Book Review

The Ambivalent Reporter

Cohen, Joshua

2008

Overview

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.

• Publisher: The Forward Association, Inc
• Subject: Biographies / Kraus, Karl / Nonfiction / Reitter, Paul