Karl Kraus and the Jewish Self-Hatred Question

I despise above all two kinds of people: Jews and journalists. Unfortunately, I am both.

—Ferdinand Lassalle

One knows that my hatred of the Jewish press is exceeded only by my hatred of the antisemitic press, while my hatred of the antisemitic press is exceeded only by my hatred of the Jewish press.

—Karl Kraus

Has anyone been accused of Jewish self-hatred more often and more emphatically than Karl Kraus? Otto Weininger, Kraus's fellow fin-de-siècle Viennese, appears to be the only real competition. In fact, studies of German-Jewish culture frequently make Kraus and Weininger stand by themselves, under headings like "Self- Rejection and Self-Hatred" and "Prophets of Doom." ¹ Kraus receives such treatment because he laced his satirical newspaper, The Torch (Die Fackel), which he founded in 1899 and wrote and edited by himself from 1911 until his death in 1936, with countless antisemitic imprecations. ² He condemned the "world-destroying power" of "Jewish capitalism." ³ He bragged that the "aversion" most antisemites felt against "Jewish things" was "child's play" next to his. ⁴ He castigated the "Jew boys" at the "Jewish press." ⁵ And he demanded that Jews give up Judaism completely and seek "redemption through total assimilation," to cite a final example. ⁶

Responding to these anti-Jewish fulminations, Theodor Lessing labeled Kraus "the most revealing instance of Jewish self-hatred." ⁷ Other influential contemporaries—such as Martin Buber, Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Werfel, and Max Brod—described him in similar terms. ⁸ And, again, so have more recent critics. Mark Anderson, Steven Lowenstein, Jacques Le Rider, and Sander Gilman all have portrayed Kraus as a maniacal self-hater. ⁹ In well-known works, Anderson and Lowenstein underline the parallels between Kraus and Weininger, a famous suicide who disparaged Jewish culture with unremitting truculence. ¹⁰ Le Rider maintains that antisemitism alone produced "Heine and the Consequences" ("Heine und die Folgen," 1910), Kraus's polemic against Heinrich Heine. ¹¹ This essay, he insists, "can only be understood if it is seen as another symptom of jüdischer Selbsthaß [Jewish self-hatred]." ¹² Although Gilman points to ambiguities in Kraus's claims about Jews and Judaism, soon afterward he makes a more dramatic gesture in the opposite direction, likening Kraus's rhetoric to Hitler's. ¹³

This approach has an obvious problem. The murkiness that Gilman notes actually pervades The Torch, because Kraus also embraced his Jewish heritage, at times quite forcefully. ¹⁴ He even avowed, "Above all things, I love, and am grateful to, the holy, uncompromising natural power of Judaism" (TT 890-905: 38). To be sure, statements of this kind do not populate Kraus's writings as densely as do antisemitic barbs. But neither are they isolated second thoughts. Tellingly, some of Kraus's most astute readers believed that he revealed his true face in formulations like the one I just quoted. They include Berthold Viertel, Werner Kraft, and Erich Heller, all of whom viewed Kraus as a "great Jew." ¹⁵ Theodor Adorno expressed much the same perception more poignantly, apostrophizing Kraus as an inverted, self-immolating "Shylock" who "sacrifices his own blood" out of altruism. ¹⁶

What critic today would attach the phrase "great Jew" to Kraus? Jewish self-hatred, by contrast, has developed into an academic category. And so its side has prevailed in the once-polarized debate about Kraus's Jewish identity. Yet there are notable exceptions to this interpretive trend. For example, Edward Timms has given a balanced account of Kraus's writings on Jewish culture. ¹⁷ Harry Zohn, Leo Lensing, and Robert Wistrich have tracked these rhetorical vacillations just as carefully. ¹⁸ Even here, however, conceptual difficulties persist. In analyzing Kraus's Jewish self-hatred, all the scholars whom I have mentioned proceed from a single hermeneutic point of departure. Those who assert that Kraus offered dichotomous answers to "the Jewish Question," as well as those who focus on the more draconian ones, pursue literal...