68 IN JUNE 2010 the journalist John Crace published a parody of Wyndham Lewis’s novel Tarr for his newspaper column “Digested Classics” in the English newspaper The Guardian. This was perhaps only the second time since Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s original Futurist manifesto appeared on the front page of Le Figaro on February 20, 1909 that a work of the early-twentieth-century avant-garde featured prominently in a main- stream newspaper. Not surprisingly, it consisted of a combination of direct satiric hits and interpretive missteps. Crace describes Lewis’s self- destructive character, the Prussian art student Otto Kreisler, as saying, “I am an Artist; this means I never actually do any Art as I spend too long talking about it. I am also a German Artist which means even if I did cre- ate Art it wouldn’t be any good.” This is a fair enough lampoon of Lewis’s treatment of both artistic ego and the excesses of nineteenth-century German Romanticism. But Crace’s parody also reports, as Kreisler pre- pares to rape Bertha, “Bertha found herself lying semi-naked on the chaise-longue, posing for Kreisler as he attempted his matchstick repre- sentation of her in the finest tradition of German vorticism.” 1   CHAPTER FOUR HOW GERMAN IS IT: VORTICISM, NATIONALISM, AND THE PARADOX OF AESTHETIC SELF-DEFINITION SCOTT W. KLEIN 05_ScottWKlein230213OUS_C04.indd 68 05_ScottWKlein230213OUS_C04.indd 68 6/28/2013 5:22:30 PM 6/28/2013 5:22:30 PM