Volume 33, Number 17 · November 6, 1986
Master of Horror
By D.J. Enright
Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist—Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna
by Edward Timms
Yale University Press, 443 pp., $30.00
In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader
edited by Harry Zohn, with translations by Joseph Fabry, by Max Knight, by Karl F. Ross, by Harry Zohn
Carcanet, 263 pp., $14.95
Half-Truths & One-and-a-Half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
by Karl Kraus, edited and translated by Harry Zohn
Carcanet, 128 pp., $8.50 (paper)
A common misfortune of cultural historians, scholars who propose to supply the background to the work of writers, is that the writers have already supplied not only a foreground but, by implication, a background as well, and, if they are writers of account, one of considerable brilliance and intimacy. We know medieval England through Chaucer, and Victorian London through Dickens; we know Hanseatic life in the nineteenth century because of Buddenbrooks;. we know Hapsburg Austria because of The Man Without Qualities,. and because of Karl Kraus. Of course such knowledge is incomplete—what knowledge of the past, indeed what knowledge, isn't?—and an able historian or biographer can fill in gaps. If these are small or trivial, he is condemned to mere exhaustiveness. If they are truly large, if the impressions derived from the literature are radically false, then the writer in question is one that no serious historian or critic would concern himself with. A species of Catch-22 is operating here.
Review, 3781 words
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