Violent Modernists

Front matter

VIOLENT MODERNISTS

VIOLENT MODERNISTS

The Aesthetics of Destruction in

Contents

Acknowledgments vii List of Abbreviations ix Introduction xi Chapter 1 Modernity, Modernism, and Violence 3 Chapter 2

Causing Violence: Robert Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless and the Path to an Antireductionist Theory of Violence 39

Chapter 3 War, Violence, and the Malleable Self: Robert Musil’s

Postwar Critique of Violence in The Man Without Qualities 75 Chapter 4 Kafka’s Poetics of the Knife: On Violence, Truth, and

Ambivalence in In the Penal Colony 117 Chapter 5 Chemical Warfare and Destructive Satires: Canetti and

Benjamin’s Search for the Murderous Substance of Satire 156 Conclusion 209 Notes 213 Bibliography 235

Index 253

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book took far too long to complete, which is perhaps as it should be. Not remembering to thank someone who had a direct influence on this study will be an unfortunate consequence of such an extended period of writing. Therefore I will acknowledge here my gratitude first of all to this unnamed friend and colleague and hope that not too many individuals will realize that I am speaking of them right now.

Next I thank friends, colleagues, and students, many of them from three institutions in particular: Duke University, Middlebury College, and the University of California, Irvine. The following helped in many conversations to keep the work on this study interesting and stimulating and their generosity of thought has prevented many mistakes from making it onto these pages: Katja Altpeter-Jones, Anke Biendarra, Janelle Blankenship, Robert Buch, Sibylle Fischer, Michael Geisler, Robert Gibson, Roman Graf, Erin Hourigan, Fredric Jameson, Kristen Kramer, Lisa Lee, Glenn Levine, John Lyon, Bob Moller, Alberto Moreiras, Michael Morton, Simona Moti, Kamakshi Murti, Jane Newman, David Pan, Thomas Pfau, Ann Marie Rasmussen, Thomas Saine, Rebecca Schuman, Sumie Song, Mark Southern, Daniel Villanueva, Katrin Volkner, and Ingeborg Walther.

Particular thanks belong to Henry L. Carrigan Jr. at Northwestern University Press. I could not ask for a better editor. Special thanks go to project editor Gianna Mosser.

It is a true pleasure to express my gratitude to five scholars and mentors without whose continued encouragement and support this book would not have been written: Gail Hart, Julia Hell, Ruth Klüger, James Rolleston, and John Smith. I have no doubt that those parts of the following chapters that make good sense owe this quality to their advice. For the rest of the book I take all responsibility.

This book is dedicated to the patience and love of my family and to no one more than Laura Barnebey and Theo Barnebey Evers.

vii

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ABBREVIATIONS

Elias Canetti. Auto-da-Fé. Translated by C. W. Wedgewood. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984.

Franz Kafka. Briefe an Felice. Edited by Erich Heller and Jürgen Born. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1967.

Franz Kafka. Briefe an Milena. Expanded Edition. Edited by Jurgen Born and Michael Miller. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1986.

Robert Musil. Briefe 1901-1942. Edited by Adolf Frisé. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981.

Franz Kafka. The Diaries 1910-1923. Edited by Max Brod. Translated by Joseph Kresh and Martin Greenberg. New York: Schocken Books, 1988.

Robert Musil. Essays und Reden, Kritik. Edited by Adolf Frisé. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978.

Franz Kafka. Amtliche Schriften. Edited by Klaus Hermsdorf and Benno Wagner. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2004.

Franz Kafka. Briefe 1900-1912. Edited by Hans-Georg Koch. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999.

Franz Kafka. Briefe 1900-1912. Edited by Hans-Georg Koch. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2001.

Franz Kafka. Drucke zu Lebzeiten. Edited by Wolf Kittler, Hans-Georg Koch, and Gergard Neumann. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999.

Franz Kafka. Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente I. Edited by Malcom Pasley. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1993.

Franz Kafka. Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II. Edited by Jost Schillemeit. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992.

KKT

LF

LM

MwQ

PS

PuS

VZ

YT

Abbreviations

Franz Kafka. Tagebiicher. Edited by Hans-Georg Koch, Michael Müller, and Malcom Pasley. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990,

Franz Kafka. Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Schocken Books, 1977.

Franz Kafka. Letters to Felice. Edited by Erich Heller and Jürgen Born. Translated by James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth. New York: Schocken Books, 1973.

