| book details |

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

By (author) Paul Reitter

| on special |

normal price: R 1 654.95

Price: R 1 488.95

| add to trolley |

| book description |

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. Krausâ€™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 Krausâ€™s criticisms form the center of a radical model of German-Jewish self-fashioning, and how that model developed in concert with Krausâ€™s modernist journalistic style. Paul Reitterâ€™s study of Krausâ€™s writings situates them in the context of fin-de-siÃ¨cle German-Jewish intellectual society. He argues that rather than stemming from anti-Semitism, Krausâ€™s attacks constituted an innovative critique of mainstream German-Jewish strategies for assimilation. Marshalling three of the most daring German-Jewish authorsâ€”Kafka, Scholem, and Benjaminâ€”Reitter explains their admiration for Krausâ€™s project and demonstrates his influence on their own notions of cultural authenticity.Â 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.