The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus.

Nessan, Craig L.

The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus. Translated and annotated by Jonathan Franzen. A Bilingual Edition. New York: Farrer, Straus and Giroux, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-3741-8221-2. Cloth. 318 pages. $27.00.

Well known for brilliantly insightful novels depicting the stressed state of contemporary society (Freedom, The Corrections), Jonathan Franzen here retrieves, through translation and commentary, the legacy of contrarian journalist Karl Kraus (1874-1936). Kraus, especially through the publication of a literary and political review, Die Fackel (The Torch), offered critical, satirical, and sometimes brutal commentary on fin de siecle Vienna, leading up to the rise of German fascism. Franzen finds in Kraus a fascinating social critic, whose commentary cuts to the chase also for an analysis of our generation.

Franzen first encountered the work of Kraus as an exchange student in Germany and his fascination finally culminated in this book. Four texts by Kraus are reproduced in this volume, both in the German and English translation. The ostensible subjects of the essays are the German author, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), and Austrian playwright, Johann Nestroy (1801-1862). However, the heart of the matter, both in the originals by Kraus and in the annotations by Franzen, is social criticism then and now. As Kraus lampooned the shallowness of journalism and popular culture at the turn of the twentieth century in Vienna, Franzen scrutinizes the foibles of social media, TV news, and what passes today for journalism.

Franzen observes about cable news "the phony coziness that tolerates the grotesque 'expansion of trivial news, traffics touristically in stories that ought to have no place in public discourse, and makes no tonal distinctions in its blending of serious and meaning less news items" (247). Franzen comments: "Amazon wants a world in which books are either self-published or published by Amazon itself. ..The work of yakkers and tweeters and braggers, and of people with the money to pay somebody to churn out hundreds of five-star reviews for them, will flourish in that world" (273). Franzen laments "the inherent antagonisms between the ascendant mass media and the (privileged) kind of spirituality/imaginativeness that, as Kraus saw it, makes us human" (277). Such reflections are increasingly astute, given we are the fish lacking perspective to notice the waters in which we are swimming (cf. David Foster Wallace, "This Is Water," Commencement Speech at Kenyon College).

While the writings of Kraus are exceedingly dense, Franzen's annotations--reflecting also about "progress," war, propaganda, and the need for resistance--provide prophetic challenges too seldom raised about what is becoming also of this generation. I give it five-stars.

Craig L. Nessan

Wartburg Theological Seminary