Franz Kafka. Letters to Milena. Edited by Willy Haas. Translated by Tania and James Stern. New York: Schocken Books, 1953.

Franz Kafka. Metamorphosis and Other Stories. Translated with an introduction by Michael Hofmann. New York: Penguin Books, 2007.

Robert Musil. Der Mann obne Eigenschaften. Edited by Adolf Frisé. 2 vols. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981.

Robert Musil. The Man Without Qualities. Translated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike. 2 vols. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Robert Musil. Precision and Soul. Translated by Burton Pike and David S. Luft. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Robert Musil. Prosa und Stücke. Kleine Prosa, Aporismen, Autobiographisches. Edited by Adolf Frisé. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1978.

Robert Musil. Tagebücher. Edited by Adolf Frisé. 2 vols. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1983.

Robert Musil. Prosa und Stücke. Kleine Prosa, Aporismen, Autobiographisches. Edited by Adolf Frisé. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978.

Robert Musil. The Confusions of Young Törless. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. New York: Penguin, 2001.

Introduction

From Homer to Dante and Tolstoy to Cormac McCarthy, detailed descriptions of war, murder, and punishment are at the center of the most revered works of Western literature. Few topics could claim a literary tradition as long and continuous as the representation of physical violence. Few topics remain more controversial. Does the human capacity for violence and destruction pose a greater or smaller risk today than ever before? Two recent studies by renowned scholars in their respective fields take the long view of human history and come to diametrically opposed conclusions. The experimental psychologist Steven Pinker (2011) presents statistics and scientific evidence to support his thesis that human history is a history of the decline of violence. The sociologist Robert Bellah fails to see such progress in human evolution, and arrives at the following risk assessment:

Of course we may well blow each other up with atomic weapons before we wipe out all species of life, including our own, by more gradual means. |... .] If there is one primary practical intent in a work like this that deals with the broadest sweep of biological and cultural evolution, it is that the hour is late: it is imperative that humans wake up to what is happening and take the necessarily dramatic steps that are so clearly needed but also at present so clearly ignored by the powers of this earth. (2011, 602)

Not surprisingly, the question of whether and how violence and destruction should be represented stands at the core of literary controversies as well. This is particularly true for German modernism, for the most demanding literary texts written at the time and place when and where much of the twentieth-century mass violence originated.' When W. G. Sebald questioned Döblin’s standing as one of Europe’s great modernists, he accused the author of Berlin Alexanderplatz and Wallenstein of exhibiting fascist tendencies in his recurrent depictions of violence (1980, 160). When Karl Heinz Bohrer sought to establish Ernst Jünger as one of the few truly modernist writers, he based his argument on Jünger’s xi xii Introduction portrayals of shock and terror (1978). Helmut Lethen applauds the authors of the militant avant-garde during the 1920s for their ability to confront directly the violent historical changes of their time. In the same breath, he mocks the supposedly more fragile modernist writers for their inability to bear a closer look at violence. Lethen mentions in particular Hofmannsthal, Mann, and Musil, and claims that German and Austrian modernists could “endure the process of historical acceleration only from a healthy distance” (2002, 6).

What then is the relationship between violence and modernism, except contentious? Two highly influential responses to this question have been given. Neither of them brings into focus the innovative quality and central importance of violence for writers like Kafka or Musil. The first response is offered by literary historians from Paul Fussell to Modris Eksteins. They claim that modernism, especially German modernism, is born out of the violence of World War I. The war is understood as Urkatastrophe that directed German modernism toward an aesthetics of destruction, a development that culminated in the fascist aesthetics of the Third Reich. In other words, they make the same reductionist teleological claim for German modernism that Siegfried Kracauer made for Weimar cinema in his tellingly titled study From Caligari to Hitler (1947). In Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Eksteins insists that the “Great War was the psychological turning point, for Germany and for modernism as a whole. The urge to create and the urge to destroy changed places. The urge to destroy was intensified; the urge to create became increasingly abstract. In the end the abstraction turned to insanity and all that remained was destruction, Götterdämmerung” (1989, 328).

