Through the generosity of the late Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, the Thammasat University Library has acquired some important books of interest for students of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) studies, political science, literature, and related fields.

They are part of a special bequest of over 2800 books from the personal scholarly library of Professor Benedict Anderson at Cornell University, in addition to the previous donation of books from the library of Professor Anderson at his home in Bangkok. These items are shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.

Among them are books useful for TU students interested in literature, European history, philosophy, and related subjects. They are shelved in the Fiction section of the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room in the Pridi Banomyong Library.

They include Half-Truths & One-and-a-half Truths by Karl Kraus.

Karl Kraus was a satirist, essayist, playwright and poet. He targeted the press, German culture, and German and Austrian politics.

The TU Library collection includes a number of other books by and about Karl Kraus. 

The Austrian author Stefan Zweig once called Kraus “the master of venomous ridicule.”

Here are some examples of observations by Karl Kraus:

• When someone has behaved like an animal, he says: ‘I’m only human!’ But when he is treated like an animal, he says: ‘I’m human, too!’

 

• War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that the enemy too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.

 

• There are people who can never forgive a beggar for their not having given him anything.

 

• Do not learn more than you absolutely need to get through life.

 

• I have often been asked to be fair and view a matter from all sides. I did so, hoping something might improve if I viewed all sides of it. But the result was the same. So I went back to viewing things only from one side, which saves me a lot of work and disappointment. For it is comforting to regard something as bad and be able use one’s prejudice as an excuse.

 

• Hate must make a person productive; otherwise one might as well love.

 

• The real truths are those that can be invented.

 

• Education is what most people receive, many pass on, and few have.

 

• How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.

 

• Women at least have elegant dresses. But what can men use to cover their emptiness?

 

• The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people meaner.

 

• Solitude would be an ideal state if one were able to pick the people one avoids.

 

• There is no doubt that a dog is loyal. But does that mean we should follow his example? After all, he is loyal to people, not to other dogs.

 

• An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half.

 

• The secret of the demagogue is to appear as dumb as his audience so that these people can believe themselves as smart as he.

 

• The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater the distance from which it looks back.

 

• In literary work I find enjoyment, and literary enjoyment becomes work for me. To enjoy the work of another mind, I must first take a critical attitude toward it— transform reading, that is, into work. For which reason I shall more easily and gladly write a book than read one.

 

• A plagiarist should be made to copy the author a hundred times.

 

• Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune tellers to metaphysics.

 

• Journalism only seems to be serving the present. In reality it destroys the intellectual receptivity of posterity.

 

• A journalist is stimulated by a deadline. He writes worse when he has time.

 

• A historian is not always a prophet facing backwards, but a journalist is always someone who afterwards knew everything beforehand.

 

• In a hollow head there is much room for knowledge.

 

• The ugliness of our time has retroactive force.

 

• If you wish to form a clear judgement of your friends, consult your dreams.

Not every reader has been an admirer of Kraus. The philosopher Walter Kaufmann, whose books are in the TU Library collection, once wrote:

Kraus was above all an arbiter of taste, but his literary judgment was undistinguished. He considered himself an incomparably greater writer than he was, and his megalomania often becomes tedious. He failed to recognize the best writers of his time, largely ignored Kafka and Rilke, denigrated Stefan George and Hofmannsthal, quite failed to recognize Freud’s genius, and in 1922 proclaimed Else Lasker-Schüler and Peter Altenberg the greatest German writers of the last fifty years!..

In 1921 Kraus wrote of Nietzsche: “He was untimely and thirty years ahead of his time. Now he is timely; in twenty years not one sentence of his will survive.”

Kraus’s judgment was warped by his violent prejudices… Kraus was not a shining example of intellectual integrity, as Allan Janik keeps suggesting in Wittgenstein’s Vienna. It has often been remarked how Kraus demolished those he despised by simply quoting them. But in a recent study of Kraus’s attack on Heine, Mechthild Borries shows how “the insidiousness of this procedure…depends on mutilations that falsify the meaning. The effectiveness of this method is magnified by the satirical technique that emphasized some quoted words by using italics. Thus the original is supposed to stand revealed as a satire of itself…. Since Kraus is convinced that for him ‘in art…one line reveals the whole personality,’  he has no scruples about saving himself the trouble of acquainting himself with the whole work. What misinterpretations can result from this procedure is shown by the following examples….” The author goes on to furnish convincing illustrations of Kraus’s utter lack of scruple in his attack on Heine, before concluding: “That Kraus did not deceive himself about the dubiousness of this way of quoting is shown by his panic fear lest this weapon…might be turned against himself.” Thus he insisted in self-defense: “They take what suits them…. The organic whole from which the part was torn is then no longer recognizable…by omissions one can turn a platitude into a thought, but also a thought into a platitude….”

Finally, one gains the impression from some of Kraus’s admirers that his peers looked up to him, and that the greatest spirits of the age, at least in Vienna, considered themselves his disciples. Janik says this repeatedly. But although Janik quotes Robert Musil again and again, often at great length, to show us what Vienna was like, Janik never mentions, any more than Heller, that in Musil’s diaries Kraus is mentioned frequently, but never favorably. 

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)