The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe

di Paul Reitter (Autore)

The University of Chicago Press, 2020

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.

• Autore: Paul Reitter
• Editore: The University of Chicago Press
• Collana: Studies in German-Jewish Cultural History and Literature, Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• Anno: 2020
• Rilegatura: Paperback / softback
• Pagine: 256 p.
• Dimensioni: 229 x 152 mm
• EAN: 9780226754574

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