At first sight, it is imminently plausible that the war that caused in its first months numbers of casualties that are still shocking and introduced tanks, machine guns, trenches, aerial attacks, and chemical weapons into modern warfare should have left a deep impact on the literary representations of violence. But the relationship between the war and modernist literature is less linear and more complex. The construction of a causal relationship between the experience of the First World War, the rise of modernist literature, and its preoccupation with destruction as a harbinger of fascist politics and aesthetics does not hold up to scrutiny. Chronology contradicts Eksteins’s sequence of events. The supposed effect preceded its cause by at least one decade. Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Walser, Musil, and Döblin published paradigmatic modernist texts well before the war, and these novels, stories, and poems exhibit an intense interest in representing physical violence. Historical research on the war experi-

Introduction xiii ence undermines further the popular assessment of the war as a modernist Urkatastrophe. This research fails to confirm Eksteins’s narrative of a cultural breakdown caused by the war and detects far more continuity and even a strengthening of tradition in German postwar society and culture. An additional challenge has to be directed against the telos of Eksteins’s narrative. Eksteins echoes the Lukácsian idea that German modernism leads up to a fascist aesthetics. Such narrative does not account for most German modernist writers: not for Rilke or Musil, Kafka or Mann, Canetti or Brecht. The suggestion of a causal relationship between historical violence and modernist literature provokes doubts instead of delivering answers.

The second main thesis on the relationship between German modernism and violence is less historically and more theoretically inspired. Even though it often aligns itself with the historical argument, usually invoking Benjamin’s observation that the war generation underwent a fundamental crisis of experience that led to the demise of traditional storytelling, this second account does not require it. In recent years literary theorists and historians like Peter Bürger, Andreas Huyssen, and Helmuth Lethen have expanded significantly Adorno’s narrow canon of modernist literature. These new readings supplemented the notion of modernist literature with that of a fascist modernism and a militant avant-garde. But the attention paid to writers like Ernst Jünger or Gottfried Benn or to the avant-garde authors of the new sobriety creates an oversimplified, pacified account of modernism. As I argue in the first chapter, these innovative and influential rereadings of modernist literature presuppose distinctly different stances toward physical violence that reduce “proper” modernism’s interest in violence almost exclusively to explorations of suffering and victimization.

The introduction of the fascist modernist, the modernist tempted by the promise of violence, and the daring avant-gardist, the author willing to embrace destruction to create the utopia of a new man and a new society, are accompanied by accounts of “proper” modernists like Kafka, Musil, or Rilke who either don’t dare to come too close to violent phenomena, as Lethen suggested, or whose fascination with violence is supposed to be restricted to masochistic self-wounding but never by an endorsement of violence against others. The idea of an opposition between a high modernism on the side of nonaggression and a fascist modernism and a militant avant-garde on the side of destruction produces a convenient notion of modernism that fails to recognize some of the most challenging and innovative aspects of German modernism. Rather than debating whether Jünger should be considered a modernist, as Berman xiv Introduction

(1989) and Huyssen (1995) do in their opposing arguments, or dismissing Döblin’s representations of violence as guilty of fascist ideology, as Sebald proposed, this study analyzes the aggressive probing of violence by German modernists, in particular Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, and Elias Canetti.

The purpose of this study is not to collect and analyze the violent fantasies of German modernism and to produce a modernist version of Theweleit’s inquiry into the (proto-)fascist imagination. Similarly, the following chapters do not pursue the echoes of Nietzsche’s call for the “the barbarians of the twentieth century” that reverberate throughout the writings of the militant avant-garde of the Weimar Republic and are so audible in contemporary theory (Nietzsche 1988, 13:18).* The longing for the “new barbarian,” as Benjamin called him, and this barbarian’s work of destruction remains a powerful and terrifying concept. It recurs in many contemporary theoretical projects, including Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000, 212-18) or Zizek’s defense of “the properly leftist project of emancipatory rage” (2008, 187). As important as it would be to retrace the German roots of Zizek’s attempt to “rehabilitate the notion of resentment” (189) in which killing can become an act of mercy—and besides Brecht and Benjamin, Zizek refers to Sebald and Amery’—the present study is more interested in modernist reflections on violence that challenge the avant-garde’s glorification of violence and catastrophe as necessary steps and stages toward a new man and a new society. While the avant-garde continues to demand that the “multitude, in its will to be-against and its desire for liberation, must push through Empire to come out the other side” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 218), the modernist writers in this study came to doubt that war and revolution could bring about fundamental sociopolitical change. They began to question their own initial assumption that violence functions as a means to reach this “other side.”

