The heart of the Karl Kraus exhibition (literally) was the mortal agony of his relationship with Sidonie Nádherný (25th October 1999, Vienna)

The heart of the Karl Kraus exhibition (literally) was the mortal agony of his relationship with Sidonie Nádherný; a countess from above his station, he could never be sure of her feelings for him, so lived in constant lovestruck torture. But that was what inspired his creative imagination. “To love, to be betrayed, to be jealous in that order is easy; it is much more uncomfortable to be jealous, to be betrayed, and to love.”

I step through Munich, Nuremberg, Vienna, Berlin, Stockholm, provoking abuse and hatred everywhere like Kaspar Hauser (25th October 1999, Vienna)

I step through Munich, Nuremberg, Vienna, Berlin, Stockholm, provoking abuse and hatred everywhere like Kaspar Hauser. I cut a swathe and leave people poisoned in my wake. I have got my own style. I am as wild as Salvador Dali; as wild as Oscar Wilde. As Aubrey Beardsley, Egon Schiele. I will be torn apart like Sebastian in Suddenly Last Summer. I will be pierced with arrows like Saint Sebastian. “Yet Kraus himself was a regular visitor to the coffee house, first of all the Greinsteidl and then the Café Central but saw himself in literary terms more as an outsider. He founded and ran his own journal, the Fackel, the mouthpiece for his own cultural criticism. As a protest against the madness of the war, he wrote Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (1918/19), an extensive collage of texts, it was his main dramatic text, one which, as he said, he had written for a ‘theatre on Mars’, he himself imagining it to be unperformable. At the same time this critic of language and the age wrote unerring essays, satires, aphorisms and poems.” The real world is only possible if you have a relationship; I will never have a relationship, so the real world has never been possible for me; I will always necessarily live in the dream world. In the steamy, erotic ferns & fronds of some Central European porn cinema, surrounded by other men with their big fat cocks out of their trousers in the flickering half-light of the screen. Dreamy, like Noodles in his opium den. This is my paradise; and a paradise that I am sure will be over soon enough.

I make people do things; they are like Pavlov’s dogs (24th October 1999, Vienna)

I make people do things; they are like Pavlov’s dogs. I provokingly ring their bell all day long. Standing on the balcony in the Museum de Stadt Wien looking out to the Karlskirche church to my left and all the glorious buildings before me, I was thinking wouldn’t it be nice if the illusion of being the only person in Vienna at that moment were real. If the city had been emptied by plague and I had the whole place to myself forever, like the man in War of the Worlds walks a world devoid of all human beings, wiped out by Martians. Like Cole comes up to a world devoid of all human beings in his sealed suit in Twelve Monkeys. If that could be me! If I could be the one person left inhabiting Vienna, the only person left in the world. I have rejected their normal society because to me it is foul and repulsive, being based as it is on socialising, talking, conversation, friendship, all things that have no meaning for me. I exist in an alternative world, of blackness, night, silence, despair and the exultation that only comes at the very moment of total final despair. Stockholm for me is representative of all that. I just want nothing to do with people. They play no part in my scheme of things. They are completely just in the way.

I am Švejk. Everything they do to hurt me just thrills me even more (24th October 1999, Vienna)

I am Švejk. Everything they do to hurt me just thrills me even more. Everything they do just fills me up with power and delights me further. How terribly annoying for them. You are, I take it, terribly annoyed? I have a talent for provoking the stupid and the ugly, the dissatisfied and the resentful, the conformists and homophobes of all stripes everywhere. I flaunt myself in their faces, like Nana on the stage of the Théâtre des Variétés in a little flimsy see-through piece of white fabric. I invite the whole of Paris back to my gigantic bedroom to worship my sovereign nudity, my insolent display of luxury. I am the Golden Butterfly on the shit heap of Turn of the Century 1990s society. I am Walt Whitman. I am all the ships on the ocean, all the stars in the sky, I am the baby suckling at its mother’s breast! I contain multitudes!

Vienna for me is the Etna of hate that was inside Karl Kraus (24th October 1999, Vienna)

Vienna for me is the Etna of hate that was inside Karl Kraus.

The more people attack me the more determined I become to go on to Berlin and Stockholm and Helsinki (22nd October 1999, Vienna)

The more people attack me the more determined I become to go on to Berlin and Stockholm and Helsinki. To go to the capital of storm and stress itself: Weimar! Vienna for me stands for the 1914 feverhouse, the experimental station for world destruction, in the last days of mankind. The Vienna that Karl Kraus wrote about, of 2 million souls and him. And he was going to take them all on himself. The Vienna of the neurosis and hysteria that made the too sensitive like Richard Gerstl take their own lives, that made Egon Schiele paint the way he did, that made Arnold Schoenberg start composing music the way he did. By coming here, and just looking all around me with the shutters of my eyes fixed open like a camera so it will all just be recorded on my photographic plate, I am tapping into all that.

“Egon Schiele lived in Vienna during its last years as capital of the declining Habsburg Empire” (15th April 1999)

“Egon Schiele lived in Vienna during its last years as capital of the declining Habsburg Empire. Rejected by his family, hounded by society for his interest in young girls, he expressed through his art a deep and bewildering loneliness and an obsession with sexuality, death and decay.”
I am evil, I love animosity. I am mischievous, I thrive on it, its sweet, bloody, pleasures. I create animosity for me to revel in its orgies. I’ve not finished being wild yet. When you’re young is when you’re supposed to be wild isn’t it?
BEHAVE DISGUSTINGLY.
They hate me because I don’t get bored.

It’s good to go out lots now, to theatre, opera, cinema, before the hot summer arrives. Take advantage of the last cold, rainy weather. An Ideal Husband, Salome, Suddenly Last Summer, Semele, Plenty.
I am an autistic prince, and I am proud of it. The rewards are great.