Karl Kraus and the Discourse of Modernity by Ari Linden (review)

Elias Canetti rightly held Karl Kraus to be the greatest satirist in German literature, a distinction that, however, has complicated the author's entry into the modernist hall of fame. Adorno, the gatekeeper par excellence of literary modernism, effectively blocked the way by insisting in his influential Minima Moralia that satire—due to its implication in the mortal sin of "identity thinking"—has no place in the genre. But in 1964 the great man had a change of heart. "Detecting in the satirist what he calls an 'undomesticated mimetic impulse,'" Linden informs us, "Adorno includes Kraus among the anointed figures of European modernism, whose work seeks to articulate a language of nonidentity, or a language that bears the imprint of the violence and suffering of the twentieth century" (15). Linden's insightful study tacks between two critical postures. On the one hand, it seeks from critical theory a benediction upon Kraus (as we see in the quotation above) and accordingly shows some defensiveness about his use of social satire. On the other, it boldly challenges the definitional strictures of literary modernism, requiring it to come to terms with, among other things, Kraus's magnum opus, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit. While successful on both counts, Linden's more lasting contribution is the latter: not only bringing Kraus into the modernist fold but also critically assessing modernism's heretofore abjected others: satire and social criticism. Moreover, in rendering Kraus a preeminent "theorist of European modernity" (5), Linden successfully tempers his deference toward critical theory with a mode of "reciprocal illumination" in which Kraus, Adorno, Benjamin, and Kierkegaard all come into clearer view via mutual juxtaposition.

In this study, we are introduced essentially to two images of Karl Kraus: In part 1 (chapters 1–3) we encounter the great satirical journalist and dramatist; in part 2 (chapters 4–5) we come to see Kraus as a kind of cryptic Critical Theorist, a largely unacknowledged confrère of Benjamin, Adorno, and in certain respects of Kierkegaard as well. Kraus the satirist is of course the better known of the two personae, but even in this role, he is too often limited to a narrow circle of cognoscenti. (This has changed somewhat—but only by a little—in the wake of Jonathan Franzen's Kraus Project of 2013.) Linden gives us expert access to difficult and fascinating texts. Chapter 1 examines the monumental Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, Kraus's attempt to "recite" the First World War in terms that clarify—rather than domesticate—the catastrophe. Here, as in chapter 2 (where he discusses the 1923 drama Cloudcuckooland), Linden reveals an author deeply concerned with memory. In the case of the former, that of the satirist side, it is perhaps more a case of preserving—or establishing—a more honest and critical record of the war. In the case of the bird drama, Kraus's concern is about memory itself and the way "a proper historical consciousness" may be suppressed and secreted at just the wrong time.

But in both cases, as in chapter 3 (where Linden explores the challenging Third Walpurgis Night), Kraus is always also concerned with concrete social and political arrangements. In Cloudcuckooland, for example, he certainly raises theoretical issues (such as the worrisome tendency to view causality not historically but as a matter of simultaneity of terms). But he is at least equally and as earnestly engaged with post–World War I Austria, the rise of fascism, and the unstable meaning of the much-touted post–World War I phrase "self-determination." One might say that the entire recourse to Faust in the Third Walpurgis Night is meant to reintroduce a sufficiently robust discourse capable of challenging the slide into National Socialism. Linden concludes his examination of this daunting text with great insight. Third Walpurgis Night, he writes, characterizes "Nazism as, on the one hand, a civilizational caesura whose deeds exceed the limits of discursive representation, and, on the other, as a legible function of modernity that...