In turn-of-the-century Vienna, Karl Kraus created a bold new style of media criticism, penning incisive satires that elicited both admiration and outrage. Kraus's spectacularly hostile critiques often focused on his fellow Jewish journalists, which brought him a reputation as the quintessential self-hating Jew. The Anti-Journalist overturns this view with unprecedented force and sophistication, showing how Kraus's criticisms form the center of a radical model of German-Jewish self-fashioning, and how that model developed in concert with Kraus's modernist journalistic style.
Paul Reitter's study of Kraus's writings situates them in the context of fin-de-siecle German-Jewish intellectual society. He argues that rather than stemming from anti-Semitism, Kraus's attacks constituted an innovative critique of mainstream German-Jewish strategies for assimilation. Marshalling three of the most daring German-Jewish authors-Kafka, Scholem, and Benjamin-Reitter explains their admiration for Kraus's project and demonstrates his influence on their own notions of cultural authenticity. The Anti-Journalist is at once a new interpretation of a fascinating modernist oeuvre and a heady exploration of an important stage in the history of German-Jewish thinking about identity.
In turn-of-the-century Vienna, Karl Kraus created a bold new style of media criticism, penning incisive satires that elicited both admiration and outrage. Kraus's spectacularly hostile critiques often focused on his fellow Jewish journalists, which brought him a reputation as the quintessential self-hating Jew. The Anti-Journalist overturns this view with unprecedented force and sophistication, showing how Kraus's criticisms form the center of a radical model of German-Jewish self-fashioning, and how that model developed in concert with Kraus's modernist journalistic style.
Paul Reitter's study of Kraus's writings situates them in the context of fin-de-siecle German-Jewish intellectual society. He argues that rather than stemming from anti-Semitism, Kraus's attacks constituted an innovative critique of mainstream German-Jewish strategies for assimilation. Marshalling three of the most daring German-Jewish authors-Kafka, Scholem, and Benjamin-Reitter explains their admiration for Kraus's project and demonstrates his influence on their own notions of cultural authenticity. The Anti-Journalist is at once a new interpretation of a fascinating modernist oeuvre and a heady exploration of an important stage in the history of German-Jewish thinking about identity.
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
A Note on Editions
A Note on Translations
Introduction: All That Is Solid Melts into Ink
1 German Jews and
the Writing of Modern Life
2 Karl Kraus
and the Jewish Self-Hatred Question
3
Mirror-Man
4 Messianic
Journalism? Benjamin and Scholem Read Die Fackel
Conclusion: The Afterlife of
Anti-Journalism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Paul Reitter is professor of German at Ohio State University.
“Karl Kraus remains among the most controversial figures in the
history of German-Jewish literary culture from the Viennese
fin-de-siècle to the Nazi Machtergreifung. A brilliantly prescient
satirist of the modern media, he was always deeply ambivalent about
his own Jewish origins and identity. Meticulously setting his work
in the wider context of Kraus’s Jewish (and anti-Semitic)
contemporaries, Paul Reitter reveals Kraus as a far more nuanced
and impressive figure than the ‘self-hating Jew’ condemned by some
other scholars. This is a fine work of literary rehabilitation,
based on reading that is both impressively broad and Krausian in
its rigor.”
*Niall Ferguson, Harvard University*
“Paul Reitter’s study of Karl Kraus is an illuminating account of a
highly contradictory and elusive writer. Kraus has often been
stigmatized as a self-hating Jew, but Reitter’s investigation of
Kraus as a counter-journalist exposes the simplifications of that
view, and his use of the lens of Scholem and Benjamin to examine
Kraus is deeply instructive in this and other regards. This is a
welcome fresh assessment of one of the central figures in European
modernism.”
*Robert Alter, University of California, Berkeley*
“An exciting and yet highly lucid account of the formation and
significance of Karl Kraus’s modernist journalism, an activity that
Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem regarded as the most Jewish
writing in the German language. The Anti-Journalist is the best
book I have seen on this engaging topic.”—István Deák, Seth Low
Professor Emeritus of History, Columbia University
*István Deák, Seth Low Professor Emeritus of History, Columbia
University*
"A perceptive study of the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus. . . .
[Reitter shows] an assured command of complex sources and a gift
for teasing out the implications of abstract terminology."
*Times Literary Supplement*
"For understanding Kraus as a Jewish writer, no book is better than
this one."
*Choice*
"Intelligent and clarifying. . . . In his most speculative and
intriguing chapter, Reitter traces the affinities between Kraus's
style of criticism-by-quotation and Benjamin's own metaphysics of
quotation."
*New York Review of Books*
One of the Times Literary Supplement's Best Books of 2008
*Times Literary Supplement*
"[The Anti-Journalist] displays a remarkably alert understanding of
the duplicitous integrity of its subject in his one-man war against
media cant."
*Times Literary Supplement*
"An innovative account of fin-de-siecle Europe, modern Jewish
identities, antisemitism, and cultural critique."
*H-Net*
"An important study that significantly advances critical
examinations of Kraus, Jews, journalism, and culture in
turn-of-the-century Vienna. By placing Kraus's anti-Semitic
discourse at center stage, the book represents an important step
forward in plotting Jewishness and anti-Semitism onto the broader
map of Central European society and culture."
*Austrian History Yearbook*
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