Heinrich Heine so loosened the corsets of the German language that today every little salesman can fondle her breasts.

Karl Kraus (1874–1936), the Viennese satirist and editor of *Die Fackel*, waged a long campaign against what he saw as the moral and intellectual corruption of modern public language—journalism, advertising, and political rhetoric in particular. He frequently attacked celebrated writers whose stylistic brilliance, in his view, encouraged a glib, marketable facility with words. This remark belongs to Kraus’s polemics about Heinrich Heine’s legacy: Heine’s supple, witty, modern-sounding German is figured as having “loosened the corsets” of the language, making it more accessible—yet, for Kraus, also more easily exploited by commercial and mediocre speakers (“every little salesman”). The sexualized metaphor is characteristic of Kraus’s aggressive, scandal-ready satirical register.

The sentence is a deliberately shocking metaphor about linguistic democratization and its costs. Kraus concedes Heine’s transformative effect on German style—loosening constraints, making expression freer and more sensuous—but frames that freedom as a kind of undressing that invites vulgar handling. “Every little salesman” suggests advertising and petty commerce: once language becomes pliant, catchy, and emotionally manipulable, it can be used to sell, flatter, and deceive. The image of “fondling” implies not only misuse but a loss of dignity and integrity in public discourse. Kraus’s deeper claim is that stylistic charm can become a gateway to cliché and commodification, where verbal elegance serves persuasion rather than truth.