Review: Die verfolgende Unschuld: Zur Geschichte des autoritären Charakters in der Darstellung von Karl Kraus by Irina Djassemy

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)