COVER TO COVER

KEEP THE FIRE BURNING: SÉLAVY IN CONVERSATION WITH KARL KRAUS

September 24, 2025

A century late to his own appointment, Karl Kraus still manages to dominate the table. He sits across from Madame Sélavy in a café outside of time, arguing fire versus embers, authorship versus anonymity, the duel versus the whisper.

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A Narrator: It begins in a café somewhere else, some other time. A place that should not exist. Not because of the décor—all heavy wood and tarnished brass, the kind of place where time refuses to accelerate—but because of the clientele. At one corner table, Karl Kraus (1874–1936), dressed as if the Habsburg monarchy had never fallen, eyes the room as though looking for a grammatical error. Opposite him sits Madame Sélavy, wearing the kind of expression that is itself a disguise: You suspect she knows more than she will ever admit.

This is a meeting across a century. In 1899 Herr Kraus founded “Die Fackel” (The Torch), a Vienna-based journal of merciless satire and cultural criticism, edited and written almost entirely alone until he died in 1936. His prose was a weapon, aimed at politicians, journalists, generals, even fellow writers, and sharpened to the point where it could cut reputations in half.

Madame Sélavy is no one and everyone, an editorial presence with dozens of aliases, a journal built to resist the cult of personality. It speaks in many voices, sometimes contradictory, always deliberate. The name itself is a mask—Marcel Duchamp’s “Rrose Sélavy” with the “Rrose” plucked off, an homage and a mutation.

The question before us is simple enough: What happens when two writers meet across a gap of a hundred years, both writing in times of political decay, but in radically different worlds? One thrived on confrontation; the other thrives on ambiguity.

The coffee is bitter. The conversation begins.

Act I—The Mask and the Voice

Herr Kraus: So, you write. Dozens of names. In my day, the scandal was standing by your errors, letting your name be dragged through the street, preferably by its heels, by your enemies. Masks were for the stage, or for men in hiding from the police.

Madame Sélavy: And yet, you used pseudonyms. Ein Gegner, Ein Patriot.

Herr Kraus: Theatrical devices, nothing more. Anyone with a subscription knew it was me. The syntax gave it away. The mask was there to change the lighting, not the actor. I didn’t hide; I multiplied my angles.

Madame Sélavy: I multiply, too, but without the anchor of a single public self. A piece signed by “Adrienne Mornay” feels different from one by “Otto Knapp.” Multiplicity frees the reader from the gravity of the author’s biography. They can’t lean on the shortcut of personality; they must engage with the words as if the words arrived from nowhere. Anyway. It is not important.

A Narrator: Here Herr Kraus leans back, as if physically recoiling from the idea of “arriving from nowhere.” He is, after all, the man who once declared that his enemies “knew where to find him” because his address was printed in “Die Fackel.” His sense of responsibility was architectural. You put your name on the building, and you live in it, however often the windows are broken by thrown stones.

Before the monologues, before Die Fackel, already glaring at the century to come.

Herr Kraus: A text without an author is like a dagger without a handle. You might admire its blade, but who will you blame for the wound?

Madame Sélavy: Blame was a reflex in your time; interpretation is ours. You had centralized newspapers, state-controlled radio, a handful of magazines. We have a billion feeds and no editors. If we stand out too much as individuals, we are absorbed into the economy of self-branding, and the work becomes just another commodity.

Herr Kraus: Branding—the cattle mark of your so-called democracy. I see the trap, but anonymity risks something worse: dilution. Your Adrienne and your Otto may be charming, but do they sharpen each other, or blunt each other’s force?

Madame Sélavy: They create a chorus. Not every truth needs a single herald.

Herr Kraus: And yet a chorus without a conductor is just noise. You speak of “freeing the reader” from personality, but personality is not always a prison. Sometimes it’s the lighthouse that guides the reader to shore.

A Narrator: Kraus’s metaphor is apt. In the first decades of the twentieth century, he was a fixed light in a darkening sea. “Die Fackel” was read as much for his style as for his targets. His sentences were structures in which thought could live. But Madame Sélavy is speaking from another geography entirely—one where visibility itself can be a liability, where the glare of constant exposure erodes meaning.

Madame Sélavy: A lighthouse is useful when the shoreline is stable. Our world is tectonic. The coastlines shift daily. Multiplicity mirrors the battlefield.

Herr Kraus: Then perhaps we are not so different. I, too, adapted my voice to the terrain, but I never surrendered the self that wielded it. A blade split into too many shards becomes dust, and dust, however clever, never draws blood.

