.pdf, accessed March 14, 2022. Knüchel, Johannes/Langkabel, Isabella (2022): Akte 99 Karl Kraus ca. Völkischer Beobachter (München), in: Johannes Knüchel/Isabel Langkabel (eds.) in collaboration with Laura Untner et al.: Karl Kraus: Rechtsakten der Kanzlei Oskar Samek. Wissenschaftliche Edition. URL: www.kraus.wienbibliothek.at/legalkraus-app/objects/188671, accessed June 15, 2022. Kraus, Karl (1952): Die dritte Walpurgisnacht. Ed. by Heinrich Fischer. München: Kösel. Kraus, Karl (2015): Die dritte Walpurgisnacht. Ed. by Bruno Kern. Wiesbaden: Marix. Kraus, Karl (2016): Dritte Walpurgisnacht. Ed. by. Christian Wagenknecht. 4th edition [1st edition 1989]. 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Tálos, Emmerich (2013): Das austrofaschistische Herrschaftssystem. Österreich 1933–1938. Wien: Lit-Verlag. Timms, Edward (2005): Karl Kraus. Apocalyptic Satirist. The Post-War Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Wagenknecht, Christian (2016): Anhang, in: Kraus 2016, pp. 329–389.