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A great American writer's confrontation with a great European critic-a personal and intellectual awakening
A hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and farsighted writers in Europe. In his self-published magazine, Die Fackel, Kraus brilliantly attacked the popular media's manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumer capitalism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But, even though he had a fervent following, which included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely prophet, and few people today are familiar with his work. Luckily, Jonathan Franzen is one of them.
A hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and farsighted writers in Europe. In his self-published magazine, Die Fackel, Kraus brilliantly attacked the popular media's manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumer capitalism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But, even though he had a fervent following, which included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely prophet, and few people today are familiar with his work. Luckily, Jonathan Franzen is one of them.
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Reviews
"The Kraus Project, which reprints the German essays alongside Franzen's translations, is a fluid version of Kraus that captures as best it might the author's irascible precision without tinkering his prose to make it sound like any other writer's . . . In the end, it is the achievement of The Kraus Project to provide a solid picture of what make Kraus incomparable and, paradoxically enough, relevant. Franzen builds a very effective case that Kraus's criticism of media technology--particularly of the ways that it deformed language and thought--pull him out of the Vienna of a hundred years ago and reveal him to be a timely visionary . . . Franzen's footnotes form a running dialogue with Kraus, and he is full of provocative observations about the encroachments of Twitter streams and AOL news feeds, iPhones and Facebook, and the fawning embrace of technology among the very people whose livelihood is most jeapordized by it, journalists."
Eric Banks, Bookform
"Engrossing, highly original . . . As a declared enemy of the easy response in an instant-access culture, Franzen finds in the unduly neglected Kraus a model of how to provoke readers while at the same time getting them to do some work."
Edmund Fawcett, The New York Times Book Review