These modernists cannot be distinguished from the militant avant-garde (or the fascist modernists) by their supposed distance from or rejection of violence. Their vast majority welcomed the First World War. The aggressive stance in favor of violent action was not limited to this critical moment in twentieth-century history. As I argue in my reading of Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless, both the novel’s narrator and its protagonist justify physical violence, rape, and the humiliation of others in their own search for the “other side.” What distinguishes the authors discussed in this study from the militant avant-garde and from fascist modernists is something other than a clear-cut opposition to violent action. While the texts of the avant-garde and of fascist modernism

Introduction xv tend to conceptualize violence as a means to establish a new society, the modernist texts at the center of this study question such a reductionist approach to violence and reflect on the phenomenon of violence itself. They challenge the widely accepted premise that violence should be approached and understood as an instrument.

Representations of physical violence are not only at the center of German modernist writings, but these writings also belong among the most innovative investigations of violence undertaken in the twentieth century. Musil’s, Kafka’s, and Canetti’s examinations of physical violence and its impact on our conceptions of the self, of language and communication, and of history and society deserve to be discovered as the sites of some of the most insightful and provocative reflections of the role of violence in modernity. To recognize the centrality and the complexity of these modernist responses to violence, it is necessary to perform close readings and to pay attention to the specific historical context of these literary texts. Only during such intense readings does one begin to recognize the full aesthetic and epistemological potential of these canonical modernist texts.

Since this approach sets strict limitations on the number of authors and texts that can be analyzed in a single volume, the choice of literary works becomes all the more important. Why two chapters on Robert Musil but none on Thomas Mann or Alfred Döblin? Why Franz Kafka and not Robert Walser or Hugo von Hofmannsthal? Why Elias Canetti and not Hans Henny Jahnn or Heimito von Doderer? And what about Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan George, Else Lasker- Schüler, Karl Kraus, Anna Seghers, Veza Canetti, and Hermann Broch? The presence of two chapters on Musil is not meant to suggest that Musil is twice as important as Kafka and infinitely more significant than the absent Thomas Mann. These two chapters do not argue for Mann’s (or Broch’s) irrelevance but for Robert Musil’s unique contributions to an understanding of violent phenomena. The first chapter on The Confusions of Young Törless makes the second chapter on The Man Without Qualities necessary, because only after the First World War did Musil fully appreciate the challenge posed in his first novel by the figure of Basini and his experience of humiliation, rape, and torture. Musil recognized after the war that Basini’s malleable self was no rare exception, as The Confusions of Young Törless suggested, but a widely observable phenomenon. Musil’s The Man Without Qualities becomes a continuation and revision of his first literary exploration of the experience of violence, the self, and history. Once one reads these two novels as Musil’s sustained attempt to rethink violence, the originality of Musil’s antireductionist reflections on violence xvi Introduction emerges. While the choice of Franz Kafka and his story In the Penal Colony might be the least controversial—even though the actual reading goes against all prevalent interpretations of this central modernist text—this choice does not imply that a reading of Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten or Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge could not provide different but similarly significant examinations of violence in German modernism. There is no single modernist response to violence, and only if the following chapters on Musil, Kafka, Benjamin, and Canetti demonstrate the range, depth, and innovations of these modernist reflections on violence, only if these readings offer new insights into these literary texts themselves, is the concentration on these particular writers justified.

The first chapter analyzes the relationships between theories of modernity, violence, and German modernism. I argue that the question of violence is at the center of German modernist literature. In contrast to the French, English, or Russian literary histories, this focus on physical violence distinguishes modernism from realism in the German tradition. In stark opposition to the German realist literature of the second half of the nineteenth century, the works of modernists like Rilke and Walser or Musil and Canetti are just as filled with images of violence as the films of Murnau, Lang, and Pabst, or the works of more popular writers like Zweig, Roth, and Kellermann. The emergence of modernism and a new fascination with previously marginalized violent and pathological acts occurred simultaneously in the German tradition. The significance of these representations of violence for German modernism has been obscured by predominant theories of modernity that preferred not to acknowledge the centrality of violence in modernity. The dominance of such theories enabled and supported equally pacified constructions of German modernism. I argue that literary-historical and theoretical reflections on the relationship between violence and modernity, in particular those regarding the influence of World War I on postwar literature and culture, continue to follow untenable assumptions. With the help of historical research on the war experience, I show that the widely accepted narrative of a breakdown of culture and a collapse of tradition during World War I and an ensuing crisis of experience underestimates the continuity of social institutions and traditions. This narrative as it has been introduced, expanded, and refined by theorists from Freud to Arendt and from Benjamin to Agamben is of limited descriptive value for an understanding of the war’s impact on its participants and the representation of violence in modernist literature. The other metanarrative on the relation between modernity and violence, a story that Nobert Elias developed in The Civilizing Process (1939) and that Pinker endorsed enthusiastically

Introduction xvii in his recent study, calling Elias “the most important thinker you have never heard of” (Pinker 2011, 59), avoids the idea of catastrophe and collapse entirely and speaks instead of the decline of violence in modernity. These competing narratives of cultural breakdown and of a disappearance of violence in modernity share a disinterest in looking more closely at violent phenomena. As I argue in the chapters on Musil, Kafka, Benjamin, and Canetti, modernist literature investigates the complexities of violence and its effects on the self and society in such detail and with a reflective ingenuity that the metanarratives of modernity are lacking.