A Narrator: Here, there is the faintest smile from Madame Sélavy—not of agreement, but of recognition. The blade-and-dust image is pure Kraus: theatrical, memorable, slightly unfair, but difficult to shake.

A stare strong enough to file libel suits. The kind of look that turns whole newspapers to ash.

Act II—Subtlety vs. the Scalpel

A Narrator: The waiter replaces their cups. Herr Kraus hasn’t touched his coffee. Madame Sélavy has been sipping as if to test whether the bitterness changes with time. It hasn’t. The room has filled with a hum of conversations in languages that do not exist. In this café, they do.

Herr Kraus: You speak as if subtlety were a virtue in itself. But what good is a whispered truth in a room already full of whispers?

Madame Sélavy: It depends on the listener. Not all ears respond to the shout. Some require the seed to be planted quietly, to grow unnoticed until it changes the ground beneath them.

Herr Kraus: A fine metaphor. But I prefer my ground scorched. Die Fackel did not sow; it seared. In Vienna, subtlety was the mask hypocrisy wore to dinner. I stripped it away.

A Narrator: He is not exaggerating. Herr Kraus’s columns were a kind of social X-ray. bureaucrats, editors, generals—exposed in print until their reputations were skeletons. His prose did not invite; it cornered.

Madame Sélavy: We do not live in Vienna. We live in a hall of mirrors where outrage is a commodity. Shouting often feeds the spectacle it hopes to destroy.

Herr Kraus: So you refuse the duel?

Madame Sélavy: We change the terms. A duel assumes two combatants in one arena. Our opponent is dispersed: in the feed, in the algorithm, in the casual cruelty of comment threads, in the bureaucratic blandness that signs death warrants. To strike directly is to risk becoming just another act in the theater of noise.

Herr Kraus: Then what is your weapon?

Madame Sélavy: Collage. The slow build of pattern recognition in a reader’s mind. We leave space for them to assemble the indictment.

A Narrator: It is unclear whether “we” means a literal editorial staff or something more metaphysical—an assembly of selves, fictional or otherwise. Madame Sélavy’s voice carries the composure of someone accustomed to leaving a trail, but not a fingerprint.

Herr Kraus: I see the seduction of your method. But a trial without a prosecutor can end without a verdict.

Madame Sélavy: Or it can leave the verdict in the reader’s hands, where it belongs.

A Narrator: The tension between them is almost architectural. Herr Kraus builds with stone blocks: declarative sentences, fortified positions. Madame Sélavy prefers scaffolding—structures that can be dismantled, reconfigured, moved to another site entirely.

Act III—The Custodian

Herr Kraus: In my time, the world was not merely unkind—it was sharpened to a point. Empires collapsing, the guns of the Great War still warm, politics conducted like knife fights in an alley. A false word could ruin you; a true one could end you.

Madame Sélavy: And you think ours is gentler? We have no trenches, perhaps, but the field is everywhere. The violence is more diffuse—in the air, in the wires, in the eyes that never look away. A person can be destroyed before breakfast, and by lunch it’s as if they never existed. War has changed shape. It slips through borders and screens. Natural disasters arrive with the speed of news alerts, each one another crack in the floor we stand on. And over it all, the quiet advance of machines learning to think—or to mimic thinking—faster than we can decide what they should know.

Herr Kraus: Then your world is as brutal as mine, only it smiles while it strikes.

Oskar Kokoschka’s portrait of Herr Kraus: drawn as if mid-argument, because Kraus never truly stopped. Even his hands look like editorials.

Madame Sélavy: Which is why culture is not a luxury, but the last form of armor. Not to escape the brutality, but to remain human inside it. Without it, we are only the blows we take and the blows we give.

Herr Kraus: And with it?

Madame Sélavy: With it, we survive long enough to remember. And remembering is the first act of resistance. In our world, ambiguity is not weakness, but the dagger. Absurdity keeps us sane. A small measure of anarchy reminds us that systems are only as permanent as our obedience to them. We do not hunt for a position to defend; we live in the in-between, where dogmas dissolve and ideas can breathe.

Herr Kraus: I would have never taken you for such a hopeless romantic.

A Narrator: Outside, the street tilts toward dusk. In here, the lights stay at the same level, indifferent to hours. The conversation shifts away from tactics, toward the question of purpose.

