Start thinking 

Michael Wood

Karl Kraus had many enemies, but his friends and admirers are something of a liability too. They insist on his unremitting probity and passion for justice, but his justice was all his own – there was no one else on the bench. ‘His vision was never unsteadied by scepticism,’ Erich Heller wrote. Walter Benjamin asserted that ‘Kraus never offered an argument that had not engaged his whole person. Thus he embodies the secret of authority: never to disappoint.’ It’s easy to see why unsteady, disappointed people would be attracted to such a figure, but the more general virtues of unfailing dogmatism are not so clear. Jonathan McVity, in an afterword to his excellent translation of a volume of Kraus’s aphorisms, says that Kraus ‘miscalculated badly in the Dreyfus Affair’. A remorseless critic in Kraus’s own mould might well argue that if you were wrong about Dreyfus it wouldn’t matter too much what you were right about.

Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.

From the archive

The Shape of Absence
Hilary Mantel on The Bondwoman’s Narrative

Eat Grass
Jenny Turner on The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank

Touches of the Real
David Simpson on Stephen Greenblatt

High-Meriting, Low-Descended
John Mullan: The Unpolished Pamela