The soul of form: Karl Kraus, essayism and Jewish identity in fin-de-siecle Vienna

Abstract

This study examines the connection between Karl Kraus's innovative journalistic style and the construction of German Jewish identity. Its argument is that the discourse of Jewish mimesis played a key role in discussions of Jewish identity among Kraus's contemporaries in Vienna, and that the formal features of Kraus's writing engaged productively with this discourse for some of Kraus's most prominent readers. Prompted by Kraus's style, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Gershom Scholem and Berthold Viertel, rehabilitated the antisemitic stereotype of Jewish mimesis. In their responses to Kraus's journalism, this marker of German Jewish intellectual inauthenticity is transformed into an emblem of Jewish intellectual authenticity.The focus in the long-standing debate on Kraus's Jewish identity has been his willfully contradictory and often antisemitic utterances about Jews and Jewish culture. The leading contemporary participants in this dispute have maintained that Kraus was a Jewish antisemite and an inspired critic of antisemitism who occasionally identified with Jewish traditions. This position is accurate but also limited. For it cannot account for responses to Kraus in which his writing becomes a significant answer to the problem of German Jewish identity. By explaining these responses to Kraus, this study thus contributes to the debate on Kraus's Jewish identity.This study also contributes to the scholarly literature on the relation of crises of German Jewish identity and formal innovation in Viennese modernism. Studies of this connection have emphasized the causal link between cultural alienation and artistic creativity, maintaining that crises of German Jewish identity led to prominent formal innovations, such as Schonberg's atonal music. According to these readings, innovative modernist works by German Jews might be seen as expressions of problems of German Jewish identity. Such readings have neglected an important aspect of the relation they examine: the ways in which modernist formal innovation participated in the construction of German Jewish identity. Combining historical and literary analysis, the present study demonstrates how Kraus's innovative writing became caught up in, and contributed to, a discourse in which journalistic writing was treated as a marker of German Jewish identity. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 1999.School code: 0028