Review: The Kraus Project by Jonathan Franzen

Abstract

Rarely do the worlds of twentieth- century Austrian modernism and twenty-first-century American fiction so explicitly collide. Yet it is this unlikely marriage that we find in Jonathan Franzen’s translations of some of Karl Kraus’s seminal writings: Heine and the Consequences (1910), the afterword to Heine and the Consequences (1911), Nestroy and Posterity: On the Fiftieth Anniversary of his Death (1912), Between Two Strains of Life: Final Word (1917), and Kraus’s last poem, “Let No One Ask . . .” (1934). Paul Reitter’s commentaries provide the necessary historical context and critical insight into the various discourses and polemics to which Kraus was responding (or into which he inserted himself), and the contemporary Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann aids in both parsing some of the difficult syntax and allusions for which Kraus was known and providing details about the late nineteenth- century and early twentieth-century Austrian and German literary landscape. Collectively, this project represents a productive encounter between past and present, fiction and the academy; it may even have spawned a new literary genre.