Herr Kraus: So tell me, what do you hope to achieve? In my time, the answer was simple: to wound the corrupt, to rally the sane, to carve truth into the public record before the censors arrived.

Madame Sélavy: We don’t hope to achieve. We hope to endure.

Herr Kraus: Endurance without engagement is mere survival.

Madame Sélavy: And yet survival is the precondition for all else. We are not here to lead movements or to be remembered as thunderous voices in some future anthology. We are here to keep the language alive, to tend the embers of a culture that will outlast both of us—if it is tended.

Herr Kraus: A caretaker’s creed.

Madame Sélavy: A custodian, yes. There are enough pamphleteers shouting in the marketplace. Our work is not to swell their number, but to make sure that, when the shouting dies, the quiet pages are still here.

A Narrator: For Herr Kraus, readers were a battalion. For Madame Sélavy, they are incidental, perhaps even irrelevant. What matters is the continuity of thought, the invisible thread that runs through centuries and cannot be measured in subscriptions or clicks.

Herr Kraus: You would rather speak into the void than rouse a crowd?

Madame Sélavy: If the void is where truth can survive without being mauled, yes. The crowd has its own metabolism—fast, hot, and forgetful. We work for a slower digestion.

Herr Kraus: Then you see Sélavy as my Fackel without the fire?

Madame Sélavy: With the fire banked. Flames leap and fade. Embers glow for decades.

A Narrator: Herr Kraus studies the answer. He is not a man who romanticizes patience, but he understands the metaphor. “Die Fackel” was, after all, named for its ability to light and burn. But even torches need someone to carry them when the crowd disperses.

Vienna’s fiercest satirist dressed in a robe, temporarily disarmed by wicker furniture and a loyal dog. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times, naturally—never won, even more naturally.

Act IV—The Test of the Flame

A Narrator: The air in the café thickens, not with smoke, but with the weight of unspoken conclusions. Neither will convert the other; both know it. But neither is willing to let the conversation dissolve into politeness.

Herr Kraus: A fire that never leaps risks being mistaken for ash. Tell me: If you tend the embers forever, how will anyone know they are still warm?

Madame Sélavy: By finding them when they need them. We don’t measure success by the size of the blaze, but by the fact that the world can still be lit if we wanted to. Die Fackel burned in its day because the air was ready for combustion. Our air is saturated with fire—most of it theatrical, much of it false. Adding to the blaze would only make more smoke.

Herr Kraus: So, you admit the times do not belong to you.

Madame Sélavy: They never did. And they don’t have to. We belong to something older than our times—a chain of language, art, and thought that outlives its carriers. Our task is not to win the present, but to keep the past from being erased so completely that the future cannot inherit it.

A Narrator: This is the core of Sélavy’s creed, if it can be called one. Culture is not an event, nor a market, nor a battlefield, but a line of transmission. The work is not to lead, nor to follow, but to remain, so that when history loops back, there is still something intact to receive.

Herr Kraus: You would have made a poor satirist.

Three crowns for Austria-Hungary, six for the Reich, seven for the world: the going rate for being skewered in Kraus’s torchlight. His address was printed on the front, so even his enemies knew exactly where to deliver their outrage.

Madame Sélavy: I’m not one.

Herr Kraus: No. You’re a keeper of the keys. But even keepers must sometimes open the door and let the wind in.

Madame Sélavy: And risk the flame?

Herr Kraus: And test if it still burns.

A Narrator: For a moment, they are silent. Herr Kraus, who once believed the pen’s job was to cut and cauterize, is faced with the idea that sometimes the truest act is to shelter the wound from more harm. Madame Sélavy, who resists the cult of the public self, listens to the man whose identity was his weapon and wonders whether anonymity, too, can become a shield too heavy to lift.

Outside, a tram passes. The driver rings the bell, but no one in the café reacts.

Madame Sélavy: If I wrote for Die Fackel in your time, I would be out of place.

Herr Kraus: And if I wrote for Sélavy, I would be too loud.

Madame Sélavy: Then perhaps it’s enough that our work shares the same root—a refusal to let the language rot.

Herr Kraus: That, at least, is a pact I can sign.

A Narrator: The waiter clears the table. Neither notices. The conversation has not ended, only paused, as if both expect to pick it up in another century, in another café that should not exist. The light above them flickers—not in warning, but in recognition. The flame, for now, still burns.

Cover image: First cover of Die Fackel, a torch to burn hypocrisy, launched in 1899. Kraus would write nearly every word himself until 1936.