The argument of this study goes therefore much further than claiming that Musil, Kafka, and Canetti validate acts of violence and the harming of others in their fiction. Violent acts against others are at the center of their literary and aesthetic experiments, and these authors offer unique insights into our limited understanding of violence, the self, and the experience of modernity, and the challenges to perceive and to communicate new risk situations that threaten the continued existence of modern societies—insights that are rarely found in the surprisingly narrow scope of current theories of violence. The task of my readings of Musil, Kafka, and Canetti is therefore not only to demonstrate how provocative and often disturbing their different approaches to violence remain, but to discover their works as some of the most insightful reflections on violence the twentieth century produced.

Chapter 2 opens the argument for Robert Musil as the not-yetacknowledged expert on violence in German modernism. Musil’s analyses of violence afford the reader the opportunity to perceive the full scope of modernist responses to violence. In contrast to previous readings of his first novel, I examine The Confusions of Young Törless (1906) as a novel of violence. Musil’s early masterpiece of German modernism presents and confronts several traditional theories of violence, sacrifice, and suffering. Musil’s novel rationalizes the use of violence against others—gendered and constructed as the perverse other—as necessary acts to complete the main protagonists aesthetic education. As a representation of the perverse, The Confusions of Young Törless barely moves beyond conveying homophobic anxieties about the effeminate boy. Rather than analyzing the perverse—as the novel’s narrator, Törless, and Musil in his prewar essays repeatedly proclaim to do—the novel constructs Basini, the effeminate boy, as a legitimate target of physical violence and humiliation. Despite such validation of violence against the marginalized other, the novel moves eventually into uncharted territory in its reflections on violence and the self. In apparent agreement with recent theories on the effects of torture and humiliation on the self (Elaine xviii Introduction

Scarry and Richard Rorty), Torless expects to gain insight into the mechanics of the individual’s identity by breaking it. He anticipates that every victim holds certain core beliefs whose forced renunciation would render futile any future efforts to reconstruct his or her self-narrative as a coherent and plausible narrative. Against Torless’s expectations and Rorty’s and Scarry’s predictions, Basini’s experience of torture defies these assumptions. Violence subverts its use as an instrument and, more important, the self does not shatter into pieces when exposed to physical violence and humiliation. Nothing seems more absurd and frightening to Törless and the novel’s narrator than the observation that the experience of physical violence might not produce lasting observable effects on the self. In Basini’s response to the violence and humiliation he is forced to suffer, Musil approaches for the first time the notion of a malleable self. This malleable self does not follow the trajectory of the bildungsroman according to which “each soul has to perfect its own possibilities into reality,” as Musil still expected while writing The Confusions of Young Torless (Musil 1983, 161). Instead, the malleable self lacks a stable core and adapts without apparent harm to the most extreme circumstances. Although the question of the malleable self is left unresolved in Musil’s first novel, its challenge to our understanding of the effects of violence on the self is one of its major achievements and sets the stage for Musil’s postwar reflection on war, violence, and society.

In contrast to his prewar writings, Musil, after Germany’s defeat, no longer defends violent action and stops considering it as an effective means to an end. Musil continues, however, to acknowledge the omnipresent possibility that violent action will occur in modern society, and he took seriously its tempting promise to generate an experience of unity and clarity for its citizens. Reversing Lethen’s distinction between modernists and members of the avant-garde vis-a-vis violence, I argue in the third chapter that Musil’s continued interest in the malleability of the self, combined with his antireductionist approach to violence, allows him to reconsider the role of violence in modernity while the avantgarde’s functionalist theories of the self (Brecht, Jiinger, Benjamin) remain captive to more simplified views of violence. The malleable self is in Musil’s postwar writings not anymore a notion too absurd and frightening to entertain but a ubiquitous phenomenon of wartime and postwar society. The malleable self’s experiences of violence led Musil to rethink the function of causation and progress in history. Acts of violence can no longer be approached from their purported function as means to an end. By intending to explore the causes of World War I in a world that defied the idea of causation, Musil’s revised analysis of violence moved

Introduction XIX to the center of his postwar writings and their modernist aesthetics and can be best understood in comparison to the antireductionist theory of violence proposed by the sociologist Heinrich Popitz (1925-2002). Musils engagement with war and violence structures his masterpiece of European modernism, The Man Without Qualities, and its theories of the self, emotion, and history and discloses Musil as one of the most original thinkers of war and violence in the twentieth century.

