Heinrich Fischer, the editor of the new edition of Sittlichkeit und Kriminalitiit [Morals and Criminality], says in his postscript that no book by Karl Kraus is more relevant today than this one, published almost sixty years ago. This is the pure truth. For all the talk to the contrary, nothing has changed in the fundamental stratum of bourgeois society. It has walled itself off malevolently as though it were indeed eternal and existed by natural law the way its ideology used to assert that it did. It will not be talked out of its hardening of the heart-without which the National Socialists could not have murdered millions of people undisturbed-any more than it will be talked out of the domination of human beings by the exchange principle, which is the basis for that subjective hardening. The need to punish what ought not to be punished becomes flagrant. In Kraus diagnosis, the judiciary, with the obduracy of sound popular sentiment, arrogates to itself the right to defend nonexistent rights, even where by this time the majority of the representatives of scholarship and science no longer subscribe to things which in the earlier years of the century only a few psychologists like Freud and William Stern-whom Kraus praised for it at the "time——dared to attack. The more adroitly ongoing social injustice conceals itself under the unfree equality of compulsory consumers, the happier it is to bare its teeth in the domain of unsanctioned sexuality and let those who have been successfully homogenized know that the social order is serious about not letting itself be trifled with.
展开
