Volume 55, Number 16 · October 23, 2008
The Torch of Karl Kraus
By Adam Kirsch
The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe
by Paul Reitter
University of Chicago Press, 254 pp., $35.00
When the eighteen-year-old Elias Canetti first came to Vienna in 1924, nothing more plainly marked him as a provincial than the fact that he had never heard of Karl Kraus. For a quarter-century, Kraus had been publishing Die Fackel (The Torch), a magazine that relentlessly exposed the crimes, lies, and blunders of Austrian society—above all, of its press, which he considered its greatest plague. 'Why didn't Eternity have this deformed age aborted? Its birthmark is the stamp of a newspaper, its meconium is printer's ink, and in its veins flows ink,' ran a typical Krausian aphorism. The Neue Freie Presse, the influential Viennese daily, was Die Fackel 's favorite target. It was a measure of how deeply Kraus got under the skin of its powerful editor, Moriz Benedikt, that the Neue Freie Presse had a standing policy of never mentioning Kraus's name in any context. When the writer Peter Altenberg died in 1919, the paper refused to cover the funeral because Kraus had delivered the eulogy.
Review, 3723 words
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