The fourth chapter offers a reading of the most renowned representation of violence in modernist literature, Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony (written 1914, published 1919). As I argue, Kafka’s position toward power, war, and violence is far more ambivalent than generally acknowledged. Focusing on these ambivalences leads to insights into Kafka’s writings and to a more complex understanding of the relationship between German modernism and violence. Even though almost all readings of In the Penal Colony depend on it, the question of the reliability of the story’s central source of information, the officer, judge, and executioner, is rarely raised and even less often answered. In contrast to previous readings of this story, I argue that the officer is a figure of ambivalence, belonging to both the new and the old orders, someone who defends and mistrusts the lethal workings of the apparatus. Because of the officer’s position of radical ambivalence, the story’s structure mirrors Kafka’s most radical reflection on his poetics of the two-edged sword, what I call his poetics of the knife. Neither the expectation of finding truth and justice through the execution apparatus nor its frustration should be taken as the story’s meaning. In models of direct and indirect communication, Kafka deconstructs in his story the equation of pain and truth, but at the same time he is unwilling to renounce the cutting, never abandoning the hope that torture and violence could force the right word to be uttered. We are left with the repetitions of gestures of radical ambivalence from one level of the story to the other. Correspondingly, Kafka refuses with this story to choose between the (misleading) alternative between realist storytelling and modernist description, as readers from Lukács to Scherpe have claimed. Never allowing for a decision between such alternatives, the story collapses and disintegrates like the apparatus at its center. With In the Penal Colony Kafka neither renounces the promise of violence nor adheres to it but exemplifies his poetics of indecision.

This study moves in its final chapter from a poetics of indecision to a poetics of destruction and concludes with two strange pairings: Walter Benjamin and Elias Canetti as well as satire and the new risks of chemical warfare. In response to the employment of poison gas during the war and in anticipation of ever more advanced technologies of mass xx Introduction death, Benjamin and Canetti recognized that these new weapons posed radically different challenges to perception and imagination. They both searched for ways that would enable the public imagination to perceive the destructive potential of such triumphs of modernization. And they both turned to the genre of satire and developed new models of what I call destructive satire. Benjamin and Canetti reached, however, rather different conclusions regarding the destructive potential of modernist literature. In his essay on Karl Kraus, Benjamin proposes such a radical reconsideration of satire that it turns into an apologia for indiscriminate physical destruction. His theory of satire is tied to a politics of destruction that is at risk of losing sight of any limits to its advocacy of political violence.

Canetti’s practice of satire, primarily in his novel Auto-da-Fé (completed 1931, published 1935), is more subversive, extremely focused, but also strangely aimless. In contrast to Benjamin, Canetti pronounces no end to communicable experience, storytelling, or the role of tradition per se but he develops a model of satire that communicates indirectly and harmfully with its audience. After the war and in anticipation of another man-made disaster, Canetti’s satire presupposes no longer that the satirist and his audience share a common set of values, as theorists and practitioners of satire from Schiller and Hegel to Kastner and Tucholsky have assumed. The only common ground that Canetti’s satire presupposes is the very ground it seeks to destroy: the reader’s preconceived notions of reality, from misogynist and racist stereotypes to class and educational prejudices. Canetti’s satire does not already suffocate on the poison gas of future chemical attacks, as he claimed for Broch and his novels. And it does not deal directly with the destructive potentials of modernization. The destructive force of Canetti’s satire is aimed at the reader’s preconceived notions of reality to prepare a catastrophic imagination that might not blind itself to new methods and technologies of destruction. The fifth chapter does not provide a comprehensive reading of Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé but seeks to understand the principles and structure of his destructive satire. Rather than providing an answer as to whether modernism’s most daring experiment with a destructive aesthetics failed or succeeded, these readings of Benjamin and Canetti invite the reader to explore the outer limits of modernism’s experiments with an aesthetic of violence.