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[Karl Kraus], for instance, viciously attacked feuilletonistic writing and wrote an antiSemitic attack on Heinrich Heine for using his \"parasitic\" and \"uncreative\" Jewish genius to import stylized, effete and insubstantial essays into \"pure\" German discourse. But Kraus was himself a master feuilletonist, and his antiSemitic attack on Heine is full of ironies and subtle self-contradictions. Here is how Kraus summed up his own positions; \"My hatred of the Jewish press is exceeded only by my hatred of the anti-Semitic press, while my hatred of the anti-Semitic press is exceeded only by my hatred of the Jewish press.\" Therein lies the chief frustration of \"On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred.\" It is an ambitious book. Reitter apparently intends, as he promised in an earlier, programmatic essay titled \"The Jewish Self-Hatred Octopus,\" to provide the framework for a history of Jewish self-hatred from \"[Anton Kuh] and Karl Kraus through Theodor Lessing, Clement Greenberg, and Philip Roth, all the way to 'The Simpsons.'\" The result is a hodgepodge, maddeningly compressed, touching on but not fully developing the term's background in prewar Germany, its use by Kuh and Lessing and its contested meanings today. Along the way, there is an excursus on different types of conceptual history and sustained and intricate critiques of Reitter's scholarly peers. There is even a paragraph suggesting that Philip Roth continued the positive use of \"Jewish self-hatred.\" Thankfully, we have been spared \"The Simpsons.\" Reading Reitter's book, I occasionally had the suspicion that the author was himself writing a feuilleton. He writes colloquially but not clearly. (A short story \"got [Thomas] Mann into some hot water\"; a scholar who tries to define Jewish self-hatred \"isn't yet ready to give up on up on the phrase,\" though others have \"moved on.\") \"Notwithstanding various differences, [contemporary scholar Shulamit] Volkov sounds quite a bit like Lessing channeling Kuh as she works with 'Jewish self-hatred'\"; That already confusing sentence actually appears in the first third of the book, before any sustained discussions of either Kuh or Lessing have been broached. Hyperbolic questions punctuate the narrative. One chapter, discussing Lessing's rejection of [Sigmund Freud]'s theory of the Oedipus Complex on the grounds that he hated his mother, too, begins by asking, \"Could there be a sadder objection to psychoanalysis?\" The question suggests Reitter has not talked to many neurotics.

Mehlman reviews Bambi's Jewish Roots and other Essays on German-Jewish Culture by Kitsch Schmaltz and Paul Reitter.

With the regrettable exception of Hitler's mature years, there was no German-language phenomenon that did not occasion [KARL KRAUS]'s print comment: He inveighed against the Neue Freie Presse, Vienna's petit-bourgeois paper of record; the ideal of pan-Germany; the Habsburg Monarchy, and, especially, the new Jewish science that was psychoanalysis: Kraus found exceptional hilarity in Freud's account of Vienna's fantasies of violence and sex, which transpired after the populace was safely in bed, and the sleepiness of the newspaper's realism. Die Packet's eminent early contributors included Peter Altenberg, Richard Dehmel, Oskar Kokoschka, Else Lasker-Schuler, Adolf Loos, Heinrich Mann, Arnold Schoenberg, August Strindberg, George Iraki, Franz Wedekind, Franz Werfel and Oscar Wilde; Prague's Franz Kafka was a loyal reader, as was Berlin's Walter Benjamin, who regarded Kraus's project as the literary fulfillment of Trotsky.'s Permanent Revolution - the making of \"an eternally new newspaper.\" Benjamin often discussed Die Fackel with his friend Gershom (then Gerhard). Scholem, who would torch the noun Fackel into a verb: fackelt, \"to fackel on\" - signifying a prophetic though aggressively egotistical rhetoric, not necessarily flattering, but proof that Kraus could not be ignored. To understand the specificity or minor mimetic nature of Kraus's Die Fackel, we should first have our obituaries for his peers: Kafka is still read because his horror at the anonymity created by modern bureaucracy is ours, too; Benjamin was a mystical Marxist, and we share his political yearning today more than ever - namely for a messianic redemption from history's slough; we still listen to Arnold Schoenberg and to his mentor, Gustav Mahler, as their music enacted the passage of Romanticism into dissonance or kitsch, and marked the beginning of what we've called postmodernity to describe the styles of different eras and cultures co-existing and so, made conscious of both each other and themselves; Paul Klee's paintings elucidated the spare landscapes of a technological, or dehumanized, future, while George Grosz and Otto Dix appropriated the ravages of war to update the grotesque. The creations of this bunch were metaphorically concerned: Their work had to mean more than just words and tones and colors; relevant politics were to be extrapolated by means of analogy, or the narrative dramatization of the abstract. Instead of writing about the ways in which technology impacted his life with the inventions of the telephone and automobile, Kafka preferred to write \"In the Penal Colony\"; instead of gathering reportage about the empire's decline, Robert Musil wrote \"The Man Without Qualities,\" and Hermann Broch, \"The Sleepwalkers\" - two novels that could have been \"based on real events\" but were mostly invented.

45-6649 PT2621 2007-20594 CIP Reitter, Paul. The anti-journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish self-fashioning in fin-de-siècle Europe. Chicago, 2008. 254p bibl index afp ISBN 0226709701, $35.00 ISBN 9780226709703, $35.00

Some members of minority groups come to accept the validity of unjustified criticism and negative views of themselves held by the majority culture. [MARC Reitter] (Germanic languages and literature, Ohio State Univ.) does not deal directly with important debate about Jewish selfhatred.

Gluck reviews The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe by Paul Reitter.

Wistrich reviews The Anti-Journalist Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-siecle Europe by Paul Reitter. .

Carrie Muehlemann, the Creative Group's division chief here, ticked off a string of offenses to which the persistent battering of bad behavior may have inured us: singing cell phones and loud people using them; music and other offensive noises; in-your-face political mottoes and statements; the entering of another person's work space without knocking; long, boisterous stories about our kids (we care, but not that much!), and odorous perfume, cologne and microwaved lunches. And don't forget the employee who needs a bath.