Review: Die verfolgende Unschuld: Zur Geschichte des autoritären Charakters in der Darstellung von Karl Kraus by Irina Djassemy
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Issue Date
2012Author
Linden, Ari
Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, author accepted manuscript
Rights
Copyright © 2013 Austrian Studies Association
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The late Irina Djassemy’s most recent book picks up where her earlier study, Kulturkritik Bei Karl Kraus und Theodor W. Adorno, left off. Die Verfolgende Unschuld offers, however, a more concentrated analysis of the various ways that the authoritarian character finds its literary analog in the oeuvre of the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus. Djassemy’s essential thesis is that Kraus’s satirical representations during the first third of the twentieth century—of judges, businessmen, journalists, war profiteers, generals, bureaucrats, and so on—anticipate not only the political devolvement of Germany and Austria into fascism but also the theories of authoritarianism elucidated by figures such as Adorno after the Second World War. Djassemy furthermore concludes that insofar as Kraus’s literary method alludes to the positive exclusively via the representation of the negative, “hat die Kraussche Satire teil an jener negativen Dialektik, die von Adorno in der Philosophie entwickelt wurde” (27).
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Citation
Linden, Ari. Review: Irina Djassemy. Die verfolgende Unschuld: Zur Geschichte des autoritären Charakters in der Darstellung von Karl Kraus (Böhlau Wien: 2011). Journal of Austrian Studies (45:3-4, 2012): 140-142.
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