Healing powers :: Karl Kraus and Walter Benjamin

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rtianti0 wrote at 17 Nov 2011 05:41 AM GMT: To the Editors:
In his review of Paul Reitter’s book on Karl Kraus [ NYR cheap moncler, October 23], Adam Kirsch is right to highlight the chapter on Walter Benjamin’s and Gershom Scholem’s reception of the satirist. Exploring the apparent contradiction between Kraus’s reputation as a self-hating Jew and the undeniable fascination he exerted on these two great figures of Jewish modernism constitutes one of Reitter’s most impressive achievements.
Kirsch does a grave disservice to both Kraus and Benjamin, however, by insisting that Kraus “dismissed Benjamin’s essay as ‘abyssal feuilletonism,’ reducing Benjamin to yet another example of sterile ‘Jewish journalism.’” First of all moncler kid, Kraus was perfectly capable of using “feuilletonism” without anti-Semitic undertones mens moncler jackets, and the phrase “Jewish journalism” is not linked to Benjamin in the context of the remarks about the essay “Karl Kraus” or anywhere else in The Torch.
Furthermore, the phrase “abyssal feuilletonism” (” mit abgr��ndigem Feuilletonismus ” in the original) certainly does not mean ” abysmal feuilletonism discount moncler jackets,” as Kirsch implies. The adjective abgr��ndig almost always has ambivalent connotations; and Kraus employs it here also in the sense of “profound,” in order to give Benjamin an underhanded compliment. In any case, he is not describing the entire essay with this phrase, but rather a passage in it that characterizes one of his famous one-man reading performances of Offenbach operettas.
If Benjamin was moncler coats for men, as Reitter reports, disappointed by Kraus’s muted reaction to the essay as a whole moncler jackets wholesale, he should have taken heart in what followed. In subsequent issues of The Torch, Kraus twice referred to it in the irregular gatherings of bibliographical notices of his own work. As close readers of the journal knew, being cited without being torn apart was in itself a mark of high distinction.
Leo A. Lensing
Middletown, Connecticut


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