In turn-of-the-century Vienna, Karl Kraus created a bold new style of media criticism, penning incisive satires that elicited both admiration and outrage. Kraus’s spectacularly hostile critiques often focused on his fellow Jewish journalists, which brought him a reputation as the quintessential self-hating Jew. The Anti-Journalist overturns this view with unprecedented force and sophistication, showing how Kraus’s criticisms form the center of a radical model of German-Jewish self-fashioning, and how that model developed in concert with Kraus’s modernist journalistic style.
Paul Reitter’s study of Kraus’s writings situates them in the context of fin-de-siècle German-Jewish intellectual society. He argues that rather than stemming from anti-Semitism, Kraus’s attacks constituted an innovative critique of mainstream German-Jewish strategies for assimilation. Marshalling three of the most daring German-Jewish authors—Kafka, Scholem, and Benjamin—Reitter explains their admiration for Kraus’s project and demonstrates his influence on their own notions of cultural authenticity. The Anti-Journalist is at once a new interpretation of a fascinating modernist oeuvre and a heady exploration of an important stage in the history of German-Jewish thinking about identity.

"A perceptive study of the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus. . . . [Reitter shows] an assured command of complex sources and a gift for teasing out the implications of abstract terminology." - Times Literary Supplement

"For understanding Kraus as a Jewish writer, no book is better than this one." - Choice

"Intelligent and clarifying. . . . In his most speculative and intriguing chapter, Reitter traces the affinities between Kraus's style of criticism-by-quotation and Benjamin's own metaphysics of quotation." - New York Review of Books

"One of the Times Literary Supplement's Best Books of 2008" - Times Literary Supplement

"[The Anti-Journalist] displays a remarkably alert understanding of the duplicitous integrity of its subject in his one-man war against media cant." - Times Literary Supplement

"An innovative account of fin-de-siecle Europe, modern Jewish identities, antisemitism, and cultural critique." - H-Net

"An important study that significantly advances critical examinations of Kraus, Jews, journalism, and culture in turn-of-the-century Vienna. By placing Kraus's anti-Semitic discourse at center stage, the book represents an important step forward in plotting Jewishness and anti-Semitism onto the broader map of Central European society and culture." - Austrian History Yearbook