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The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe, by Paul Reitter. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 254 pp. $35.00.
In the conclusion to The Anti-Journalist Paul Reitter points to a problem confronting anyone who writes on the difficult, sometimes exasperating, often brilliant figure of Karl Kraus: “For if important thinkers regularly rediscover Kraus, and if both the significance of his major themes and his skill at chronicling them have been vigorously underlined, he is not widely read today” (p. 178). In the nearly 200 pages that precede this remark, Reitter astutely demonstrates why students of both European modernism and German Jewish culture would do well to read and teach the work of Karl Kraus; he shows why the “anti-journalist” media critic is still relevant today and why his troubled relationship to Jewish issues helps illuminate both fin-de-siècle Europe and Jewish life there and in modern western culture, more generally.
Both Kraus’s criticism of language (Sprachkritik) and his complex relationship to Jewish issues pose a serious challenge to Kraus scholars—Reitter cites as preface to his analysis Gershom Scholem’s admonition: “In dealing with Kraus’s relation to Jewish issues, one can only commit errors, for which Kraus himself made sure there would be plenty of scope” (p. 26). Scholem’s remark does more than underscore this challenge; it also suggests the stakes involved in Reitter’s study, for Kraus’s difficulty relates both to the larger question of German Jewish acculturation and the ways in which Kraus wove certain kinds of difficulty into his own sharp-edged analyses of society, language, culture, and the press. The fact that Reitter combines these two sides of Kraus is itself significant, for as he suggests in his introduction, one can approach Kraus without seriously exploring the question of Jewishness in his work—an approach, however, whose gaps Reitter’s study throws into stark relief.
A key question Reitter’s study responds to is: how does Kraus’s approach to language relate to his view of power? Reitter shows that Kraus criticized language abuse as a means for criticizing how the press conceals abuses of power. At the same time, Reitter addresses a second key question: how does one reconcile Kraus’s use at times of antisemitic stereotypes with his repeated assertion, especially after 1910, of his own Jewishness?
Reitter’s response to these conflicts in Kraus is both complex and elegant: it combines a careful, lucid contextualizing of Kraus’s work and the issues he responded to with a series of exacting readings of key essays by Kraus and others. In setting up this context, Reitter’s introduction discusses how figures like Richard Wagner and Heinrich von Treitschke, among others, polemicized against the role of Jews in German culture. Reitter further explores in Chapter 1 a troubled article on German-Jewish assimilation, “The German-Jewish Parnassus,” by a young Jewish scholar named Moritz Goldstein. Appearing in 1912, the article triggered much controversy about the question of German Jewish creativity and psychic health.
This debate forms a backdrop for Reitter’s treatment of Kraus’s own interventions on the subject. By focusing on the controversy around Goldstein, Reitter shows that influential German Jewish writers drew for their analyses of Jews in German culture, and journalism in particular, on terms and tropes disturbingly similar to those used by antisemites. But they did so in complex ways. By exploring these debates, Reitter seeks to generate a “new openness” for understanding Kraus’s own capacity to align himself with such issues (p. 34). He also sets up the context for showing “how Kraus’s style came to be signified within German-Jewish circles as a profoundly Jewish phenomenon,” a point explored in depth in Chapter 4 (p. 34).
Chapter 2, “Karl Kraus and the Jewish Self-Hatred Question,” explores Kraus’s utterances on journalism, Jewish issues, Zionism, antisemitism and German culture, and culminates in an exacting reading of Kraus’s oft-cited essay “Heine and the Consequences,” a reading that overturns many canonical notions about Kraus’s criticism of Heine (e.g., pp. 87–88). It is not possible here to do justice to Reitter’s incisive treatment of “Heine and the Consequences.” In brief, Reitter reads Kraus’s polemic in part as a case of strategic self-fashioning. Kraus rejected the feuilleton as a mix of literature and reportage that allowed assimilated Jews to “‘swindle’ their way into German culture” and blamed Heine for introducing it into German. Significantly, while Kraus seems to encode his critique of Heine in antisemitic terms, he ultimately praises Heine’s late poetry, suggesting that “Heine himself became a true part of the German language when he began to write about Jewish motifs.” Kraus thus used “antisemitic discourse” in the Heine essay for strategic and subversive purposes.
In Chapter 3, Reitter further explores Kraus’s views on language. Rejecting the notion that one can ever “master” language, Kraus argued that all one can really do is “quote” and collect “linguistic elements,” “cit[ing] language creatively, ‘gathering’ in novel ways what ‘someone’ has already ‘found’” (p. 101). Kraus thus advocates a form of “mirroring”—not in the mode of “realism,” despite focusing on “details . . . borrowed from local events,” but “’for the sake of that natural truth which is a symbol’” (p. 129). By seeking local and particular “symbols of a general fate” and by developing a “creatively imitative” style, Kraus further distances himself from the inflationary style he found dominant among journalists, whose “antimimetic style” was, he claimed, paradoxically “driven by an overreaching mimesis of a particular form of Jewish assimilation” (p. 135). Also at stake in this rejection was the popular imagination, which Kraus viewed as “deformed” by such “mimetic impoverishment.” In contrast, with his “creatively imitative” style Kraus sought to “uncover large and uncomfortable truths, the sound of the ‘dialect of the world’” (p. 131). Because it would at the same time “activate all the possibilities of its medium,” this anti-journalistic “mirroring [of] the dialect of a narrow milieu” would paradoxically arrive at those truths (p. 135).
In the final chapter, “Messianic Judaism? Benjamin and Scholem Read Die Fackel,” Reitter explores why Kraus figured for both as a “profoundly Jewish phenomenon.” Scholem, Reitter shows, found in Kraus’s attention to “the experience of the old word” a correlative to his own experience of reading the Hebrew Bible, while viewing Kraus’s journalistic style as an alternative to the “empty talk” he found in Martin Buber. Even more, Scholem found in Kraus’s writing “‘a messianic movement in language’” (p. 149), viewing his use of quotation and linguistic reproduction as a continuation of the Medieval Jewish “Musivstil” (musive style).
Scholem’s engagement with Kraus grew, Reitter shows, under the influence of Benjamin, who in his several essays on Kraus addressed such themes as eros, language, and Geist, but also the press, mimesis, quotation, justice, and messianism. Indeed, Reitter’s own thesis that Kraus practiced a “paradoxical” form of anti-journalism based in “mirroring” and “quotation” seems to owe something to Benjamin’s views on that subject (pp. 166–167).
Reitter’s lucid and multifaceted treatment of Kraus explains how Kraus, despite certain antisemitic and ostensibly antisemitic remarks, could appear as an important Jewish intellectual to these most innovative of Jewish intellectuals. The near iconic status of Scholem and Benjamin helps Reitter make the case for proceeding with caution in discussing Kraus’s relation to Jewish issues. By re-framing contexts and exploring strategies of intervention, Reitter provides an excellent model for others, showing in exemplary fashion how one can transform our sense of a controversial writer, one too often dismissed, forgotten or relegated to the margins. At the same time, Reitter prompts us to re-think the problematic category of “Jewish self-hatred.” The one thing I missed was more treatment of how contemporaries other than Scholem and Benjamin viewed Kraus. Brief references to figures as different as Kafka, Max Horkheimer, and Werner Kraft are suggestive, but they leave one wanting to know more. The book’s scope perhaps precludes integrating that treatment in any compelling manner. Yet, a future study of such local or forgotten “details” might uncover some “large truths” while enlisting Kraus himself in support of the project.
Jeffrey A. Grossman
University of Virginia
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